Final seminar response

Had the final seminar of this semester this morning, which is a weight of my mind at least. For this weeks seminar my group had to read a chapter from the book "Unreal Estate" by Barry Curtis. In this section of the text he references loads of films (well over 30 or so) most of which are horror related though some are a bit harder to grasp in their relationship to the others for example "honey i shrunk the kids". Anyway with regards to the films I found it really quite hard to analyse  as I think there are only a handful that he mentions which I have ever seen in entirety and have any confidence in talking about. Never the less I was still able to discuss one in particular this being "Panic Room" by David Fincher, 2002. Bellow is the small response i wrote regarding this film and some of but definitely not all of the theories he (Curtis) brings up in the text.

  In the text the author (Barry Curtis) deals with many different architectural themes as well as horror movie themes, looking at the movies Panic Room( David Fincher, 2002) and The Ring or Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002 and Hideo Nakata, 1998 respectively) he address the ideas of the intruder and the safety of the home as well as the ideas of the permeability of the home or dwelling, which he mentions several times earlier in the text. In Panic Room the “intruders” to the house can be viewed in two ways firstly the new tenants (character played by Jodie foster and her daughter) who have recently bought the house as the means to a new start (see motivation and social ideals earlier in the text) and also the thieves who later break in to steal whatever wealth was left by the previous owner (this wealth can be considered the ghost or legacy of the previous owner as touched on earlier in the text). In the film the house contains a “panic room” designed to protect the inhabitants from just such an event, akin to that of the medieval castle keep, though once they have entered the “keep” the new tenants soon find themselves entombed with no way to raise the alarm or indeed to rid themselves of these intruders thus the architectural design features ostensibly included to provide a safe haven to your safe haven (traditional view of your home) becomes an additional complication.  This then allows the new intruders to permeate the whole of the house in their search for the legacy of the previous owner only to find that the one place they can’t permeate is the place they need to in order to complete their visitation.

This theme of hide and seek is what the author describes as “ the labyrinthine quest that lies at the heart of all haunted house films”