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COOU Journal of Arts and Humanities (CJAH) Vol. 5 No. 3, 2020

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Abstract
“It's 6 rooms, each is supposed to be scarier than the last but it's psychological- gets in your 
head. Everybody who goes in describes it totally different. Most people don't even make it to 
the sixth room, and the people who do are never seen again” ("This Isn't Real" 12:17-12:34). 
Such are the first urban-legend like pieces of information given by one character on the No-
End house, the second season title and the cornerstone around which the plot of the TV series 
Channel Zero revolves. Aired on the SyFy channel in 2017, the series lived true to its ambition 
of spiralling around the topics of imagination and the supernatural. Appearing and 
disappearing in diverse locations around the world, the house gives birth to an alternate 
reality where the border between rationality and irrationality is shattered. It occupies an 
omnipresent position as an object of fascination, as the centre of the gaze. In Lacan's wake, the 
gaze is the point at which the object looks back. The outcome is an interpretation that shatters 
the observing subject's sense of control. The desire to see what is being shown and what is not 
ubiquitous. The notion of desire will be developed; at the core of the house lays a fundamental 
lack that cannot be filled in. The house is a reflection of the fissures that crack open our lives 
when the Real disrupts them; holding a relatable force for everyone. 

Key Words: TV Series, House, Desire, Psychoanalytic Approach, Psychological

Introduction
“It's 6 rooms, each is supposed to be scarier than the last but it's psychological- gets in your 
head. Everybody who goes in describes it totally different. Most people don't even make it to 
the sixth room, and the people who do are never seen again” ("This Isn't Real" 12:17-12:34). 
Such are the first urban-legend like pieces of information submitted by the character JT to 
three other major characters, Margot, Jules and Seth, and to the audience on the No-End house, 
the second season title and the cornerstone around which the plot of the TV series Channel 
Zero revolves. The second season which aired on the SyFy channel in 2017 lived true to its 
ambition of spiralling around the topics of imagination, the supernatural and horror. The 
producer, Nick Antosca, made of the unfathomable the leitmotif of the four seasons 
composing Channel Zero by giving life to storylines based on popular creepy pastas, horror 
short stories published on the net. The first season focused on a children's television program 
connected to a series of murders. Season 3 intermingled mental illness and cannibalism while 
season 4 exposed newlyweds' secrets following the discovery of a door in their basement. The 
second season, which is under scrutiny here, narrates the adventures of the protagonist Margot 
and her best friend, Jules.

Margot is introduced to the viewers as a character trapped in an uncompleted work of 
mourning and clinging to the memories of her dead father. Jules suffocates under her guilt 
feeling mainly originating from the distance that settled between her sister, mother and herself. 
Under the incentive of a common friend, JT, and along with Seth, a young man met at a bar and 

JESSICA FOLIO (PhD)
Université de la Réunion
15 avenue René Cassin

97744 Saint-Denis Cedex9
France

Phone number:  00262 692 354931

A PSYCHOANALYTICAL APPROACH TO THE TV 
SERIES THE NO-END HOUSE: 

THE FASCINATING HOUSE OF DESIRE



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with whom Margot quickly establishes a connection, the four of them decide to get a closer 
look at the No-End house. It is presented as an auxiliary of the irresistible appeal for the 
unknown, for the exploration of boundaries but also deception. Appearing and disappearing in 
diverse locations all over the world, the house occupies an omnipresent position as an object of 
fascination, as the centre of the gaze, both observing the characters and being observed. It 
gives birth to an alternate world which mimics Margot's reality; her father is for instance 
brought back to life, thus annihilating the border between life and death, between rationality 
and irrationality. 

This article aims at accounting for the fascination effect The House exerts on the 
characters and on the viewers by referring to the French psychoanalytical theorist Jacques 
Lacan's approach on desire. The path of interpretation will first lead to the hypnotic rhythm 
engendered by a process of repetition: a repetition of places, persons, objects or events. 
However, in the No-End House, what is repeated is similar but not totally identical to the 
primary element, making it hard for the characters and the audience to cling to reality. 

