University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Hearth and home: interior design as tool and weapon in creating an atmosphere of dread

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Hearth and home: interior design as tool and weapon in creating an atmosphere of dread

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Content HEARTH AND HOME
INTERIOR DESIGN AS TOOL AND WEAPON
IN CREATING AN ATMOSPHERE OF DREAD
by
Hannah Saftler
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(INTERACTIVE MEDIA)
May 2024
Copyright © 2024 Hannah Saftler

Table of Contents
List of Figures......................................................................................................................................... iii
Abstract................................................................................................................................................... iv
Chapter 1: Introduction....................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 What is Hearth and Home?............................................................................................ 1
1.2 Interactivity..................................................................................................................... 3
Chapter 2: Monster House.................................................................................................................. 6
2.1 What is Monster House?............................................................................................... 6
2.2 Why I Chose Monster House’s Floor Plan.................................................................. 6
2.3 The Living Room............................................................................................................. 8
2.4 The Main Bedroom........................................................................................................ 12
2.5 The Mirrored Bathroom................................................................................................ 17
2.6 The Tooth Chair..............................................................................................................19
Chapter 3: Overlook............................................................................................................................ 23
3.1 What is Overlook?......................................................................................................... 23
3.2 Why I Chose Overlook’s Floor Plan............................................................................ 24
3.3 The [REDACTED] Door..................................................................................................27
3.4 The Guest Bedroom..................................................................................................... 28
3.5 The Great Room............................................................................................................30
3.6 The Main Suite.............................................................................................................. 34
Chapter 4: Conclusion........................................................................................................................39
4.1 Concluding Thoughts.................................................................................................. 39
Bibliography........................................................................................................................................... 41
ii

List of Figures
1 Original floor plans for Monster House........................................................................................ 4
2 Edited Monster House plans, with key......................................................................................... 5
3 1967 Japan Pavilion at Montreal World’s Fair...............................................................................7
4 Interior of the penthouse at Trump Tower...................................................................................9
5 Strange design choices in a bedroom.........................................................................................11
6 A blue and yellow bathroom......................................................................................................... 13
7 Another blue and yellow bathroom.............................................................................................13
8 A liminal space featuring strange architecture........................................................................16
9 Another liminal space featuring strange architecture........................................................... 16
10 Original floor plans for Overlook...................................................................................................17
11 Edited Overlook floor plans...........................................................................................................18
12 A door detail in The Haunted Mansion.......................................................................................22
13 A bed in a room in the Casa Santa Marta.................................................................................. 23
14 Infographic accompanying Diel & Lewis study........................................................................25
15 Textures from the game LSD: Dream Emulator.......................................................................29
iii

