The Film Experience

"The Furniture" is our series on Production Design. Click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

“A clean house is evidence of mental inferiority,” snaps Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) from her bed, annoyed by her husband for so many reasons. One of them is Rose (Odessa Young), the young bride that has just arrived to keep an eye on both the housekeeping and Shirley. And with both husbands at campus most of the day, the two women will be spending a lot of time together in this beigely bewildering, story-haunted house.

After all, any house can be a haunted house. And while director Josephine Decker doesn’t send in any actual ghosts, Shirley is as spooky as much of Jackson’s own fiction...

To briefly summarize the plot, Shirley is hard at work on "Hangsaman," her second novel. It’s based on the disappearance of a young girl from Bennington College, where her husband teaches. Yet as she throws herself into writing and research, the lost girl and Rose begin to blur. Rose, for her part, is struggling to keep up. As Shirley projects this story onto her, we essentially watch on her face the experience of reading a Shirley Jackson novel – fear, confusion, and the eventual revelation that this quiet world is perhaps more wicked than one thought.

Yet, unlike the author’s more famous novels, Shirley doesn’t have an ominous mansion to work with. There’s just her house. This, therefore, is where production designer Sue Chan, art director Kirby Feagan and set decorator Alexander Linde come in.

How does one create a complex, psychologically unmooring atmosphere amid homey New England furnishings?

The short answer, it turns out, is “dim the lights and make everything beige.” To be sure, there is definitely an abundance of stuff to look at, from framed paintings and photographs to little figurines and stacks of books. But very rarely is our eye drawn in any particular direction by the décor. The house is as cluttered as a novelist’s mind between moments of revelation, a pile of half-remembered images and forgotten quotations that wait to be dusted off.

Its status as a haunted house, meanwhile, is hinted early on. In a direct reference to Jackson’s work, Decker mimics the tapping on the wall from a famous scene in The Haunting of Hill House. She pans across walls, from cracked paint to wallpaper, searching for the source of disembodied moaning and creaking. It settles on Shirley herself, but the message comes across: the house is alive.

We’re rarely given a good look at an entire room at once, leaving us without a truly solid sense of place - much like the experience of reading a Jackson novel. Corners remain in shadow, the camera roves behind people and around corners, and things are constantly falling out of focus. More often than not the wallpaper is the most charismatic detail, its muted colors and nondescript floral patterns dimly lit by an array of downward facing lamps.

Rose’s previous sense of self is slowly dissolved by this warm, dismal swamp of a house. She’s soon standing in the kitchen, dispassionately rolling eggs onto the grimly-patterned linoleum floor like one of Shirley’s housecats.

It’s as if the house is digesting her, or at least the “chipper professor’s wife” version of her that once stepped into the house. And that’s not too far from what Shirley is doing, slowly dipping Rose into her rapidly congealing novel. It’s like a much longer version of “get the guests,” one which won’t redeem either of the husbands but which will radically alter Rose’s understanding of things. “I’m not going back to that,” she says when she finally drives off, “Little wifey…little Rosie… That was madness.” And Shirley watches from a window above, nearly hidden by the vines that so tightly strangle the house.