This previs marks the point where I began shaping the introduction of the house itself. I wanted the story to start by showing the environment where everything takes place so that the audience immediately understands the sense of isolation. The house is either in a forest or sitting alone on a flat plain. I wanted there to be nothing around it, no neighbours, no help coming, no one to interrupt. If the story took place in a city, the presence of other people would force new interactions and change the whole dynamic. This early previs helped me realise that the setting needed to cut these characters off from the world completely.
In this iteration, the horns on the wall become much clearer when the man stands up. I added more religious references at this stage. There is a copy of the Last Supper on the right side next to the photo frame, and I wanted that image to sit quietly in the background and influence how the viewer reads the situation. After the man picks up the photo, I added a close up of his hand. I wanted it to be clearer what he was looking at. Hands reveal more emotion than people realise. They tell the truth about where a person’s attention is, and in a situation like this, they betray the man’s inner state.
After this close up he looks up at his wife, and then he looks up even further and sees the demon. In this early previs the demon was supposed to resemble a distorted version of the burlap styled friends I had designed. They were goofy on purpose. When something silly is placed in a serious context it becomes much more disturbing. I wanted the demon to have that playful wrongness. In the previs he has large cartoonish eyes, and little hands come out toward the camera. It is a point of view shot, and the slightly wobbly movement helps sell the panic of the moment.
There is a cut to the man’s hands again. His hands have been important from the beginning. They have caused damage, they have expressed fear, and now they start to move in a new way. There is a pool of blood that begins to spread under them, and his fingers twitch to show that he has become possessed. Then it cuts back outside to another shot of the house. The camera gets closer each time. I wanted to set up a rhythm where the viewer feels the world closing in on them. It also teases the idea that something important will eventually be revealed the closer we get.
The film then returns to the child’s bedroom. She is on the floor with her toy. I used a sound icon to show that the father is trying to communicate with her, but the child is deaf. The only thing she can hear is the belt buckle. That sound is familiar to her and it shapes the way she reacts. When the belt falls to the floor she responds instantly and with fear. The audience has already seen the alcohol and the belt earlier, and while those things can be interpreted in different ways, her reaction removes the doubt. It suggests that she has already been in danger long before the events of the film.
From here I began experimenting more with the sense of panic. I changed the field of view to stretch the camera and create a feeling of the world bending, and I added more camera shake. The child kicks at the door and tries to escape. It was important for me that this moment felt desperate. I used the contrast between the man’s hand on one side of the door and the child’s leg on the other. A leg feels more desperate because it is an instinctive defensive action. It is the body trying to push back with whatever strength it has.
Then it cuts to the father’s body. He has been twisted into an unnatural posture, something that removes his humanity. This moment was important because it planted an idea that becomes central later on. The father still shows a trace of his humanity. Even in this broken state he is drawn to the glow of the television. It mirrors how he sat earlier in the film. The television becomes a point of fixation that can distract him long enough for the girl to move. She tries to open the door again but his body covers most of it and blocks her.
He then opens the closet door and moves toward her. In this previs she hands him the lighter because she thinks it is what he wanted. He does not take it for the reason she believes. In this early version she opens her eyes and sees the demon, which is funny to look back on because she is blind in the final story. She panics, sparks the lighter, and that is where this previs ends. At that time I had not decided whether she escapes forward into the hallway, backwards further into the closet, or if she is captured and has to find another way out. Nothing was set in stone yet. This previs represents a very early version of the idea, but it helped me understand the emotional flow of the scene and what kind of tension I wanted to create.
This iteration taught me a lot about how the house should feel, how the father should move, and how the girl responds to danger. Even though nearly all of the details changed later, many of the emotional beats stayed the same. It was another step in shaping the story into something that feels grounded inside its own world.
1. Isolated houses in horror and narrative containment
When I started designing the house as a standalone structure in the middle of nowhere, I was working from the same logic discussed in horror studies around “narrative containment.” Isolated houses limit variables. They remove the possibility of help, intervention, or interruption, which focuses the viewer completely on the internal dynamics of the family. Films like The Evil Dead use this exact approach – a single house on its own creates psychological pressure because everything is trapped inside its walls.
2. Religious imagery and subconscious framing
Adding the Last Supper and aligning the horns behind the father’s head reminded me of how religious iconography functions even when the viewer isn’t consciously reading it. There’s a long tradition in cinema of using religious shapes as subconscious framing devices – Scorsese, Dreyer, Tarkovsky all lean on this. Horror especially uses symbolic contamination: something holy becomes quietly corrupted. That’s exactly what my previs was doing, even before I fully understood why it felt right.
3. Hands as emotional indicators
I kept cutting to the father’s hands because I instinctively knew they carried emotional weight. Later I found research in performance studies that reinforces this — hands communicate intention faster than faces in moments of stress. Animators constantly refer to the “expressive extremities” principle: hands and feet reveal subconscious truth. This helped validate why my previs focused so heavily on hands as the earliest emotional anchors.
4. Playful distortions and the uncanny
The demon’s early cartoonish design aligns with work I did in my undergraduate dissertation on the uncanny. Freud describes the uncanny as the point where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley expands on that. Something silly placed in a serious context becomes unsettling because the viewer can’t categorise it. This previs version – big eyes, goofy proportions, wrong context – was my first attempt at that psychological dissonance.
5. “Haunted media” and screen-based entities
The demon revealing itself through the TV connects with research on “haunted media,” especially analog horror. Works like Ringu and Channel Zero rely on screens as supernatural gateways. There’s a whole body of writing on how screens blur the line between diegetic and extra-diegetic presence, meaning the threat crosses into the audience’s space. This informed why the TV felt like a natural anchor for the demon early on.
6. Blood as symbolic transformation
The blood pooling under the father’s hands taps into universal horror imagery — blood marking the moment someone changes, whether spiritually, morally or physically. Academic writing on body horror often references Cronenberg’s philosophy: blood signals metamorphosis. This previs shot makes the transformation visible in the most minimal way possible, which helped me understand later how subtlety can be more effective than full transformation shots.
7. Sound as character memory
When I used the belt buckle sound as the one noise the deaf child reacts to, I accidentally aligned with theories on “sonic memory.” Sound scholars discuss how certain noises trigger learned emotional responses because they are tied to past trauma. The belt buckle becoming her only recognisable audio cue strengthened the idea that she has already survived danger. This was one of the most productive discoveries from this previs.
8. Distorted lenses and embodied panic
Switching to a stretched field of view links to the psychological use of wide lenses in horror. A warped FOV mimics panic – the edges stretch, the world bends, and the viewer feels trapped in the character’s perception. Films like Requiem for a Dream analyse this technique heavily. Using it in my previs helped me realise that distortion can be tied directly to the character’s emotional state rather than just style.
9. Broken posture and loss of humanity
The father’s twisted body position matches the visual language of German Expressionism, where unnatural physicality communicates spiritual distortion. Expressionist horror often turns characters into broken shapes to show their internal collapse. Research into films like Nosferatu helped contextualise why this previs moment worked – it communicates possession without showing any supernatural event directly.
10. Early prototype horror logic
This entire previs ties into film development research that talks about “prototype logic”: early iterations that contain emotional truth even when the narrative is unfinished. Scholars argue that the emotional rhythm – panic, stillness, misdirection, release – often forms before the story does. Looking back, this previs is a textbook example of that. Nearly everything changed later, but the emotional beats stayed the same.