Creep Mapping: On the Complexity of Visualizing Fictional Spaces from Horror Films
Please note that this article references spoilers from horror films used in the creation of an infographic on floor plans. Further, these spoilers contain references to violent or scary events that occur in the plots of these films. If you are looking to avoid these, I understand completely and advise you not to read this article.
True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.
Arthur Rimbaud
After an unintended hiatus, this year I resolved to resume my information visualization game as I move forward with my thesis work. In doing this I’ve been working on pieces across a range of subjects with a unifying goal: to experiment with visually translating the complexity of a topic. I’m also testing fun ideas from themes that have always interested me, or that I’ve at least spent a lot of time thinking about. And this month things got a little creepy.
To take a break from my more serious usual topics like infectious disease or information literacy, I decided to make an infographic of some of the floorplans I knew well from horror. Now before I proceed further I must make several disclosures: I am not a film nerd — I’m not even a horror film nerd — I just happen to like a few horror movies. And while one of the hats I wear is that of an information architect, I’m certainly not a physical one, and my design choices will show that. My selections were not based on whether I thought they were the best horror films, these are just ones that I have seen quite a few times and felt I could reasonably map out without much trouble.
Well, I was wrong.
What I came to appreciate is that horror films are woven from bits of fantasy and reality, and how a director depicts these can overlap, entangle, and often blur the line between the two entirely for the viewer. My favourite films seem to tease out Rimbaud’s declaration: in a sense, we are never quite in the world the way we think we are. We are always partially somewhere else — inside ourselves, our problems, our interests, and our relationships. For me, compelling supernatural horror has some internal element leeching out of the characters into the environment that transforms it into a reflection of the dysfunctional worlds they inhabit.
This is the first of a two-post series on the research I did and the design challenges I faced creating my infographic 10 Terrifying Floor Plans from Horror Films (link to come). In this post, I talk about a few of the films I chose from the last 20 years or so. In the next post, I’ll cover some of the older classics from the infographic. What follows are some of my challenges and observations from trying to visualize what I thought I knew about 10 films from the supernatural horror genre.
Hereditary (2018; director Ari Aster)
If you’ve seen this movie, you know it’s intense. You may also know that the beautiful home in the film, while an actual house, is different from the set that director Ari Aster had built for the interior scenes. In this story, the house is where the majority of the action takes place, and as such, Aster has clearly taken great care to create an intimate and creepy environment in which we (and the unseen forces in the film) can observe Annie’s family unravel.
For my infographic, I set about reconstructing what I thought the floor plans might look like for selected levels in the locations these films take place. To map out areas of scary activity, I used deep red skull icons to indicate them. In Hereditary, there are creepy things happening all over the place (including the worst thing you’d want to see happening in an attic), so I ultimately decided to try and represent the main floor, as that’s where the film culminates. This meant I would sketch out the first floor with the areas that we know are there from the exterior shots; the treehouse and the garage next to the front door where a key scene happens (off-screen). I added skulls in each of the four compass directions on this floor plan to attempt to show that the family is engulfed by a malevolent attack. Throughout the story, Aster uses footsteps to tell us there are always actors moving undetected in their midst. Even the opening of the movie begins with a zoom-in of the dollhouse, while the heavy, hooved steps of what can only be one of the eight Kings of Hell approach ever menacingly.
The main challenge for me here was reconciling what is presented to the audience in terms of the real building (shown in the exterior scenes) with the fictional set of the inside of the house. Since we don’t see much of the kitchen, or some of the areas we can assume to be on the main floor, I chose to handle this ambiguity by either including these elements where I thought they should be (the bathroom) or omitting them altogether (the laundry room). When working on these missing elements of the floor plan, it was obvious that Aster deftly filmed the interior life of the home as if it was itself a large dollhouse. The miniatures Annie works on are intriguing metaphors for her world. In the front hallway is perhaps one of the most suggestive ones — an eerie house with the windows and doors boarded and chained up like a vault of noxious secrets. We’re only seeing half of what’s there, and there’s a satisfying frustration in trying to get at what is just out of view.
In Hereditary, Aster consistently uses the house/dollhouse as a stage for observing the toxic closed system of a single family; a major theme in Aster’s work has been the family as cult. The ending of the film occurs when the house is consumed with nefarious actors in a truly horrifying and heartwrenching family annihilation. While I certainly thought about including the attic and second floors, for the sake of space I chose to represent the main floor as the final scene takes place in the treehouse, where the ultimate evil is revealed in its entirety.
