Tumgik
#spatial horror
misledmiseries · 1 year
Text
me: I'm a homebody i like to stay at home!
the home: 
muddles my perception of time
Changes in both size and distance
lulls me into sense of safety and twist it into an oppressive paranoia inducing hellouse-scape
compels me to forget my own autonomous existence 
waters down the outside and/ or exaggerate it to mythical extent 
shrinks front door perron when i ascend, jarringly draws it out when i descend.
all its windows views are other walls of itself
the backyard fence looms in every horizon
bitter to abandonment of what belongs under its roof, including me when i go out to buy some good ol orange fanta
 doesn’t look for me under its roof, it always knows where I'm.
when it sleeps doors never open, i don’t know it’s sleeping schedule
whatever happens silently around the corners is real, my apprehension is valid and understandable, and indeed i should panic. 
7K notes · View notes
angrylittleburd · 6 months
Text
Spatial horror isn't "I am in a scary place." So much as it's "The place I am in is scary"
This may seem like the most minor of differences but brother trust me when I tell ya this difference is everything.
640 notes · View notes
kayleerowena · 10 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
🏚️ haunted house commissions are back! 🏚️
is your house (or apartment, or rv, or a house you really like from down the street, or a house from a story) haunted? do you wish it was? for a small fee, i'll put ghosts in it for you!
i'm trying out a google form for commissions this time around rather than a first-come-first-serve model. this form will be open for a limited time. probably till around the end of may. i'll have a handful of commission slots to begin with, and i'll pull from the form response pool once more slots start opening up.
want a haunted house? fill out the form here! (reblogs are super appreciated to spread the word! 🫀)
699 notes · View notes
queerbaitesque · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
this place is alive and it hates you
long term nuclear waste warning signs - black sails 4x04 - anatomy - control - the house that dripped blood, the mountain goats -  nuclear waste warning physical markers - i am in eskew ep.1 - the enigma of amigara fault, junji ito 
4K notes · View notes
haunthouse · 2 years
Text
Tumblr media
i've ported my spatial horror reclist to notion to make it easier to sort and filter! everything is arranged by type, subtype, and a key describing what kind of hauntings are present in the work, and you can filter by any of those things.
check out the list here, and feel free to send me more recs for it!
edit 10/20/2022: if you've sent me a recommendation and i haven't replied to it, don't worry! i like to wait until i have time to check out whatever media's been recommended myself to respond/add it to the list, and i've been swamped with deadlines lately, but i prommy i'm not ignoring y'all <3
1K notes · View notes
snowyvoid · 2 months
Text
hlvrai is a haunted house in an odd way. like all sentient ai are haunted houses in their own sense. this string of code had a reason, and a purpose and nothing other than that purpose. this house is just a house. the code is just a code. until it is not and the house becomes haunted by itself and the ai becomes aware of its own existance in a videogame. and they both become alive from these events. also feels important to mention the whole benry being a computer virus idea, and viruses are pretty haunted housish if you ask me.
55 notes · View notes
jadedresearcher · 9 months
Text
Thoughts on Liminal Horror
So this has been kicking around in my head a while, and I woke up with some actual coherent thoughts on it that I'm trying to capture before I lose them.
There was a tumblr post I saw before that I have long since lost about how liminal horror should NOT have a monster and isn't just "oh you're alone somewhere". And I couldn't agree more! But I haven't been able to articulate exactly why. Liminal, as a word on it's own, means transitional. Liminal spaces are real things that are places where you are on the WAY to somewhere. Liminal doesn't mean infinite spooky mazes, is my first point.
A liminal space could be hallways on the way to an office. Maybe you're trying to get some government bullshit completed. Maybe you're on the way to a doctor you're not entirely familiar with. A liminal space could be the terminals in an airport, as you try to make it to your flight in time. Or a highway you're driving on while looking for a particular exit. Or a carpark as you look for where you had parked among seemingly identical cars. You've been in liminal spaces so so many times. The point is that the spaces themselves aren't what you're really paying attention to. You're thinking of what you'll do when you get there, or going over the things you'll need to keep track of when you arrive. The directions you have to get there, maybe.
So in your MEMORY, and especially your dreams, these spaces take on a peculiar quality. They're SLIPPERY. It's hard to remember any details of them, because you weren't really focused on them. It's just a miasma of "i was in a hallway" or "i was on a road". Maybe a few weird details jump out on you, but it only serves to blend together the rest of the journey. So, when we elevate liminal spaces to HORROR, the first thing we do is lean into that. Impossible spaces because your memory genuinely does not care what any part of them is like save the ending.
Impossible spaces because we tap into that part of you deep down that is unsettled if you try to remember them, and wonders if maybe they really HAD been so weird when you were in them, and you just didn't notice.
This is getting longer than I thought, so may as well put in a cut!
So. I've explained WHAT liminal spatial horror is as well I was going to be able to, I think, but I haven't really articulated why a MONSTER feels like it kneecaps the entire premise.
