This tunnel is the first real liminal space in the film. Everything before it still feels like rooms and locations, even if they are distorted, but this is the first environment that is purely transitional. She has to struggle her way through it. Every other space in the film can be walked, climbed, or escaped through with relative ease, but the tunnel forces her to crawl, stumble, and fight the environment itself. It is the clearest visual example of left to right movement in the entire film. She enters from the left side of the frame and pushes herself all the way to the right with no cuts or shifts, and I wanted it to feel as direct as possible.
I chose red because I wanted the space to feel organic and uncomfortable, like a birth canal. The whole point was to make it feel both biological and supernatural. The textures are wet, smeared, and uneven. It feels like something she is being forced through rather than something she is simply navigating. It is the moment she is pushed out of the familiar world and into a place where she has a degree of agency for the first time. Even the way she moves reinforces this. The stumbling came from the motion capture process, but it aligned perfectly with the idea that she is not walking confidently yet. She is still forming her own path.
The tunnel is intentionally too tight and too long. Almost everything else in the film has depth and space, but this moment is totally flat and completely side-on. I wanted it to be a visual break from the painterly three dimensional world. It needed to feel like a strip of red separating two realities. The demon does not follow her for two reasons. First, I needed to avoid revealing scale too early. Second, making his absence here creates ambiguity and sets up a later scare without cluttering this moment with extra tendrils or visual noise. His behaviour in the previous shot makes it believable that he would tear the closet apart chasing her, but here I wanted a clean transition without supernatural interference.
Once she enters the tunnel she shifts from reactive to active. Before this, she is only responding to the situation around her. After this, she is carving out her own escape. The Coraline influence is mostly in the structure. This tunnel separates the world she knows from the supernatural one. There is another inversion later with the mirrored bedroom, but this is the main threshold. The birth metaphor is intentional. She is being pushed out of a reality defined by fear and into one where she has a real chance to fight back.
Liminal Space and Threshold Design
When I built this tunnel, I was thinking a lot about how liminal spaces are used in horror. They’re neither one place nor the next, and Mark Fisher talks about how the eerie comes from that sense of a location behaving “wrong.” That’s exactly what I wanted. This tunnel doesn’t follow any architectural logic. It’s just a transitional zone that forces Lina to crawl through something unfamiliar. It’s a space she has to physically fight, and that makes the transition into the supernatural side of the story feel earned rather than symbolic.
Biological and Supernatural Imagery
The birth canal metaphor didn’t come from trying to be clever. It just felt right when I started shaping it. Julia Kristeva’s writing on the abject was in the back of my mind here – that discomfort you get when something looks half-living, half-not. The wet red strokes, the smeared texture, the organic feel – it all taps into that idea of pushing the viewer into a space that’s physically unsettling before they even process what it means narratively.
Colour Symbolism and Emotional States
The red isn’t random either. There’s a lot of writing in cinematography about red being tied to danger, transition, and rebirth. For me, this tunnel is Lina’s first step away from being reactive. It’s the moment she starts taking control. So shifting from the cold blue rooms into a fully red, oppressive space makes that transition obvious. She’s literally moving into a different emotional state, and the colour carries that weight.
Movement, Direction, and Visual Language
I also reinforce the left-to-right movement here because I’ve been building that visual language since the beginning of the film. Rightward movement reads as progression in Western visual systems, and I wanted this moment to feel like she’s genuinely moving forward for the first time. Keeping it as a single uninterrupted crawl without cuts lets the direction do all the storytelling I need.
Bodily Performance and MoCap Interpretation
The way she stumbles came straight out of the motion capture, but it ended up being perfect for the scene. There’s a whole thing in animation about retaining the imperfections of a performance because the imperfections are what feel human. The stumble helps underline that she’s not confident yet. She’s still learning how to move in a world that finally gives her space to act.
Coraline and Threshold Influence
The Coraline influence is mostly structural. Their tunnel functions like an umbilical cord between realities, and I wanted something similar, just pushed into horror. Mine is fleshy, hostile, uncomfortable. But the idea is the same: once you pass through it, you’re not in the same world anymore. This tunnel is the main threshold of the film. All the rewrites and inversions later still come back to this moment.
Absence of the Demon as Strategic Silence
I made the demon completely absent in this shot on purpose. After the violent attack in the last scene, having him not appear at all builds a different type of tension. There’s a term for it called horror withholding – when you deliberately remove the monster to create unease. It also keeps his scale hidden. I didn’t want to clutter the scene with tendrils or jumpscares. The silence is scarier here.
Visual Flatness as Narrative Reset
Flattening the scene into a side-on, almost 2D strip was also intentional. It breaks the painterly spatial logic of the rest of the film. It feels like a red barrier between realities instead of another room. And because everything else in the story has depth and dimensionality, this sudden flatness feels like a hard reset. She’s leaving one reality and entering another, and the entire frame reflects that.