This hypnotic rhythm is linked to the "Medusa effect" defined as the "simultaneous 
reactions of intense attraction and repulsion" and that captures the gaze.The Medusa effect 
both elicits the petrifying power of the gaze and the mingling of attraction and repulsion. The 
combination of attraction and repulsion is reminiscent of the components of the sublime, fairly 
reminded by Bjorn K. Myskja in The Sublime in Kant and Beckett."To fascinate is to 
immobilize by the power of the gaze", hence the emphasis laid in the second part of this article 
on the action of seeing and being seen(Encyclopedia of Lacanian Psychoanalysis). For Lacan, 
the gaze was primarily related to the mirror stage when after viewing himself in the mirror the 
subject establishes a stable version of the self. In his later essays, the gaze refers not to the look 
of the subject at the object but to the point at which the object looks back. The outcome is an 
interpretation that escapes the observing subject, shattering his/her sense of control. This is 
reinforced by the theme of the inverted mirror stage and even a regressus ad uterum in a house 
assimilated to a womb.

The desire to see what is being shown and what is not ubiquitous. The notion of desire 
will be developed for at the core of the house lays a fundamental lack that cannot be filled in. 
The house is a reflection of the fissures that crack open our lives when the Real disrupts them; 
the catch phrase 'this isn't real" used in the series holds a relatable force to each and every one of 
us. 

The spell of repetition
The title of the series prefigures the pattern of repetition pursuing the characters and the 
viewers. What returns is what is repeated and what is added have to be considered for what 
matters, is the different factor between the original element and the repeated one. Lacan states 
that repetition inevitably leads to a gap, a loss of meaning. After seemingly stepping out of the 
No End house, Margot returns to a perfect replica of her home but the signs of otherness lead 
Margot and Jules to understand that they are actually imprisoned in the sixth room of the 
house; the neighbourhood where they live has been identically reproduced. The apparent 
sameness of their neighbourhood is disturbed by the addition of a unique flower, the orchid, 
replacing the marigolds normally present in Margot's garden. Inside her house, Margot is 
greeted by her dead father. The house is an auxiliary of the loss of meaning by introducing the 
Real -what cannot be grasped by the logos- into the Symbolic order of language. For Lacan, the 
psyche is structured through a triad: the Real is a state where only need exists. It cannot be 
expressed in language. The Imaginary order corresponds to the mirror stage while the 
Symbolic order marks the acceptance of the Name-of-the-Father, that is, the rules of society 



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controlling desire and communication. The resuscitated father is a figure of the impossible 
whose existence is prohibited in a law-organized society. The streets and houses are 
reproduced but additions are made: a new road appears out of nowhere with signs in French 
when the house shows itself in Quebec in the sixth episode. It seems to digest elements in the 
characters' everyday reality while defying the rational possibility of having a street and houses 
built overnight. In Margot's fridge, egg cartons are reproduced from one second to the next. 

The first room in the house is an exhibition room where eight busts are displayed; they 
are clay replicas of the group-Margot, Jules, JT and Seth have joined when entering the house. 
The agreeable aesthetic experience of seeing their flawless busts, is shattered after the lights 
come out to reveal the clay busts, pulled apart in two, with the head opened by two hands 
defying gravity and a third hand splitting open the chests; it is proleptic of the shattering of the 
characters' identity and loss of meaning. The experience in room 1 is repeated in episode 4 
when Margot and Jules re-enter the house in order to step back into reality. The different factor 
then lies in the display of the busts. Another dark colored face is seen emerging from the top of 
each head, highlighting the quasi annihilation of their identity devoured by the house. Room 2 
is an empty blue room which exposes a man wearing a suit, a black mask and black gloves. The 
camera accompanies the hypnotic circular walk of the mysterious man around the characters 
and more intensely close to Margot. He vanishes after the lights are turned off and on again and 
a trace of blood is visible on the floor. The setting remains unchanged the second time; the 
masked man is no longer there but Jules has to jump over spreading pools of blood before they 
close on them, emphasizing the widening role played by the house in the taking over of the 
characters' identity. 

