Does Water Have to Look Like Water?

The Killscreen Podcast · Aug 21, 2026 · 1h 1m

I open with a 2015 Kill Screen essay about a police station built wrong on purpose, and end up asking Danny Snelson, a writer and professor of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, a question that runs through the whole hour: what does a work become when you move it into the wrong container?

Ed Smith's piece on Resident Evil 2 called horror architecture "anatomically correct but tonally wrong." Danny maps that onto Freud, onto the impossible geometry of the Overlook Hotel, and onto Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film, where a typewriter on a desk is asked to carry 30 years of player fluency…