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analog horror · found footage · memory tape
The VHS memory video at liminals.space takes the eerie, rebuilt versions of your own rooms and renders them as a short found-footage clip, complete with scan-line degradation, tape noise, and music by electronic artist Ancient Prayers. The whole thing runs in your browser. Nothing leaves your device during rendering.
4 photos · see 2 rooms free · no account · your photos aren't saved.
There's a reason old home-video footage feels haunted even when nothing is wrong in the frame. The tracking errors, the washed-out colours, the way the image skips. Those artifacts don't just look old, they feel unreliable. Like the tape is forgetting what it recorded. That's exactly the texture of a real memory: your bedroom at eight years old, the school corridor at 4pm, the mall food court that doesn't exist anymore. You know the shape of it, but the detail keeps sliding.
The VHS video leans into that deliberately. It's not trying to look scary. It's styled to look like something you almost remember, which turns out to be more unsettling than anything invented from scratch.
After your liminal-space images are generated, the video step assembles them into a short clip inside your browser using the Canvas API. No server renders the video. The process layers in:
The result is somewhere between an analog horror short and a home-movie you found at a garage sale, except the house in it is one you actually lived in.
The audio layer is original music by Ancient Prayers, the electronic artist and founder of liminals.space. The tracks are built specifically for this context: slow, textured, pitched-down ambient pieces that sit underneath the footage without explaining it. No jump scares, no dramatic swells. Just something that makes the empty rooms feel like they're breathing.
Music and visuals are timed together. The video isn't a slideshow with background noise. The two are cut against each other so that quieter moments in the track land on stiller frames, and the texture of the sound matches the texture of the degradation. It's a short piece, but it's put together.
The standard unlock includes the music. If you want a clean version (no watermark, no audio) for posting to your own reels or feed with your own soundtrack, that's available as an optional higher-tier unlock.
Client-side rendering matters here for a few reasons. Your photos are processed once during the image generation step, then deleted. By the time the video renders, the only thing in memory is the liminal images themselves, already abstract, already transformed. The video encoder runs in a browser Worker thread so the tab stays responsive while it processes. When it's done, the file downloads directly to your device. No upload, no cloud queue, no waiting for a server slot.
The trade-off is that very old or low-powered devices may take longer. On a modern phone or laptop the clip is usually ready in under a minute.
The clip is short by design: long enough to feel like something, short enough to actually share. The aspect ratio and framing are set for vertical viewing so it fits natively on the formats people actually use. The VHS aesthetic lands differently when other people watch it: it reads as intentional, not accidental. The rooms are yours, but the degradation makes them feel like they could belong to anyone who grew up somewhere like that.
That's the share mechanic, really. Less "look at this AI thing I made," more "does this room look like somewhere you remember?"
The VHS video is part of a one-time payment that also unlocks:
No account, no subscription. Pay once, download everything, done.
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What would my backrooms look like? · 3D step-inside viewer · Why liminal spaces feel nostalgic · FAQ