In room 3, Margot is placed in the corridor of a hotel. The process of repetition begins 
with the wallpaper motif on the walls and the identical lamps set on each side of them. A mirror 
stands at the end of the corridor; a hand popping out holding the mirror frame and two feet can 
be seen. A mad sound mingling crying and laughing is heard. The viewer's discover at the same 
time Margot does when she walks past the mirror a man with gaunt eyes and a crazy smile. The 
presence of the mad man confirms the immersion into the irrational. He is the only element 
repeated on Margot's second passage in the room; the experience is then displaced to an old 
school of hers. Writing endlessly the imperative sentence "don't go" in chalk on a board, the 
mad man then dressed up as a female teacher conforms to the motif of repetition haunting the 
series. 

An attic, empty except for a video projected on a screen, is the locus of the fourth room. 
The video repeats Margot's discovery of her father's dead body. The father figure is reproduced 
on Margot's second passage in the room with only his face on a stand, eyes closed, with the 
sound of breathing.  The discrepancy factor which provokes the intrusion of the Real is that the 
face seems to be "an autonomous partial object, an organ which can magically survive without 
the body whose organ it is" (Zizek xi). In room 5, the confrontation with the Real takes the 
form of the reunion with the fatherly figure whose facial features are a vague echo of the true 
one. The video played on TV is the same watched by Margot in episode 1. Sequences and 
sentences from this video are themselves repeated. The intertwined repetitions are visible 
when Margot enters the room a second time. The same scene unfolds with the difference being 
the deformed faced father playing with water in a bathtub echoing Jules's scene in a tub in 
episode 2.

The repetition compulsion conjures up uncanny elements that "shatter the coordinates 
of our common reality" (Zizek xv). Margot's father dies three times in the alternate reality. The 
difference factor is the way he dies; Margot's presence is the common denominator in all three 



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cases. The repetition process and the discrepancy factor concur to the oppressive feeling of 
anxiety conveyed through the over proximity of the Real. The cars look like cars but have no 
engines. The orchids are actually orchid mantis, luring insects to feed on them. The swimming 
pool at Margot's house is bottomless. The 24 hours of a day are shortened: "how did they do it 
so fast?" (22:50) Jules asks in episode 1 after their busts are created within seconds. "How is it 
night already?" (The Reflection 12:07) she asks again in episode 4 when they are looking for a 
way out. 

The entrancing repeated rhythm of the music tune accompanies the conjuring up of the 
unfathomable. Reminiscent of a hammer falling down mingled with a shrilling tune; it 
enlightens the characters' engulfment in the loss of meaning as well as the addition of the 
discrepancy factor.  It is first heard in episode 1 when the camera zooms in and out on the house 
after the characters step inside it or in episode 2 after Margot sees a mask-like version of her 
mother's face in the kitchen bin. The house mirrors Ackbar Abbas's concept of "the deceptions 
of fascination." It refers to "any experience that captures our attention without at the same time 
submitting entirely to our understanding" (Abbas 348). The repetition of the discrepancy 
factor "makes what is ungraspable inescapable" (Blanchot 25). The house is incessantly gazed 
at by the characters and the viewers while being, at the same time, a beholder of "the gaze of the 
incessant and interminable" (Blanchot 25). This is Blanchot's very definition of the term 
fascination; it reveals the motif of the gaze as a key element in understanding the power of the 
No-End house.

