“American Horror Stories” offers a mild crash course on liminal spaces in “Backrooms.”

On Tuesday, Ryan Murphy released his latest contribution to what feels like a streaming platform takeover. He follows American Sports Story: Aaron Hernandez, Monsters: The Lyle And Erik Menendez Story, Grotesquerie and a host of others with his return to American Horror Stories, bringing us a five-part series just in time for the peak of spooky season episode fell into my lap on Hulu.

If you're saying to yourself, “Wait, I didn't know there was a new season of American Horror Story,” that's not the case. This is “American Horror Story(s)” – plural – and the difference from “AHS” proper is that Murphy takes a break from tinkering by focusing each episode on a standalone story, set in 38-49 Minutes begins and ends how to create the end of a season-long narrative arc that he has been called out for fumbling in the past. Interwoven storylines that come together satisfactorily after 9 or 10 episodes? Too hard. Throw everything he can think of together for a nonsensical (but funny) episode? Yes, that's his sweet spot. And that's exactly what we get here.

In the new American Horror Stories, Murphy stays on the pulse of pop culture as always, just like we all do, by leveraging the Hive Mind (aka TikTok) for content. And as is his style, he creates a big swing that hits harder than any other. There was an episode in season 2 called “Milkmaids” that was about people literally eating pus, and it also literally made me vomit. This season, it's “Backrooms,” where he unleashes child murderer Michael Imperioli to go crazy in liminal spaces—those eerie, dreamlike, abandoned spaces that TikTok has plagued most of our For You pages with for years. And while Murphy and the episode's writers, Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, do a very watchable job of giving viewers a crash course in liminal spaces and the “backroom” phenomenon, TikTok does it better. Normally that is the case.

The structure of “Backrooms” is as follows: We are introduced to Imperioli's character – a selfish, award-winning screenwriter – and as soon as it is mentioned that his young son has disappeared, we immediately know that everything was done for this boy. The fun of Murphy's shows is never in the “how” of it all, but in the “what's next?”

The twist of this episode, as revealed in the title, is that the father detaches himself from reality by keeping the truth about his child's whereabouts secret, repeatedly disappearing into an in-between place and finding himself in spooky grocery stores when he… had been in his apartment shortly before. Or in eerie rooms lined with linoleum while visiting a restaurant.

And because Murphy wants this to be easy for everyone, he explains to us what the hell is going on using a typical Murphy™CrazyMan.

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After Imperioli's character does some research and accidentally comes across a video taken by a man using a Super 8 camera to record backroom footage, he visits him in prison, where he is being held for involuntary manslaughter – a Deception that has taken him away from his own reality, which puts him in his own liminal spaces – and we get the full breakdown over the visiting room prison phone, which feels so right.

But even with this representation, TikTok explains it or shows it better.

To scare you even further, Google “are liminal spaces real” and you'll come across articles from sites like How Stuff Works detailing that they actually exist.

“Border spaces are transition or transformation spaces that are neither here nor there; “They are the intermediate places or thresholds through which we get from one area to another,” explains the article, citing Professor Dr. Timothy Carson of the University of Missouri, using the pandemic as an example of how a person can immerse himself in it, calls it an “involuntary social limitation, a time/space full of uncertainty and ambiguity, all landmarks gone, the future undefined.”

An analysis of liminal spaces, like one in the YouTube video below, puts Murphy's “back room” to shame, but after watching his episode of “American Horror Stories” and using it as a gateway, he actually gave us a gift today, Most of them are certainly scarier now than yesterday. And as always, it's just fun to watch Michael Imperioli walk around and do things.