Abstract
Hearth and Home is an interactive, 1:24 scale miniature model installation about
a museum exhibit haunted by a sentient office building. The two house models that
make up the intended content of the exhibit before its corruption have been twisted and
distorted in ways that deliberately undermine what a home is supposed to be – a
sanctuary, a safe space, an extension of personal identity. While interior design is not
the first thing one thinks about when they think of horror, in this work, the interiors of the
two house models are, by necessity, deeply involved in creating varying forms and
degrees of dread and discomfort within the audience. One house creates this effect
through pointed use of interior trends with strong connections to bygone eras, creating a
temporal dissonance even between adjacent rooms, while the other enforces it through
a careful dissection and consequent corruption of the popular Modern Farmhouse
interior design trend.
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Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 What is Hearth and Home?
Hearth and Home is an interactive installation made to resemble an interactive
exhibit at a museum. This exhibit features the miniature recreations of two houses, and is
meant to be a self-guided audio tour through these spaces. But, as there so often are in
works of fiction, there’s a twist. This exhibit is haunted – not by a ghost, as the word
“haunted” might lead you to believe, but by something else: a building. What I failed to
mention is that the exhibit is intended to only include these two houses, but in reality, a
third structure – the model of a nondescript oce building – looms behind the intended
subjects of the exhibit. On first glance, this is a strange inclusion, but nothing particularly
alarming. That’s exactly what she wants you to believe.
One would assume that an installation about a museum exhibit about houses would
not provide many opportunities for the inclusion of characters, and initially, I thought the
same thing. On reflection, however, I realized that the form this installation took provided a
unique opportunity for a horror narrative I had never seen before. Generally, disembodied
voices tend to be obviously coming from someone who is out of sight, justified in-universe
as highly unusual phenomena, or serve as obvious framing devices for a narrative. Consider
the role a narrator plays in a game or film – we aren’t surprised by the presence of a
disembodied voice in these contexts because we understand that this is the way some
stories are told. These bring to mind another disembodied voice that would not put
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someone on guard or set a narrative expectation, at least not at first; I’m talking about the
audio tours that many museums provide for their visitors.
There’s a strange relationship we form with an audio guide in a museum. While it is a
voice that is actively giving information specific to whatever we may be paying attention to
at the moment, the actual person speaking is eternally distant. Who can say when this
audio track was recorded? We don’t concern ourselves with speculation about how our
guide specifically feels about the topic they are discussing (unless the guide specifically
makes note of a personal connection to the material – but this is more likely to happen
when the guide is a public figure whose identity somehow adds value or interest to the
narration). We often know nothing about the voice speaking to us. Modern audio tours tend
to subvert this somewhat, as they have increasingly featured commentary from
professionals qualified to speak to whatever the topic may be, but some tours merely
require the smooth delivery of an actor with a pleasing voice. Time and distance have
severed the connection between listener and speaker – they know nothing of us, and we
know next to nothing about them.
Horror is a curious genre, one that thrives on subversions. Good horror recognizes
the assumptions that the audience instinctively makes and weaponizes them. What if the
audio guide in a museum, some distant speaker with minimal emotional investment in the
topic at hand, was actually right beside you, speaking about something that has consumed
its thoughts and feelings for an eternity? And what if this exhibit that they seemingly had
no hand in was actually entirely their creation, a pocket dimension with warped logic made
to lull the viewer into a false sense of security before pulling back the curtain? I previously
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mentioned a strange oce building present in the exhibit – she’s not just a building. She is
the narrator of this tour, and she’s got a grudge against houses.
So – what is Hearth and Home, really? Hearth and Home is an interactive installation
made to look like an exhibit at a museum, but at its heart, Hearth and Home is the story of
how complicated dreams and hopes can make our lives, and what happens when
someone’s heart is overcome by spite – when someone has been so thoroughly defeated,
has become so hopeless, that they seek nothing but destruction. It is about how rejection
can transform love into hate, and the ease with which we can switch between the two,
raising the question: are love and hate really all that dierent? Hearth and Home is about
the strangeness of “home” – for a concept we put so much faith in on a daily basis, it is
awfully fragile, sometimes a mere nudge away from crumbling apart.
After all, “home” is a four-letter word.
1.2 Interactivity
The framing formats used to convey the narrative content of Hearth and Home, an
audio tour and an interactive exhibit at a museum, can both reasonably be categorized as
on the more passive side of the interactivity spectrum. In an audio tour or an interactive
exhibit, the actions of the “player”, so to speak, do not aect the contents of those
experiences – the interactivity exists mostly in the idea that each individual visitor can
create a tailored hierarchy of information, accessing the subjects that interest them the
most, while potentially omitting the subjects they have less interest in. More often than
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not, a museum is an institution that is dedicated to recording the past – something that
cannot be changed. The format, then, serves not to create a narrative that the “player”
feels they have control over – it is meant to create a dynamic means of traversal through
an otherwise static pool of content or information.
Given that Hearth and Home is formatted as something of a hybrid between
museum audio tour and interactive exhibit, one might assume that the installation itself
falls under this “passive” umbrella of interactivity. Hearth and Home, the fictional exhibit,
is merely eight LED buttons that each trigger lights and narration in one of the rooms of the
two model houses. Despite the freedom to create a personal hierarchy of information,
nearly every visitor will have the same experience – they’ll hear the same audio and see the
same LEDs light up within the models as every other person who interfaces with the
exhibit. Odds are, this will be the perception that people have of the installation Hearth