The petrifying lureof the house
The term "lure" connects the theme of deception with the ideas developed in part 1 but also 
with the hypnotising vampirish power of the house which petrifies its victims, hence the 
advanced idea of the Medusa effect. The expression is borrowed here to indicate the Medusa 
effect of the house and its creatures, the theme of deception and it hints at the mingling of 
attraction and repulsion at the heart of fascination. These elements are mingled with the motif 
of the gaze, not only in the sense of the act of seeing and being seen or who is holding the eye of 
authority but more decisively in Lacan's wake. For the latter, the gaze is "a point of failure in 
the visual field, where, because the subject cannot see or be seen properly, s/he is 
discommoded, made anxious" (Krips 95). It is also linked with indeterminacy, elusiveness: 
"the source of the gaze is a 'stain', a point where what 'we try to apprehend... seems to elude us.'" 
This stain is precisely indeterminate, "totally lacking a precise identity" (Krips 97); it can 
evoke any interpretation and this provokes anxiety. At first, the house appears as the object of 
the act of observation but when it vanishes, it leaves an emptiness in the visual field, also 
making the characters inside it vanish from the common reality. The house is the central point 
of observation, suffocating by its overwhelming presence. The act of observation is 
omnipresent and a repetitive pattern lies at its core. The characters react the same way when 
they discover their clay busts in the first room. They use the sense of sight and touch: the 
upward and downward movement of the eyes that follow the harmonious lines of the replicas, 
the slight parting of their lips, the slow circular movement of the body around the busts to 
thoroughly realise them, the halting position to focus on the details and the light touch with 
their fingers. All the gestures reveal an attempt at grasping the unconceivable (the creation of 
perfect replicas of their faces in a matter of seconds) but the prolonged act of observation is 
also a marker of seduction by the uncanny. 

The observation of the ungraspable follows the same pattern: the camera lingers on the 
characters' faces, shows their reaction before widening the scope and revealing to the viewers 
what they are transfixed with. The first episode analeptically shows Margot's discovery of her 
father's body. Through a close shot on her face, her unblinking eyes and immobility, the camera 



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reveals her disbelief and a need to understand before disclosing the object of Margot's gaze. 
The father's face is deformed, not precisely a Lacanian "stain" but certainly a point of 
indeterminacy as it lacks a precise identity. The moment of confrontation with the Real is 
invariably connected to the sense of sight and the slow change to immobility that expresses "an 
experience of trauma, dislocation and fascination all at once" (Abbas 349). It is the trauma of 
having "seen too much," of entering "a forbidden territory of what should have remained 
unseen" (Zizek xv). It is the dislocation ensuing from the sensation of being "outside human 
coordinates, outside our human reality" (Zizek x).

Trauma and dislocation rime with fascination because the very force of the 
discrepancy factor is mesmerising. When, in episode 2, JT sees his double in his duplicated 
house, his body reacts the same way Margot's does: the camera focuses on his face (unblinking 
eyes) and quasi immobility. It is for JT impossible not to look at his double kissing a girl. The 
hypnotic force of the house has the characters accept the improbable by transforming them 
into passive observers. The house is an omnipotent living entity vampirishly feeding from the 
characters' identity and memories. Vampires' mesmerising and luring force endures because of 
their "ability to reshape [themselves] continuously according to the time period's values or 
morals" (Buckley 1). The No-End house is both a dead organism (dormant when it is full and 
does not open the front door to visitors) and a living entity creating different experiences 
according to each character's memories. It feeds from memories and gives birth to other 
vampiric creatures referred to as "cannibals".

The question of the authority of the gaze is central: "to the vampire's victim, the 
vampire seems all-powerful, compelling, hypnotic" (Punter 104). This is the effect the house 
exerts on the persons who live in it: they lose their individuality. The house is not a stain per se 
but it eludes interpretation for it is the vehicle of negation. It keeps changing location and in 
those moments becomes a point of failure in the visual field. Likewise, the masked man in 
room 2 is a point of failure. Object of the characters' and the viewers' gaze, he gazes at the 
characters at the same time. Their quasi immobility illustrates Medusa's petrifying gaze: 
"there is a fear of physical petrification when faced with horrific circumstances, a deep-rooted 
and uneasy concern the body might not flee as it is supposed to when being attacked" (Kaplan 
77). The characters are not attacked but the man's physical closeness creates anxiety. The 
absence of a face makes him a point of failure even if he appears as the eye of authority in the 
scene. He is an auxiliary of the scopic drive of the house. 

