Abstract

This article builds a new relationship between film and architecture. It studies the architectural phenomenology of fear in creating an event and proposes a framework to understand the event of fear spatially and emotionally. In order to do this, the article uses a scene from the last sequence from the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs and analyses the event’s components: namely the subject and the atmosphere being encountered. Drawing upon Hanich’s categorization of the cinematic emotion in horrors and thrillers and Mølbak’s definition of the event, the article analyses the atmosphere, how to engineer it, and how to energise it. It studies the subject’s perception and embodiment in encountering the space to turn it into a place. It also explores the phenomenal zones and the “thing” that manifests the space and increases the feeling of fear.