and Home, the work discussed in this paper.
Except – that isn’t really true. Hearth and Home, the installation, is more dependent
on interaction than it initially appears. There are indeed eight LED buttons, but there are
three unique narrations mapped to each of those LED buttons, rather than a singular, static
audio file. This isn’t random, either – the installation is also running a Unity build that keeps
track of how far the player has gotten into the experience (determined by the number of
buttons they have completed the narration for) which determines which of the three
narrations (per button) that the player will get. Instead of each player leaving the
installation having heard the same eight informational audio narrations as the person
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before or after them, each player can potentially encounter something dierent, depending
on the way they choose to interact with the button interface.
One way to think about this system is to imagine that each narration on a button
has a level – every button has a level one, a level two, and a level three narration, with
“level” signifying the general creepiness and strangeness of the narration; a level one is
less outwardly creepy or menacing, while a level three is overtly creepy or menacing. At the
start of the experience, all narrations will be level one. Once a player has pressed two
distinct narrative buttons and heard their corresponding audio, the narration level jumps to
two. Then, for the final three buttons the player presses in their experience, they will hear
level three narrations, which then leads to the ending sequence.
.
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Chapter 2: Monster House
2.1 What is Monster House?
Monster House is the name I’ve used to describe the house located on the left side
of the exhibit – it is a closed plan, two-floor house. The interactions in this house are the
Living Room, the Main Bedroom, the Mirror Bathroom, and the Tooth Chair.
2.2 Why I Chose Monster House’s Floor Plan
Monster House’s floor plan (see fig. 1 and fig 2.) was chosen in specific contrast to
the other house, Overlook. I knew I wanted a space where I could evoke distinctly dated
decor trends. From my own logic, I assumed that a newer build was more likely to have
newer furniture, therefore, an older build would be more likely to contain older furniture and
design choices. I was so adamant about this design choice because I wanted to evoke the
feeling of visiting an older relative’s house as a child. There’s something dream-like to me
about my childhood memories – everything was impossibly big, impossibly strange,
impossibly mysterious.
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Fig. 1 – The original floorplan of the house, mirrored (left, 1st floor; right, 2nd floor). Source:
Small House Plan with Cottage Style Design. (n.d.). Down Home Plans.
https://downhomeplans.com/house-plans/cottage-style-4-bedroom-house-plan/
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Fig. 2 – My edits to the floor plan, reflective of the actual build rather than the fictional
house’s design, including a key for the colors seen on the plan.
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2.3 The Living Room
Visual Description:
The living room is one of the frontmost rooms of the house, entered directly from
the foyer that the front door opens to. It has a gray-blue carpet. There is a large portion of
the floor that has been sunken below the rest – this is a conversation pit, including built-in
seating (but excluding any stairs to allow easy entry into the pit). The built-ins, two
couches at opposite ends of the rectangular pit, are upholstered in a rust-red fabric. A
malm fireplace of a similar color floats in the center of the pit, suspended from the ceiling
by its exhaust pipe. The walls are finished with either a textured yellow-orange wallpaper,
although the wall connecting the stairs and the living room features wood paneling. A room
divider, which also serves as display space, hangs from the ceiling, delineating the space
between the living room and the entry to the central hallway. No furniture is touching the
floor.
Design:
This room is inspired by 50’s and 60’s living rooms. From the reference images I
came across while researching the design, I was unable to find a universal color palette –
they were all quite colorful, but their use of color diered from example to example. I ended
up using mostly warm tones (reds, yellows, warm browns) to decorate the space,
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particularly because of the overwhelmingly cool-toned palette of the adjacent room, the
main bedroom. Emphasizing the dissonance between the two rooms – separated only by a
shared wall – was a deliberate choice, meant to almost evoke the feeling that these two
rooms were in completely dierent houses.
The concept of a room with no furniture touching the ground evolved from a
suggestion I received during our first class critique. Among the ideas my cohort oered up
was the concept of a drain in the middle of a living room floor – this ended up informing the
final concept, although the drain itself did not make it into the final design.
This brought to mind a picture (see fig. 3) I had previously saved on Pinterest of a
room where the furniture conspicuously didn’t seem to touch the floor – most things were
mounted to walls, including walls created by a circular, sunken area of the floor. Further
research revealed that this photo was of the interior of Japan Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal
World’s Fair – a far more interesting origin story than the decade-old Tumblr post linked
through the original Pin.
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Fig 3. – Interior of the Japan Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair. Source: Expo 67 -
Japan. (n.d.). https://www.westland.net/expo67/map-docs/japan.htm
As I briefly mentioned before, the conversation pit – the sunken area of the floor – in
this context created a clever design workaround by creating walls for the furniture to be
attached to in the middle of the room. Otherwise, I would have been forced to only place
furniture and accessories against the walls of the room, which certainly would have worked
toward the strange atmosphere, but didn’t take advantage of the scope of the space. A
layout restricted only to the walls of the room would be too reminiscent of a dollhouse, and
I wanted to avoid that as much as I could in the interest of evoking actual living spaces.
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2.4 Main Bedroom
Visual Description:
The main bedroom is one of the backmost rooms of the house, sharing a single wall
with the living room. It has the same carpet that the living room does, and the walls are
covered in a dramatic shade of mauve paint. There are no windows, and the lighting of the
room is dim. The wall where the entry from the central hallway should be is instead solid,
albeit with a strange, vein-like texture, although the baseboards at the bottom indicate that
something used to be right in the center - a doorway that is now gone. At the center of the
room, in a slightly sunken area of the floor, is a round bed with a mirrored headboard,
