Into the Uncanny Valley: Liminal Places as the Locus of

the Unsettling in Horrific Fiction

Laura Mauro

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MA in Modern and

Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck College, University of London
September 2019

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Table of Contents

Abstract:...........................................................................................................3
Introduction:....................................................................................................4
Chapter 1: “When I walked into that room, my heart went cold” – The
strange within the familiar............................................................................11
Chapter 2: “For terror of the deadness beyond” – memory-ghosts and the
abandoned liminal.........................................................................................21
Chapter 3: “The pattern of life and death in that white paint”: Cycles of
liminality.........................................................................................................34
Conclusion......................................................................................................48
Bibliography:.................................................................................................50

2
Abstract:

Liminal places are a recurring spatial feature of horrific fictions, typically presenting as the locus of the

unsettling or the disconcerting. Utilising Victor Turner’s anthropological three-phase concept of liminality

as an overarching framework, this essay examines the different ways in which place might be considered

liminal, and the ways in which these places invoke a sense of the uncanny. My examination is focused on

three discrete categories of place. Firstly, I consider the familiar liminal components of domestic and city

space; corridors, air vents and other mundane, functional spaces, arguing that they are not inherently eerie,

but become so through decontextualisation. Secondly, I examine abandoned places, arguing that the

combined influences of memory, trauma, and the boundaries between the past and the present are integral

in shaping our perception of abandoned space, and in precluding resolution. Lastly, I consider places which

have become liminal by virtue of ritual or pilgrimage, arguing that the cyclical nature of such rites enforce

a permanent liminality upon the site in which the ritual is held. I argue that these spaces are particularly

prevalent in horrific fictions, examining as evidence the liminal settings of texts by Michelle Paver, Tobias

Hill and Stephen King, along with episodic narratives from television series The X-Files and Hannibal, and

videogame Journey. Methodologically, this essay navigates these three types of space by applying Turner’s

phasic categories of ‘separation’, ‘liminality’ and ‘reaggregation’, as well as considering a palette of

horrific affects, from Freud’s seminal treatise on the uncanny to Mark Fisher’s 2016 discussion of The

Weird and the Eerie, alongside Manuel Aguirre’s discussion of spatial integrity and monstrous ingress in

The Closed Space (1990). Finally, I argue that the concept of liminality is itself the driving force behind the

enduring appeal and effect of liminal places in horrific fictions.

Introduction:

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 In 2016, a post on microblogging website Tumblr entitled “Places where reality is a bit altered” began to

draw significant attention both within the website’s community and beyond. The initial post – subsequently

annotated by other Tumblr users – listed a series of often oddly specific places: ‘abandoned 7/11’s,

lighthouses with lights that don’t work anymore, playgrounds at night, schools during breaks’ 1. These

locations evidently struck a chord with Tumblr’s userbase, prompting a plethora of additions and expressions

of consensus. One user endeavoured to determine a causal link between the apparently random list of places:

“A lot of these places are called liminal spaces - which means they are throughways from

one space to the next. Places like rest stops, stairwells, trains, parking lots, waiting rooms,

airports feel weird when you’re in them because their existence is not about themselves,

but the things before and after them[…]Reality feels altered here because we’re not really

supposed to be in them for a long time for think about them as their own entities, and

when we do they seem odd and out of place. The other spaces feel weird because our

brains are hard-wired for context - we like things to belong to a certain place and time.” 2

A state of liminality, as conveyed by anthropologist Victor Turner, is that of an individual positioned

between two ‘phases’. Turner’s definition refers specifically to persons undertaking rites of passage: for

example, coming-of-age rituals, which are knowingly entered into, or the Western concept of adolescence,

which by contrast is an involuntary transition marked by physical change. Turner explains that these

transitions are comprised of three distinct phases: “separation”, marking the moment the individual

withdraws and detaches from the group to which they currently belong; “margin”, which Turner refers to

more frequently as the “liminal” period, in which the individual has moved beyond their original state of

being, but has not yet fulfilled the conditions allowing them entry to the next state. Finally, there is the

“reaggregation” phase, in which the “passage is consummated”, and the individual’s new status is fully

realised.3

1
Places Where Reality Is A Bit Altered (2016) <https://heart.tumblr.com/post/148851947007/places-where-
reality-is-a-bit-altered> [accessed 15 June 2019]. (Website)
2
Places Where Reality Is A Bit Altered
3
Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 2 edn (Hawthorne, N.Y: Aldine de Gruyter,
1995), p. 94.

4
 If individuals can be considered ‘liminal’ by virtue of their place within a structured society, how, then, can a

place be liminal? A spatial definition of liminality may borrow heavily from the definitions set out by

Turner: “Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and

arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.”4Furthermore, Turner notes, “the passage from lower to

higher status is through a limbo of statuslessness.”5 As I will examine, there are several ways in which we

might define a liminal place, but all liminal places have in common this ‘limbo of statuslessness’, whether by

design or circumstance; they are all in some sense “betwixt and between”.

Thresholds are a particular type of liminal place: spaces of literal transition in which the individual dwells

temporarily before moving on to another, definitive space; indeed Turner refers to liminal individuals as

“threshold people”6. Doorways, stairwells, corridors, landings and train stations, among other ‘temporary’

places, may be considered liminal inasmuch as they are spaces of transition, places we ‘pass through’; to

loiter in these thresholds makes us uncomfortable, because we are supposed to proceed onto other places. It

feels as though a veil has been lifted, forcing us to recognise the empty stairwell as a physical space in its

own right, not just an interconnecting component. To dwell in temporary spaces is contrary to their design.

Another type of liminal place is that which is designed for a particular purpose, but which – temporarily or

definitively – does not fulfil its purpose. These may include a school during the holidays, an abandoned

house or city, a train graveyard. The liminality of these places is more in keeping with Turner’s definition

inasmuch as they are between phases: they retain the characteristics of their assigned purpose but are

purposeless in their abandonment. These places may be considered “anti-structural”, in that they defy the

structure assigned to them, and do not function according to societal expectations.

We may consider a third type of liminal place, existing on the periphery of liminality; places which are not

thresholds in the traditional sense, but are nonetheless designed as a temporary places or dwellings. These

places are not unsettling in and of themselves, but may become so under certain circumstances; for example,

after hours, where the supermarket or shopping centre temporarily adopts the guise of abandonment. A hotel

4
Turner, p. 95.
5
Turner, p. 97.
6
Turner, p. 95.

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 may become unsettling when it begins to mimic, either through circumstance or prolonged inhabitation, a

space of ‘proper’ domesticity.

This latter category of liminal place may be more closely aligned with Marc Augé’s definition of the ‘non-

place’. While Augé’s non-places are, by his own admission, subjective, he does nonetheless provide a

theoretical framework. Non-place exists in opposition to what Augé calls ‘anthropological place’:

“[Anthropological places] want to be – people want them to be – places of identity, of relations and of

history.7”; “[…]the idea, partially realised, that the inhabitants have of their relations with the territory, with

their families and with others.8” These places are “relational, historical and concerned with identity” 9, and are

typically social spheres or centres – Augé refers here to the marketplace – in which a person may identify

and be identified. A non-place, then, is the opposite: “a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to

the fleeting, the temporary and the ephemeral”10; “spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit,

commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces.” 11

There is a marked similarity between what Augé defines as a non-place, and the working definition of a

liminal place as applied to this essay. Both non-places and liminal places are defined by temporariness,

whether this is in the context of a stairwell through which we pass to reach another place, or a train platform,

which exists solely as a gateway to the next stage of our journey. Liminal places, however, rely on the

contextual relationship between a person and their surroundings, whereas non-place is more concerned with

the removal or alteration of one’s own sense of identity, or the creation of a new, temporary identity: that of

the “passenger, customer or driver.12”

We may theorise, then, that physical places can be considered ‘liminal’ either because they are places of

transition, built specifically to bridge the gap between two lived-in spaces; are designed for to be populated

temporarily and for specific purpose; or because they are places which no longer fulfil the purpose for which

they were designed. And beyond the boundaries of what we may consider ‘strictly’ liminal, there are other

7
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. by John Howe, 2 edn
(London: Verso, 1995), p. 52.
8
Augé, p.56.
9
Augé, p.77.
10
Augé, p.78.
11
Augé, p.94.
12
Augé, p.103

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 spatial constructs – such as Michel Foucault’s heterotopias – which may be characterised as possessing

liminal characteristics; we might refer to these places as ‘liminoid’, to use Victor Turner’s own

nomenclature.13

These places – the liminal and liminoid, the broad framework of the non-place – are often present in horror-

adjacent fiction in some form or another. They may present as the locus of horror – for example, the ghostly

coastal hotel of M.R. James’ classic Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad (1904) (Sam Wiseman

suggests further that the Globe Inn is part of a wider patchwork of liminal places, which encompasses the

entire surrounding coastline: “[…]caught between land and sea, it is a liminal realm, which does not belong

fully to one world or the other.”14). They may occur as part of a wider geography, a brief or prolonged

narrative excursion to some other place, in which something unnerving occurs; witness the nameless narrator

of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) wandering the empty corridors and darkened rooms of Manderley,

the west wing in which the eerie Mrs Danvers lurks15.

The repeated motif of liminal places in horrific fictions certainly merits investigation. Central to the matter is

a chicken-and-egg paradox: do we associate liminal places with the uncanny because they recur so frequently

in horror fiction, or do they recur precisely because they are inherently uncanny? What features do liminal

places possess which leave them so open to uncanniness? Certainly, the late Mark Fisher notes that “the

centrality of doors, thresholds and portals means that the notion of the between is crucial to the weird.”16”The

weird”, Fisher elaborates, “de-naturalises all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the

outside.”17Fisher’s definition exposes another insight into the potentially unsettling power of the liminal

13
“[…]the "-oid" here, as in asteroid, starlike, ovoid, egg- shaped, etc., derives from Greek -eidos, a form,
shape, and means "like, resembling"; "liminoid" resembles without being identical with "liminal"” Victor
Turner, 'Liminal to liminoid, in play, flow, and ritual: an essay in comparative symbology', Rice Institute
Pamphlet - Rice University Studies, 60.3, (1974), (p. 64), in Rice University
<https://scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/63159> [accessed 22 June 2019].
14
Sam Wiseman, 'Murmuring Seas, Broken Ground: the Liminal Landscape of M.R. James’ “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll
Come to You, My Lad”', Readings, 2.1, (2016), 1-7 (p. 2), in
<http://www.readingsjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Readings-Wiseman-Murmuring-Seas-Broken-
Ground.pdf> [accessed 23 June 2019].
15
“I thought, as I stood there, wondering which way to turn, that the silence was unusual, holding something
of the same oppression as an empty house does, when the owners have gone away.” Daphne du Maurier,
Rebecca (London: Virago Press, 2003), p. 100.
16
Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), p. 28.
17
Fisher, p.29.

