The Invisible Horror of 'The Labyrinth'

Once you enter the maze, there’s no escape... An exploration of Simon Stålenhag’s gripping worldbuilding artbook ‘The Labyrinth.’
---

When I tell you Simon Stålenhag’s The Labyrinth is a maze you’ll never escape… I don’t think I’m exaggerating.

A sci-fi horror artbook where a mysterious phenomenon turns Earth into a world of ash and decay, the setup seems simple. Likewise, the characters — a trio of survivors journeying across the wastes — seem easy to relate to. Yet the deeper you venture, the more you realize The Labyrinth is a complex tangle of secrets, mysteries, and revelations so gripping that it never truly lets you go.

So, for this entry into the archive, we’ll attempt to decipher this masterpiece of dark worldbuilding. And like my videos on Stålenhag’s other series, you can purchase the artbook using the links in the description. Now, let’s enter the maze of The Labyrinth…

0:00 Enter The Labyrinth
1:00 The Dark Spheres
3:14 The Sea of Ash
4:51 Altered Spaces
8:15 Creatures of the Ruins
11:28 The Road Lies Dark
13:43 Heart of the Maze
16:50 Support the Labyrinth

Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary.

I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.

♫ Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio:
Mysterious Green Fluid, Sanity Unravels, Haddonfield Horror, Alone in the Dark, Dusk, The Witch, The Vanishing, Tenebrae, The Guardian

Beauty Flow
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

#CuriousArchive #TheLabyrinth #Worldbuilding

[indmur]

Simon Stålenhag has mastered atmospheric depth and lighting. His art lacks extreme fidelity, as it's not filled to the brim with extremely sharp textures, but it feels photoreal because of the way the light interacts with the world, and every single image has so much depth I feel like I could breathe in that very air. Absolutely amazing.

[purplehaze]

Considering The Labyrinth is, indeed, cosmic horror; it's wholly unsurprising that its visuals take inspiration from the ocean considering the progenitor of cosmic horror as a whole, HP Lovecraft, is pretty well known for his frequent oceanic themes and thalassophobia.

[williek]

I love the idea of apocalyptic scenarios that aren't just "humanity nuked itself", "we polluted the world", or "robots started killing everyone". This is far more interesting!

[sanfera]

Honestly, those empty rooms of the shelter made me feel... desperation. Like, someone was so desperately hoping they would "need" this place.
Especially some of the painted stuff...
Let me put it this way.
Imagine a neighbour. A sweet old lady, who always gives kids some candy at halloween, helps people, sometimes bakes cookies in social gatherings, and overall a good person who can give youngsters of neighbourhood some friendly advice.
And, imagine this grandma, waiting for her grandchildren to visit. Maybe they died, maybe something terrible happened. She knows, but instead of carrying the pain, she tries to be "welcoming" and cleans her house, prepares the table, the dining room. Keeps the guest rooms clean.
"They will need it!" She says. You can feel the sorrow from her cracked voice time to time. You can ask her about her family.
"Oh they are fine! They are just busy. You know how city life is."
The desperation is chasing her like a shadow. She carries a necklace holding image of her grandchildren, she started to forget their names. She knows, you can feel it. But she still keeps the necklace. It is clean. So... clean.

This... Entire shelter... Made me feel that. Someone, so desperately, trying to cling into the hope and idea that, this place would be filled with people. It will become lively again. Children will run around in the hall. Adults will gather here, sit down and talk. Families, friends... They will come back eventually. They will need more chairs. They don't use a dirty furniture right? So keep them clean. Keep them clean. Brighten up the place right?! For the people. They will come... Eventually... They have to.

[therizinosauruscheloniform]

I love everything Stålenhag makes, especially The Labyrinth.

[migueljose]

I am in fear of what a terror film directed or a novel written by Stålenhag would look like

[smilescharleston]

Simon Stalenhag is one of the best artists i've ever came across, the level of detail, the style, creativity, he's just got them all. And one aspect that makes him different from all other artists is the immersion that applies to the viewer, almost like window into another world.

