The cultural obsession with liminal spaces has been going on for years at this point, but there seems to be some kind of culmination happening now, what with Backrooms coming out and now this documentary, Stolen Kingdom. Of course there’s been other things, like video games and web series, an episode of American Horror Story, the TV show Severance, plus all the straight-to-streaming ripoffs. There’s literally an Amityville Backrooms. It’s all going off at once. It’s a monster with many heads. What stuck out to me about Stolen Kingdom was how grounded it felt in comparison to all this other media. With all of the Lore-ification and intellectualizing of the liminal space phenomena, Stolen Kingdom takes things back to when people weren’t thinking about what it all meant. They just liked seeing pictures of places they weren’t allowed to go into.
The title of the film alludes to a crime which only really comes up in the last third or so of the film. Someone, at some point, and you’ll probably be able to guess who by the end even though the crime is technically unsolved, stole an animatronic named Buzzy from the abandoned Wonders of Life Pavilion at Disney’s Epcot. This acts as an effective hook, a selling point for true crime junkies, but it’s really the least interesting aspect. Luckily, much of the limited run time is used to more generally profile the pioneers of urban exploration in theme parks, something that once held a niche space on the internet but has now evolved into a worldwide fascination with eerie empty spaces that remind you of your childhood.
What begins as an inquiry into the world of urban explorers, bloggers, and YouTubers such as Matt Sonswa, Adam the Woo, and Disney employees Dave Ensign and Ed Barlow, who ran a blog called Hoot and Chief, eventually changes gears and delves into the Disney memorabilia black market. There’s a clear delineation, here, between earnest pop-culture fixations and unseemly opportunism. While others seemed to just enjoy breaking into a place they weren’t meant to be, and others such as the infamous Patrick Spikes would turn the hobby into an illicit racket, it’s Ensign and Barlow who had a genuine, childlike fascination with the elaborate, make-believe worlds designed by Disneyworld’s imagineers, wanting to see it from new angles and privileged vantage points. This spirit of curiosity is the most relatable and also the most moving part of the documentary (we learn Barlow died tragically from skin cancer, and Ensign spread his ashes at Disneyworld).
The flashy whodunnit angle that likely draws in a fair amount of attention detracts from this genuinely interesting human interest story. A better use of run time and a more clever structure would have made the exploits of Spikes and others like him the sad epilogue, the distasteful and unfortunate, oftentimes inevitable, end result of consumerist imitation of a once sincere creative undertaking. The theme park pilferers are to loveable weirdos like Hoot and Chief as NFTs are to real works of art, or what Meow Wolf is to our beloved City Museum (not trying to start an intercity beef!)
The old, abandoned theme park attractions bring people into a haunted memory space that validates the deepest sense of nostalgia, which is not just a celebration of the retro but a wistful longing for a time when things seemed more sincere and spiritually pure (whether they really were or not). Ironically, Stolen Kingdom builds its own nostalgia for that very kind of internet nostalgia. There was a time before the enshittification of the internet where you could spend hours pouring through a blog started by some goofy Disney employees who liked to jump onto the sets of the It’s a Small World and take pictures. Beyond its affection for theme park attractions of yesteryear, Stolen Kingdom celebrates an era when true oddities were possible. | Nic Champion
Stolen Kingdom is currently touring as a theatrical road show (locations and dates here) and is available on VOD beginning June 16.