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 place: the sense that the familiar may house the unfamiliar; that these known and therefore safe places may

be in some way unsafe.

Before proceeding, we must briefly turn to the matter of the uncanny. This Freudian term may be of greater

use to this essay if we perceive it, as Fisher suggests, as existing on a spectrum rather than as a self-contained

concept, subsuming related terms such as ‘weird’ and ‘eerie’. Upon this spectrum we may locate the weird

and the eerie as separate waypoints. Fisher points out that Freud’s treatise on the unheimlich stumbles when

it reduces this infinitely complex concept to what is ultimately a frustratingly shallow psychoanalytic

chestnut: the repressed memory of the mother’s genitalia18. To presume that all modes of unsettling cognition

can be encapsulated within the uncanny is to do the complexity of the subject a disservice. I therefore

propose that the ‘uncanny’ is a specific point on this strange spectrum; likewise, where I use the term ‘eerie’,

it is a conscious choice to locate the affect elsewhere on the spectrum. The specificity of language, however,

is a secondary concern to the spatial mechanisms which provoke these effects.

It is with the central question of uncanniness that I will explore the presence of liminal places in horrific

fictions, beginning with an examination of the way The X-Files and Hannibal utilise familiar liminal places:

domestic or otherwise commonplace locations which, to use Turner’s tripartite framework, ‘separate’ from

their normative context, insinuating – but never quite becoming – something other.

I will then move on to examine the novels Dark Matter by Michelle Paver and Underground by Tobias Hill,

which explore the abandoned liminal: places constructed for a specific purpose which, by virtue of their

abandonment, they do not fulfil; places which exist in a kind of liminal stasis, mimicking Turner’s ‘margin’

phase – neither entirely one thing or another.

Finally, with reference to Stephen King’s novel The Long Walk and 2012 videogame Journey, I will examine

Turner’s idea of ‘reaggregation’ as it relates to liminal places, and ask whether the nature of their liminality

precludes true reaggregation.

18
“It often happens that neurotic men state that to them there is something uncanny about the female
genitals. But what they find uncanny [‘unhomely’] is actually the entrance to man’s old ‘home’, the place
where everyone once lived.” Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock (London: Penguin
Classics, 2003), p. 151.

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 Chapter 1: “When I walked into that room, my heart went cold”19 – The
strange within the familiar.

‘Squeeze’, the third episode of cult sci-fi/horror TV show The X-Files, introduced the recurring character of

Eugene Victor Tooms, a genetic mutant whose unusual physiology enables his furtive century-long tenure as

a serial killer. As the first and most iconic of The X-Files’ ‘Monster(s) of the Week’, Tooms is routinely

recalled as one of the series’ most frightening villains.

19
‘Squeeze’, The X-Files Complete Series 1-9 (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2012) [on DVD].

9
 Tooms’ success as both a serial killer and a celebrated monster can be credited to his ability to subluxate and

elongate his limbs, enabling him to literally squeeze through small openings in order to gain access to his

victims. Journalist Mark Butler notes, of Tooms, that “The mutant serial killer had viewers everywhere

double-checking the corners of their rooms. And under the toilet seat.20” Tooms’ ability to access closed-off

spaces through impossible points of entry make him uniquely terrifying; such a creature cannot be protected

against, as Mulder himself points out: “All these people spending good money on high-tech security systems

—I look at this guy, and I think—it ain't enough."21The spaces in which Tooms carries out his predations are

therefore of significance. The opening scene to ‘Squeeze’ depicts a businessman in his deserted after-hours

office; we are reassured by the presence of CCTV cameras as the businessman enters the office. Even at

night the environment is familiar; the sheer ordinariness implies an inherent security. It is what Manuel

Aguirre would refer to as a ‘closed space’, a term he uses broadly to describe the ‘human world’ and all its

constituent parts, as portrayed in horror fiction22. The essence of horror fiction, according to Aguirre, is the

interplay between these closed spaces and what he terms ‘the Numen’: “that which we are not” 23,

specifically, that which exists outside of our closed space, seeking to invade or infiltrate.

Tooms initially appears to be a textbook Numen: “[…]lurking behind every gateway, seeking entrance into

the world.”24But the peculiar terror of Tooms is that he does not slot neatly into Aguirre’s definition of the

numinous, which requires externality. When we meet Tooms for the first time – not as a glimpse of unearthly

gold eyes in the dark, nor as a set of weirdly elongated fingerprints – we are introduced to a man perceived

by those around him as a normal human being; a blue-collar worker, “euphemistically titled an "animal

control worker." He wears humble clothes and holds himself humbly.25”Tooms blends in because he mimics

the familiar; his occupation and his uniform enable him to move unseen in a world which treats men like

20
Mark Butler, The X-Files’ greatest monster: how Eugene Tooms terrified us 25 years ago (2019)
<https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/the-x-files-eugene-tooms/> [accessed 17 July 2019]. (Website)
21
‘Squeeze’, The X-Files Complete Series 1-9 (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2012) [on DVD].
22
“It manifests itself in haunted buildings, in labyrinths and prisons, catacombs and caves; in borders and
frontiers, thresholds and walls; in the terror of the shuttered room and the protection of the magic circle; in
the promise and dread of the closed door” Manuel Aguirre, The Closed Space: Horror Literature and Western
Symbolism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 2.
23
Aguirre, p. 3.
24
Aguirre, p. 163.
25
Rhonda V. Wilcox, '"The X-Files" and Ingestion: Or, How to Become Vegetarian in Twelve Easy Episodes',
Studies in Popular Culture, 19.3, (1997), 11-22 (p. 18), in < https://www.jstor.org/stable/23413716> [accessed
17 July 2019].

10
 Tooms as background noise. Worse still, his occupation grants him a legitimate excuse for his presence in

odd locations; we may cast a sideways glance at a suit-clad executive lurking around air vents, but an animal

control worker is a far less strange presence. He does not seek entrance to our ‘closed space’ because he

already exists within it.

Freud describes the uncanny as “the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar”.26Though clearly

numinous – or perhaps numinoid, to borrow Turner’s linguistic device – Tooms is nonetheless eminently

familiar. His veiled strangeness is initially detectable only through his unearthly jaundiced irises. The

selectiveness with which the camera reveals this tell is notable; in presenting as a humble dog-catcher,

Tooms’ eyes – often cast in shadow – appear normal. It is only in his capacity as abhuman monster that the

true colour of his eyes – and therefore his true strangeness – is revealed. The flash of yellow eyes in the dark

becomes Tooms’ motif, proof of his hidden numinoid nature.

The opening scene of ‘Squeeze’ depicts Tooms skulking variously inside storm drains and lift shafts before

progressing on to the air ducts which ultimately allow him ingress. In sequel episode ‘Tooms’, he is shown

to inhabit the space beneath a shopping mall escalator. These places are liminal inasmuch as they exist

between the inhabitable and the inhabited; as Roger Luckhurst points out in relation to corridors, they are

“[…]regarded as infrastructure, the underpinning service elements of the world that are too big, or buried, or

boring to deserve comment.”27Architects Joshua Cameroff and Ker-Shing Ong note the “unspeakable

cavities” which are “smuggled into the walls of the home and the office”; an “unseemly interior” 28which

modern architects seek to ‘disappear’ from the collective consciousness of those who inhabit these spaces.

But they do exist, and Tooms – whose occupation requires an awareness of these hidden functional spaces –

is able to exploit his victims’ disinterest in the specifics of their surroundings to his advantage. Even Mulder

and Scully, aware of Tooms’ preternatural abilities, neglect to secure their own ‘closed spaces’; across the

two episodes, both of their homes are invaded via the same kind of air vent we witness Tooms entering in the

opening minutes of ‘Squeeze’.

26
Fisher, p. 10.
27
Roger Luckhurst, Corridors: Passages of Modernity (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), p. 9.
28
Luckhurst, p.13.

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 Tooms endures as a terrifying filmic monster because he exposes a truism: we lack an awareness of the in-

between places, those liminal conduits which permeate our closed space, through which the Numen may

enter. The very nature of these places as between opens them to the possibility of intrusion; this may be why

Dr Caron Lipman notes, in her study of hauntings, that liminal places are traditionally the site of eerie events

and ghost sightings: “Staircases, landings, windows and reflections, doorways, corners, crevices, and the

minor or lesser used rooms or storage spaces[…]footsteps are often heard ascending or descending

staircases, ghosts frame doorways or linger at landings.”29These liminal spaces are typically thresholds, or

else infrastructural spaces, the ‘unspeakable cavities’ which nonetheless must exist so that the wider space

around them might function. They are, as Anthony Vidler describes, “”forgotten spaces” – under the stairs,

in the closet, the bottom drawer – which, once forgotten and now returned through the work of memory, take

on an uncanny, mysterious, and threatening aspect.”30

But these liminal places are not always unsettling. We may pass through stairwells and along corridors in

everyday life without discomfort; we may utilise lifts and landings without considering their liminal-ness.

They are primarily functional spaces, and we derive comfort from the familiar context of this functionality.

Yet these places return again and again as spatial motifs in horror-adjacent fictions, from the strange gothic

topographies of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to the labyrinthic corridors of Twin Peaks

(1990-91). We may surmise that there is some quality that these places have in common which leaves them

susceptible to eeriness. Mark Fisher’s definition seems particularly pertinent here: “The sensation of the eerie

occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present

when there should be something.”31The eerie is a product of decontextualisation; when a place behaves

differently to that which we expect of it. This might be as simple as lingering in a stairwell for too long; we

are accustomed to the stairwell as a space of transition rather than a place in its own right, and to recognise it

as such is to experience this familiar place in an unfamiliar context. To stand in a corridor instead of passing

through it is to experience the previously unrecognised strangeness of its design; “like ‘looking down a gun

29
Dr Caron Lipman, Co-habiting with Ghosts: Knowledge, Experience, Belief and the Domestic Uncanny (Surrey:
Ashgate Publishing, 2014), p. 54.
30
Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (London: The MIT Press,
2001), p. 166.
31
Fisher, p. 61.

12
 barrel’”32, to quote Mayer Spivack, whose study ‘Sensory Distortion in Tunnels and Corridors’ analysed the

admittedly extreme example of a 905 metre long hospital corridor. It is to recognise the multiple points of

ingress and thereby situate oneself in an open space, one which might be accessible to others, or worse still,

the other.

