Hallways and Horror

The endless allure of long corridors.

Even if you haven’t seen The Shining, there’s a good chance you know the scene. The closed doors and carpet. The floral wallpaper and unsettling symmetry. The hallway with Danny on a tricycle at one end and spooky twins at the other, holding hands, asking if he wants to play forever and ever and ever.

While it’s perhaps one of the most recognizable movie scenes in horror history, it highlights an ongoing obsession within the genre:

Hallways.

If you’ve ever walked the empty hallways of a house, hotel, hospital, or office, you’ll know the feeling. The unease. The sense of dread. But what, exactly, makes that happen?

Image credit.

I think, in part, it’s because they’re liminal. You don’t spend considerable time settling into or getting to know a hallway. You don’t sleep in it. Instead, they’re places of transition; there to carry you from A to B. That gives them a sense of impermanence. It makes them feel fleeting. A little surreal, with different expectations to a bedroom or living room.

The other part is how hallways harbour, by design, the unknown. They’ll have doors, all leading to something or someone you don’t get to see, windows that reveal only a section of the world outside, and corners that you can’t see around. Pair that with an odd sense of symmetry mentioned above or things on the wall that reveal more questions than answers, and you have an interesting setting.

Movies work well to capture all of those feelings and you no doubt have memories of being taken down some hallway — whether slowly or at speed — while sitting on the edge of your seat.

I find gaming elevates that and some of my most memorable gaming moments have been spent there. Silent Hill P.T. has players follow an endless hallway, loop after loop, corner after corner, until details start to emerge that weren’t there before. Resident Evil 7 and the swamp-stained corridors of the Baker’s house are claustrophobic, atmospheric, and make it clear that doors won’t always work to stop monsters.

I’m about to finish Karma: The Dark World which, like Silent Hill, does a great job of presenting the hallway as something fluid. Walking past a door doesn’t guarantee it’ll be there if you turn back. Entering a bedroom doesn’t mean you’ll find things as you left them. It all leaves you on edge, anxious, questioning everything.

In books, the theme of a house and, by extension, its hallways being fluid is a personal favourite, especially when that house is actually living, breathing, and feels alive. It makes you see hallways as a vein or a throat, transporting whoever’s in there from one place to another, or swallowing them entirely.

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is a notable example not just because of the unpredictability of what lies at the end of its corridors, but because of its very specific Five and a Half Minute Hallway. You’ll have to read it to find out why it gets that name.

Other books like Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House all offer a claustrophobic take on hallways, and Uketsu’s Strange Houses explores the idea of a house’s in-between spaces, or dead spaces, and whether they hold sinister secrets.

But beyond the surreal symmetry, impermanence, and this idea that a house is living, what’s perhaps most unsettling is how familiar hallways are. No matter where we live, work, or hang out, we’ve all spent time in them. We know what they are. What they look like. How they operate. We know their rules.

What all of the above does is what any great horror should.

It takes that familiarity and twists it. Repackages it. Rewrites its rules. Grasps something mundane and tips it into madness to the point that you’re left wondering, if I can’t trust a hallway, what else can’t I trust?

Before you go

I write books! My latest, The Flowers at Flood House, is out now. It’s a horror novella about memories, grief, and lots of flowers. Feel free to check out reviews on Goodreads or click here to grab a copy.

Before that, I published Waxwing Creek, a collection of interconnected horror stories about a haunted motel. You can grab that here.

Want to read some free short stories?

Below are a few to get you started but you can check out all the fiction I’ve shared on Substack here.

• Lightbulb 💡 - A short horror story about a haunted lamp.

• A Gentle Rain 🌧️ – A short horror story about loss.

• Checkmate ♟️ – A short horror story about long-distance chess.

I love hearing from readers. I keep an Instagram updated and post regularly to Threads and Notes. You can also find me on TikTok.

/ JJW