Poster for Liminal Psychological Horror ‘The Space Between’ [Exclusive]

Damian Maffei stars as an overnight security guard whose carefully constructed routine begins to collapse inside an empty Midwestern mall.

Liminal horror continues to escape the strange corners of the internet and find new life on the screen, and Dread Central is exclusively revealing the official poster for the upcoming independent feature The Space Between.

Damian Maffei (The Strangers: Prey at Night, Wrong Turn, Haunt) stars as Rick, an overnight security guard working alone inside a once-bustling shopping mall after closing.

Quietly carrying the grief of losing his daughter, Rick relies on the strict structure of his nightly rounds to keep himself grounded. Every door is checked. Every corridor is observed. Every checkpoint is completed at precisely the right time. But over the course of a single shift, that routine begins to fracture.

Found footage captures moments Rick does not remember. Familiar hallways seem to shift around him. His reports no longer match his experiences. Something waits beyond the reach of his flashlight and appears to be retracing every step he takes.

Production took place after hours inside an operational Midwestern mall, giving the filmmakers access to more than 96,000 square feet of retail space, service corridors, abandoned storefronts, loading areas, and back-of-house passageways. Rather than recreating the environment on a soundstage, writer-director Joshua Garity used the real location to capture the unnerving scale and stillness of a functioning mall after everyone else has gone home.

“The mall is a character in the film,” Garity said. “It was important that the spaces felt real because Rick’s entire sense of stability depends on understanding where he is and where he is supposed to go. Once those familiar spaces begin behaving differently, he has nothing left to anchor himself.”