A Few Words About Liminal Horror

I’ll never forget when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and I was on contract to The RAND Corporation. Many staff members were sent home, and I stayed behind to complete my contract. Costs had to be cut since operations in-house were suspended, so all the vending machines and coffee makers were shut down. Shortly thereafter the two top floors were closed down, and those departments were sent home.

Out of morbid curiosity I went up to those floors and walked around. The lights were turned off, and previously occupied desks and offices were now abandoned, relegated to complete darkness and silence. I was possessed by the apocalyptic eeriness of my environment. (I didn’t steal anything LOL, I have religious guilt).

For the past year I’ve enjoyed the surreal horror of liminal space videos and vaporwave music, so I couldn’t resist running to the cinema to catch Backrooms and wasn’t disappointed. Backrooms is an extraordinary film, but it’s been the topping of several years of liminal space horror videos making the rounds on You Tube.

Around the same time that liminal space videos were posted a new series of videos of abandoned and decaying malls went viral, as well. Shuttered shopping malls of elephantine proportions across Middle America were explored and filmed for Tik Tok and the ubiquitous You Tube. Their cheerful video arcades and food courts were now dead like a long-abandoned corpse. The creepiness was downright surreal, and I imagine if J.G. Ballard were still alive his eyes would be glistening.

Getting back to Backrooms, several of the Backrooms series videos date as far back as 2022, some even in 2021. These dates struck me as significant in that this was the era of COVID-19 enforced lockdown. Liminal space horror was created to show a desolate world evacuated by a biological pandemic. You can almost make a case that these horror videos pose political commentary on the destruction of commercialism by social neglect.

I’ll decline from discussing the film, I’ll just recommend that you see it, especially if you like brain twisting surrealism from artists like M.C. Escher or Rene Magritte. I'd also like to point out that liminal space as a horror device in the cinema has its precedents, especially in the films of Antonioni, ie. the park in Blow Up, the last ten minutes in L'Eclisse, and parts of Red Desert.

Leyland Kirby · 11 - Isolated lights

I also recommend that you check out the Poolrooms videos, which are similar to Backrooms, but you’re stuck in an indoor swimming pool world, complete with fifty-foot-tall rubber duckies, gigantic Greco-Roman statues and endless towers constructed of bleached white tile. Aquaphobes need not apply.

I’ll also drop recommendations for Vaporwave music, which provide the soundtrack for both Backrooms and Poolrooms videos. It can either emulate innocuous shopping mall muzak, or provide dark ambient sounds, like Brian Eno’s Music for Airports series with a more sinister edge.

My favorite Dark Ambient artist is Leyland Kirby aka The Caretaker, and assorted labels Geometric Lullaby and Dreamcorp Records Inc. on Bandcamp are dedicated to this wild genre of music. Admittedly, everything listed here is an acquired taste, not for everyone, but if you like your surrealism on a horrorshow level, you’ve come to the right place.

Oldboy - New Poetry Album OUT NOW!

Spring is here, and a young man’s fancy turns to poetry, indie poetry, punk poetry slam, darkwave poetry, a dying rose by any other name and all that. Two years after my last audiobook I’m here with the new opus, Oldboy. And as Sir Humphrey Pengallan (Charles Laughton) defiantly sneers, “What are you waiting for? A spectacle? You shall have it!!!” So polish up your spectacles, Andy Seven Ltd. has returned.

Oldboy is my fourth audiobook of poetry, fifteen prose poems that up the ante from previous efforts. While past audiobooks featured poems with more traditional soundscapes, the new work features dark ambient, industrial neofolk mixes and drum and bass rhythm tracks.

All music mixes aside, Oldboy is a wild mosaic of sonnets dedicated to horror films (Sadako, Succubus), Robert Williams-inspired sports sleaze (Demolition Derby, Bantamweight Vs. Flyweight), and a triptych of Southern California gothic (Bougainvillea, California Boyfriend, The LA River).

The title, aside from the movie, comes from my theory that some males are men from the day they were born and always remain men, while others will always be boys, even when they’re pushing their Seventies. Some boys always inhabit an adult form. The same goes for females. Some women will always be young girls no matter how old they age.

Making the transition from punk singing to poetry recital wasn’t a Herculean task. When I sang with my band Trash Can School the most common remark I heard was that my vocals were “monotonous”. Whether I was aware of it or not, the monotony of my vocals probably meant that I chose to recite my lyrics as poetry.

I could make a case for it by saying that singing was never the objective but just reciting my prose. So, in a very loose sense I’ve always performed poetry recitals back in the days of my band and I’ve continued to this day.

Islington High Street was about my all-nighter at Islington Screen on The Green spent fifty years ago watching The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and other future superstars like Billy Idol and Siouxsie Sioux. Slumgullion is a piss-take on Willy the Shake’s classic plays, some of my favorites. I love the surrealism of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Saints and Sinners was about a real saloon in the heart of sleepy Culver City. Transfigured Night is my surreal take on a dream where I walked through a forest accompanied by mutilated lab test animals. The dream world continues with Succubus, nocturnal eroticism let loose upon the bedroom walls.

Those expecting sermons from the mount taking a political stand will be disappointed, as the only track that shows a political angle at all would be Carrot in The Donkey’s Eye, which criticizes the punishing exploitation of the average worker, the most offensive culprit being factory and warehouse environments. I suppose Smog lies somewhere in social commentary, too.

While I’m on the subject of poetry, what are your favorite movies about poets? We don’t get a lot of cinema space, I see movies about Bukowski, Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, but I’d like to see a film about Anne Sexton or Rod McKuen. Rod McKuen was an awful poet but his life story is utterly fascinating.

My favorite movie about a poet is Orpheus by Jean Cocteau about a popular poet despised by the hipster cognoscenti because his work is too successful. His best friend is a poet so jaded with writing that his next book will be a volume of nothing but empty pages. Doesn't get more existential than that!

But back to Oldboy, ahem: Some poems have been published in the past, i.e. Bantamweight Vs. Flyweight, Succubus, and California Boyfriend were featured in Horror Sleaze Trash. Other poems like Slumgullion, Transfigured Night, and Sadako were included in several Dawn of Darkness witch house compilations, available for listening at The Internet Archive.

Oldboy can be streamed on You Tube, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, Amazon Music, or Deezer. Hard media CDs can be purchased at Bandcamp. I’ll merch a few on eBay, too. Friends, Hollywood Babylonians, and countrymen, lend me your ears.