[purplehaze]

"Yet cruelty does not vanish; it lingers, festering in the souls of those who wield it, and those whom it is wielded against"
My jaw dropped from the quality of writing exhibited in that line.

[Martial-Mat]

This book is absolutely incredible. Another utterly heart breaking gut punch ending like The Electric state. Super, SUPER dark.

[clappagemcphee]

"Common objects take on a cadaverous quality" is absolutely fantastic. Well done, sir!

[wither]

i happen to live in the same area Simon Stålenhag grew up. there are illustrations in his books that are literally areas/buildings in my local area, its very surreal to see his art and have it also be basically my backyard lol.

[tommybootlegger]

What's really cool about this to me personally is the fact that years ago, in one of my writing classes, we did an exercise where we had to write a short story using stream of consciousness writing. No outline, no brainstorming, just put pen to paper, and start writing. The story I wrote was so eerily similar to this, right down to the details in color, the ash, the otherworldly atmospheres positioned againt common everyday things left behind, etc. Like, it was so similar to this that somebody would probably think I plagiarized it, even though at the time, I'd never even heard of this guy's work. Kind of makes me think that there's a real shared sense of terror of the unknown in our subconscious minds that seems to materialize in a lot of the same ways.

[straight-up]

I’m so glad you mentioned “The Endless”, it was such a fun, engaging watch!! It had some of the best film depictions of cosmic horror I’ve seen

[Nuke_Gunray]

Great video. Reminds me very much of Lovecraft's masterpiece "The Colour Out of Space": There is something truly terrifying about an entity that causes death and insanity to humans, but cannot be classified as "evil" in any sense of the word, since it does not even comprehend the concept of "being alive".

[edanpino-xtph]

One of the themes you mentioned Stålenhag using reminded me of a term. It’s the banality of evil, called such because bureaucrats can put evil actions into such neutral terms that the act of even genocide can be seen as banal

[Tyrexthecreaturedesigner]

Another piece of work by Simon Stålenhag! Simon has such an interesting artstyle! I love it!

[newdefsys]

There really is an unsettling feeling that accompanies an empty space that is designed to be occupied by many people.
I used to be a maintenance guy at a factory that had about 200 employees working in it during the shift. On holiday weekends, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, it was my job to go around the facility and shut down the equipment for the long weekend, after the production staff had left the building. Traversing through the empty corridors and between the machinery was a very eerie and unsettling experience. It was a surreal feeling to enter an empty and lifeless work space that was normally occupied by a dozen people and the quietness of the silent machinery only amplified the unnerving sensations. People bring life to a place and in their absence a haunting atmosphere takes hold.

[carolynallisee]

This reminds me of an episode of Stargate SG-1. In it SG-1 have helped a population of humanoid aliens relocate and establish a colony, only for another alien ship to arrive and begin planet-forming the world to a biosphere suited to the aliens in stasis inside it. Without viewing the episode, I can't say for certain what the biosphere actually was, but I believe it was sulfur based. The factor that made the planet suitable for the humanoids was the same for the aliens: the AI running the ship requested that the humanoids leave, unaware they had no space travel tech, and required a world with those specific factors to live on. To cut this short, SG-1's intervention ended with the ship locating the humanoid aliens' original home-world, and offering to cease transforming the planet to ship them home before returning to resume its task.
Perhaps the spheres didn't recognise the life on Earth as life. In that, they are as short sighted as we are: after all, Earth is the only planet we currently know harbours living things. It's difficult to think that life may exist that may not need liquid water, or free oxygen. If we struggle to accept there may be other paths to life, why do we assume that aliens wouldn't have the same issues? Would an intelligent alien species realise life in an oxygen atmosphere is possible, when the only life they knew had arisen in an ammonia rich one?
A final thing: when I saw the fan shaped structures, my fist thought was how much they looked clike the fins of a lion fish!

[aidanflynn]

“But The Labyrinth has no villains, not really. Just people who had to make terrible decisions, and people who can’t let go”-such a raw line

[ASKomycet]

I've been waiting so long for a new video on the work of Simon Stalenhag and here it is. Thank you very much