The corridor is a typical modern space, from ancient times to the present, from religious shrines to terrifying imagery, it has gone through a legendary path of advancement.
Nowadays, corridors are often seen as boring infrastructure, so they rarely attract attention like gutters, cables, and vents. Corridors are passed by indifferently countless times in life, but they are ubiquitous in movie theaters, television shows, and computer games.
The most impressive was Stanley Kubrick's film The Shining (1980). In the movie, Danny, a young boy, rides a children's tricycle through a maze overlooking the hotel. He circled around the dazzling space while drawing incomprehensible characters.
The reason why this short-lived image is remembered is that the audience has not seen a similar scene before. Director Kubrick used the then relatively new invention of the camera stabilizer (Steadicam), turning it upside down and placing it close to the ground. From this perspective, the corridor becomes a frighteningly eerie space. In addition, the smooth sliding process creates an atmosphere: as if someone's eyes are following behind the little boy – not human eyes, but full of malice.
Before the release of The Shining, we were simply portraying the house of horror through the portrayal of spaces such as vertical staircases, attics, and basements. After The Shining, however, fear is more visible than ever in the transverse corridors, perhaps in the vista of an unnamed modern hotel, or in the mundane passageways of public buildings.
In addition, corridors have appeared in thousands of horror movies and computer games, such as the haunted house, mental hospital or hotel corridor raids in the SERIES series American Horror Story, such as Resident Evil, Monster Strange And Westworld, the main space in the military base - the empty laboratory labyrinth. These works can be subcategory under the Corridor Challenge.
We see endless scenery through the corridor, and the corridor itself is also an endless landscape. A Brief History of the Corridors takes us back in time, with University of London Professor Roger Lukhurst telling us from literary, philosophical, historical, cinematic, artistic and even games perspectives, from the corridor's first appearance in Western architecture, to becoming a neglected infrastructure, to an overly extended metaphor.
Roger Lukhurst / Han Yang / Oriental Publishing House / 2021
Beginning with country houses and utopian communities in the 17th and 18th centuries, through reformed Victorian prisons, hospitals and shelters, to the "corridors of power", to the bureaucracy and the corridors of twentieth-century estates. From architectural history to fiction, from film to television, Roger Lukhurst explores the corridor's unique path from a utopian ideal to a horror cinematic imagery.
Xiao Meow said that the things we are accustomed to have a particularly interesting history.
Xiao Mao said, right, right.