dressed with pillows and a comforter. Above the bed hangs a chandelier, installed into a
round ceiling that echoes the shape of the bed beneath it. The whole bed area is
surrounded in drapery, both on the wall behind the bed and in the space surrounding the
bed itself. A chaise lounge sits in a corner, as if trying to fill up space. To the side of the bed
is a small hallway with an arch, again echoing a rounded theme. There is a small step up to
this hallway, which quickly ends in a slightly ajar door – what is behind the door is a visual
mystery, and only the light streaming through the cracked door hints at what lies beyond.
Design:
This bedroom primarily leans into 80’s interior design trends. Hotel rooms
were a major theme for the design of the room. I took particular interest in Angelo
Donghia’s work on the interior of Trump Tower and the coverage of it in the July 1985 issue
of Architectural Digest (see fig.4). Something about it – maybe the strong sense of time and
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place, maybe the nature of hotels in general, maybe even the clear social posturing that
comes with living in a place like this – feels incredibly distant.
Figure 4 – A photo of Angelo Donghia’s design for the penthouse of Trump Tower. Source:
Aronson, Steven. “New York Apogee.” Architectural Digest, July 1985.
Another room in a hotel – perhaps the most famous one in horror media – was just
as influential: Room 237, from the 1980 film The Shining. Room 237 is more than its interior
design – from the start of the film, it is established that Room 237 is, for all intents and
purposes, a forbidden space. One could argue that this creates a sort of chicken-egg
relationship with the interior – is the interior of the room creepy because of its design
choices, or because we have been told from the start to be wary of this room? Do I
associate these visual elements with creepiness because that’s how they actually made me
feel, or because the movie had told me to?
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This question was important because I did not want to make an empty reference –
while The Shining is one of my favorite films, I didn’t want to limit the potency of the
atmospheric eect to only those who had seen the film before. I ultimately came to the
conclusion that there was definitely something visually about Room 237 – something that
I’m not sure I can even name now – that communicated a wrong-ness about the space.
In some ways, the theme of this room is the sinking feeling that you’re in a space
you’re really not supposed to be in. In order to further create a feeling of isolation, I
removed the door that leads to the hallway outside – it’s the visual equivalent of a door
locking behind you. To make the strangeness of the missing door even more prominent, I
added some vein-like growths on the wall’s surface where the door would have once been.
One narration even draws direct attention to the lack of entryway in the room – it mentions
exiting the room through a blue door, and a glance at the scene will reveal that there is no
such thing present. No one likes to feel trapped, and there’s a comfort to knowing exactly
where and how you can exit a room – in this case, there is no exit. The only door within the
scene leads deeper into the room, rather than out of it.
There are also a couple of highly influential inspiration images I found on Pinterest
that aected my aesthetic choices.
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Fig. 5 – A bedroom with some distinct design elements that were echoed in the design for
the Main Bedroom discussed in this section.
Take, for example, this image (fig. 5) – likely from a long-since deleted Zillow listing,
now remembered only by a Pin with no information about what or where this is. This
bedroom is strange, and it’s surprising to see it in a relatively recent domestic setting (given
the quality of the photograph). I’m particularly amused by the architectural detail on the
ceiling mirroring the shape of the bed. Theoretically, if the owner were to move out of the
house, they would take the bed with them… and leave the circle on the ceiling. It’s such a
specific choice, and that alone is really conceptually interesting.
The function of a bedroom – to sleep in – demands vulnerability of the person using
it. In turn, we ask for it to bring us comfort, whether that be through the softness of the
sheets or the color of the walls. Speaking for myself, I find no comfort in a bedroom that
looks like the one I render here. On further reflection, it eventually occurred to me that this
era’s aesthetic was also o-putting to me because I didn’t exist when it was en vogue. By
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the time I was born, many of the trends of that era would have been just old enough to call
passe, but not old enough to take on that alluring patina that we associate with the word
“vintage”. This same phenomenon ended up occurring again in my tweens with the
aesthetic trends of the 90's - it somehow would instill this deep discomfort in me every
time I was faced with it. It didn’t feel retro then – it felt wrong.
This brings me back to the specific reference of the interior of Trump Tower – when I
look at it, I feel an immense sense of distance, which is why I made specific reference to it
earlier. Looking at the images in Architectural Digest, I feel everything I wanted to evoke in
this room – the temporal weight of the bygone aesthetics, the distinct feeling of being in a
place that I shouldn’t be in, the isolation and emotional distance.
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2.5 The Mirrored Bathroom
Visual Description:
Although small in size, this is technically a full bathroom (as opposed to a half
bathroom) – presumably the bathroom meant to be used by those occupying the
upstairs bedrooms. The entrance of the bathroom is directly across from the mirror and
vanity, with the bath and shower area to the left of the entrance and the toilet area to the
right. The sink is located in the vanity, right in front of the mirror. The bathroom is decked in
cheery yellows and blues, and the appliances (the toilet, the sink, and the bathtub) are a
distinct shade of periwinkle. Much of the wall is covered in yellow tile, but there is also a
yellow-and-blue floral wallpaper present. A pony wall creates a little bit of privacy in the
area where the toilet is, but not much - a quick glance in the mirror reveals the entire area
upon entry. The mirror seems a little strange – as if it is choosing to reflect some things and
not others. The reflection does not perfectly match its counterpart.
Design:
Catching people o their guard is a classic horror technique. This thesis is deeply
rooted in the idea of “relooking” – making people look twice, creating a veneer (however
thin it may be) of normalcy before tearing it away. What if you suddenly realized the mirror
you were looking at wasn’t a mirror at all? A player will look into this space, only to very
quickly realize that they have no reflection in the mirror before them. It’s an extremely quick
shift in logic – it only takes a split second to understand that you aren’t actually looking at a
17

