Die Familie Schneider

In many horror films the truly unsettling sequences come near the beginning. Before the axe murderers start chopping, the cannibal zombies start munching and the malevolent forces of cheap special effects are unleashed on the world, the unknown, unexpected and unpredictable form the advance party of fear.

As the latch on the door to the small terraced house in London’s Whitechapel district quietly clicked shut, silencing the noisy street outside and leaving me alone in the gloomy light of Gregor Schneider’s recent Artangel commission, a queasy sense of trepidation set in. Padding down the worn carpet hallway, I could hear the sound of dishes being washed in an adjacent room. Faced with the choice of entering and proceeding either up the stairs or, worse, down into the even murkier basement, I paused by the door, took a deep breath and entered.

It’s disappointing to be reminded of one’s own cowardice. As the illusion of rationality grows stronger with age, so too does the sense that one would be able to cope heroically in a dangerous situation, suppressing fear and getting on with dealing with the matter in hand. And then all it takes is 30 seconds inside a public art commission and to be ambushed by primitive fears of monsters under the bed. Behind the door was a middle-aged woman washing dishes in a kitchen that led through beaded curtains into a dingy, stale living-room. With no response to my ‘hello’, it became clear that in Schneider’s dysfunctional household the visitor was invisible – at liberty to rummage through cupboards, drawers and shelves.

The interior could have been from any period in the last 30 years. Grimy flock wallpaper choked the rooms. Shabby thick brown carpet smothered floors. Every detail, down to the last cheap brass drawer handle, was pure British kitchen-sink misery. Upstairs, in the clammy, humid bathroom, a man masturbated in the shower, oblivious to visitors despite his furtiveness. In the bedroom a small figure sat calmly under a bin liner. As these tableaux became more outwardly sinister, so they also seemed more overt, and perhaps clumsy, in their reference points – cheap TV documentaries on serial killers, the morbid fascinations of tabloid sensationalists – a feeling reinforced by the sight of a small mattress in the putrid-smelling basement suggesting some unspeakable abuse.

Leaving the grim, tobacco-stained oppressiveness of the house, I was given keys to the dwelling next-door. Inside was what could have been titled Die Familie Doppelgänger. Here, once again, was the woman washing up – the plastic carrier bags full of identical items, books stacked in exactly the same way. The man continued to get steamy in the bathroom. The prone bin liner remained prone. Everything – fittings, possessions, ‘residents’ – was twinned. As soon as this conceit revealed itself, any nervousness was dissipated. Die Familie Schneider foregrounded its entertainment mechanism much like Wes Craven’s self-referential horror flick Scream (1996). It was a spine-chiller, but beyond the fun park thrills it described nothing more than today’s popular notions of dark, familial dysfunctionality. Familiarity, like daylight, purges the mysteries of the dark.