Nightmare Fuel / Liminal Land

It's okay, she's just giggling!

Liminal Land is shaping up to be a very creepy Analog Horror about an amusement park with a dark secret.

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Website

• Every single Nightmare Face. There's barely any photographed face that isn't blurred, horribly stretched, or otherwise warped to the point it just looks wrong. It's one thing for a picture to have strong motion blur, but it's another thing for everyone to look like their faces are caving in.
• HOME. It was meant to be an underground suburbia so visitors would stay onsite for as long as possible. People loved it so much, they wanted to live there permanently. The washed-out colors, harsh artificial lighting, compact spacing, and lack of windows make it feel more claustrophobic than comfortable. Not to mention that at least one employee has heard something he thought was a child screaming and [REDACTED] in the hallways.
  • It doesn't help that the entire thing is one giant repurposed nuclear power plant. The former plant's main energy sector, "The Hub", housed reactions so powerful that simply entering it meant death within an hour. To put that in perspective, the Soviet workers who looked directly into the freshly exposed reactor core during the Chernobyl disaster suffered for weeks from acute radiation before they died. Whatever was going on in "The Hub" would kill you in an hour.
  • This area was retrofitted into the lowest zone of the Subliminal Land Water Park. That's right, families, the elderly, children, and infants can go swimming in a pool of extremely powerful radiation! What could possibly go wrong?
• The science behind the Laugh Track ride involves "cortical activation" and "compression-induced laughter". As in, you wear a mount that will forcibly crush your chest and suffocate you to deprive oxygen to your brain. Out of the 25 university students who volunteered for early trials, all of them came out with severe stomach pain and brain fog, and three of them had damaged or ruptured diaphragms.
  • After a year of activity, the Laugh Track was shut down and tarped over by Charon. While the reason they put for this was due to "mechanical issues," if the page image (which is of a person riding on the Laugh Track) is anything to go by, maybe claims of the ride making people laugh and giggle were exaggerated if not fabricated.
• The secret area of the site, accessed by inputting a hidden passcode. It links to an image of an idol to Moloch, a semitic God of Evil that demanded that his worshippers sacrifice their children to him. By fire. He's nowadays equated to Satan! Further, nuclear radiation is often compared to fire in its effects on the body. As mentioned above, the reactor would kill people within an hour. It's quite likely that whoever used to own H.O.M.E. was using a portal to Hell as a power source in some way, and marketing it as "nuclear".

Videos

• In the Training Tape, lots more Nightmare Faces, and also an odd bit of wording: "THIS IS THE PERSON." Combined with the fact that some of the photos have only one person, you start to wonder... is the viewer learning to recognize dissatisfied customers, or just to recognize humans at all?
• Investigation Tape covers a series of cases involving "The Liminal Land Anomaly", in which certain parkgoers were attracted to one of the rides, disappeared, and were found dead later. We don’t see the corpses themselves, but we do see sketches of what their recovered bodies looked like, and they are horrific: their facial structures are distorted and stretched into grotesque mimicries of smiles with beady black eyes, barely resembling their former selves.
  • The way each victim found themselves on the Anomaly is eerie as well. Grown, otherwise able-minded adults suddenly sneak away from their family or class of first graders for hours on end, only to be found later in such a mutilated state.
    • The last case study bears mentioning on its own. A woman managed to access the ride controls despite the attraction being closed for repairs due a faulty failsafe, in view of the employees (who did nothing), then rode the anomaly non-stop for 26 minutes. For reference, the average roller coaster ride lasts a little under two minutes. When they finally got the ride under control again? To say that she was "unrecognizable" would be an understatement.
• Found Footage-Welcome H.O.M.E. all but confirms that H.O.M.E. is an Eldritch Location purposely designed so that no one can leave…even if you wanted to. Even its very name is a lie: the true meaning of its acronym is not Holistic & Opportune Mutual Experience, but Hide, Obscure, Maintain, Evict.
  • The first part of the video shows an overground map of Liminal Land alongside a box with house icons on it representing the underground area of HOME. When the video overlaps the two to compare their relative sizes, the map gets smaller…and smaller, and smaller, and smaller, and—
    "Warning: Do not attempt to explore or ascertain the true size of the H.O.M.E. facility. Even we are entirely unsure of its true size and extent."
  • There's a photo of a typical bedroom in H.O.M.E. Nothing out of the usual, right? Well, there's something wrong, silly: There shouldn't be any windows or doors, obviously!
    "Routinely and securely remove any and all doors, windows, or thresholds that can potentially serve as an exit from the H.O.M.E. containment area."
  • The second part is found footage of an employee who decided to check out a strange noise they heard emanating from one of H.O.M.E.'s houses. Very soon they get stuck in an impossible Backrooms-esque maze filled with fake exit signs. And unlike the Backrooms, which has confirmed monsters inside, there's seemingly nothing chasing the employee. They just run and panic and eventually die from exhaustion. As far as the archivists' know, the body was never found.
  • The "helpful hints" that let viewers know what the employee did wrong get progressively more ominous.
    Never leave a passage unblocked
    Curiosity will become regret
  • The employee encounters a closed door. Behind it there's a flame-like light… and screaming… and possibly an animal bellowing…
    DO NOT
    DO NOT GO IN THERE
  • The employee finds what looks to be an exit, complete with large doors and a sign that says "We'd Hate To See You Leave". They open the door only to find that it's blocked by… something too blurry to make out, but it's enough to make our poor employee finally collapse from exhaustion and despair. Viewers have guessed everything from mortar to human corpses.
• The opening of Nexpo's video Fear of the Deep. We're treated to a phone message that was recovered on May 25, 1989 from the answering machine of a man named Frank, who we can assume is Frank Strother, one of the missing persons listed in the LVVT Channel 5 Sign-Off (1988) video. On the other end is a woman (presumably a family member or friend) who has been desperately trying to reach him for the last 5 days, as he had apparently taken her children to the park, but never came back. Considering how many people have up and vanished at that park, or worse, one can only begin to guess what happened to them.
  "Hi, this is [UNINTELLIGABLE]. Please leave a message at the tone. Thanks for calling."
  [beep]
  "Where are you? I've been trying to reach you for five days. Five fucking days and nothing! Where are my kids, Frank? Where are my fucking kids—ing kids—ing kids—ing kids—"
  [tape ends]

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