The hallway has been used as a number of symbolic objects in fiction, from doorways to other worlds, to extensions of characters mood and emotions. I will in this essay present three genres of fiction, and their use of hallways in wildly different ways. Namely will we examine fantasy, science fiction and horror, and their uses of the hallway as a way of telling a narrative.
Fantasy
Many types of fantasy, especially those that follow the trope of “two worlds”, use some sort of doorway or hallway to access the different worlds. The use of hallways can be used to extend the notion of distance between the “real” and “other” world. A good example of this would be the wool corridor between the other mothers world, and the world of everyday life. The transportation through it, both with time and space, can create a larger sense of distance, and otherness.
Science fiction
The blog post created by Curley (2015), discusses the idea of the corridor as a canvas to create world building and set dressing. The corridor can be used to present the tone, setting and themes of the narrative. Two examples would be the sleek corridors of the enterprise showing the futuristic utopian world that the story takes places in, where minimalism and simplicity of life has taken hold in the confederacy. This can be juxtaposed with the shops if the Alien franchise, where the ships are seemingly created from a lot of different manufacturers, and clearly made with a small budget, where price comes before safety.
Horror
The corridor in the is almost a staple of the series, where it is used to great effect to show anything from loneliness, to claustrophobia and disorientation. A classical example would be the corridors in Saltney Cambrics, the Shining uses corridors very effective to create a sense of dislocation, and otherworldliness to the hotel of the movie. Nightmare of Elm Street uses the hallway as a way to enhance the sensation and feeling of nightmares and otherness.
The corridors have been used as hunting grounds for monsters and villains to set harrowing chase scenes, or once again be used as a portal between the natural and the supernatural world. (Ripatrazone, 2015)
Romance
The corridor in romance films are used to show closeness as well as distance, separation and togetherness. By empathising the size and distance of the hallway can the physical distance between characters work as an allegory for both emotional and mental distance, as well as the actual distance between them in space and time.
Conclusions
We have here seen how the hallway has been used to create a series of different moods and narrative cues, and concepts. Many of the themes are somewhat bleeding in to each other, and are used in similar ways, but I have in this chapter tried to show a distinct tradition and history of using the hallway in narratives. I wanted to show in this chapter that even a seemingly arbitrary set piece as the hallway can have a rich use of narrative and symbolic use within film making.
References:
Let’s explore science fiction’s glorious hallways, Christopher Curley, 2015, taken from: https://news.avclub.com/let-s-explore-science-fiction-s-glorious-hallways-1798283284
The Long, Lonely Walk: Hallways in Horror Films, Nick Ripatrazone, 2015, taken from: https://themillions.com/2015/08/the-long-lonely-walk-hallways-in-horror-films.html
An Unused Frequency 