"Bad" or "dim" places like haunted houses are "unregulated, irrational additions" that often need to be mastered through the layered topography of Sigmund Freud's mental model. The vertical layering of the house—basement, staircase, attic—is all part of the deeper mental topography.
Consider Alfred Hitchcock's The Horror: there are steps leading up to carpenter-Gothic houses on the hill characterized by folding roofs; there are deadly stairs leading to platforms and mother's rooms; there are secrets buried deep in basements and swamps.
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="01" > Gothic corridor</h1>
Horace Walpole's description of a medieval castle at the beginning of Fort Otranto is a space whose fantastic logic is confusing and the vivid portraits in the gallery are disturbing. In addition, secret passages and escape tunnels are scattered under the castle, subverting the hierarchical control of the above-ground parts. The original manuscript came from the superstitious 16th century, so Walpole was careful when rewriting it, avoiding the use of modern words like "corridor."
The location where Walpole completed this fanatical hybrid novel also made him very important: he had a house on strawberry slopes on the picturesque banks of the River Thames, slightly north of Richmond. Walpole took more than 40 years to complete its transformation, and the entire project was a direct response to his father's perfectly symmetrical Palladian-style Howden manor in Norfolk. Built in 1735 as a suburban retreat for Britain's first Whig Prime Minister, Howden Manor embodied the order and power of the Enlightenment. In contrast, Horace began to build small-scale buildings from 1749, which mixed many architectural and decorative styles from the 11th to the 15th centuries: Rouen Cathedral, Reims Cathedral, King's College, Cambridge University, Westminster Abbey, medieval stone courtyards, glass curtain walls, stained glass and elements drawn from other churches throughout Europe. Although this is not the case, it can make the building appear like an organic combination of centuries. Walpole formed a committee of tastes, reviving only the "precious barbarism" of the pre-modern Gothic style, thus ensuring that the house remained pure for its purpose. Strawberry Slope was so acclaimed at the time that Walpole ended up writing a guide for visitors, "Introduction to the Villa." The guide covers every aspect of the house, from the fan-shaped ceilings of the large galleries to the smallest ornaments in the small hallways.
In the 1790s, Ann Radcliffe's series of definitive modern novels expressed the importance of distinguishing between ancient and modern architectural spaces. In The Romantic Forest, the initial threats and suspense are in the ruins of the Gothic church and its "winding passages", an incoherent space that is the same as the path in the forest outside, "labyrinthy," only confusing. Soon, the heroine, Adeline, is in her nightmare, first "going mad in the winding passages of the church." There were barely five fingers out there, and she lingered for a long time, but not a single door was found." Adeline escaped the threats of the church, including various underground passages, tunnels, and dungeons, and returned to social order and etiquette. All this is marked by her walk into the bright Larouc Castle, which is open-minded, picturesque and seemingly magnificent, but in fact hides the fears of countless imaginations: "The manor is not large, but it is very practical, with an elegant and simple temperament, and the order is orderly." Through the meticulous depiction of the "small living room", we find that the space there is reasonably distributed from left to right, and the distinction between the family living room and the study room is obvious, which shows that Adeline has shed the disorder of superstition and approached enlightened modern life. She moved from the labyrinth and mixed passageways into the reasonable proportions and layout of the modern family corridors.
Robert Wise's The Haunted House (1963), a long shot of a corridor
By the middle of the 19th century, after corridors appeared in large numbers in family homes, stories of "haunted corridors" were well documented: there were many uncertainties in news reports, urban stories, and absurd myths. In 1863, the story that appeared in the Kent Gazette was a typical example, and the ghost story that took place in an old family home in Somerset seemed to be well known to women and children: "It is like this, basically every night at twelve o'clock in the morning, something invisible comes in from one end of a corridor and then goes out from the other." "The sound of footsteps accompanied by the sound of silk rubbing the ground suggests that it should be a woman who is walking by." I got... Permission that has been prepared, to stay overnight in a haunted corridor, and if necessary, to stay a few more nights. The narrator sets up the table and plays cards with another friend to "completely block the passage." As midnight approached, footsteps came, and gradually "along the dim corridor" went away, but there was not even a half-figure: "I admit that I am stunned." The story ends, but this phenomenon is still not explained.