The Medusa effect the house engenders transfixes both the characters and the viewers 
thanks to the zoom-in / zoom-out movement of the camera. The camera is the eye of the house 
showing the viewers what takes place inside. The play on closeness and distance equals a 
vampire and prey game. This close-up and zoom-out alternation contributes to "the tension 
between representation and elusiveness" (Baumbach 8) that accounts for the fascination 
effect. As the eye of authority, the house controls the balance between monstration and 
absence, hence the theme of deception. The cars have no engines, the orchids are cannibal 
flowers, the swimming pool is an entrance into a bottomless world, Margot's wardrobe opens 
on the swimming pool, but the window of her bedroom does not open. Once in the house, the 
characters' status changes from "I see" to "I am seen by". 

The mesmerising force of the house leads the characters to cohabit with the 
impossible: Seth is a permanent resident in the house, luring people into entering and staying 
inside, bringing new girls in as a food source, then having them lived confined in different 
houses surrounding a cage. Five people are kept prisoners in it, the family the house created for 
him and that he accepted as such. This normalised situation parallels Margot casually having 



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breakfast with her fake father and JT telling his double he could give him advice on girls. The 
house fragments the characters' mastery of perception of the surrounding world, of rationality 
and of their own identity, slowly filling them with the same void the house is actually made of. 
It is linked to the observation of the self.

The series highlights the path from identity deconstruction to reconstruction. In room 3 
(episode 1), a mirror stands in the middle of a corridor; a single hand is seen on one side of its 
frame and two feet. Margot's eyes are fixated on the mirror, on the hand and feet. The vision of 
these body parts conjoined with her vision of her father's face exposed on a stand (room 4) or 
her mother's face in a bin show the emphasis laid upon the body fragmentation. Margot's 
alternate reality is a place of regression to childhood. In the No-End house, Lacan's mirror 
stage seems reversed. It is the process of identification for a child between his body and his 
image in a mirror. For Margot, room 6 is the place of the disunification of the self: "it's like he 
took the memory in and ate it" (Beware The Cannibals 24:35-24:37). The self is fragmented 
because the characters are subtracted from the power of the eye/I, from the Symbolic triggered 
by the confrontation with the Real. The fragmented self is connected to the multiplicity of 
viewpoints on the same element: each visitor sees different things in rooms 3, 4 and 5. In room 
5, JT sees the mysterious masked man met in room 2 who takes his mask off only to reveal a 
second mask that looks identical to him. Proleptic of JT's meeting with his double, the 
mysterious man plays the role of a mirror but the projected reflection is a fake persona created 
by the house. JT sees a deceiving version of himself which only confronts him with the Real.
For Jules, the process of regression goes even deeper as what she experiences can be 
assimilated to a regressus ad uterum. In room 3, she comes into contact with a membranous 
white ball -which seems to play the role of a mirror- and whose hypnotizing force entices her to 
touch it in order to eat away the memories of her as a toddler with her mother and sister. The 
beginning of episode 2 films her immerged in a bathtub. With the water as a reminder of the 
amniotic fluid combined with the sound of a heartbeat, she seems to be regressing to the state of 
a foetus. This connection to fluids or womb-like elements reaches a climax when she finds 
herself imprisoned within the ball in episode 6. The ball appears to function as an organ per se. 
Endowed with the Medusa effect, it attracts Jules, calling on her: "come here... come closer" 
(The Hollow Girl 16:13-16:21). This voice coming out of the ball stands for Zizek's partial 
object. The ball stands for the point of failure in her visual field. It is an indeterminate, leaving 
stains on her memories. The more she touches the ball, the more blurred her vision becomes 
and the more she even fails to see herself in those memories. Instability was already present in 
Margot's, Jules's and JT's lives before entering the house but, as a magnifying glass, it pushes 
the disruption further. The house offers the possibility of fulfilling the desire of filling in the 
absence that permeates their lives. 

