Muyang Li

A Rat is in search of its cage.

Dead House is an experimental film that questions the violence of categorization — the invisible boundaries we draw between those who are compliant and those who are deviant. Drawing inspiration from a Southern Fujian tradition where rat-catchers must never utter the word “rat” during hunts, the work exposes the ideology behind those unspoken social rituals that stigmatize the marginalized. Through three chapters — “Bait,” “Long Time Ago,” and “Wheat & Tare”, the film inhabits the psyche of a protagonist consumed by purification hysteria, a man who believes he’s restoring order but only self-destructing.

The rats in Dead House are neither villains nor victims, but dark mirrors. Their twitching whiskers reflect our collective anxieties about contamination — of bodies, of borders, of belief systems — while their absent presence (we hear but never truly see them) reveals the phantom nature of all social threats. By blurring the line between hunter and hunted, the work reveals the sacrificial logic behind our endless wars against imagined infestations.

This is not just a story about rats, but about the cages we mistake for homes. Like the Fujianese rat-catchers bound by silent rituals, the protagonist is trapped in what he believes is a noble pursuit of purity — of a “correct” way to exist. Yet his obsession unveils the perverse truth: the desire for normalcy is itself a form of madness. He doesn’t hunt because rats exist; he conjures them because the house demands it. The real horror lies not in any infestation, but in the architecture that requires such violence to sustain its illusion of safety.

At its core, Dead House is a parable about the terrible arithmetic of belonging. It lays bare how society creates outsiders to maintain its fragile cohesion, just as the unspoken naming taboo transforms ordinary pests into mythical enemies. The rats remain elusive; it was never about them — the hunt itself is the ritual that lets us pretend our walls protect rather than imprison. But safety was always an illusion. The cage doesn’t contain the rat; it creates the very being it claims to exclude.