In 1897, a "real" psychological investigation was conducted at Ballatsin Manor in Perthshire, where the corridor was also one of the main haunting sites. The controversial investigation took up multiple pages of The Times. The Marquise of Bit asked the newly formed Society for Psychological Research to investigate a legendary haunted house. Originally built in the 16th century, the house was completely renovated in 1803 and a wing was added in 1887. It is said that there are banging, screaming and tapping sounds in some rooms, and there is a lot of movement "in the corridor with the turnaround door". After midnight, many solo visitors "often hear the sound of the swing door being pushed open, and there are footsteps in the corridors", and sometimes the door will be slammed shut, with such force that the hinges are almost taken down from the wood. The investigation, conducted by Ida Goodrich-Freer, who was very sensitive to psychological problems, was ridiculed for being considered a clumsy conclusion drawn by rash and sensitive investigators. One explanation is that there are a lot of wood-paneled rooms in the house with passages behind the rooms, perfect for scaring the faint of heart. The Psychological Research Society shelved the investigation after the media leaked the secret, but Freer and the Marquise's book on the investigation became the source of material for Shirley Jackson's classic horror novel, Ghost in the Mountain House. Later, the work was adapted by Robert Wise into the memorable film The Haunted House.
The Golden Age of Ghost Stories (from about 1880 to 1914) saw a plethora of legends that created a real uneasiness about the modern corridor space. In Henry James' The Corner of Joy, Spencer Braden returns to New York, gets his inherited mansion, and spends the night walking in empty corridors, associating rooms and corridors with perverse expectations—"He may meet strangers, and there will be an uninvited guest at the corner of a dim passage in an empty house." The mysterious quest takes place in "open rooms and empty corridors". Braden found two rooms in the corner, what appeared to be a series of rooms communicating with each other, "three rooms built along a normal corridor, but there was a fourth room in front, and the back was gone"—a dead end. He suddenly didn't want to face the person behind the door anymore and fell into what he called "vague pain", "he made up his mind, or rather, he was too scared to really stop". Braden turns to escape from the house, but encounters a ghost at the bottom of the stairs. He fainted, unable to believe it, "at the end of the long gray corridor" before he woke up, "that's the other end of his dark tunnel."
<h1 class="pgc-h-decimal" data-index="02" > Horror Movie: Corridor Shot</h1>
Corridors play a much more important role in the visual economy of horror movies, so at least after the expressionist claustrophobic fear space of Dr. Carrigalry, the corridor shot became a very common figurative method. A very significant example is the film "The Curse of the Devil"—adapted by Jacques Turnur based on James' story "Using the Runes"—in which the American psychologist John Holden is in the hallway of an unnamed hotel, and when his hand touches the door of the room, the image of a demon flashes in his mind. This is a borrowing of premodern times in typical modern spaces, but the sudden metamorphosis of the corridor space behind Holden also reveals that psychologists' dubious rationalism also exhibits unspeakable vulnerability in the face of supernatural threats.
Shooting classic wide-angle shots within a narrow focal length, the narrow space of the corridor is distorted and the space is expanded, so that the viewer loses sight: "The edges of the frame are no longer straight, and the lines become oblique. The empty space in the picture is expanded. The distance is longer than the human eye sees. This technique played a major role in "The Haunted House" and "The Legend of the Old House". The two films used almost all of the film's shots of the corridor using a deformed wide angle to reflect the endless feeling of the corridor of the mountain villa.
Corridors appear in large numbers in horror movies because cameras advance in a limited space, which multiplies the fear of the off-screen corridor space and the blank space through which the camera passes. Dario Argento's "Storm of Shadows" creates suspense by using strange pauses in the highly stylized corridors and secret passages of the dance academy, and also allows the camera to slip through the viewpoint where the motives are unclear. In the opera-like finale, as the camera steadily passes, at the turn of the hidden corridor, a series of hidden and obscure incantations appear, revealing that the witch is gathering in the distance.
