Home is where the horror is. Some of the most iconic horror settings are homes, whether single-family houses in movies like Halloween and Poltergeist, sprawling estates like Manderley in Rebecca or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak, or inhabited hotels like the Bates Motel or the Overlook. The residence of interest in Marjane Satrapi’s 2014 film The Voices is a single converted apartment in an abandoned bowling alley, where Jerry (Ryan Reynolds) lives with his dog, Bosco, and his cat, Mr. Whiskers. It’s also where he butchers and stores the women whom his pets have told him to kill. However, it isn’t the murder or dismemberment that we’re made to find horrific; it’s the mess.
Jerry has an unnamed mental illness. He hears his pets talk to him, like an angel on his shoulder that needs to go on walks and a devil on his other shoulder that needs its litter changed. For most of The Voices, we see Jerry’s apartment as he sees it – a tidy one-bedroom apartment that’s an unremarkable background for his life. But in a few specific scenes, we see that this is in fact a delusion or a fantasy. The apartment is actually cluttered and filthy. Through the editing, acting, mis-en-scène, and the contrast of fantastic and realistic, the unseemly state of Jerry’s apartment is made horrific, more than the blood and body parts.
