The liminal space has played an outsized role in horror media this decade—the mystery and vague unease of “in-between” places, the empty corridors and abandoned lots we pass through when we’re on our way somewhere else, which seem to buzz with a life of their own.
Have you ever felt a twinge of dread passing through a dead mall, a parking garage, a half-empty arcade? Harry Nordlinger has, and the San Francisco artist’s comics, etchings and paintings have played with this feeling since he began to seriously establish himself as an artist in 2019.
“The abandoned mall or like the closed-down Chuck E. Cheese, all of these things from our childhood, they’re gone,” Nordlinger says. “And it’s not just that I’m older. Our era of abundance, our time of plenty, the peak empire is behind us, and we’re now living in the waste of all these excesses we used to enjoy.”
The centerpiece of Nordlinger’s new art show “Spite House,” on display through July 11 at the Eye & Hand Society at 3425 Balboa Street in San Francisco, is his just-completed comic Laser Quest, which comes out in August through Portland’s Floating World.
Drawn in stark black-and-white with huge chiaroscuro shadows that often threaten to engulf the entire page, the comic was inspired by the laser tag birthday parties Nordlinger often attended while growing up in Palo Alto—and whose half-lit mazes felt like a place you could get lost in at that age.
“In the ‘50s and ‘60s Victorian mansions were these abandoned creepy things from the past,” Nordlinger says. “That’s where haunted houses come from. For us, it’s malls and Chuck E. Cheese, movie theaters even, these old abandoned places that used to be fun and now they’re creepy.”
Nordlinger is 34, a little older than the Gen Z cohort among whom the concept of “liminal spaces” has gained popularity as of late—notably through Backrooms, the A24 horror hit directed by 21-year-old Bay Area filmmaker Kane Parsons, set in an endless labyrinth of empty office spaces and deserted corridors.
As a result, Nordlinger has a slightly different experience of the “liminal space” than a younger artist like Parsons. “I got to experience peak America, and then I got to witness the collapse,” Nordlinger says. “Gen Z is just witnessing the collapse.”
Nordlinger has always been fascinated by comics. American staples like Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes introduced him to the form early on, but it was Dav Pilkey’s mischievous kid-lit series Captain Underpants that made Nordlinger realize making comics was within his reach.
“In [Captain Underpants], the kids make their own comics,” Nordlinger said. “And it made me realize that I could make comics.”
Nordlinger initially harbored aspirations of being a filmmaker—he currently works as a projectionist at the Balboa Theater—but never stopped making his own comics, which moved from “surreal freak-out horror comics” into a quieter and more ominous register as his style developed.
“At some point in my 20s, I was like, you know what? Forget film,” Nordlinger says. “I’ll just do comics because I can do it on my own. And I can tell the same stories and there’s the same visual language, but I don’t need money or collaborators. And so around 25, I actually started trying to make comics for real.”
Nordlinger describes his first self-published comic, 2019’s Softer Than Sunshine, as “terrible.” It was with the Vacuum Decay series that his style fully developed; published and edited by Nordlinger, the series features some of his darkest and most mature work alongside contributions from other artists in the underground horror-comics world.
“Doing an anthology was how I could first get people to pay attention to what I was putting out,” Nordlinger says. “I was still curating and editing it, so I still had my voice in it, even though I wasn’t the only cartoonist. Once there was some amount of an audience, I felt better about putting out my solo stuff and getting more attention for it.”
The other highlights of Nordlinger’s show include selections from Shadows Over Springfield, a horror-noir series aligned with a long tradition of Simpsons bootleg merchandise, and Night Cruising, which uses the night drives of a rebellious L.A. miscreant as a vehicle for exploring the American highway system as a liminal space.
“I wanted to make ‘Night Cruising’ be my darkest comic ever,” Nordlinger says. “Not, like, thematically—literal darkness.”
Nordlinger is currently working on a book of short stories, also called Spite House. A release date hasn’t been confirmed yet, but Nordlinger is pleased to have secured a front-cover quote from Kyle Edward Ball, the Canadian director whose Skinamarink Nordlinger cites as his favorite film of all time.
If Nordlinger’s work has any effect on you, check out Skinamarink, a polarizing low-budget indie from 2022 where a shot of a hallway or a staircase can be as terrifying as anything going bump in the night. Nordlinger traces his fascination with these spaces to his childhood as a scared and sleepless kid, staying up late to experience the overwhelming emptiness and quietness of the family home.
“The scariest thing is your imagination,” he said. “No monster is scarier than whatever you’re thinking.”
HARRY NORDLINGER: ‘SPITE HOUSE’ runs through July 11, closing party 6pm-9pm, The Eye & Hand Society, SF. More info here.
