Sydney Friesen

Advisor: Liane Veness

The image shows a detailed floor plan on a dark background, divided into a main floor with red furniture illustrations and a minimally detailed basement overlay. The main floor includes living areas, bedrooms, and utility spaces, with stairs centrally on the left.
Floor plans display how my own house and its furniture is generally organized, exploring how it conforms to “unnatural” societal pressures through the concealment of things we commonly perceive as messes.
The image features two floor plans: a main floor with hand-drawn dark pink furniture (living area, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom) on a light blue background, and a simplified basement labeled "BASEMENT FLOOR PLAN with movie furniture."
Floor plans illustrated with the furniture from a true crime movie that was filmed in my house, as various spaces were used to simulate an apartment inhabited by a serial killer/. The areas of my house employed for the film used clutter and its association with societal fears concerning acts of horror, to impose preconceived notions onto the inhabitant.
The image shows an aerial view of a partially deconstructed architectural model with white walls, window cutouts, and tiered layers suggesting a multi-level design. Against a black background, a smaller inset in the lower-left highlights the complete exterior with windows and doors.
A model of my house creates a visualization of how the film was able to change the viewers' perception of the space through cinematography and set decoration, leading to discrepancies regarding the exterior, as a different building was used for exterior shots in the film.

Grotesque Suburbia: Confronting the Monsters in Our Homes 

“[The haunted house] is identified as a troubled place, marked by neglect, strange habits and failed rituals of order and maintenance. It is an established scenario for childhood fears, tentative new beginnings, dramas of inheritance and the return of the repressed.” 

This thesis aims to explore the unnatural ways in which we present and interact with our domestic spaces as a result of societal pressures deriving from fears of the grotesque. The awareness of how we are perceived influences how we interact with domestic spatiality, as we establish spaces of natural consequences within basements, closets, and attics where we conceal the aspects present in our lives that we identify as messes. Likewise, the unnatural is found throughout living spaces displayed as practices of domestic commonality and concealing the horrors of homogeneity. While we may or may not directly acknowledge our awareness regarding the influence societal pressures have on us in places of study, work, the public, and social media, the concept of keeping things hidden in the domestic capacity is no secret to us. Idioms used during general exchanges reveal these practices when referring to something that happened behind closed doors, the skeletons in the closet, or sweeping things under the rug.  

As a method of exploration into the horror found in the unnatural spaces of our homes, domestic spaces portrayed in select horror movies offer insight and parallels into revealing the manners in which we interact with our living environments. Through the relevancy concerning the editing of our domestic spaces and the processes used in filmmaking, various cinematic and production techniques propose methods of exploration into how filmmaking can be utilized in these contexts. Finally, a case study and site inquiry regarding the analysis of my personal house explores the similarities between fictional spaces depicted in film and spaces of reality.