Welcome to The Queue — your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web. Today, we’re watching a video on why basements are such a terrifying cinematic space.
The only thing worse than having to go down into a basement is watching someone else do it in a movie.
What unseen terrors lie beneath unassuming floorboards and cellar doors? When it comes to basements, hell knows no bounds! You could be greeted by the infernal jaws of a furnace, like poor Kevin McCallister in Home Alone. Your exposed ankles might get snatched like Ash’s in Evil Dead II. Or you could stumble in the dark into a putrid lair like in The Silence of the Lambs.
Now, not all on-screen basements are evil. There are plenty of underground spaces that feel — dare I say it — safe and comfy. Or at least safe from harm. But, beneath it all, be it a man cave or a mass grave, all basements have one thing in common: they are pressure cookers of story, stakes, and symbolism.
Out of sight and out of mind, basements can be a metaphorically subconscious space: a literally repressed area of the home where you can be vulnerable, bury your trauma, or squirrel away dark secrets. They can blur the line between a refuge and a prison. And they can physically manifest the stratification of class. As the video essay below argues, basements derive their power not from the dark, but in bringing the unseen, uncomfortable, and unacknowledged to light.
Watch “Why Are Basements Scary? Underground Spaces in Movies and TV“:
Who made this?
This video essay comes courtesy of Now You See It, a YouTube channel dedicated to film analysis searching for meaning in unexpected places. You can follow Now You See It on YouTube and check out their back catalog here. Now You See It is run by Virginia-based software engineer Jack Nugent, whom you can follow on Twitter here.
More Videos Like This
- Here’s another taste of Now You See It: a video essay about the delicate art of the cinematic courtroom scene.
- And one more: on the uniquely cinematic ways movies break the fourth wall.
- The Evil Dead franchise sports one of the darkest, most putrid, and dangerous basements in horror history. Here’s Queue favorite Ryan Hollinger dissecting the original trilogy.
- Likewise, Best Picture winner Parasite has an unforgettable, wildly unsettling, and narratively vital basement. Here’s Thomas Flight on how Parasite’s set design supports the film’s themes about class structure.
- Here’s SciShow Psych‘s Hank Green on humanity’s deepest, darkest fear: the unknown.
Related Topics: Horror, The Queue
