‘NOCLIP’ Panic Fest 2024 Review: An Earnest Attempt To Capitalize On Liminal Spaces
Mary Beth McAndrews
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If you’ve spent any time online in the past few years, chances are you’ve heard of liminal horror, particularly on YouTube and TikTok. These pieces of horror fiction capture an uncanny terror of a place that solely exists as a transitory space, often soaked in sickly pastels and fluorescent lights. Filmmakers Gavin Charles and Alex Conn are tapping into this fear with their film NOCLIP, a short journey into the bowels of hell, aka a suburban shopping mall.
Charles and Conn are two best friends searching for liminal spaces as listed on an online forum about local liminal spaces. Filmed in 4:3 with what appears to be VHS glitches over iPhone footage, each takes the camera as the other wanders through double doors and dour staircases to the parking garage, office spaces, and even a strange place called the Lunch Zone. While dry in delivery, it’s apparent Charles and Conn is a parody of the horror hipster, desperate to fit into the trending discussion and show off their own search for the backrooms. It’s vaguely reminiscent of the Slender Man obsession of the late 2000s as unsuspecting young people fall into something much scarier than expected due to digital obsession.
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Plus, Charles and Conn keep repeating, “This is another liminal space”, collecting weird rooms like hellish Pokemon as they wander through the bowels of the Kansas City mall. They rattle off definitions of liminal space, bragging about their knowledge to no one but themselves. NOCLIP feels like two stoners were bored and picked up a camera to pass the time during a lazy holiday break. Think Clerks but with way less story and more bizarre visuals that resemble deranged heat maps.
But Charles and Conn are never more than stereotypical stoners hotboxing their car and wandering a mall with a suspiciously refilling water cup and asking employees about weird floors. A bit more characterization of our guides would help NOCLIP feel a bit more interesting and less repetitive in its structure. I love that they’re stoners, but what else about them? There’s an air of closeness between the two leads, but their friendship is never really probed or discussed. It’s very surface-level in its approach which means once it hits a certain point, the film stagnates.
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Ultimately NOCLIP feels like a short film stretched too thin to fit over a feature film framework. Even with such a short runtime, there isn’t enough story or visual variety to call this a full success. But, it’s a rad experiment in trying to translate the horror of the liminal seen in analog horror on YouTube and in films like Skinamarink. While not entirely successful, it’s cool to see how this trend is evolving and how filmmakers are interpreting it in their micro-budget filmmaking practices (this was made for only about $100). Found footage heads will want to check this out simply to see a sliver of subgenre history, but it won’t win you over if you aren’t a fan of the format. NOCLIP is a strange step towards the next level for found footage, earnest in approach but shaky in execution.
Summary
‘NOCLIP’ isn’t necessarily successful, but it’s a rad experiment in trying to continue to translate liminal horror into feature films.