Whether in a straight vista or an angled bend, the length of the corridor allows the object to move forward or backward from the viewer's point of view, bringing an ominous feeling. Narrow spaces can contain threats that turn corridors into places of harsh testing: this is common, from Romero's zombie horror film Night of the Living Dead to the arcades of malls in Dawn of the Living Dead to umbrella companies' endless corridors with a variety of research equipment in the Resident Evil series. Sometimes, the corridor space itself expands, reinforcing its role as a transitional space or teleportation space, and the indoor corridor in Ghost Drive is distorted and stretched abnormally. Corridor spaces themselves can also be a source of fear. In high-profile films like Paranormal Activity, a significant portion of the film's directors are waiting to emerge from the hollow darkness of the half-open bedroom door in the distance. In Mike Flanagan's Absence, the underground passage at the end of the street is a secret passage that we can't fully understand. At the end of the old British film remake "Frontier", the slowly narrowing tunnel finally squeezes people to death.
Dario Argento directed the Baroque dormitory corridor in the film The Winds
Similar examples abound: another way to use this type of material is to find a director who is accustomed to using corridor spaces. Here I would like to introduce 3 directors who make good use of the corridor. In Cold-Blooded Horror, Roman Polanski expresses the distorted sense of the corridor in the ornate form of expressionism. Carol's madness is expressed through a subjective illusion: there is always a hand reaching out to grab her in the hallway wall of the apartment. In Tenant, Polanski uses distorted angles to move the camera through the corridors of an apartment building in Paris. In Child the Devil, form becomes content, as the mysterious enclosed corridors of the apartment contain clues to the evil conspiracy between the tenants of the Dakota building.
David Lynch usually uses corridor spaces to evoke fears about the future, from the shadows of the corridors in Eraserhead to the Deep River Apartment in Blue Velvet as Jeffrey's entrance to the world. In Twin Peaks, sexual injuries are often seen in transitional family spaces such as stairs, foyers, and corridors in houses, while violent attacks are always in hotel foyers or institutional hallways. In the pilot clip, before the principal announces the death of Laura Palmer, a aimless footage slides through the empty school hallway. The Red Room, as well as the white or black hut where Laura lived after that, are supernatural spaces that are constantly divided into mazes with curtains, existing for ulterior motives. In Mulholland Drive, the eerie scene that appears at the turn of a narrow alley behind a bistro is enough to scare people to death. Lynch even meticulously constructed a winding corridor in his house on Mulholland Road that leads to the humiliating marriage bed in Nightfall. That corridor is an illusory space full of fear—from a certain point of view, where even the camera itself is attacking Fred. Richard Martin noticed Lynch's obsession with "the symbolic power of dark corridors, narrow passages, and claustrophobic spaces." He argues that in Night's Terror, "the corridor is some sort of portal, a transforming space where Fred has repeatedly disappeared."
A pilot clip of Twin Peaks (1960) that scans the empty school hallway before announcing Laura Palmer's death
Most influential, however, was Stanley Kubrick's obsession with the sense of perfection that the camera's single-point view brings. In this way, the vanishing line of the corridor became one of his favorite forms of cinema. Kubrick's shots swoop forward or backward to devour space, and mastering this requires absolute technical precision — something he's trademark. He experimented with this technique on the straight track of Killer through the room and further refined it in shots gliding through the trenches of Path to Glory. The architectural space of the corridor constitutes the trajectory of the lens itself, and the corridor and the lens mirror each other in a completely symmetrical way.
When shooting horror movies, it's almost impossible to avoid the influence of the shots in The Shining that look into the corridors of the hotel. It was one of the early films that used Garrett Brown's new invention, the camera stabilizer, and was definitely the first to reverse the use of the device, allowing the lens to slide a few inches above the ground. The film takes full advantage of the strict horizontality of the corridor, allowing the camera to easily follow Danny's tricycle and move horizontally, and the use of wide-angle lenses makes the wall stand proudly next to Danny. Jean-Pierre Guerns argues that The Shining introduced a "new mirroring system" that freed the camera from mobile camera cars, allowing subjective perspective to be no longer limited to the use of traditional handheld rockers. In addition, this approach creates a weightless, mechanical perspective that "doesn't necessarily come from some kind of entity" (Garrett Brown), but "from something smoother and more grotesque."
Screenshot of the movie The Shining
Is the word "grotesque" appropriate? What kind of emotions are the corridor spaces trying to evoke? Is this space full of suspense always meant to express more extreme fears? Is it a measure of the success of the first wave of Gothic films? When Perek thinks about the "Paris Metro Car", he thinks that this space is "empty, mutilated, invisibly immature" for him, and that "its silence has a long history and ends up arousing some kind of emotion similar to fear". This quieter feeling, this feeling of fear, is what we call terror or Angst.