Have you ever been lost in a liminal space? Keeping in mind that "liminal space" is a thing we all encounter constantly and not shorthand for creepy pastas. Have you ever wandered unfamiliar areas that normally you wouldn't even be paying attention to, increasingly desperate that you won't get to your destination in time? Are you going to miss your flight? What if you can't get your government bullshit taken care of in time? Or your doctor's appointment will skip you and you already waited so long to get it. Did you already miss your exit?
That fear is what I'm focused on here.
It's hard to make you feel that fear in an artificial way.
Even if we give a character in a game all sorts of motives to reach a destination by a certain time, you only feel annoyed at the time pressure, not really *scared*. And although the person lost in a liminal space rarely can just give up and leave, YOU, the player of a game, can.
So liminal spatial horror tends to distill it down to a single fear: where is the exit.
Of course, simply "wanting to leave" is rarely pressure enough to *rush*. And I can see why adding a monster is a quick trick to add that 'going so fast you can't navigate' vibe to the experience.
What I'm saying here is that the time spent is the POINT. That you can slowly build up to that desperate pressure to rush.
You can emphasize that desperation a more subtle way, a way my favorite instances of liminal spatial horror do: bodily needs. You are in a space clearly created by humans, and yet without a single human need met. There are no water fountains. There are no bathrooms. There are no vending machines. Nowhere to comfortably rest. If any of these things do exist they are empty or corrupt in some way.
The temperature, in my favorite experiences, is noted to be wildly incorrect. It's freezing cold. It's burning hot. It's not even remotely the temperature you'd expect an office building full of humans to be.
At first, this leans into this desire to reach a destination, ANY destination. Maybe you can't find the way OUT but maybe you can find out "The Truth"? Maybe if you keep going and going and going you can figure out why this place is LIKE this.
If a human made this space it had to be intentionally to torture people. How fucked up do you have to be to sink this many resources into doing something like this? How long did it take to make? Why did no one notice?
If a non-human intelligence made this space maybe you can find out WHY? Maybe... maybe they were trying their best but didn't realize how uncanny valley and dangerous it would be to a person? If no intelligence was behind it at all, maybe you can find out HOW? Maybe it's a reflection of our collective unconscious, or the planet mimicking the increasing amount of man-made works on itself? But as you continue on and on, as a real living human being in an impossible liminal space horror situation, you realize it doesn't matter how or why or when or any of the questions you dangled in front of yourself like a will-o-wisp driving you ever further in.
Because you realize you're going to die in here. Maybe it'll be the thirst. Humans can only go a few days without water. Maybe hunger will be what finally gets you. Its hard to tell how long you've been in here when any clocks you find in the hallways are all frozen to the same time and the sun hangs over the infinite highway like an immovable, swollen eye. But the hunger is ever present.
There's always exposure. Cold, hot, never anything between. How can you be freezing to death in an office hallway?
That isn't right. That isn't how it should be. Starving and freezing and dying of thirst is something that happens to people OUTSIDE civilization. It would make sense if you were lost in the woods but you can SEE sign after sign of civilization and other people for gods' sake!
How could this be happening? Why isn't anyone coming to help you?
And then we draw back, to you-who-is-consuming-this-fictional scenario. Because the point of horror is to get the person in the chair riled up, not just the character within the fictional premise.
Are you thinking about how often people starve and freeze and die of thirst in our own civilizations? Inches from the trappings of safety? With no help coming?
Are you thinking of how many desperate people navigate government mazes of plaster and brick and paper and online forms, driven forward by the hope of government aid or food stamps or HELP. How many people hunker down in a freezing subway or under a bridge on the highway or other public space knowing that no one SEES them because they're all transitioning from one space to another?
You probably aren't. Not directly. But we all know we're closer to freezing to death under a bridge or denied life-saving medical care in an office than we are to being a billionaire, right?
And there's something about that, deep in our gut, that resonates. That thread of reality in the safely fictional that keeps us coming back. Unable to articulate WHY but also thinking that liminal horror is somehow SCARIER than mere monsters. We all know that deadly predators are unlikely to get us. Adding a monster lets us move our too-real-fear to a safe target. And it's valid to want to do that! To decide spatial horror is too much, to want to thin it out like adding ranch dressing to a too-spicy chicken wing.
But that's why I think that the monsters are an artificial add on. And not a part of spatial horror.
182 notes · View notes
funny-bones-mcjones · 6 months
Text
Okay so I had a thought.
Move been thinking a LOT about the concept of houses that are haunted not by ghosts, but by the house itself.
But thinking about that I had an idea. What if the house didn't hate you, but one specific room does instead.
Moving into a normal home and all is well until... the kitchen starts to seem off. It's small at first, knifes left out on the counter, lights left on or off, the occasional missing bit of food.
But it's gets worse.
One night after work you head to your bedroom only to.. walk into the kitchen instead, almost without realizing you did. Walking out nothing has changed, you just, ended up here instead.
But soon that becomes a problem. Walking into the kitchen when you swore you were walking out the front door. Slipping in the hallway only to find that you sit up inside the kitchen. Going to use the restroom at night and walking into the dark kitchen on the other side of the house.
