The Chair Short Horror Film Explained- A Haunting Allegory For Alzheimer’s

The Chair, a short horror film by Curry Barker, is just under 23 minutes. It flies by. The film is so disorienting and riveting you half wonder if the Chair has also infected you. When Reese(Anthony Pavone) finds an antique chair on the side of the road in front of what appears to be a well-kept suburban house, he picks it up and brings it home. It’s his six-month anniversary, and everything is going well for him. All of that changes when he brings that chair home, though.

It’s a normal-looking wood dining chair. It has green upholstery that isn’t stained or torn, and the wood is in good shape. There is nothing distinct about the Chair. Nothing at all. His girlfriend doesn’t like it and thinks it is weird, but her response isn’t disproportionate to the situation. She doesn’t freak out or overreact. She thinks Reese should get rid of it. He thinks it’s “homey,” and she thinks it’s creepy. Right away, she feels something negative emanating from it. He sits down in it and tells her he will return it and finds himself back in front of the house he first took the Chair sitting down. Reese has no idea how he got there or when it is.

He leaves the Chair behind, forgetting to close his hatch, and returns home only to find his girlfriend now has the Chair and says she found it on the side of the road. She now says it is “homey,” and she changed her mind. It seems for a week; he talked constantly about the Chair. He has no memory of that, though. If fact, he can’t remember the entire last week at all. In the past seven days, he has lost his job, friends, and memories. He blames the Chair. She thinks he is deflecting. She says he has become aggressive and racist and has gotten fired from his job. He says he feels a negative energy from the Chair. It makes him agitated and mean. They argue, and the Chair stays.

The Chair has been moved into the bedroom, and when Reese wakes up in the middle of the night, he turns it towards the wall only to have it turn back around, and an older smiling man appears sitting in it. This is disturbing to both of them. Julie screams until the man disappears, smiles, and promptly goes back to sleep. The next day she has no memory of anything. By this point, Reese is convinced he is sick or has brain damage. Over breakfast, he explains what he saw the night before, and Julie abruptly says, “Dead Man Franklin? He comes with the chair”.

Who is Dead Man Franklin?

The old man from the night before appears, and now he is dressed in the same dress as Julie, and when he speaks, she does as well. Julie first laments that she is “so tired of living, but she loves him so much.” The old man in the background begins yelling that he doesn’t want Reese to forget him as he bashes himself in the head. In what appears to be a moment of lucidity, Julie urgently whispers, “Reese, your dying of Alzheimer’s, but you keep forgetting about it.” In all likelihood, Reese is Old Man Franklin.

The police arrive as Reese discovers a dead body in his laundry room. They have a warrant and are investigating a missing person and possible murder. The older police officer sits in the Chair and almost immediately becomes violent. He threatens Reese with his gun, and then more bizarrely when the interrogation doesn’t go as he hoped, he bashes his head against some furniture and then shoots himself in the chest. Julie and Old Man Franklin emerge from the bathroom covered in blood, saying she “got him.” Reese panics and finds himself having lost time again. He is holding a hammer and is filthy. Now it is months later, and he has a house full of dead people. What happened at the end of The Chair, and what did it all really mean?

The ending of The Chair and what it symbolizes

The Chair is a representation of all of Reese’s biggest fears. He is terrified of not satisfying Julie physically and abstractly, so she blithely masturbates in the face of his abject terror. It is also why the detective comes out of their bedroom, retucking his shirt and straightening his tie. The implication is he had sex with Julie right under Reese’s nose. The Chair uses his insecurities against him. Reese may have anxiety about developing Alzheimer’s like his grandfather later in life and worries about his partner leaving him. As I posited earlier, he might already be an older man struggling with Alzheimer’s.

That’s why he first sees Julie tell him he’s a monster and later that she’s exhausted but loves him. Most caregivers experience fatigue and despair. Caring for someone is a difficult job under any circumstances, but when they are prone to verbally and physically lashing out and regularly forgetting who you and they are, it is horrific.

The Chair is also a character study of Alzheimer’s and its effect on the entire family. It is terrifying and confusing for the sufferer, but those around them suffer too. When Reese first brings the chair home, he tells Julie it reminds him of his grandfather. He doesn’t acknowledge the older gentleman standing in front of the house where he gets the Chair, though. Is the man a ghost just waiting for someone to take him home or a real person desperately hoping to offload their grief and pain?

It’s possible every time Reese sees himself as a younger man; he is confused again. The camera angles further support this theory, as when Reese first brings the chair home, we only see Julie in the reflection. Later when the police arrive, we see their feet only. Alzheimer’s can rob the sufferer of their memories and the family of their identity. Barker seems to be making this correlation.

If you accept this theory, then Reese is Dead Man Franklin. The older man is who he is now. The young man we see throughout the film is who he once was and has forgotten. He probably didn’t kill anyone, but all the dead people in his house are metaphorical ghosts of people in his life. His girlfriend or spouse, a friend or coworker, and possibly police that took him to a facility for his own safety. All these people could have been warped in his mind into the nightmares he experiences. The Chair he initially thought reminded him of his grandpa has become the source of his fear because he fails to see it as a link to his past. For him, it is the totem causing all the terrible things to happen.

The ending surrounded by dead people with the Chair centered in the shot is Hell, but not the Satanic kind. It is a Hell on Earth that Reese is stuck in. The Chair is his fleeting and often unkind memories, and the flowers mark the passage of time and possibly the death of friends and family either by actually dying or leaving him. He is now stuck with the lingering memories he can’t hold onto and a whole lot of regret.

Many short horror films pack as much of a punch as the full-length variety. Curve, Childer, and Other Side Of The Box all come to mind. These gifted filmmakers deserve our attention as they are true artists making something great out of the tiniest resources.