Liminal horror is having a moment, and the vultures are already circling the aesthetic. The Bloody Disgusting exclusive teaser for The Space Between just dropped, and the pitch is irresistible: an indie film shot inside an operational Midwestern mall, trading in that creepy, abandoned-retail energy. But look past the marketing buzzwords and you'll find something far stranger and far more personal than another Backrooms knockoff. This is an 11-minute short about a suicide survivor trapped between life and death, and the 17th-century girl who pulls her back.
BEYOND THE BACKROOMS GOLD RUSH
Let's address the elephant in the empty food court. A24's Backrooms franchise turned creepypasta architecture into box office gold, and now every film with fluorescent lighting and empty hallways gets slapped with the liminal label. The Space Between is wearing that tag like a cheap suit. Dayanara Rodriguez directs from a script she co-wrote with Lena Yuhas, and their actual premise is a raw existential drama. Evangelina, played by Daniela Rodriguez, survives a suicide attempt only to wake up in a surreal threshold between living and dying. There she meets Evi, a girl from the 1600s, played by Allie Burns. Together, they navigate self-acceptance and a return to passion through art. That tagline, "We've been here before, but must we always return?" isn't about wandering a dead mall. It's about the cyclical trap of despair.
ELEVEN MINUTES OF SUFFOCATION
An 11-minute runtime is a brutal constraint, and Rodriguez uses it like a weapon. You cannot stretch true liminality, the suffocating disorientation of existing between states, into a two-hour theme park ride without diluting it into set dressing. Rodriguez and Yuhas compress their entire arc into a tight, gasping sprint. The cinematography comes from Jonathan Hresko, who now has the unenviable task of making an operational Midwestern mall feel like a space between life and death without relying on the tired visual shorthand of flickering lights and stained ceiling tiles. The score from Noah Dudas will have to carry the emotional weight of Evangelina's survival alongside the historical weight of Evi's 17th-century presence.
THE DANGEROUS ALLURE OF MARKETABLE VIBES
Here is the real tension. The source reporting leans hard into the mall location and the liminal horror trend because that is what moves clicks in a post-Backrooms marketplace. But the actual film is a drama about a young woman fighting for her will to live. Can a film carry both weights? Can Rodriguez deliver a genuine portrait of suicidal crisis and artistic rebirth when the audience is showing up for empty retail spaces and uncanny architecture? The marketing risks reducing Evangelina's raw survival narrative to a trendy creepypasta backdrop, prioritizing marketable vibes over genuine existential dread.
VERDICT
The Space Between released on May 1, and the teaser is out there right now. The question isn't whether Dayanara Rodriguez can execute her vision. The question is whether horror fandom, drunk on architectural dread and creepypasta lore, will actually see what she built. This is an 11-minute film about the terrifying reality of wanting to die and finding a reason not to. If the teaser manages to convey that emotional stakes rather than just mall-ghost aesthetics, it could carve out something real inside a subgenre that is rapidly flattening into a hollow aesthetic. If it leans into the trend, it risks burying Evangelina's story under the very emptiness the subgenre celebrates.