The transition from the safe and familiar to the strange and uncanny may be viewed in terms of Turner’s

phasic notion of ‘separation’. At some point, the stairwell (or corridor, or attic) becomes detached from its

known context – a temporary, transitional space – and moves toward a new, unfamiliar context. This is in

itself an expression of liminality; Turner’s full three-stage process is never properly fulfilled, and the

‘separated’ space either reverts back to its original state upon passing through, or maintains its liminal sense

of unfamiliarity. We may be reminded, each time we subsequently enter the stairwell, of a lingering

strangeness. In this instance, it might be said that we have entered the uncanny valley.

Roboticist Masahiro Mori’s 1970 essay ‘Bukimi no Tani’, popularised as ‘The Uncanny Valley’, posits that

as robots increasingly come to resemble humans, so our affinity toward them grows until they reach a

particular degree of resemblance – close, but imperfect – at which our affinity sharply turns to repulsion. As

the robot continues to become more human in appearance, so our affinity is once again restored. This dropoff

is referred to as the ‘Uncanny Valley’, though it may more properly be called the ‘Eerie Valley’ 33. Mori’s is

an object-focused definition rather than a spatial one, but we may nonetheless be able to broadly apply the

trajectory to the spatial in order to explain why a familiar space might suddenly strike us as eerie.

In Mori’s example, the ‘Uncanny Valley’ effect strikes when we are suddenly confronted with the

artificiality of a prosthesis we had previously thought to be real34. Mark Fisher suggests that the ‘weird’ can

be defined as “the presence of that which does not belong”35, and this definition is also broadly in line with
32
Luckhurst, p. 199.
33
‘不気味の谷’- the constituent noun ‘不気味’may be translated variously as ‘eerie’, ‘weird’ or ‘ominous’,
utilising three individual kanji: 不, meaning ‘negative’ or ‘not’, 気, meaning ‘spirit’ or ‘atmosphere’, and 味,
meaning ‘flavour’ or ‘taste’. With this in mind, I will use the term ‘Uncanny Valley’ as a means of describing
that which is specifically eerie in nature.
34
“[…]once we realize that the hand that looked real at first sight is actually artificial, we experience an eerie
sensation. For example, we could be startled during a handshake by its limp boneless grip together with its
texture and coldness. When this happens, we lose our sense of affinity, and the hand becomes uncanny.”
Masahiro Mori, 'The Uncanny Valley [From the Field]', IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 19.2, (2012), 98-
100 (p. 99), in <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254060168_The_Uncanny_Valley_From_the_Field>
[accessed 19 July 2019].
35
Fisher, p. 61.

13
 Freud’s definition of the uncanny: “something that should have remained hidden and has come into the

open.”36 But the problem is not that the prosthesis does not belong; rather, it is our hastily re-evaluated

perception of it which renders it eerie. The prosthesis belongs from a bodily perspective, simulating an

absent limb, but the context of the prosthesis recalls Fisher’s definition of the eerie: “a failure of absence

or[...]a failure of presence.”37 The synthetic limb is present when there should be absence; likewise, flesh and

bone is absent where it ought to be present, replaced with synthetic materials. In a similar fashion, we may

suggest that although the presence of that which does not belong can absolutely render a place unsettling, the

liminal locations so frequently featured in horror fiction more often become so when we are confronted with

a failure in context, a cognitive dissonance; their affect operates along a different axis.

‘Squeeze’ and ‘Tooms’ provide us with a new and frightening context for familiar liminal places. These

quotidian functional zones, previously barely considered, become the site of invasion, not from without but

from within; a presence where there should be absence. In some ways, Tooms as mundane blue-collar

worker is more frightening than any supernatural or cosmic Numen. Despite his improbable anatomical

adaptations he is nonetheless a credible threat, a monster hiding in plain sight who exploits the quiet,

overlooked spaces which permeate our everyday existence. “The Other resides in us, 38” Aguirre notes. More

pertinently, the Other resides alongside us, and he can reach us through our air vents.

We need not stretch so far as man-eating mutants to find the Numen among us, though. Perhaps one of the

earliest fears we may exhibit as children is a terror of monsters hiding in ordinary places. The space beneath

the bed is an intimately familiar domestic cousin to the liminal infrastructure discussed in our exploration of

Tooms. Folklore is littered with ‘bogeyman’ characters said to reside beneath our beds. In Brazil, the Boi de

Cara Preta dwells beneath the bed and snatches at children’s feet 39, while the Dutch Bussemand eats children

who refuse to go to sleep40. These are obviously cautionary tales designed to incite good behaviour, but they

tap into a phenomenon described by Anthony Vidler: “space is assumed to hide, in its darkest recesses and

36
Freud, p. 148.
37
Fisher, p. 61.
38
Aguirre, p. 211.
39
María Herrera-Sobek, Celebrating Latino Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Cultural Traditions, Volume 1 (Santa
Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), p. 161.
40
Theresa Bane, Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters in Myth, Legend and Folklore (Jefferson, NC: McFarland
& Company Inc., 2016), p. 71.

14
 forgotten margins, all the objects of fear and phobia that have returned with such insistency to haunt the

imaginations of those who have tried to stake out spaces to protect their health and happiness. 41”

‘Buffet Froid’, the tenth episode of short-lived TV series Hannibal (2013-2015) introduces its own ‘Monster

of the Week’: Georgia Madchen, a young woman suffering with Cotard’s syndrome; a form of psychosis in

which the sufferer believes themselves to be dead. Echoing Tooms, Madchen is initially revealed to us as an

intimation of domestic insecurity; we see her first as a set of footprints in the snow on Beth LeBeau’s roof –

a house which may itself qualify as liminoid, isolated as it is in the middle of the woods. Madchen’s

footprints lead from the attic to beneath LeBeau’s bed, where LeBeau pauses for a moment, aware, perhaps,

of a sudden eerieness; the presence of footprints where there should be absence, leading to an empty bed. As

Tooms’ victims fail to assess the air vents a source of danger, so LeBeau does not, at first, consider that her

unseen companion may be beneath the bed. In the last shot before LeBeau is pulled under, the camera hovers

above her as she stands beside the bed, her torch illuminating a circle of empty floor. The shot frames a

swathe of empty space in which nothing can feasibly be hiding, except, of course, for beneath the bed.

LeBeau may be oblivious to its danger, but by this point, the viewer is not. A hand shoots out to grab her,

and a screaming LeBeau disappears into the darkness. A spatter of blood fans out across the floor. The next

time we see LeBeau she is dead, her face distorted by a Chelsea smile; her brief sojourn into the liminal

underbed has transformed her into the monstrous Other.

Madchen, we learn, is numinoid only by her own self-perception. By visual motif she is analogous to Tooms:

a pair of discoloured eyes in the dark beneath LeBeau’s bed. Unlike Tooms, however, she resides in the

liminal not out of predatory necessity, but because she perceives herself to exist in liminal state: she has

Separated from her state of humanity and exists now in a grey space, as a corpse who nonetheless moves and

breathes. Through physical neglect she has developed a severe leprous infection, causing the skin of her arm

to slough off like a glove when protagonist Will Graham attempts to catch her, a literal Separation. It is only

Graham’s empathy – himself a liminal individual, poised on the precipice between sanity and madness – that

allows Madchen to return to her pre-psychotic state. The revelation of her bloodshot eyes in the dark outside

Graham’s window unsettles in the same way as Tooms in the storm drain; she is the Numen at the gates of

41
Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), p. 167.

15
 our closed space, and like Mulder and Scully, Graham has forgotten that the Numen gains access to us via

the liminal. When Madchen is revealed to be hiding beneath Graham’s bed, the initial horror is nullified by

Graham’s empathy: “Your name is Georgia Madchen,” Graham reminds her. “You are not alone. We’re here

together.42” Graham’s intercession liberates Madchen from her liminal state of being, allowing her to return

to the living, breathing being she previously was – an oppositional trajectory to that of LeBeau, whose mortal

disfigurement persists even as Madchen’s disfigurement is cured.

Aguirre’s framework is limited insofar as it divides space into that which belongs to Man, and that which

belongs to the Numen, thereby creating a binary in which the Numen is, by default, an invader from some

Other place. This binary does not take into account Man-as-Numen; where Aguirre does touch upon this, he

focuses on possession – Man as host to some nebulous Other43 – thereby reinforcing his binary, and leaving

Man himself without agency. Georgia Madchen is not possessed, but a deeply unwell human being. Tooms

too is a terrestrial creature; a mutated man, but a man nonetheless. Must the Numen always be Other? Can it

not hide among us, clothed in human skin?

As ‘Tooms’ inspired a memorable terror in its audience, so too did ‘Buffet Froid’. “The opening scene is

easily the most unnerving moment in the show thus far,” says Gabriel Bergmoser, “as a young woman is

murdered alone in a seriously creepy house in the middle of a forest. The method of her death plays on one

of the most universal of human fears; that there is something hiding under the bed. 44” ‘Buffet Froid’ reminds

us that the ‘forgotten margin’ of the underbed is a source of potential danger. We are as adults supposed to

grow out of this primal fear, so that the underbed becomes a functional space, often a liminal graveyard for

infrequently used items. But the same liminality which allows us to conveniently disappear our

accoutrements also powers our childish imaginations, morphing this forgotten space into a darkened zone in

which monsters can and do lurk.

As we have examined, these forgotten margins are often places which exist directly alongside us: thresholds,

places of transition or simply infrastructural spaces, which simultaneously exist and do not exist; a kind of

42
‘Buffet Froid’, Hannibal – Seasons 1-3 (Studiocanal, 2015) [on DVD]
43
“Time and again the Other seeks to take flesh and dwell amongst us. Throughout the period of Modern
terror, this is the grand theme: the incarnation of the Numen.” Aguirre, p. 198.
44
Gabriel Bergmoser, Hannibal: 110 “Buffet Froid” Review (2019) <http://cultfix.co.uk/hannibal-110-buffet-
froid-review-23292.htm> [accessed 3 August 2019].

16
 Schrödinger’s architecture. These liminal places become self-contained Uncanny Valleys when their

empirical reality ceases to match the context by which we recognise them. An air vent becomes

disconcerting when it is seen to house a yellow-eyed murderer; a storm drain seems blandly functional until

we are appraised of the possibility – as in Stephen King’s IT (1986) that it may host a child-slaughtering

clown45. The space beneath the bed becomes mundane once we reach adulthood and imbue it with purpose,

but may once again become unheimlich when we are reminded of the horrors that might lurk in the dark.

With these new, unfamiliar contexts mundane places become frightening; we have been transported to the

Uncanny Valley, in which everything looks right, but feels wrong.

