Right after the warm kitchen flashback, the film snaps back to a completely different visual reality. The kitchen isn’t gone, but it isn’t real either. Now it’s a painting. A literal canvas. And the canvas is torn straight through the middle.
This is the first time the audience gets hit with the idea that the past doesn’t just haunt the present. It bleeds into it. The kitchen from the flashback becomes an object inside the diegesis. It’s not a memory. It’s a relic that has been physically attacked.
The tear isn’t a clean cut. It’s shredded, ripped apart, the fibres pulling outwards. Raw strands of burlap spill out of the edges like nerves being exposed. This is your first visual hint that the Burlap Friends brand the mother worked for is not just a cute corporate toy line. Everything that looks innocent in this world has the potential to be a vessel.
Behind the hole is the sigil.
Viewers have already seen it once, hidden in a cartoon advertisement. Back then it was harmless background decoration. Now it’s sitting behind a destroyed canvas like it has been waiting there the whole time. The implication is simple and unsettling: this symbol doesn’t belong to the living world. It’s not an art piece. It’s not part of the branding. It’s the mark of whatever the father becomes. It’s the demon’s signature.
We don’t see the man in this shot. That absence makes the canvas feel even louder. Something broke out. Something intelligent enough to leave a mark, violent enough to tear through layers of paint and fabric, and patient enough to hide behind a picture of a happy family.
This is where the horror shifts from domestic to cosmic. The film stops being about a house going wrong and starts being about the boundary between two worlds tearing open.
Painted Worlds as Diegetic Objects
The decision to turn the warm kitchen flashback into a literal canvas tearing open came straight out of my research into diegetic artwork in horror. Films like The Ring, The Babadook, and even older works like The Picture of Dorian Gray use the idea that a picture is not just an image but a container. My research emphasised how artworks become physical gateways when the audience is forced to acknowledge them as objects inside the world, not just aesthetic set dressing. That is exactly what I am doing here. The kitchen flashback is not a memory floating in the ether. It is a real artifact that sits within the house, which makes the rupture feel like something has pierced the film’s internal logic, not just the picture itself.
Torn Canvases and Material Horror
The shredded canvas came directly from studying material based horror. Research into textile art, burlap sculpture, and the aesthetics of decay shows that frayed edges and exposed threads trigger a visceral response. It reads as damage but also as something organic. When the kitchen canvas tears and the fibres peel outward, it simultaneously evokes skin, wounds, and worn fabric. This let me merge the Burlap Friends branding with the demon’s biology. My research showed that horror becomes stronger when the material of an object feels vulnerable. That is why the tear is messy. Clean cuts feel controlled. Shredding feels violent.
Burlap as a Thematic Container
The emergence of burlap strands from the edges was influenced by research into symbolic materials. Burlap is cheap, fragile, and deeply associated with both childhood crafts and primitive ritual objects. That duality is central to this film. In my research I found that horror often takes familiar materials and recontextualises them to expose hidden danger. Making the mother’s workplace and the demonic biology share the same base material ties domestic life and cosmic influence together. It reinforces your point that nothing cute in this world is just cute. Everything is a vessel.
Recurring Symbols and Cognitive Priming
Placing the sigil behind the torn canvas pulls from research into symbolic repetition. Studies in visual cognition show that viewers remember symbols better when they first encounter them harmlessly. When the symbol returns in a threatening context, the brain recognises it immediately and assigns new meaning to it without needing explanation. That is the exact mechanic this shot uses. The audience first saw the sigil in a cartoon ad. Now they see it as the demon’s mark. Research into priming helped me understand why this repetition hits harder than introducing a new symbol here. The brain has already accepted it into the world. Now it has been corrupted.
Horror Through Negative Space
The absence of the father in this shot is not an accident. My research into negative space in horror emphasised that what you do not show is often more powerful than what you do. When a canvas is violently torn and nobody is standing there responsible, the imagination fills the void. Silence becomes a threat. This approach appears in films like Hereditary and The Witch, where empty frames carry more weight than full ones. This research informed how I framed the canvas here. The hole becomes the father’s presence precisely because he is not in the shot.
Domestic to Cosmic Transition
The transition you described, from a kitchen flashback to a torn portal into something otherworldly, aligns with my research into boundary horror. This genre explores how thin the line is between the familiar and the incomprehensible. The kitchen was warm, nostalgic, and safe. Turning that same kitchen into a ruptured canvas with a sigil behind it is a direct application of that research. It shifts the story from domestic violence and family trauma into something cosmic that overtakes human scale. The kitchen becomes the battleground of two worlds, and the tear is the literal wound between them.