The fascinating house of desire
At the heart of the distinction between desire and want is the satisfaction of a lack which is not 
possible in desire. For Lacan, man lives "according to a permanently unsatisfied desire, a 
desire that is for this reason inevitably a little painful and awkward, and which continually 
reminds him of the fundamental lack that lies at the heart of his being" (Kesel 3). Margot 
expresses to Jules why she won't leave the house: "I can't just walk away right now. You know 
how long I've wanted a second chance with him" (Nice Neighbourhood 18:28-18:33). The 
house reunites her with her father to free her from her guilt feeling and help her understand the 
reason for his suicide. The fake father confirms this fact when he says to Margot: "I was put 



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here because I think that's what you wanted." (Beware The Cannibals 06:17). When Jules 
touches the ball, she can feel the closeness she lost with her mother and sister; the ball satisfies 
her immediate lack. JT wants a perfect appearance, that is what the house gives him with his 
bust in room 1 and his double, "the version of you that you want to be; the alpha version" (Nice 
Neighborhood 27:48- 27:54 ).

What the house wants is made clear before the characters enter it the first time. The 
plate nailed at the entrance reads: "Unknown artist The No-End House Date unknown Wood, 
nails, copper, caulk, you". The house is a kernel of absence which cannot exist without the 
persons it feeds on. It is a vagina dentata, sharing characteristics with a castrative mother 
figure. It reproduces persons, animals, objects remembered by Margot although they only 
exist to be torn apart by the father creature to devour the pomegranate-like substance they are 
made of.

Margot's desire is underlyingly linked to an absence: "I just wanted to see what you 
saw and feel what you felt, just anything that would make me feel closer to you again" (Beware 
The Cannibals 10:30-10:38). Her desire is to fill in the absence the non-recognition of his face 
left in her memory, to fill in the lack of understanding left by the confrontation with the Real, 
symbolised by the blank left in language itself. Her sentence remains unfinished: "I found you, 
you didn't look like you, your face..." (Beware The Cannibals 9:26-9:32). She can only leave 
the blank that haunts her unanswered; she has to accept the attempt at filling in the absence 
only impregnates her with a bigger absence, that is the blank left by the fading of her dearest 
memories. 

Likewise, the father creature has to figure out that he is simply an auxiliary of the 
scopic drive of the house. The scopic drive is "a site for the circulation of both voyeuristic and 
exhibitionistic impetuses that, working together, create pleasure" (Krips 98). The fake father 
leaves a mark of his cannibalistic act to be seen: what is left of the eaten mother is a face found 
in the kitchen bin by Margot. The camera lingers on the act of devouring intermingling 
moaning, tearing apart of the limbs, avidity and visible pleasure. The viewers are the observers 
of this deviant act. Only when he admits he is a figure of lack, only made from Margot's 
memories can he die free from any guilt and not be brought back by the house. He slowly 
becomes aware of his true nature: "there is a gap in my memory and I realize I'm not supposed 
to be here" (Nice Neighborhood 14:51-14:58). The ultimate sign of love is to remain an 
absence; accepting the impossibility of his existence, he reaches a self-awakening and is 
eventually called by his name "John". 

The white ball wants to be gazed at and touched by Jules to eat away her memories. The 
more she touches it, the longer her trance lasts, the more attraction and torment are visible on 
her face. The surrender in episode 3 of her body leaning forward and backward before she 
faints and falls on the floor can be assimilated to a jouissance, which is close to pain for Lacan. 
The womb-like ball completely engulfs Jules in episode 6. She goes through the initiation 
stages depicted by Mircea Eliade: the isolation from family members, the trials before facing 
the ultimate monster and the symbolic death and rebirth when she uses a knife to cut her way 
out. She emerges from the ball soaked in blood. Her symbolic rebirth is possible when she 
understands that her desire to comprehend the absence left by the distanciation with her family 
has to remain a blank. 