The preponderance of liminal places in horror fiction, and their dominance in accounts of ‘real-life’

hauntings, suggests that they are particularly susceptible to affects along the uncanny spectrum, perhaps

moreso than more well-defined, well-populated places. We rarely encounter a haunted kitchen; the liminal

platforms and tunnels of the Tube are more frequently the locus of horror than the aboveground-dwelling

bus. In his lengthy answer to Freud’s essay, Nicholas Royle posits an expanded version of the uncanny

which might explain why these hidden places so readily trigger unease 46: “It comes above all, perhaps, in the

uncertainties of silence, solitude and darkness[…]it is perhaps inseparable from an apprehension, however

fleeting, of something that should have remained secret and hidden but has come to light. 47” It is within this

definition that we may locate the second type of liminal place: the abandoned liminal.

45
“’They float,’ the thing in the drain crooned in a clotted, chuckling voice. It held George’s arm in its thick and
wormy grip, it pulled George toward that terrible darkness where the water rushed and roared and bellowed
as it bore its cargo of storm debris toward the sea.” Stephen King, IT (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011), p.
17.
46
“The uncanny has to do with a strangeness of framing and borders, an experience of liminality.” Nicholas
Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 2.
47
Royle, p. 2.

17
 Chapter 2: “For terror of the deadness beyond”48 – memory-ghosts and the
abandoned liminal.

If the locus of unease in familiar liminal spaces is altered context, then what of spaces which lack an

everyday context? Specifically, what of places in which human habitation is a past phenomenon, in which

only artefacts remain as evidence of their former purpose? Abandoned spaces are distinct from apocalyptic

spaces in that, for the most part, they are intact, and their structures are not dramatically unsafe. There is

often no violent inciting incident prompting their abandonment; indeed, the explanation tends toward the

mundane. Yet abandoned spaces capture our collective imaginations. London’s Aldwych tube station, which

has existed in a permanent state of disuse since 1994, has been utilised latterly as a filming location for a

multitude of productions. The empty platforms and dark, quiet tunnels are perhaps most suited to films of a

horrific persuasion; the claustrophobic tunnels in which the titular Creep (2014) lives, holed up in an

abandoned Tube carriage, or the ruined passageways populated by a murderous cannibal in 1974 film Death

Line.

Though they exist outside of the quotidian, these abandoned passageways are nonetheless still rendered

uncanny by the removal of context, albeit on a more holistic scale. Divorced from their purpose, Tube

tunnels and their underground walkways become strange and unsettling places, purposeless loops and dead

ends which, without the temporal grounding of routine – the arrival and departure of trains, the swell of rush

hour – exist outside of normative space and time. Nora Pleßke speaks of the “materialisation of time-space

compression, encompassing all temporalities and spatialities[…]being a non-place and non-time, at least

according to the traditional categories of space and time.” 49 She is referring specifically to the Underground

as viewed through the lens of Neil Gaiman’s novel Neverwhere, in which Underground London becomes a

literal ‘otherworld’, an altered space inhabited by an altered reality. Nonetheless, Pleßke’s description is

broadly applicable abandoned parts of the Underground; true, they may not host bustling markets or

improbable characters (so far as we know), but those empty, decontextualized tunnels, devoid of time-

markers like natural light or even clocks, are indeed non-places, existing in non-time.

48
Michelle Paver, Dark Matter (London: Orion, 2010), pp. 23-24.
49
Nora Pleßke, 'The Liminality of the London Underground', in London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City
Beyond the City, ed. by Nick Hubble and Philip Tew, 2 edn. (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) p. 171

18
 There exist a number of online communities dedicated to what is broadly known as ‘urban exploration’, or

Urbex. Urban explorers are not solely focused on abandoned spaces, though they tend to favour liminal

locations: sewers and storm drains, active transit and utility tunnels, catacombs, even restricted sections of

buildings in active use, harking back to Cameroff and Ong’s ‘unspeakable cavities’. Nonetheless, abandoned

spaces comprise the primary target for urban explorers. Photographer Jeremy Gibbs, under the pseudonym

Romany WG, describes the lure of abandoned spaces, the “beauty [of] layers of history, multi-hued peeling

paint, antique objects, ancient initials in the dust and the other physical manifestations of memory that

abandoned, impermanent urban spaces manifest”.50 What Gibbs describes are places imbued with liminality,

haunted by the literal or figurative ghosts of their past.

Abandoned places are liminal precisely because they are stranded ‘betwixt and between’ two states of being.

They are trapped permanently in Turner’s ‘margin’ phase; they are manmade spaces, inextricable from the

purpose for which they were created, and yet paradoxically unable to fulfil that purpose. They cannot

proceed to the final ‘reaggregation’ stage by virtue of their continued existence, perpetually poised as they

are to resume their former function. The Canfranc railway station in the Spanish Pyrenees, replete with ticket

office and bar, has stood in suspended animation since its abrupt closure in 1970, as though awaiting the

arrival of a train that will never come. The Ukrainian city of Pripyat – perhaps the world’s most notorious

abandoned place – is catnip to urban explorers precisely because it exists, like a snowglobe, in perfect

posthuman stasis. In this chapter, I will ask whether complete demolition of these frozen-in-time places

might represent the only means of reaggregation, and with it, the exorcism of these memory-ghosts.

The locus of the unsettling in an abandoned place is distinct from that of the liminal space which exists

within the context of the home, or the city. These latter places are lived-in; their contexts form part of the

fabric of our everyday lives, and they become disconcerting when those contexts are disrupted. An

abandoned space lacks everyday context, but their familiar spatial forms spark a cognitive awareness in the

individual; we are able to perceive the purpose of an abandoned space by virtue of visual clues. The

apartments and schools and playgrounds of Pripyat inform us that it is supposed to be a place of habitation.

The ticket hall and railway tracks of Canfranc railway station describe what is supposed to be a place of
50
Romany WG, Beauty in Decay II: Urbex (2019) <https://romanywg.com/shop/product/beauty-in-decay-ii-
urbex/> [accessed 16 May 2019]. (Website)

19
 transportation. But our discernment of these visual clues does not mesh with what we are actually observing:

a facsimile of inhabited space without the corresponding behaviours and occurrences. Pripyat is no more a

functional town than a doll’s house is a functional house. It is a liminal diorama. Mark Fisher suggests that in

order for an abandoned place to be truly eerie, there must be a sense of inexplicable mystery; where an

explanation exists for abandonment, “the sense of the eerie is limited” 51. But Fisher’s definition is limited in

its literalness; even where a ready explanation exists, our imaginations are nonetheless powered by the sheer

strangeness of desolation. And as Fisher himself suggests, mystery does not guarantee eeriness: “There must

also be a sense of alterity, a feeling that the enigma might involve forms of knowledge, subjectivity and

sensation that lie beyond common experience.”52Horror fiction is ideally situated, then, to posit new and

eerie mythologies where we may otherwise perceive a lack of mystery.

In Michelle Paver’s novel Dark Matter the protagonist Jack joins a meteorological expedition overwintering

in Gruhuken, on the remote island of Spitsbergen53 high in the Arctic Circle, which Jack imagines will be a

great adventure in the pristine wilderness. The expedition set up camp in a location previous occupied by a

fur trapper. The abandoned trapper’s hut is a source of unease from the outset: “Suddenly, I felt

desolate[…]A wild plummeting of the spirits. The romance of trapping peeled away, and what remained was

this. Squalor. Loneliness. It’s as if the desperation of those poor men had soaked into the very timber like the

smell of blubber on the Isbjørn.”54The Gruhuken of Jack’s imagination is untouched and unoccupied; the

introduction of existing spatial forms is an interruption of the freedoms Jack dreams of. That Gruhuken has

been previously inhabited, built upon and subsequently abandoned means that Jack, however unconsciously,

views the location in the context of trapper’s hut. Gruhuken is no longer “just a name on the map” 55but a

physical place. The expedition demolish the hut and replace it with a building of their own, retaining the bear

post, a sole physical reminder of the location’s past.

As the events of the novel unfold it becomes clear that the ‘physical manifestations of memory’ cannot be

erased quite so simply. The haunting of Gruhuken by what the Norwegian sailors refer to as the “gengånger

51
Fisher, p. 62.
52
Fisher, p. 62.
53
Now known as Svalbard
54
Paver, p. 65.
55
Paver, p. 17.

20
 – ‘the one who walks again’56” increases in frequency and intensity with both the onset of winter – and

therefore perpetual darkness – and the loss of Jack’s colleagues, Gus and Algie, who return to the mainland

after Gus is stricken with appendicitis, leaving Jack alone. Jack initially reasons that the strange sensory

episodes he has been experiencing are echoes, resonating from something “appalling” that happened in the

past; “an act of savagery.”57 Unnerved by what he perceives as a presence in the darkness, Jack turns his

attention to the bear post, which he believes is somehow moving closer to the cabin. His behaviour takes a

turn for the obsessive-compulsive: “You’re allowed ten checks a day – and no more.”58Eventually, disturbed

by his own obsession, Jack chops the bear post down, and its constituent fragments are soon buried by an

ensuing blizzard.

Fisher’s eerie framework is well suited to the spatial: “places are eerie; empty landscapes are eerie;

abandoned structures and ruins are eerie. Something moves in these apparently empty or vacated sites that

exists independently of the human subject, an agency that is cloaked or obscure.” 59 Nonetheless, the uncanny

also raises its head. The ‘haunted’ bear post recalls a brief aside in Freud’s essay, in which he mentions, in

passing, a story about a young couple taken from Strand Magazine in 1917. They come to believe that the

source of the strange happenings in their apartment is a table carved with crocodiles, which preceded their

moving in. Of the “quite naïve story”, Freud notes that “[…]in the dark the tenants stumble over things and

fancy they see something undefinable gliding over the stairs.”60Nicholas Royle elaborates upon Freud’s

rather sparse retelling, revealing that the couple eventually burn the table and are apparently freed from the

wrath of the carved crocodiles61. Despite Freud’s dismissiveness, he nonetheless notes that the story is

“extraordinarily uncanny”62; the mechanism at play here is, Freud suggests, akin to magic: “[…]when we are

56
Paver, p. 199.
57
Paver, p. 154.
58
Paver, p. 159.
59
Roger Luckhurst, Making Sense of “The Weird and the Eerie” (2017)
<https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/making-sense-of-the-weird-and-the-eerie/> [accessed 14 August 2019].
(Website)
60
Freud, p. 151.
61
“’I have burnt that infernal table,’ Hugh went on, forgetting his manners for once; ‘nobody will ever see it
again[…]With that he marched out of the office, and we went back to our house, a house which, from that day
to this, has shown no sign of abnormality.” Royle, p. 138.
62
Freud, p. 151.