mirror – but that moment of dissonance, however brief it may be, has tended to stick with
people in the wake of playtests.
If the mirror is our focal point, how do we choose to frame it? With a blue and yellow
bathroom, of course.
Yellow and blue? Why these colors?
For starters, they’re dated, or, if you’re being generous, they’re “retro”. The bathroom
is an interesting place to make and implement hyper-specific design choices, because,
much like with a kitchen, the appliances – the tub/shower, the sink, the toilet – all get left
behind when someone leaves the house. They’re literally built into the structure of the
room – you can’t just pick them up and hide them in a closet. Of course, they can be
replaced, but that is its own whole ordeal, not to mention potentially costly. The same can
be said for the tile installed throughout the room.
Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 – Two dierent bathrooms that provided inspiration for both the layout of
the bathroom and the chosen color scheme.
My original instinct had been to lean the blue elements into more of a periwinkle, in
order to achieve the visual interest that complementary colors lend to a space – yellow and
18

purple are complementary, meaning they are directly across from each other on the color
wheel. This is an easy way to create an immediate sense of visual interest, even if the
viewer doesn’t realize exactly what is catching their eye. In the end, some of the elements
(mostly the shower curtain) were blue, rather than periwinkle, by necessity, due to the
accessibility of certain materials. Fortunately, the overwhelming presence of the periwinkle
appliances made the curtains a non-issue.
These colors are bright and cheerful – one may wonder why an experience that
claims to be horror would willingly use this palette. I knew I wanted the focus of the room to
be the dissonance of the “reflection” not matching in the “mirror” – the disarming colors of
the bathroom create an even greater sense of logistical whiplash when the player has their
“aha” moment about the true nature of the scene before them.
2.6 The Tooth Chair
Visual Description:
Overlooking the stairs is a small loft area. The same carpet as before continues here.
Although there is no door to separate the loft from the hallway, it seems to be treated as a
distinct room, given that a dierent wallpaper is used for it. A maroon reclining chair sits in
the middle of the landing, facing the stairs. A single lamp provides poor illumination to the
area. Beneath the chair is a row of teeth, much bigger than teeth should be; they truly look
as if they were grown by the chair itself. Less eort has gone into making this feel like a
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“real” space – its very nature is infused with a sort of dream logic that falls apart the longer
you think about it.
Design:
Funnily enough, I hadn’t always planned to feature a chair with teeth in this scene.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted a burgundy or maroon velvet armchair sitting in front
of this bizarre cutaway in the wall overlooking the stairs.
Originally, the design of this area was meant to be more of an oddity than anything
else – just another piece of set dressing meant to further enforce the strangeness of the
space. If you take a moment to think about it, the presence of this little area is completely
illogical. Why put essentially an observation deck over the stairs and the wall? There’s
nothing interesting to see. People don’t tend to congregate on stairs – so even the
argument that it’s there for people-watching doesn’t hold up. What hallway ends with a
weird non-room nothing space? Were the space bigger, one could maybe argue that it’s a
loft, meant to be made into a casual gathering space. But this space is too small to fit even
another chair – hardly an environment that encourages social interaction. If we take it a
step further, think about the reality of getting that heavy chair up the stairs and to the very
end of the hall – it’s possible, of course, but it’s a pain. As previously mentioned, there is a
dream-like nonsense to the very composition of the space.
This quiet, relatively mundane addition served additionally as an homage to the
concept of the Liminal Space – these often take the form of disquieting or oddly empty
domestic settings. When there are distinguishing features within this type of image, they
read as unextraordinary – I felt that this would create an interesting contrast with the
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highly-stylized first floor of the house. Most liminal spaces are meant to look and feel like
they could have come from a distant memory you had otherwise forgotten, and therefore
often do not have any explicitly creepy visual elements – maybe something that is
logistically questionable, like a landing overlooking nothing – but that’s about it. As it was
initially intended to be a little extra flavor to the house, it felt like the perfect place to
reference this burgeoning subgenre of internet creepiness that thematically echoed other
rooms in the house.
And then I gave the chair teeth.
I can’t even claim that the idea itself came from an image – I was standing in the
fabric store, looking over their options for velvets, when I saw this particular velvet and
went, “huh, that kind of looks like gums. Really inflamed gums.”
Fig. 8 and Fig. 9 – Two personally influential “Liminal Space” images that specifically make
use of a strange relationship between stairs and landing spaces. Sources: (left) Pinterest,
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2023, https://www.pinterest.com/pin/311663236728029849/; (right) Pinterest, 2023,
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/311663236727413850/
It was after seeing the visceral reactions people had to this concept that I decided
to upgrade the weird landing from an extra detail to its own interaction. To be honest, it was
refreshing to have a design element that wasn’t some abstract idea – aside from having to
clarify where the teeth were located (under the chair, facing the back – the chair is
positioned with its back to the audience - not exactly the placement one would think of in
the theoretical anthropomorphization of an armchair), the idea spoke for itself - people had
little issue conjuring up a mental image of the idea.
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Chapter 3: Overlook
3.1 What is Overlook?
Overlook is the second house in the exhibit, the one located to the right of the
player. It would be easy to assume that I named this build Overlook as a cheeky reference to
the notorious hotel of the same name in The Shining, but no – I didn’t name this house. The
builders did. In contrast to Monster House’s closed-concept layout, Overlook is almost
overwhelmingly open. This house contains four interactions: the [REDACTED] Doorway, the
Guest Bedroom, the Great Room, and the Main Suite.
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3.2 Why I Chose Overlook’s Floor Plan
Fig. 10 – Overlook’s original floor plan (left, 1st floor; right, 2nd floor) Source: Overlook -
Yankee Barn Homes. (2022, March 3). Yankee Barn Homes.
https://yankeebarnhomes.com/portfolio-item/the-overlook/
Fig. 11 – Overlook’s plans with my edits, reflecting the actual build (red X’s indicate removed
areas; blue lines indicate added walls)
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This house is entirely based on a real home. My edits of the floor plan were nowhere
near as drastic as the ones I made to Monster House – most of my changes were simple
removals, which tend to be easier to implement than additions. I loved that the floor plan
allowed for a more comprehensive view of both the first and second floors at the same time
from an audience perspective – Monster House uses a traditional second story, which helps
add to a sense of intended normalcy, but it does limit how much of the house can be seen
at once (not that this is a bad thing, per se). In contrast, Overlook has almost no hindrance
to the audience’s line of sight – everything is on display. What this also meant is that I would
need to put considerable thought even into the non-interaction spaces, an issue I did not
often face in the design of Monster House.
This house is strange, and not strictly because of the edits I made. It has truly
become more perplexing the more I think about it. For example, this (originally) 2,252
square foot vacation home has a grand total of two bedrooms. This is in comparison to
Monster House’s original 4-bedroom floor plan, which comes in at 1,958 square feet. Here’s
the thing about vacation homes – more bedrooms add more value to the property. The
general assumption is that a vacation home will be used not only by its owners, but also by
guests of the owners – friends, family, etc. I understand that the owners of Overlook built it
to fit their needs, not necessarily the most valuable vacation home possible, but the lack of
sleeping space will definitely negatively impact the resale value of the house. As a complete
outsider, it reads as a strange choice.
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There’s more to discuss here. The placement of the main suite (the main bed, bath,
and closet) is utterly perplexing. It’s unusual to see a main suite on the ground floor of a
house, but that doesn’t necessarily mean placing it there is inherently bad. The critical
factor when placing a main suite is privacy, and yet… the door of the main bedroom opens
directly into the great room, the room generally dedicated to being a gathering space for
people. Hardly a bastion of privacy.
I know that most people won’t think twice about the oddities I’ve just mentioned – if
anything, their attention will go to the bridge on the second floor that gives the house its
name. I’m fine with that. As with Monster House, the interaction rooms are the critical areas
for conspicuous strangeness here. In a perfect world, in fact, a player would go through the
experience, leave the thesis show, sleep, and then the next morning, as they eat their
cereal, go, “hey, wait a second –”. I cannot count on this happening, but that’s the tradeo
with this brand of horror. Sometimes people aren’t going to notice everything that’s meant
to be scary.
In some ways, being provided with actual interior photos from the house’s page on
the website was a lifesaver – but it came with a curse. The moment I saw those photos, I
knew the interior had to be in the modern farmhouse style, whether I liked it or not. Maybe
it was the emphasis on exposed beams, the barn doors on the guest room, the rustic
fireplace, or the already-installed light fixtures. The house was built to be in the modern
farmhouse style, and it wouldn’t let me forget it.
Normally I would welcome the pinpointing of a style already done for me, but the
problem here was clear – how do you make modern farmhouse style scary? People like to
26