Seth lives a fulfilled life in the house because it stands for what he desires: to be an 
absence himself. " I keep waiting for one of you to understand how magnificent this place is, 
all the gifts that it can give you because memory is a disease and that this house is the cure" 



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(The Hollow Girl 33:00-33:38). Seth is offered an absence of memories whereas JT's double is 
avid for memories; he wants to step into the Symbolic: "I just wanna get out of here. I'm real. I 
feel everything" (The Reflection 23:23-23:33).

The house is a vehicle of the non. "This house looks like our house but it's not. This 
street looks like ours but it's not in our neighborhood. It's not in our reality. You don't belong 
here" (Nice Neighborhood 23:08-23:17). "This is not your home and that is not your dad [...] 
It's him but it's not him" (Nice Neighborhood 18:22-18:25). The eggs Margot's fake father 
cooks "taste like nothing" (Nice Neighborhood 09:35). It is "an organism, it has instincts, it has 
an appetite, it has a will to survive" (The Hollow Girl 12:09-12:20). It is an endless void, an 
excess of indeterminacy which explains "the very blindness at the heart of vision" (Harris 3). 
This blindness echoes the stain as the source of the gaze. "The emptiness Lacan has in mind [...] 
is and remains empty once and for all. For him, desire never ceases desiring" (Kesel 36). The 
house's object of desire is not so much having a perennial presence in the Symbolic as feeding 
from the characters to fill in the absence that lies at its core. The blank it is made of cannot be 
filled in, hence the endless displacement on a multiplicity of victims. 

The exit sign appears when the symbolic castration is performed: Margot stabs the fake 
father with Jules's help, cutting the bond with this transitional object to her desire of knowledge 
of the mysteries of death. Jules tears apart the transitional object to her desire of piercing the 
reasons for familial separateness. Only then can Margot and Jules glance behind them and see 
what had been there all along: an emptiness they had to accept and are now ready to live with 
after the correct distance has been installed between them and the object of desire.

Conclusion
This article considered the interconnectedness between the repetition pattern, the power of the 
gaze, the themes of deception, fragmentation, deconstruction and reconstruction to try and 
comprehend the fascination effect The No-End House triggers. The discrepancy factor 
between the original element and the repeated one is the intrusion of the Real, leading the 
characters to be hypnotized by what the house gives them to see. At the image of Medusa, it 
horrifies but equally captivates its victims; it petrifies them, physically immobilizing them and 
capturing their minds. The house gazes back at the characters and the viewers and questions the 
reason for their fascination. A shatterer of bodies, a fragmenter of the self and of the sense of 
sight itself, the house constitutes an excess of emptiness; its existence is only possible thanks to 
its victims' memories and desires. For the characters, it is about the desire to fill in the absence 
triggered by an idealized past, and more importantly a desire to obsessively understand the gap 
left by the confrontation with the Real. The house exists through its desire to fill in the non (non 
place, non time, non experience of memories) that lays at its core. The experiences in the No-
end house are meaningful to each of us. Memories can have a vampiric force; we might want, 
just like Seth, to find a cure. The house is, for the viewers, a projection of their own desire. Who 
would say no to the possibility of filling in the absence left by the loss of a loved one? The 
house is also a projection of our own moments of insanity when facing trauma, mental stability 
vacillates and we want to convince ourselves that "this isn't real". It is a projection of all the 
times we are on the edge of the Symbolic. The house will continue to exist, allure and repulse, 
remaining simply "hungrier and hungrier" (The Hollow Girl 10:38).



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REFERENCES

Abbas, A. (1999). Dialectic of deception. Public Culture,11(2), 29-45.
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