21
 faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary, when a symbol takes on the

full function and significance of what it symbolizes, and so forth.”63

For Jack, the bear post had from the start symbolised Gruhuken’s unhappy history; prophetically, he makes

the suggestion that to keep the post would be to invite that “dismal past” to ‘poke through’ 64. As Fisher notes,

the inscrutability of the bear post as a symbol lends it a heightened eeriness: “For the symbolic structures

which made sense of the monuments have rotted away”.65 Indeed, Jack’s misplaced relief on removing the

bear post reveals his lack of understanding of its true symbolism, and days after chopping the post down,

Jack once again senses a presence: “Where the bear post had been, a figure was standing.” 66Unlike the young

couple and their crocodile table, Jack’s attempt to rid himself of this terrible symbol only reinforces its

magic. The gengånger advances, no longer on the periphery but seeking to invade; Aguirre’s Numen stalking

the perimeter of Jack’s closed space.

The isolated Jack is briefly visited by a trapper, Bjørvik, who reveals that the gengånger was brutally

murdered by miners seeking to occupy his part of the island. An abject creature in life 67, his abiding fury at

the circumstances of his terrible death manifests in a series of strange accidents, by which the gengånger

transmits his physical abjection: “A cable severed a man’s leg and he bled to death. A boat overturned,

drowning two men within sight of the shore. Finally, a rockslide destroyed the cabins, and the surviving

miners left.”68

Slavoj Žižek, in his analysis of the Lacanian uncanny, suggests that “the return of the dead is a sign of a

disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization; the dead return as collectors of some unpaid

symbolic debt.”69The destruction of the trapper’s hut and desecration of the bear post, stained with the

gengånger’s life-blood, is an unforgivable disturbance. The new cabin is constructed on the site of the old,

retaining something of its terrible, lonely symbolism; this is a liminal cabin, positioned between the enduring

63
Freud, pp. 150-151.
64
Paver, p. 68.
65
Fisher, p. 63.
66
Paver, p. 171.
67
“Bjørvik called him something in Norwegian; I think it means God-forgotten. One of life’s rejects.” Paver, p.
196.
68
Paver, p. 198.
69
Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (London: The MIT
Press, 1991), p. 23.

22
 rage of the ghostly gengånger and the hopes and ambitions of Jack’s crew, between life and death (and

indeed, un-death). It is irrelevant that Jack’s presence on Gruhuken comes years after the trapper’s demise; it

is simply enough for him to occupy the site of the murder. As Nicole Merola notes, “their razing of the old

cabin enacts its own violence by effacing part of the site’s history”70. “It doesn’t matter that I’m innocent”,

Jack reasons, as he becomes aware of this accidental taboo. “It isn’t only the guilty who suffer. Besides, I am

guilty. Because I’m here.”71

Joyce Davidson and Hester Parr’s exploration of the psycho-dynamic city proves relevant even in the frozen

wastes of Gruhuken; the “grief work” which they attribute to cities can be seen here on a smaller scale, in the

heterotopic space of the cabin: “There is so much we cannot know about city spaces – about who lived (and

died) here before us, or about how they lived (and died)[…]that these spaces become intensities of

uncertainty, associated with ‘spooky’ happenings, legacies of terror and the uncanny.” 72These legacies,

according to Jack, bleed through into the liminal space of the cabin “like blood staining a bandage” 73; once

again, a presence where there ought to be absence. As Andrew Thacker notes, the heterotopia “involves a

sense of movement between the real and the unreal; it is thus a site defined by a process, the stress being

upon the fact that it contests another site.”74The ‘real’ space of the cabin contests the ‘unreality’ of the

trapper’s hut; the resultant stress creates a kind of faultline between the present and the past, allowing the

numinous gengånger ingress.

Ghosts, Roger Luckhurst reminds us, “[…]appear precisely as symptoms; points of rupture that insist their

singular tale be retold and their wrongs acknowledged.”75These examinations are inevitably chained to city

space, as in Luckhurst’s consideration of a London Gothic, which represents a kind of limitation. We must

dislocate these psycho-dynamic legacies and points of ghostly rupture from the urban in order to understand

70
Nicole M. Merola, ''For terror of the deadness beyond’: Arctic Environments and Inhuman Ecologies in
Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter', Ecozon, 5.2, (2014), 22-40 (p. 30), in
<https://ebuah.uah.es/dspace/bitstream/handle/10017/20860/terror_Merola_ecozona_2014_N2.pdf?
sequence=1&isAllowed=y> [accessed 12 August 2019].
71
Paver, p. 207.
72
Joyce Davidson and Hester Parr, 'Geographies of Psychic Life', in Psychoanalytic Geographies, ed. by Paul
Kingsbury and Steve Pile, 2 edn. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), p. 128
73
Paver, p.174
74
Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003), p. 25.
75
Roger Luckhurst, 'The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the 'spectral turn'', Textual Practice,
16.3, (2002), 527-546 (p. 542).

23
 how they might affect a place like Gruhuken, at the apex of the world. Indeed, Luckhurst is critical of the

‘spectral turn’, which he considers “Unable to discriminate between instances and largely uninterested in

historicity (beyond its ghostly disruption)”76. Historicity is the thread which runs the length of Dark Matter;

it is present in Jack’s initial disappointment at the island’s history, tangled inextricably in the trapper’s fate,

which is ultimately the result of his refusal to give way to industry. The gengånger’s rage is imbued with

historicity; it views Jack as a usurper, whilst simultaneously seeming to recognise Jack’s ignorance of

Gruhuken’s past. When Jack learns of the gengånger’s brutal end, it is through the unlikely medium of a

dream in which Jack temporarily assumes the identity of the trapper; the bloody transference Jack describes

takes the form of an unconscious transmission, neatly echoing his role as a wireless operator. Paulina Palmer

draws a parallel here between Freud’s concept of the unheimlich, arguing that the gengånger operates as a

kind of “spectral double” 77; Palmer notes shared motives and emotions, potentially including Jack’s

attraction to Gus. I am not convinced by this reading, which attributes to the gengånger a degree of agency

not otherwise observed, but it nonetheless raises the interesting suggestion of a kind of common empathy

between two outsider figures; the abject gengånger and Jack, whose working-class roots and suppressed

queerness make him an ill fit with the rest of the expedition.

If a hypothetical London Gothic can be seen to emerge from the city’s “psychic topography” – the “traumatic

memory [that is] recovered on the ground of the city’s buried history”78 – then we may also make a

concurrent argument for an Arctic Gothic, which similarly draws upon the manifestation of historical spatial

trauma; “these networks of violence”79, predicated by the cruelty of colonisation against the landscape,

against the Arctic wildlife, and against man. In the expedition’s attempt to physically erase the traumatic

memory of Gruhuken we may find the answer to our earlier question: to demolish these frozen-in-time

places is not enough to free them from their ‘margin’ status; they cannot simply proceed to ‘reaggregation’

upon the removal of their symbols, for the memory-ghosts still remain.

76
Luckhurst, London Gothic, p. 535.
77
Paulina Palmer, Queering Contemporary Gothic Narrative 1970-2012 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p.
170.
78
Luckhurst, London Gothic, p. 528.
79
Merola, p. 26.

24
 Not all ghosts are literal, however. In Tobias Hill’s 1999 novel Underground, the tunnels and platforms of

the London Underground become a space of profound trauma, both in the present day, where two women are

pushed onto the tracks and killed, and in the memories of protagonist Casimir and homeless runaway Alice.

These memories are actualised in the form of physical occurrences; the resolutely earthly figure of Alice’s

abusive father stalks the Underground in search of her, and attacks women who physically resemble her. It is

these proxy killings which transform the Underground for Tube worker Casimir, who derives a sense of

comfort and order80 from the peculiar temporality of this self-contained space. He seems to understand that

the Underground itself possesses the power not only to hide people, as Casimir himself is hiding, but to

change people: “What disturbs him is what the Underground will do to people[…]Things are less mundane

down here, more precarious. There is always the way the Underground can contain things, trapping them in

corners, hiding them, making them stronger.”81 As a non-place, the Underground has the power to alter

identity: “The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and

similitude.”82

Unlike the clearly delineated isolation of Gruhuken, the abandoned sections of the Underground exist

alongside those in use. Unused stations and empty cross-tunnels intersect with busy platforms and moving

trains; in Casimir’s subterranean world it is entirely possible to begin one’s journey on a functional section of

track and end up on the platform of an abandoned station. Pleßke notes that this peculiar spatial compression

“enhances the chronotopic character of the urban and generates the thirdspace of heterotopia.” 83Here, we find

a parallel between the familiar derelict forms of Casimir’s world, and the far more specific abandoned space

of Gruhuken.

In Foucauldian terms, the cabin meets many heterotopic requirements. Its Arctic location, with cycles of

perpetual night and perpetual day, renders it heterochronic; “The heterotopia begins to function at full

capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time.” 84 The remoteness of the

cabin – accessible only by boat, in optimal conditions – and the conditions for access set out by the very

80
Tobias Hill, Underground (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 8.
81
Hill, p. 45.
82
Auge, p. 103.
83
Pleßke, p. 172.
84
Michel Foucault, 'Of Other Spaces', Diacritics, 16.1, (1986), 22-27 (p. 26), in The Johns Hopkins University
Press <https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.lib.bbk.ac.uk/stable/464648 > [accessed 20 June 2019].)

25
 nature of the expedition, grant it an almost ritualistic exclusivity, the exclusive domain of those who ‘belong’

– including, by definition, the gengånger. In a similar fashion, though Casimir may freely encounter

abandoned spaces in the context of his job, he is able to access the heterotopic spaces of Alice’s abandoned

Underground only when he is granted permission. His first visit to the former South Kentish Town station

yields no trace of Alice except for her voice. It is only when he takes the matchbox lid 85 – and later

completes this symbolic object with the half that Alice gives him – that he is able to access to the ‘real’

South Kentish Town station, in which she and her companions live. He has fulfilled Foucault’s fifth

principle: “To get in, one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures.” 86

Pleßke suggests that as a heterotopic space, the Underground is “a border of human perception. Something

in-between the conscious and unconscious is constantly on the verge of resurfacing. In the urban

unconscious, repressed memories and traumatic experiences from the past are unearthed[…]opening the

possibilities of an uncanny beyond in the future of the city.”87 Pleßke’s use of ‘uncanny’ seems appropriate,

recalling Nicholas Royle’s assertion that “the uncanny seems (at least for Freud) to involve a special

emphasis on the visual, on what comes to light, on what is revealed to the eye. The uncanny is what comes

out of the darkness.”88 This is a significant factor in Dark Matter, but also in the artificial darkness of

Underground, which frequently recalls the unease of the unseen: “Once I heard him in the cross-tunnel, in

the dark. I kept still and he went past me”89 Alice says, of her abusive foster father. As with Tooms and

Madchen in the previous chapter, the foster father represents the figure of Man-as-Numen: a human monster

who invades the closed, heterotopic space of the abandoned Underground, a presence felt initially as

disembodied sound in the dark90. The dark allows Alice to hide, but it also allows terrible things to hide from

her.

