Wendy is center screen. To the left a MATTRESS is slumped over the railing. The walls are blue - this movie codes themes chromatically, so much so that few scenes fail to be inflected along the lines of a semiotics of color. The most prevalent color opposition is between red and blue. Blue is the color of civility, platitude, and polite behavior. It is associated with the empty chatter of tv, scenes of decorous family life, stereotypical repetition, and Jack's wife, Wendy, who is represented as something of a space cadet. Red is the color of horror and violence, everything from the blood that flows from elevators to the bright red walls of the bathroom in which jack receives instructions to kill his family.

The movie uses filters to make certain color tones dominant in certain scenes, and the device is especially noticeaeable in contrasting scenes, as when there is a cut from a dominant blue family/tv scene to a dominant red scene in which jack enters the occult world. In the end, when Jack breaks down the bedroom door with an axe, the alternation is between a blue exterior and the red interior, as if the external world of civility were being set off from an inner world of primitive blood violence. When jack is in between the two worlds, still behaving civilly, not yet mad, he wears both red and blue; when his son, Danny, begins to enter the occult world, he is shot against a red carpet and he starts to wear a bright red sweater; and when wendy finally passes over into the occult world, she too shifts from predominant blues to red. moreover, intense yellow to gold coloring in the fantasy bar connotes a world of leisure and wealth, a world from which jack in excluded in reality. The same color is associated with his work, the medium of his attempted rise on the class ladder.