Distortions

The space itself bends. Walls curve, corridors stretch, corners stop meeting at the angles they should, and the room becomes unreliable while the person in it stays ordinary.

That split is the point. The audience trusts the figure and stops trusting the architecture, which puts the wrongness in the world rather than in the character's face.

Bend the architecture and leave the face alone, as the note says. Straight lines are what the eye uses to judge a space, so curving a wall or a ceiling changes everything while a curved face reads as a lens fault.

Give the distortion a rule. It increases with distance, or it grows toward one corner, or it breathes in and out. Random warping everywhere reads as a glitch rather than as a place behaving strangely.

The floor is the most powerful surface to bend, because people read level from it. A floor that tilts and returns unsettles an audience faster than a wall that curves.

Use it for a mind coming apart, for a building that is hostile, and for horror where the geography stops being dependable.

Skip it when the audience still has to follow the layout. A distorted space cannot also be a map.

A fisheye is a lens. It bends the whole frame according to one fixed optical rule, with the curve strongest at the edges and the centre almost straight. A distortion is a property of the space, so it can bend one wall and leave another.

The test is consistency. A single symmetrical curve across the frame is a fisheye. Different amounts of bend in different places is a distortion.

A fisheye comes back, because it is the distortion a model knows best. Say the architecture bends and the lens does not, and name which surfaces are curving.

The second failure is a warped face. State that the subject stays correctly proportioned while the space around them does not.