There is a core challenge in trying to plot the seams of narrative in these films; a graphic translation invariably sacrifices nuance in order to reduce it to something visually understandable. It was with this acceptance that I ended up working on only the scary facet of these movies for my graphic, and not the more elegant and complex themes that emerge in their storylines. And although this floor plan wasn’t the most challenging one to complete, I did find it perhaps one of the most emotionally draining, as if I could not avoid encountering it as a multi-level map of generational trauma as well as terror. So my cheers to Aster, who, like the jerks in the treehouse, was there the whole time orchestrating it all.
The VVitch (2015; director Robert Eggers)
Another psychologically intense film that culminates in a family annihilation. I assumed that because this movie also takes place mostly in the confined space of a single-room dwelling it would be a quick and straightforward floor plan. Not so.
In my graphic, I attempt to map out the hot zones of creepy activity from these films, but in The VVitch, due to space constraints, I made the hard choice to omit one of the most important parts of the set: the forest. Instead, I again chose to indicate the direction of the menace by using arrows pointing from the skull icons. In this liminal setting, I felt that Eggers was saying something about Puritanism and colonialism, and being dragged to an understanding of the brutal hubris that underpins both. The patriarch William and his family leave the comparative safety of their settlement to live at the very threshold of the unknown, defiant of the wills of both their former community and the wilderness that William is utterly inept to conquer. Even his daughter Thomasin attempts to bring him to this understanding: “Thou canst do nothing save cut wood!” At the end of the film, it is heartbreaking to watch a father plead for the souls of his children as he finally admits his accountability: that William’s hubris had condemned his family long before they encountered the forces in the woods and the animal pen.
While the film’s story is in colonial-era New England, the set itself was built in Northern Ontario, making the film feel even colder to me as I studied it. There are three main parts to the farmstead in The VVitch: a single dwelling of one room with a ladder leading to a loft where the children sleep; a second building that appears to be for storing crops, the cart, and tools; and of course, the animal pen where the goats bed down. One thing that was easy enough to visualize in this floor plan was the stark simplicity of the farmstead. The three spaces are crudely-constructed, rickety, pathetic buildings that are as dark and chilling as you could imagine in the New England countryside of 1630.
And yet the house, while simple, is so dark and claustrophobic in its interior that I found it disorienting to interpret. It is clear in the film that the upper loft is literally just that: wooden boards with some hay and bedding materials on the floor for the children to sleep on. It was not clear to me whether any glass covered the windows — from the lack of visible dirt, I decided there was none. This detail does not translate well in my floorplan, as the window elements appear as normal and the viewer cannot see how exposed and vulnerable the site truly would be.
The main level of the homestead served as a common area with a meager hearth, a large table with bench seats, and a curtained corner where Thomasin’s mother and father slept. I chose to situate the table against the wall, but noticed that it appears to be pulled into the middle of the room at mealtime to accommodate all the members of the family.
At a glance, the bleak simplicity of the floor plan itself suggests something about the oppressiveness of the space the family lived in, and doesn’t need any tokens or text added by me to show this. It is a suffocating environment of whispers and paranoias of privacy: the entire farm site could have been showered in skull markers to indicate the menace. In creating this floor plan, I came to take that as Eggers’ point here: whatever ramparts we construct against the outside world, we cannot escape ourselves. The farmstead and the woods, to me, represent a psychological brink in which we encounter a more chasmic version of us, and the VVitch is as much about confronting our internal demons as it is about satanism and witchcraft.
Sinister (2012; director Scott Derrickson)
The floor plan from this movie was definitely one of the most challenging ones of the batch. Again, I figured that because the house is where the majority of the action occurs, it would be easy enough to map out. But as soon as I revisited the film to study it for this graphic, I realized I was in for a battle.
The plot of Sinister centers around a true crime writer, Ellison Oswalt, who moves his family into a murder scene in order to complete research for his next book. Director Scott Derrickson manages to infuse an inscrutable shroud over every inch of this house that makes it feel like the Oswalt family is drowning in shadow in each scene, even during the daytime. At first, I was making amused jokes about how much trouble Ellison could have saved himself if he just invested in decent light bulbs. And yet I was completely stalled. Because of this incredible shadowing treatment, I experienced the same disorientation trying to understand the layout of this home as I did for The VVitch, despite most scenes taking place in the main and attic levels of the building.
As Derrickson turns what appears to be a basic house layout into an endless dark labyrinth, I found myself giving up on interpreting it from the film alone. This led me to do a little sleuthing to see if I could get some information on the actual property. I did not expect to find a real estate listing that left me not only with most of my questions unanswered, but that would reveal the home’s current state as somehow even creepier than it was in the film. If you click on no other links in this article, you might want to click on the listing to see it for yourself here, as it is truly astonishing.