joke about the fact that it already is scary – followed by a snide comment about “live, laugh,
love” signs – but when you really interrogate the aesthetic elements of the style, you
suddenly realize that many of the visual elements one thinks of when they think “creepy”
are completely o the table. It was time to get creative.
3.3 [REDACTED] Doorway
Visual Description:
The remnants of a doorway and door frame just barely peek out from beneath the
wall’s new growth, as if healing a wound. The new “skin” is mottled, a flawed attempt at
recapturing the color of the paint on the walls surrounding it. There is little indication of
what may have been inside this room at one point - just the half-healed evidence of what
once was the entry to another room.
Design:
This one is a little bit of an outlier among the interactions, as it technically isn’t a
room, but rather, the lack of a room where one should be. In horror, as previously
mentioned, not showing something to the audience can be used to fantastic eect – with a
limited amount of information, the imagination can truly run wild, and sometimes that’s
scarier than anything you could have shown in the first place. The choice to make the wall
that falls inside the door frame slightly warped and discolored was to evoke the imagery of
scar tissue – it’s almost comically simple in comparison to the abstract nature of some of
27

the other rooms, but it does a sucient job of reinforcing the implications made
throughout the experience that houses are actually living things. A fun fact about this
interaction’s concept – it is one of the only surviving concepts from the ideas I
brainstormed over the summer before thesis year.
3.4 The Guest Bedroom
Visual Description:
The guest room is outwardly relatively normal; the most distinct element in it is likely
the wrought iron bed frame, a staple of the modern farmhouse aesthetic. However, this bed
frame is a little unusual – if looked at from the correct angle, it resembles a wildly-grinning,
one-eyed monster. As if diametrically opposed to the main bedroom downstairs, most of
the guest room is open to the outer world, rather than being closed in. What at first appears
to be a geometric pattern on the wallpaper is, on closer inspection, revealed to be a mass of
disembodied hands and eyes, tangled together without rhyme or reason. An “Eat” sign that
one might expect to find hanging on a kitchen wall sits in the corner, trying not to attract
attention to itself.
Design:
Finally, we have reached the inevitable moment that Disneyland’s The Haunted
Mansion is cited as my inspiration. The Corridor of Doors, a scene from the ride, contains
doors that have wrought-iron decorative elements, located above the transoms, that
resemble menacing monster faces (fig. 12).
28

Fig. 12 – A door located in the Corridor of Doors in Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion,
brightened for better visibility (the monster face can be seen at the top of the door).
Source: HBG2. (n.d.). Unseen twists and turns in the corridor of doors.
https://longforgottenhauntedmansion.blogspot.com/2014/01/unseen-twists-and-turns-in
-corridor-of.html
The wrought iron bed in this room is made to resemble a single-eyed grinning
monster when looked at from straight on. My original design bore a much stronger
resemblance to the design seen in the ride (a monster-like face, all located at the footboard
of the bed), but ended up taking equal inspiration from an image (fig. 13) I initially found on
Pinterest, but later was able to specifically identify as a room in the Casa Santa Marta “used
29

to house cardinals during conclave” (Parks, How Conclave works: All the rules and rituals of
the Papal election — Tiany Parks).
Fig. 13 – A room in the Casa Santa Marta at the Vatican, used as housing during conclave.
Source: Parks, T. (2017, September 7). How Conclave works: All the rules and rituals of the
Papal election — Tiany Parks. Tiany Parks.
https://www.tiany-parks.com/blog/2013/03/10/how-conclave-works-all-the-rules-and-r
ituals-of-the-papal-election
3.5 The Great Room
Visual Description:
The Great Room is massive, its size only accentuated by the open floorplan that
creates little spacial distinction between living room, kitchen, dining room, and foyer, not to
mention the ceiling that stretches to the top of the second floor. As if to redirect attention
to the living room specifically, the kitchen consists only of a flat picture of a kitchen, and
the dining room sits bare. The size of the living room becomes even more overwhelming
30