Later, in pursuit of the foster father, Casimir descends into a disused deep-level shelter, where the foster

father himself has gone to ground: “It’s like being underwater, Casimir thinks.[…]There is the need to see

85
Hill, p. 68.
86
Foucault, p. 7.
87
Pleßke p. 174.
88
Royle, p. 108.
89
Hill, p. 147.
90
Hill, p. 147.

26
 everything that is hidden, and the desire to get back up to the light. The desire to get out is stronger now.” 91

The emphasis on darkness obscuring of the real, as though the real may only be visual, recalls Anthony

Vidler’s commentary on dark space: “the fear of the Enlightenment in the face of “darkened spaces, of the

pall of gloom which prevents the full visibility of things, men and truths.” 92 Ironically, it is only in the dark

that Casimir and Jack are able to discover their respective truths; the revelation of Alice’s past in the liminal

gloom of the cross-tunnels sits in parallel to the moment a young Casimir, in the midst of a solar eclipse,

discovers that his father is importing chemical weapons from Russia:

“A shadow is coming across the sea towards us, racing across the flat water. It is the shadow

of the moon. It is as big as Poland. It makes no sound as it swallows us, a cold mouth

without language. I look up, head right back on my shoulders. Straight up into the sun’s

black death mask.

‘Casimir? Casimir?’

I look back down for my father, but my father has gone. Beside me stands nothing but an

evil man.”93

Casimir’s childhood revelation takes place on a boat, which is not only Foucault’s ideal of the “heterotopia

par excellence”94, but a liminal place in its own right: “A place without a place that exists by itself, that is

closed in on itself, and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea[…]” 95We might conceivably

say that the Underground has similar qualities: “The Underground starts out perfect. At first it isn’t like the

city about it because it is conceived all at once[…]Then years go by. Decades. Cross-tunnels are found to be

unnecessary, so they are bricked up. Deeper tunnels are added by the government, then closed down.” 96The

Underground too is a placeless non-place, a self-contained space which is given over not to the sea, but to the

infinity of tunnels, used and unused, bricked-up or repurposed by squatters, a place whose margins are

unknowable in the dark. Uncanny, yes, but also unquestionably eerie in its enduring mystery.

91
Hill, p. 234.
92
Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, pp. 168-169.
93
Hill, p. 215.
94
Foucault, p. 9.
95
Foucault, p. 9.
96
Hill, pp. 135-136

27
 Casimir is himself a liminal individual – a Polish immigrant in London, the son of a Jewish mother and an

anti-Semite – who, as with Jack and haunted Gruhuken, finds both solace and disquiet in the liminal space of

the Underground. In those tunnels and passageways, where time coalesces and topographies mutate over

time, it is possible to understand the ways in which a place may remain perpetually liminal; these forgotten

tunnels retain “the sensitive echoes of the past”97, recalling almost the traumatic recordings of Nigel Kneale’s

The Stone Tape (1972)98. The abandoned tunnels of the Underground may well achieve ‘reaggregation’

should they be restored to regular use, thereby reinstating their original purpose. On the other hand, as

Pleßke points out, the Underground itself is inherently liminal, whether abandoned or utilised:

“Simultaneously ‘womb and tomb’, the inner sphere of the earth is the realm of the dead as well as a shelter

for the living.” “Underground London”, Pleßke continues, “is a threshold, the liminal space of an illimitable

metropolis where the real and the imaginary overlap.”99

We have explored the ‘separation’ and ‘margin’ phases of Turner’s tripartite framework. We might expect

that the progression to ‘reaggregation’ is the logical next step, and indeed, as we have explored, there are

conditions in which a liminal place may ‘reaggregate’, albeit with limitations. But we must consider whether

there also exist liminal places which, by their very nature, cannot reaggregate in any meaningful sense. With

this in mind, we will move on to consider the cyclical liminal; spaces which attain a permanent liminality by

virtue of their symbolism.

Chapter 3: “The pattern of life and death in that white paint”100: Cycles of
liminality

Turner’s third phase, ‘reaggregation’, occurs when “the passage is consummated.” “The ritual subject,”

Turner elaborates, “[…]is in a relatively stable state once more, and by virtue of this, has rights and

97
Pleßke, p. 165.
98
“Kneale’s thesis is that hauntings and ghosts are particularly intense phenomena that are literally recorded
by matter, by the stone of the room. (Hence the “stone tape” of the title.) – Fisher, p. 87.
99
Pleßke, p. 162.
100
Stephen King, 'The Long Walk', in The Bachman Books (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012), p. 111

28
 obligations vis-à-vis others of a clearly defined and “structural” type; he is expected to behave in accordance

with certain customary norms”.101 A spatial interpretation of this requires that the formerly-liminal space

behave differently to its original state; it may be utilised for a different purpose, or house social gatherings of

an entirely different nature. An example of this might be the former yeshiva in television series Russian Doll

(2019); a Jewish institution of Talmudic study repurposed into an apartment in which main character Nadia

relives her birthday party again and again. Nadia, who is herself Jewish (albeit non-observing) incorrectly

suspects the former yeshiva as exerting some transformational influence, thereby forcing her to infinitely

relive the same day. The yeshiva, though, has reached ‘reaggregation’; its transition from one purpose to

another is complete, and therefore the building – whilst maintaining architectural evidence of its former

purpose – has attained a newly stable state as accommodation, with the ‘right and obligations’ that this type

of space demands.

The visual traces of the former yeshiva – particularly the inscription on the outer wall of the building, which

Nadia initially views as proof of its continued influence – can be likened to Anthony Vidler’s assessment of

the Venetian district of Cannareggio, itself a former Jewish quarter: “In this context the red “standing

stones” of Cannareggio might be read as the posthumous traces of such a death.[…]They neither symbolise

nor may they be used. Indeed, it is the mark of their posthumous existence that they have already

symbolised, have already been occupied.”102The yeshiva, as we come to understand, holds no lingering

power; these physical traces are merely a monument to its former symbolism, now overtaken by the business

of living, and of perpetual partying.

But not all liminal places are able to ‘reaggregate’. In the previous chapter, we explored the lingering effect

of ‘memory-ghosts’ on abandoned spaces, and the enduring legacy of trauma. This is one way in which

places may remain in liminal stasis. Another way is the imposition – whether intentional or accidental – of a

‘cycle’ of being, a rehashing of conditions or events which render a place liminal. The cycle may resolve

temporarily, thereby allowing for the precarious illusion of reaggregation until it begins again, plunging the

location and its inhabitants back into a state of liminality. Eventually, the inevitability of the cycle, and the

tacit recognition of such, undermines the period of resolution so that it cannot be seen as true reaggregation;
101
Turner, p. 95.
102
Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 124.

29
 it is a rite of passage which is never properly consummated and thus requires the subject to be submitted

again and again to the ritual state of liminality, so much so that liminality becomes the default state.

These cycles, as in Russian Doll, tap into the uncanny via the repetitious; that which “transforms what would

otherwise seem quite harmless into something uncanny and forces us to entertain the idea of the fateful and

the inescapable”103As the subject becomes increasingly aware of the cycle they are trapped in, they may find

the accidental repetition of actions or conversations unnerving or even disturbing. Sandor Klapcsik describes

“a period of social liminality when transgression, doubling and reversals saturate the characters’ lives,

creating an enforced, carnivalistic experience.” According to Klapcsik, these characters “do not find but lose

their identity in the uncanny, abyssal mirrors that they are confronted with” 104

The same is equally true of artificially imposed cycles. Contemporary literature is awash with examples of

‘gamified’ cycles, often sinister in nature: The Hunger Games (2008-2010) series imagines a dystopian

North America which annually enacts an enforced ‘battle royale’, in which twenty-two children are forced to

fight to the death. The series’ precursor, Japanese novel Battle Royale (1999), imagined a similar

programme, enforced by a fascist Japanese government; an annual tournament in which forty-two students

are sent to a remote island in the Seto Inland Sea and forced to kill one another. In both novels, reluctant

competitors endure a loss of identity, reduced to a collective of sacrificial lambs, representative of their

respective institutions but, crucially, denied individual personhood. Despite the invariably fatal nature of the

respective tournament for all but one of the participants, the cycle is nonetheless repeated on a yearly basis.

This rite-of-passage becomes a cultural norm, but the majority of initiates are never able to attain

reaggregation, unless we are to view death as its own form of reaggregation. For the winner – or perhaps we

may more accurately refer to them as the ‘survivor’ – navigating the liminal period of their contendership

does not necessarily result in reaggregation; Battle Royale’s de-facto ‘winner’ Shogo Kawada is killed

helping his friends escape, while survivors Shuya Nanahara and Noriko Nakagawa are forced to flee to

America in order to survive, thereby entering into an entirely new state of liminality.

103
Freud, p. 144.
104
Sandor Klapcsik, Liminality in Fantastic Fiction: A Poststructuralist Approach (Jefferson, NC: McFarland &
Company, 2012), p. 167.

30
 Stephen King’s eerily prescient105 1979 novel The Long Walk is perhaps one of the earliest examples of the

‘dystopia games’ subgenre (preceded by Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story The Lottery). The plot revolves

around an annual walking contest which recruits 100 teenage boys from across a vaguely dystopic future

America. The Walk itself is a voluntary death march: boys who violate the rules of the Walk are shot dead

until eventually, a single Walker remains. The surviving Walker is designated the winner; his prize is

anything he wants, for the rest of his life106.

Unlike the more overtly dystopian worlds of The Hunger Games and Battle Royale, the Walkers freely

choose their vocation. Protagonist Ray Garraty alludes to the possibility of coercion for Walkers who have

already been drawn to compete, suggesting that to back out from the Walk would result in ‘Squading’ 107 – a

nebulous threat which implies government-sanctioned kidnapping. Nonetheless, the initial decision to enter

the Walk is freely undertaken by the boys themselves. The lavish prize is the primary motivator, but it is

strongly implied that the physical and mental strain of the Walk typically preclude the winner from living

long enough to enjoy the fruits of their labour.