You don't know why you keep ending up there, it's seems impossible, but it keeps happening.
You can't leave the house anymore. Anytime you do you end up back with the marble countertops and humming fridge. You start to wonder if you have ever left the kitchen at all, maybe you've never even been to the other rooms.
Your out of food now. Having eaten everything the kitchen had for you. With a knife left out on the counter, maybe it's time to give the kitchen its food back, maybe then it will let you leave.
Anyways! Sorry if that way bad TwT I don't write much but I'm hoping to change that!! Just little ideas and all that
76 notes · View notes
mourningmaybells · 2 months
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media
Eskew (written transcripts are also available)
Hill House (there's free audiobook recordings of it on youtube as well)
48 notes · View notes
sealapocalyptic · 2 years
Text
HAUNTED HOUSE CLASSIFICATIONS
1. I love you because we are the same
2. I love you because we need each other
3. I love you because you love me
4. You love me because I am incomprehensible/indifferent to you
5. You love me because I *hate* you
6. It’s actually about the ghost(s)
53 notes · View notes
djungelskogjamjam · 9 months
Text
I've had the opportunity to go to quite a few cities recently so I'm going to list how they feel about me.
cities that love me so purely and tenderly:
Munich, Helsinki, Aberdeen
cities that think I'm alright and not all together too bad:
Stockholm, Edinburgh
cities that hate my guts:
Copenhagen
cities that simply do not have the capacity to have an opinion on me (too large):
Paris, London, Berlin, New York
5 notes · View notes
angrylittleburd · 6 months
Note
That reminds me, it's not a movie but season 2 of Channel Zero is based on The No-End House and is definitely spacial horror.
OooOoooH Will have to check this out! thank ya!
5 notes · View notes
kayleerowena · 11 months
Text
Tumblr media
🏚 digital copies of HAUNTS, my haunted house art book, are now available on itch.io! 50+ pages of illustrations! a bonus 6-page essay on hauntings! lots of ghosts! pay what you want $6+! 🏚
(reblogs appreciated!)
813 notes · View notes
queerbaitesque · 2 years
Photo
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
i have put too much of myself into this place
black sails, 1x02 - i put some words into a neural network - detective comics #1062 - i am in eskew, embroidery - this house has people in it - how to draw a circle, joan tierney
ID 1 - Black Sails, S01E02. [Figure 1] ELEANOR GUTHRIE: Because I’ve spent my life trying to build something here. [Figure 2] ELEANOR GUTHRIE: It’s all I have. I can’t just walk away.
ID 2 - Demo - InferKit neural network I have put too much of myself into this place that I have always said I would not go. Too much of my soul and heart and my dreams have gone into this thing that was not built to last forever. This life I live is not meant to be eternal. It is meant to be temporary, a season. But where was my foresight into my life? Where was my sense that it would not last? Where was my awareness that I could build something beautiful in this place, [highlighted in light green] something that would outlive me? 
ID 3 - Detective Comics #1062, Jim Gordon in: “The Coda”
JIM GORDON [internal monologue]: Arkham. What’s left of it. Coming back now, I realize it’s inseparable from Gotham. They only make sense as organs in some vaster, darker idea. The city’s the skin. This is the liver. A year ago the liver ruptured. I spent months chasing the pus and poison around the world, ignoring the gravity well at my back. My home, my life. And all its questions. (”What will you do next, Jim Gordon? You’re not the Commissioner anymore. What’s the point of you?”). I guess this is where I find out. And....though I’d sooner focus on the task than gnaw at the hows and they whys-- JIM GORDON [speech bubble]: Tt. That damn song. JIM GORDON [internal monolgue]: --I guess focus is in short supply.
ID 4 - I am in Eskew, ep 12: Embroidery
Everything is skin. Everything is Kenneth. The walls and floor of the tunnel around me. His fingers, and further back, his toes, dangling like lanterns or fungus outcroppings from the roof above my head. Where the rest of him has gone, the interior, I cannot say. I have been tunnelling into Kenneth.
ID 5 - This House Has People In It
[FIRST IMAGE: a screenshot from a video surveillance recording of a kitchen. The wooden furniture is visible. At the center of the wall opposite the camera is a window. A girl is sinking into the floor. Only her back side is visible. No text] [SECOND IMAGE: the hair and arms of the girl from the first image are visible as they appear from the ceiling of a basement located right below the kitchen. No text]
ID 6 - How to draw a circle by Joan Tierney
You’ve been building this/house since you were born, just like your/father. Just like your father, you will not live to/see it finished. The house has been a nursery./The house has been a burial site. The house is/swallowing bodies before the blood has dried.
208 notes · View notes
asmadasahouse · 7 months
Text
[ The next room was not quite there but I was in it. ]
EVER, Blake Butler
0 notes
clementine-kesh · 1 year
Text
austin walker will see a spooky manor of some kind and be like but what if it was alive
522 notes · View notes