with the little furniture that remains in it. Hanging on the back wall is a picture of what it
probably looked like some time ago – its current state is a far cry from what it once was.
The back wall that the picture hangs on looks as if it has been overwritten by the presence
of the picture, as if someone had dragged-and-dropped the picture into the middle of the
wall.
Design:
For a very long time, this room was the bane of my existence. It is massive. Between
the high ceilings and complete lack of walls between this room, the kitchen, the dining
room, and the foyer, I felt deeply overwhelmed. I did not want to design all of those rooms.
One idea I played with early on was the “dead mall” aesthetic, which can be made into
downright vaporwave if given a little push. It seems random, but there’s a sad vastness to
pictures of dead malls that reminded me of this overwhelming space I now had to address.
It certainly would have been fun to design, but frankly, I think it would have been
conceptually weak in the context of the larger thesis. If this is about homes, why transform
one of the rooms into something that is outside of the home? Ultimately, this was a dead
end.
I was lucky enough to come across an incredibly fascinating study about liminal and
uncanny spaces. I was thrilled to find an included image from the study that attempted to
clearly delineate what makes a space uncomfortable in that particular, uncanny way. (Diel &
Lewis, 2022).
31

Fig. 14 – An image included with the Diel & Lewis study, illustrating the primary visual
principles that create a sense of “liminality”. Source: Diel, A., & Lewis, M. (2022). Structural
deviations drive an uncanny valley of physical places. Journal of Environmental
Psychology, 82, 101844. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101844
32

This image (fig.14) is such a beautiful way of concretely explaining what is otherwise
a rather nebulous concept. Empowered by this new wave of clarity, I decided that the
vastness of the space – what made it so daunting to design – could be used to my
advantage. When every other space in the environment is decorated with thought and care,
an empty – or almost empty – room would feel truly unsettling. However, I knew leaving it
completely empty could inadvertently come across as if I had forgotten to fill the space or
ran out of time. I figured that if I put a framed photo on the wall of the room in its
fully-decorated glory, I could show a clear before-and-after relationship – and the framed
photo was an opportunity as well. I imagined what had once been a wall of windows having
this framed photo essentially dragged and dropped in the middle of the wall, completely
disrupting the geometry of the windows themselves, almost as if the picture was
“overwriting” them.
Prior to this point in the paper, I have barely brought up The Building, who, as
discussed earlier, disguises herself as the audio tour guide for this exhibit, only to reveal
that she isn’t an audio recording at all, but a sentient building, lurking in the back of the
model, that harbors deep resentment toward her inability to be a home (and the constant
reminders of her inferiority in the eyes of the people who once worked there). I mention her
now because the concept of the design of this room also plays into her character – she did
this because she was putting the room in its place. There’s a pettiness, a clear bitter
undertone to the implication that someone hung a picture on the wall of a destroyed room
33

showing how it looked in better times. Two of the narrations for this room, in turn,
specifically reference how sorry a state the room is now in, particularly in comparison to its
former glory, immortalized on the wall for all to see.
Design-wise, this room posed some unique challenges. While it might be empty in
the final experience, I still needed to take a photo of it with all of the furniture in place – no
shortcuts here, unfortunately. Well, that isn’t entirely true – it was at this point that I
purchased two miniature house DIY kits (in the appropriate scale) with the intention of
streamlining some of my fabrication process. One house had a sectional that I decided was
a good fit for this room – the kit made the process a lot easier, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied
with the end result – the couch felt too short, and realistically, it was too small for a couch
that would be in that space. Sadly, I did not have the time to be as picky as I wanted to be –
too much other work to be done.
3.6 The Main Suite
Visual Description:
The Main Suite consists of the interconnected bedroom, bathroom, and closet. The
main bath and main closet, placed closest to the audience’s view, are both unextraordinary
in every way. They feel flat, lifeless. This makes the view through each room’s doorway back
into the main bed all the more alluring, for in the main bedroom, something has clearly gone
wrong – it is a technicolor mess where a giant eyeball seems to stare out at the viewer, and
34

instead of a normal finish on either the walls or the floors, the words “wall” and “floor” are
written, respectively, in a multitude of colors, many of which do not seem to go together.
One of the walls is covered with a plasticky green fabric, covered by an iridescent curtain.
The purple cast of a black light renders anything white in the room with an otherworldly
glow, and blurs the line between seen and unseen – were the light to turn o, how much of
this chaos would suddenly vanish?
Design:
One of the reasons I chose to use real house floor plans for my designs was the clear
relationship the design has with actual spatial logic. A dollhouse, in the interest of serving
its function, is very vertical in its design. This is so that every space is equally accessible for
decorating or playing in. There are very few “behind” spaces – rooms completely blocked
from view because they are deeper into the house. This, perhaps unintentionally, serves to
make a dollhouse even more welcoming – there aren’t many spaces in which things can
hide. I did not want this to be the case for my houses. I’m well aware of the power that the
unseen has in the horror genre, so it's only natural that I would choose the format that
facilitates the obscuring of information rather than the one that puts everything plainly in
front of you.
I specify this here because I actively make use of this principle in these rooms.
Technically, the interaction is for the main bath and main closet, which both obscure the
main bedroom itself from the clear sight of the viewer. There are, however, doorways in
each room that look directly into the main bed, so the room is not fully obscured by any
means. If you’re really curious about the bedroom, you can probably gather a significant
35