The Walk takes place on a length of road running from the border of Maine and Canada, through New

Hampshire and on to Massachusetts, passing through towns and cities and in-between spaces, akin to Marion

Shoard’s betwixt-and-between ‘Edgelands’108. The road is utilised normally outside of the Walk, a mundane

space of transit. During the Walk, however, it is imbued with a specific liminality, becoming an almost

profane space. It becomes a Foucauldian crisis heterotopia: “privileged or sacred or forbidden places,

reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a

state of crisis”109 Indeed, as the site of a rite of passage the road is inaccessible to non-participants. The

soldiers who oversee the Walk are permitted to enter the road only to kill, as per the rules of the rite, or to

provide the Walkers with rations; their place in the ritual is clearly defined, and they have earned conditional

105
The Swedish competition ‘Fotrally’ has been held annually since 2009, directly influenced by King’s novel.
The longest recorded race time stands at 87 hours and 48 minutes. (hrnick, Marathon March (2019)
<https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/marathon-march> [accessed 25 August 2019].)
106
King, p. 267.
107
“But they Squad them just as fast for trying to back out of a Long Walk as they do for talking against it.” –
King, p. 268.
108
Marion Shoard, 'Edgelands of Promise', Landscapes, 1.2, (2013), 74-93, in <10.1179/lan.2000.1.2.74>
[accessed 22 July 2019].
109
Foucault, p. 4.

31
 access to the heterotopic road by obtaining “certain permission, and [making] certain gestures.” 110 They

speak to the initiates only to issue the three warnings their pre-agreed role demands; to do anything else

would be to violate the rules, which is viewed as a kind of taboo. “You get paid to shoot me, not to look at

me”111 Garraty tells one soldier, whom he perceives as having stared at him for too long.

Similarly, the crowd are clearly demarcated from the liminal Walkers by their position beside the road. They

are not permitted to enter the road, nor to interfere in any way; when Dom L’Antio tries to give the Walkers

watermelon he is tackled to the ground by a State Trooper and put in handcuffs. 112 A dog which runs onto the

road is shot dead; moments later, a young boy wanders onto the road, “but the soldier merely swept the little

boy indifferently back into the crowd.”113The crowd are unable to enter or alter the liminal ritual space of the

Walk.

The Walkers come to perceive the crowd as an almost malevolent mass, a single entity which, by virtue of

their almost-humanness, must surely be situated at the nadir of the Uncanny Valley:

“Only Crowd, a creature with no body, no head, no mind. Crowd was nothing but a

Voice and an Eye, and it was not surprising that the Crowd was both God and

Mammon[…]Crowd was to be pleased. Crowd was to be worshipped and feared.

Ultimately, Crowd was to be made sacrifice unto.”114

The crowd’s compulsive consumption of the spectacle manifests in detachment. When Garraty almost faints

on the road, the crowd respond with “a muted, almost sexual murmur”115; moments later, the crowd “watched

voraciously as Wyman squatted to make his bowels work.”116As George Cotronis notes, the crowd are

“essentially a neutral force; an act of god. They’re easy to hate, but they are simply the instrument of the

Walk.”117This perception of the crowd as a singular mass invokes the eerie; there is at once a failure of

presence and of absence. The crowd fulfil the physical requirement of presence whilst simultaneously failing
110
Foucault, p. 7.
111
King, p. 84.
112
King, p. 202.
113
King, p. 271.
114
King, p. 276.
115
King, p. 165.
116
King, p. 167.
117
George Cotronis, 'The Long Walk': Stephen King's Best Novel (2017) <https://litreactor.com/columns/the-
long-walk-stephen-kings-best-novel> [accessed 2 August 2019].

32
 to be present, a neutral glut in human guise. Fisher contends that the issue of agency is central to the eerie 118,

and the traces of this are clearly visible in the Mammonic crowd; they are in their entirety an agent, but the

purpose and motivation of this agent are as alien to the reader as they are to the Walkers. A greater sense of

the eerie is evident in the thinly-sketched dystopic world of the Walk, replete with fascist allusions and hints

of an alternative strand of post-World War Two history119; the mystery, which is never resolved, leaves the

world of the Walk “saturated in a sense of the eerie. The enigma here, evidently, turns on two questions:

what happened and why?”120

As the Walkers cease to recognise the personhood of the crowd, so the crowd responds in kind to the

Walkers. By entering into the covenant of the Walk, they voluntarily ‘separate’ from humanity and enter into

a liminal state of being. The initiates come together to form what Victor Turner refers to as ‘communitas’:

“an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community or even

communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders.” 121 Liminal

individuals are required to “submit to an authority that is nothing less than that of the total

community.”122The crowd, in its faceless entirety, becomes the authority to which the Walkers must submit,

with the soldiers to enact judgement, and the Major as the ritual elder; each amalgamates with the others to

form a de-facto community (or perhaps agent, in Fisher’s terms) which stands in opposition to the

communitas of crisis formed by the Walkers. Within Turner’s framework of liminality, the judgement of the

crowd towards each death, each bodily function and each failure of corporeal integrity is a necessary

condition of the rite: “The ordeals and humiliations, often of a grossly physiological character, to which

neophytes are submitted represent partly a destruction of the previous status[…]They have to be shown that

in themselves they are clay or dust, mere matter, whose form is impressed upon them by society.” 123

The eerie detachment of the crowd recalls Augé’s consideration of the tourist: “there are spaces in which the

individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle. As if the position of

118
Fisher, p. 64.
119
“This was followed by the face of the New Hampshire Provo Governor, a man known for having stormed the
German nuclear base in Santiago nearly singlehanded back in 1953.” King, p. 317.
120
Fisher, p. 62.
121
Turner, p. 96.
122
Turner, p. 103.
123
Turner, p. 103.

33
 the spectator were the essence of the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of spectator were

his own spectacle.”124Indeed, we may argue that without the spectator – in this case, the faceless Crowd –

there could be no spectacle. The essence of the spectacle is the way in which the crowd consume this cyclical

ritual, with its constituent deaths; without the crowd-as-authority to bear witness, the rite cannot truly be

consummated, nor its milestones marked: “somehow they understood that the circle between death-worship

and death-wish had been completed for another year and the crowd went completely loopy.” 125 We might

argue further that the Major, as the arbiter of the Walk and the principal authority, is the ultimate spectator,

“incredibly, fantastically oblivious of the crowd in the gigantic throes of its labour all around him” 126

The Walk positions its participants as liminal individuals, but it also renders the road itself a liminal place.

Augé identifies highways and other major roads as non-places, sites of transit, which stand opposed to

anthropological place: “Thus we can contrast the realities of transit (transit camps or passengers in transit)

with those of residence or dwelling; the interchange (where nobody crosses anyone else’s path) with the

crossroads (where people meet); the passenger (defined by his destination) with the traveller (who strolls

along his route”.127Of these ‘spaces of supermodernity’, Augé notes that individuals are identified “only on

entering or leaving”128; upon beginning the Walk, the participants are identified only by their number and

their surname. Some Walkers are supplemented with a first name throughout the text, a function of the

communitas engendered by the Walkers. The non-place thereby becomes a liminal heterotopia, differentiated

by its microcosmic organic society, its communitas, which Augé notes is absent in a true non-place.129

The heterotopic road, in this context, is “a kind of intermediary or interstitial site, existing in the entredeux,

between existing spatial categories”130; during the ritual of the Walk, the road is transformed from a non-

place of transit to a self-contained space possessed of arcane rules (‘’Conserve energy wherever possible’ –

Hint 13.’131). Both types of space are liminal, but their interstices vary. The transit-space of the everyday road

124
Augé, p. 86.
125
King, p. 277.
126
King, p. 277.
127
Augé, p. 107.
128
Augé, p. 111.
129
Augé, pp. 111-112.
130
Eric Prieto, Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), p. 85.
131
King, p. 20.

34
 is positioned between centres of anthropological space, whereas the heterotopic road of the Walk is both a

physical and symbolic intermediary; it is positioned between cycles, existing only in a specific moment of

time after which it returns to its original state. But this liminal road can never be said to truly reaggregate; the

cycle at play here is not a time loop as in Russian Doll, but a deliberate culling manifested by an earthly

agent. The road oscillates between transit-space and ritual-space, forever returning to one state or the other,

but never transcending. And indeed, even as Garraty completes the walk, and thereby the rite, he too is

ultimately denied reaggregation: “The dark figure beckoned, beckoned in the rain, beckoned for him to come

and walk, to come and play the game. And it was time to get started. There was still so far to walk.” 132

If, as Augé contends, “the traveller’s space may thus be the archetype of non-place”133, we may expand upon

the concept of the recurrent journey to include a different kind of cycle to those we have considered thus far.

The time loop in Russian Doll is contingent on its participants correcting a specific ‘bug’ in the metaphorical

software; once Nadia ‘fixes’ the bug, the loop is broken and she is permitted to proceed. As demonstrated by

Battle Royale and The Hunger Games, the dystopian cycle of The Long Walk might conceivably be broken

by an act of revolution, a fundamental shifting of the status quo. The 2012 video game Journey134, though,

offers another perspective on the journey through liminal space. Surrounded by a seemingly endless vista of

empty desert, the player takes control of an androgynous135 red-cloaked humanoid, propelling them through

what is later revealed to be a post-apocalyptic wasteland; an “estranged gameworld” 136, as Gerald Farca puts

it, liminal as Dark Matter’s Gruhuken is liminal: bearing the architectural traces of its former purpose.

The diegetic world of Journey is entirely immersive thanks, in part, to the lack of player interfaces such as

the ubiquitous ‘Heads-Up Display’ (HUD) or other in-game ‘menus’. As game designer Nick Harper notes,

“The world tells you where to go. Even if the player fails to comprehend it, the game directs you through the

use of wind walls which blow you back[…]there are no invisible barriers but a gentle sandstorm that builds

132
King, p. 339.
133
Augé, p. 86.
134
Journey (video game) (Los Angeles, CA: Thatgamecompany, 2012.)
135
The androgyny and anonymity of the traveller is in itself “highly characteristic of liminality. In many kinds of
initiation where the neophytes are of both sexes, males and females are dressed alike and referred to by the
same term.” (Turner, pp. 102-103)
136
Gerald Farca, Playing Dystopia: Nightmarish Worlds in Video Games and the Player's Aesthetic Response
(Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2018), p. 212.

35
 to prevent progression”137. The pared-down game world allows only for exploration without annotation, and

entirely without dialogue or narration; the traveller must navigate the liminal desert and its constituent ruins

with the sole object of reaching a glowing mountain in the distance, which the game continually foregrounds.