One of the most compelling aspects of Sinister is how Derrickson balances Ellison’s obsession and eventual disintegration with the gradual revealing of the forces that are surrounding the family the entire time. With each film that the author views during the course of his investigation, the veil between the surreal and the real is wearing thinner. By the time the family flees the house, the veil is torn entirely, and somehow the floor plan becomes less like a house than a maze of shadows in which the occupants are being stalked. As with William in The VVitch, it is Ellison’s stubborn hubris that seals their fate.
So how did I manage to visualize this strange floor plan? In the end, I took many, many liberties. I knew I would get several things wrong, simply because areas of the home I knew were there were not shown in the film. At first, I was convinced the house must have been a duplex, as it has two front entrances of equal style and size, and two main windows adjacent to each entry. After viewing the real estate listing, though, I understood that this was a 70s-era executive home and that Ellison’s office (the room that is set up like an FBI profiler’s), would be located over the three-car garage at the side of the house.
With the impermeable darkness of the film, I found it very challenging to understand certain parts of the home, like where the main hallway opens up to other rooms, and how those rooms connect to each other. There’s a moment in the film where Ellison comes out of his office to a fight being had in what appears to be the front foyer, but he walks between doorways and shadows toward them in a path that seems like the house is organized in aisles. I made some questionable choices in representing this area of the floor plan — attempting to address this aisle-like aspect in Ellison’s area while acknowledging the second front entrance. I reasoned that there must be a storage or closet area located off the second entrance, and I included a bathroom in this wing, as the realty listing states that the actual home has 4.5 bathrooms. And since we know from the listing that there is a garage directly beneath Ellison’s office, I added a stairwell leading down next to the laundry room (whose location is verified in the film).
Once I wrangled Ellison’s wing into a logical plan, I had even more difficulty with the location of the children’s bedrooms. Several key moments from the film occur in this area of the house, and yet we only get a momentary glimpse of where some of these rooms are off the main hallway. I was unable to discern where the closet or ensuite bath for the master bedroom was located from the film, and so made a call to tuck them in where they would make sense structurally. But these are wrong, as I realized from catching a brief moment when we see where Trevor’s room is located in relation to Ashley’s in the movie. This is why there are two bedrooms located side-by-side next to the living room at the back of the house, rather than across the hallway from each other, to accommodate the bathroom and storage closet I added.
The red skulls in this floor plan run along the hallway like the spooky spinal cord of an even spookier nervous system. You would think a straight hallway wouldn’t be confusing, but Derrickson even manages to play around with this space, too. The attic, where major plot moments occur throughout the story would logically have to be placed closer to Ellison’s office than the bedroom wing, for all the activity that goes on there. Yet in the scenes where the attic ladder is pulled down, it appears to be near the end of the hallway where the bedrooms are; even in this choice, I am not sure that I have situated it correctly. The skull icon in the main hallway points up to indicate where I decided the hatch to the attic must be located.
Like the floor plans for the other two films, I tried to show how pernicious the danger is for the characters in this story. In Sinister, the plot of evil follows the family inside the home, up to the attic, running through bedrooms, and is a constant presence inside or outside. Even more than the other film locations, this house feels simultaneously located in both the real and the unreal. The relentless menace in this story is a heavy theme that is difficult to communicate in a floor plan without seeing it at work in the film.
What started out as a silly side quest turned into something that became surprisingly personal in meaning to me. I had a lot of fun going down some of those rabbit holes. Speaking of which, I finally settled a question I’ve always had about The Blair Witch Project. I’d heard the years-long debate over whether the witch appears in the original film. While trying to see how much of the basement from the Rustin Parr house is actually visible, I saw that the thing that gets poor Mike does in fact appear on-screen (if you have nimble fingers, pause the movie at the 1 hour, 16 minute and 33–34 second mark to see a face appear before the camera drops). I further learned that the house used in the final moments of the film was a historic site that was destroyed a year after the filming wrapped, courtesy of an oddly adorable fan-made video of the site that was recorded shortly after the film was released in 1999. And the house from the first Paranormal Activity? It looks almost exactly the same as it did in the movie, except for different furnishings. People manage to sleep in that infamous master bedroom. Amazing.
A heavier takeaway I have from this project is how challenging it is to represent these spaces where internal anxieties intersect with external perils in the world. Perhaps because each of the stories in this article deals with family annihilation, it’s inevitable that the supernatural becomes a conduit through which we can express the horrors of trauma, betrayal, and grief. The zones of menace where our fears consume us end up pointing to the same places, those micro-worlds where we are half-here, half-somewhere else. The dinner table. The bedroom. Alone in your office. I suppose that’s what scares me in these films: the nightmares aren’t just simmering out there. They are carried around in us.
But in the meantime, I still say it never hurts to splurge on the good light bulbs.
In my next post, I’ll compare my experiences mapping the floor plans of some older supernatural horror classics with the set designs of the more recent films I discussed here. Stay tuned!