amount of visual information about it, even if only through those two doorways. Therefore, I
designed the interaction to outwardly be presented as about the bathroom and closet,
when it’s really about what’s happening in that space just beyond the viewer’s
comprehensive reach.
If I was going to purposefully obscure access to something I actually wanted
viewers to pay attention to, I knew that I had to make it very visually interesting, almost
impossible to ignore. This introduced a wonderful opportunity to pay homage to a game
that I had long been fascinated by – LSD: Dream Emulator. The name alone gives a pretty
good indication of what the game is like, but in the interest of specificity, the 1998
Playstation game is a sort of exploratory “walking simulator” in which you explore a world of
dreams each night for 365 days. There are no real objectives or goals in the gameplay – it is
simply meant to be experienced. LSD: Dream Emulator is, if nothing else, visually engaging.
This is no fluke – the game is well-known for being spearheaded by Japanese artist Osamu
Sato (Sato, About). A selection of textures ripped directly from the game speak for
themselves (see fig. 15) .
36

Fig. 15 – Textures of the “Kanji” variety, pulled from the location Bright Moon Cottage in the
game LSD: Dream Emulator; Source: PlayStation - LSD: Dream Emulator - Bright Moon
Cottage - The Textures Resource. Uploaded by Skructured. (n.d.).
https://www.textures-resource.com/playstation/lsddreamemulator/texture/9230/.
I found myself deeply amused by the concept of the intended interaction being
incredibly plain, while the room that guests are supposed to ignore looks like that and has a
large eyeball in it. This also facilitated a much-needed injection of surreality into the design
of Overlook – surrealism, and the works of artist such as Rene Magritte, were always
conceptual inspirations for what I wanted to accomplish with this work, so it was great to
37

have the chance to give more of a nod to that side of things than most of the other rooms
allowed.
38

Chapter 4: Conclusion
4.1 Concluding Thoughts
Designing these two houses was an immense challenge, one that took up a
significant portion of the time I spent on my thesis. When you start to imbue meaning into
some of your choices, you quickly realize that nearly every choice you make has the
potential to further empower the themes and concepts you want to highlight, all leading
towards a larger goal. I knew from the beginning that this was part and parcel of the
experience I sought to make – a technically “horror” narrative that thrived on dread and
anxiety rather than traditional scares. Horror fiction often imbues locations with innate
dread or danger by setting a precedent of some terrible thing that previously happened
there. I could have taken that approach, but I deeply wanted the conceptual terror to come
from the houses themselves, letting the aesthetic elements define the emotions of the
audience rather than some sordid backstory that, by necessity of the nature of backstories,
had already happened.
On reflection, I believe that the inclusion of a spoken narrative is what allowed me to
be as precise with my aesthetic choices as I ended up being. Without the stress of
upholding the entire narrative logic of the experience, my aesthetic choices had
much-needed room to breathe, to grow in organic (and sometimes unexpected) ways. Of
39

course, they still provided much of the foundation for the narration itself – the narration
constantly references specific traits or elements of the room being discussed.
Being at the end of this long journey feels strange, to say the least. I can’t
help but imagine that I’ll reflexively check my Pinterest for interior inspiration long after this
project will be technically over. It’s been enlightening to gather the thoughts and ideas I’ve
had over the span of a year into a single document – I feel a similar sense of awe when I
scroll through my dedicated Pinterest board and watch a replay of the places my brain
went over time, where some ideas were abandoned, and where others suddenly sprouted
from the ether. Although it is an untraditional (and perhaps unscholarly) means of
documentation, that Pinterest board is just as much a culmination of my creative process
as this paper is.
I hope the reflections that I’ve recorded in this paper have provided a little clarity
and insight into a project that I have consistently struggled to describe to others. Many of
the observations made here will quite literally go unspoken in the final experience – if it isn’t
brought up in the narration, then I am leaving an idea to be conveyed exclusively through
visual choices. It’s a risky choice, but one I am okay with making. If I can get some of the
visceral feelings I’ve discussed here to come through, I will consider my design choices
successful.
40

Bibliography
Diel, A., & Lewis, M. (2022). Structural deviations drive an uncanny valley of physical places.
Journal of Environmental Psychology, 82, 101844.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101844
Kubrick , Stanley, director. The Shining. Warner Brothers, 1980.
Osamu sato site. (n.d.). Osamu Sato Site. https://www.osamusato.net/
Parks, T. (2017, September 7). How Conclave works: All the rules and rituals of the Papal
election — Tiffany Parks. Tiffany Parks.
https://www.tiffany-parks.com/blog/2013/03/10/how-conclave-works-all-the-rules-and-rit
uals-of-the-papal-election
41

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Asset Metadata

Creator Saftler, Hannah Delaney (author)

Core Title Hearth and home: interior design as tool and weapon in creating an atmosphere of dread

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Interactive Media

Degree Conferral Date 2024-05

Publication Date 05/17/2024

Defense Date 05/16/2024

Publisher Los Angeles, California (original), University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Furniture,game,Home,horror,House,interactive,interactive installation,Interiors,miniature,museum,OAI-PMH Harvest

Format theses (aat)

Language English

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Advisor Bolas, Mark (committee chair), Campos, Martzi (committee member), Lemarchand, Richard (committee member), Nealen, Andy (committee member), Vigil, Jesse (committee member)

Creator Email hannahsaftler@icloud.com,hsaftler@usc.edu

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