Horror films often base their scares on what is hidden in their surroundings. Filmmakers use editing and cinematography to create a sense of spatial continuity within a scene, but in horror films they may intentionally subvert these conventions to create subconscious unease.
A film often heightens our sense of terror by scaring us in a comfortable space, such as the bathroom. When a threat manifests itself in the bathroom, it shatters our understanding of it as a universal place of vulnerability.
Many horror films prey on our instinctive perception of the bathroom as a protected space in which we can be defenseless. In body horror films like “Titane” or “Black Swan,” The four walls of a bathroom tolerate a space of self-harm and transformation for the purpose of realization or destruction.
Purple Baltaxe | Lead graphic designer
The allegorical horror in Titane uses the bathroom as a site to explore the limitations that the gender binary imposes on the body. “Black Swan,” which follows a ballerina’s self-destructive path to stardom, transforms the bathroom into an isolated area of physical distortion and delusion.
“The Substance,” a recent horror hit that follows a fading TV star's struggle with unattainable beauty standards, similarly casts the bathroom as a place of violence where the greatest threat to the body is its owner's judgment. The four walls may protect us from the scrutiny of the rest of the world, but they also leave us vulnerable to our own gaze, often leading to complete physical destruction.
The bathroom can also be a place of accidental discovery. In Witness, the non-threatening nature of the room is turned on its head when a young Amish boy witnesses a murder, transforming a private room into an exhibition of vile behavior. Similarly, in “The Substance,” the main character's self-destructive spiral is accelerated by what she hears her boss say while hidden in a bathroom stall.
The isolation of the bathroom also allows for the possibility of self-discovery. In “The Shining,” which follows a hotel manager’s spiral into madness, the bathroom is a central space of realization. There, main character Jack Torrance encounters a seductive and shape-shifting ghost who disarms him with the eerie truth about his role in the hotel's history. It becomes a place of confrontation with one's own psyche, a sobering space in an otherwise labyrinthine building.
In the troubled world of The Shining, we also see the bathroom used in its most conventional horror meaning – a space imposed by a threat. In perhaps the most iconic horror scene of all time, an abusive and hostile Jack bursts through a bathroom door with an ax, shoves his face through the hole and screams, “It's Johnny!” at his frightened wife.
In these cases, what matters is less what is happening in the space and more about who or what is violating the space. The characters enjoy the safety of the bathroom, but are distracted by an invading threat that they don't realize until far too late.
Because the bathroom can pose the greatest threats, the space has great social power in shaping our prejudices. Films that use an external threat to destroy the intimacy of the bathroom often frame the encounter through the lens of the predator's innocence. In A Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy falls asleep in the bathtub, leading to the famous shot of Freddy Krueger's gloved hand emerging from the water between her thighs, suggesting some physical or sexual violation of her body.
But of these movies about bathroom predators, none is more iconic than Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Marion, on the run for stealing from her boss, is stabbed to death in a motel shower by owner Norman Bates while disguised as his mother.
“Psycho” was the first of many films to feature the depiction of a cross-dressing killer. By making a bathroom the scene of the crime, “Psycho” codified the panic of seeing androgyny or transience not just as a threat but as a violent force in a space where women are at their most vulnerable — a motif that has become a transphobic topic of conversation has become today.
The intimacy of the bathroom gives the place enormous power in creating social norms and prejudices. The vulnerability of this space has undeniable power, and the way we use it to shape predator and prey relationships influences the reality of social dynamics.
The horror movie bathroom is a malleable place, one that we can use to justify bias, as seen in Psycho, or that we can use to condemn those harmful standards, as seen in The Substance is.
What happens on the screen in the shower, bathtub, or mirror has startling implications for our fears in the real world, and the consequences of space cannot simply be confined to four tiled walls.
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