In a sense, the player becomes the traveller; as Farca notes, “the moment the empirical player commences the

act of play, she enters a creative dialectic with the intersubjective framework of the implied player, whose

roles she interprets, performs and scrutinises.”138

Journey is not a horror game, nor is it intentionally horrific; its affect is largely a sense of mystery which

touches, in several instances, upon the eerie, not least within the gloomy subterranean corridor of the ruined

temple. David Sanchez contends that Journey is a kind of survival horror game, citing several features of its

narrative and wider world: “The first is the lonely feeling you get upon starting your trek through the

desert[…]The whole idea of being in a vast desert by yourself is terrifying, especially when you think about

the massive stretches of land you need to travel. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, you encounter a stranger.

Is this person going to help you? Does he have a similar goal?”139The ‘stranger’ Sanchez describes is a

traveller controlled by a second, anonymous player, simultaneously experiencing the gameworld. Farca

acknowledges that the “emergent social interactions” – characterised by anonymity, and the inability to

communicate beyond cryptic chirps – allows for the player to enact various outcomes: “to travel with

companions or not, to be gentle with them, or to ignore them”140. However, Journey’s creator Jenova Chen

reports that players tend to form bonds with one another: “People started to post on our forum, they started to

apologising [sic] for kind of disconnecting, or having to leave the game early, but they couldn’t tell the other

player. So they actually come to our forum to make a post to apologise.” 141Chen also noted that players

would replay with the express purpose of guiding new players, taking on the role of an ‘elder’ 142. Raoul

137
Nick Harper, Journey and the art of emotional game design (2012)
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2012/nov/21/journey-emotional-game-design>
[accessed 1 September 2019].
138
Farca, p. 210.
139
David Sanchez, Why Journey is the best survival horror game in recent memory (2012)
<https://www.gamezone.com/originals/why-journey-is-the-best-survival-horror-game-in-recent-memory/>
[accessed 18 July 2019]. (Website)
140
Farca, p. 210.
141
Variety (2019). Journey Game Creator Jenova Chen "Theories Behind Journey" - Full Keynote Speech. [image]
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S684RQHzmGA&t=1062s [Accessed 3 Sep. 2019]. (Video)
142
“The Elder player likes to come back to the world to help the new player, and when the new player grows
into the Elder player, they like to help other new players.” (Variety, “Theories Behind Journey”)

36
 Dubois directly invokes Turner’s liminal framework in contending that “by completely negating all the

players' social differentiation characteristics, Journey's desert also appears as a non-hierarchical space,

allowing the game to simulate the heightened sense of belonging, the communitas, characteristic of

pilgrimages and similar phenomena.”143This harks back to the communitas of crisis formed by the Walkers,

whose space is also ultimately non-hierarchical.

There is unquestionably a certain eeriness in the way the world, with its empty ruins and near-mute

humanoid inhabitants, is constructed. The uncanny cannot truly operate in this space; it is concerned with the

strange within the familiar, but the ruins of Journey are inherently unfamiliar, devoid of context, which

points them towards the eerie. Of eerie ruins, Fisher asks “What kinds of being created these structures?

[…]What kind of symbolic order did these beings belong to, and what role did the monuments they

constructed play in it? For the symbolic structures which made sense of the monuments have rotted away,

and in a sense what we witness here is the unintelligibility and the inscrutability of the Real itself.” 144 At the

end of each level, a ghostly white-robed ‘elder’ – themselves the memory-ghosts of the lost civilisation –

presents the player with fragments of historical context in the form of an animated mural; through these, the

player may come to understand the how this lost civilisation came to fall. The story of the civilisation’s rise

and fall is navigable through symbolism, but as Fisher points out, there is no Rosetta Stone to verify our

interpretation: “the culture to which they refer and which would vindicate [our] speculations can never

(again) be present.”145 Without text or voice as a guide, the narrative must be decoded by the player utilising

only visual clues.

This speculative symbolism extends to the ending of the game, and thus to its very nature as a cyclical

narrative. The traveller, having reached the mountain at last, collapses in the snow before they are able to

reach the summit. The white-robed beings imbue the traveller with the energy not just to continue, but to fly.

This triumphant apotheosis ends with the traveller reaching the summit and walking into the light at its apex.

A shooting star appears from the cleft at the summit, retracing the traveller’s path in reverse before coming

143
Raoul Dubois, Pro Evolution Pilgrimage: On (a) Journey between ‚Sionpilger‘ and ‚Cyberpilger‘ (2018)
<http://www.paidia.de/pro-evolution-pilgrimage-on-a-journey-between-sionpilger-and-cyberpilger/>
[accessed 6 August 2019]. [Own translation] (Website)
144
Fisher, p. 63.
145
Fisher, p. 63.

37
 to rest at the exact location where the traveller first began their journey. The game then offers the player the

option of beginning the game again. The implication is of a cycle of life, death, and rebirth, with the

pilgrimage serving as the sum total of the traveller’s lived experience. As the liminal traveller is denied

reaggregation, perpetually returning to the start, so the ruins they travel through are also repeatedly denied

reaggregation, remaining unchanged throughout every subsequent cycle. The ruins defy Turner’s three-stage

structure, but unlike the road at the centre of The Long Walk, their liminality is not dependant on an external

arbiter; even if the white-robed elders were to break the cycle of rebirth the ruins themselves would remain

liminal: “Ruins pose a constant negotiation between glory and dissolution; success and failure; substance and

nothingness.”146

Though Journey thwarts reaggregation on a macro level, it does offer the possibility of a kind of micro-

reaggregation, a subtle shift from one state of being to something different. Should the player opt to begin

the cycle again, they will notice that for each completion, a line of gold embroidery is added to the traveller’s

red cloak. Should the player locate all of the game’s hidden secrets, they will be granted access to the white

cloak of the ghostly elders. Turner notes that “through successive life crises and rites of status elevation,

individuals ascend structurally”147; the embroideries earned through the traveller’s successive crises are

reflective of their earned knowledge and experience.

When Jenova Chen reports that players choose to return to help new initiates, he is underlining a crucial

aspect of the videogame form: the meaning of the narrative can be altered through the agency of the player.

The world of The Long Walk is a self-contained narrative, unalterable except through certain minor

differences in interpretation. But the player might exert some small influence on the world of Journey; “the

player finds herself in constant renegotiation of meaning, incorporating newly found perspectives (and those

she has helped create) into the horizon of past ones and aligning this experience with her real world

knowledge.[…]JOURNEY may thus be described as an experiential epiphany that is different for each and

every player.”148There is, therefore, a cognitive gulf between the game’s structure and the player’s

experience: even with the symbolic addition of the embroidery, suggesting a progression from liminality to a
146
Ian Rodwell, Ruin (2019) <https://liminalnarratives.com/2017/08/26/ruin/> [accessed 4 September 2019].
(Website)
147
Turner, p. 176.
148
Farca, p. 203.

38
 new state of being, the game itself precludes true reaggregation in that it is impossible to break the cycle. The

possibility of reaggregation exists only in the mind of the player, who may conceive of an extradiegetic

conclusion in which the traveller’s eternal pilgrimage results in the restoration – or perhaps repurposing – of

the ruins. The game hints at that which it does not fulfil; the shift in status represented by the embroidery

may change the way the player negotiates the gameworld, but the gameworld itself cannot be any more than

it is. Therefore, as in The Long Walk, and indeed in our other examples, from distant Gruhuken to the

‘unspeakable cavities’ of the familiar liminal, these places are constrained not only by their context within

the wider world, but by the literal constraints of the narrative they are built into.

We may illustrate this with a final example. Stephen King’s epic seven-novel fantasy series, The Dark

Tower (1982-2004), details the pilgrimage of gunslinger Roland Deschain to the eponymous Tower. In a

direct echo of Journey, upon finally reaching the Tower, Roland is transported once again back to the desert

in which he began his journey. Roland’s memory of his previous pilgrimages is erased every time he is

returned149, thereby denying him even the structural ascension gifted to the travellers. However, the

possibility of eventual reaggregation is still present, as Roland is shown to have acquired the Horn of Eld, an

item which he did not possess in his previous loop. As with Journey, though, the prospect of reaggregation

remains purely extradiegetic, as the narrative simply ends precisely where it began: “The man in black fled

across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”150As King himself says, “An ending is a closed door no

man[…]can open.”151

149
“And each time you forget the last time. For you, each time is the first time.” Stephen King, The Dark Tower
(London: Hodder, 2004), p. 670.
150
King, The Dark Tower, p. 672.
151
King, The Dark Tower, p. 661

39
Conclusion

In the beginning, we asked what properties liminal places possess which leave them uniquely susceptible to

the spectrum of the uncanny. Through examination of different kinds of liminal place we are able to piece

together the ways in which uncanny affects infiltrate these spaces. Those familiar liminal spaces which

surround us – which we might not even recognise, to begin with, as liminal – are vulnerable to

decontextualisation, producing an effect akin to that of the Uncanny Valley phenomenon. Abandoned places,

perpetually betwixt and between, carry with them the indelible marks of history, and unsettle when we

cannot reconcile that history with our own encroaching presence. And those places caught within a cycle of

liminality, whether by design or by circumstance, which become uncanny through the conditions imposed

upon them, and through the effect this has both on the space itself and those who exist within that space.

Throughout these chapters we have observed that in most cases, spatial liminality is not, as Turner suggests,

an intermediary phase, but a permanent state of being. Once we become aware of the liminality of a

particular place, we are nonplussed at its continuing to be so; there is no resolution to its in-betweenness, as

we might ordinarily expect. This may be because liminality is a crucial feature of their design, or because the

sheer power of memory impedes resolution. It might also be that liminality has been imposed on a place in

order that it might attain significance as a ritual space. Attuned to the anthropological notion of liminality as

a temporary phase, the idea that a place may remain in a ‘limbo of statuslessness’ is contrary to our

expectations; perhaps, to return to Freud’s concept of the uncanny, this is the very definition of the strange

within the familiar.

40
There are, of course, other kinds of liminal place, some of which exist in the interstices of those we have

explored here, and a more thorough examination is necessary in order to fully comprehend the power these

spaces have to distort and provoke our fearful imaginations. This analysis, while limited in scope, shows that

while there may be certain commonalities across different types of liminal place – altered context recurs

throughout, though it is not universal – there is no singular affect which explains their recurring presence in

horrific fictions. Nonetheless, they do recur, which suggests that it is the fact of their liminality itself which

presents a kind of existential uncanniness, an open door to the weird and the eerie, through which the Numen

might enter our collective closed space.

41
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