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The Navidson Record is a Deconstruction Fic about an unfinished novel Zampano wrote.
Johnny found the remnants of the novel "The Navidson Record.", a symbolic story about how Zampano feels about Johnny being 'deformed' and cast into a "labyrinth" (a life of sex and drugs) sucking the sanity out of someone who feels guilt about letting a child wither away despite being able to save them (Zampano/Navidson). Johnny, being paranoid (from being raised with an insane mother), misinterprets the novel, and sees the Minotaur as a creature who is real and wants to kill him. So, in an attempt to keep himself safe, he extends the novel to great lengths, to try and have the monster get lost in the "labyrinth" (which, at this point, is the book), by adding backstories, in depth explanations of the dimensions of the house, millions of fake citations, fake celebrity quotes, (possibly extra characters) etc. He even goes to the point where he starts writing about his real life just to make the "labyrinth" more confusing. Unfortunately, the Minotaur "follows" Johnny into real life, in the form of delusions.
The Monster attacking Johnny is, in fact, nothing.
I don't mean nothing in the traditional sense. I mean he was being attacked my absence itself. Much like Holloway and the Navidson family. The panic attacks (like the "don't look behind you" one or the one in his apartment) weren't just figments of his imagination. It was nothing assaulting him, it just manifested itself as, well, nothing. He felt it attacking him, he knew all the terrible things that could happen, and he saw it all in his mind but in reality there wasn't anything there because the attacker was "nothing."
One of the Editors is Mark Z. Danielewski... the other is Walden D. Wyrtha.
Given that Walden Wyrtha is the one who found the 11 additional letters included in the stand-alone novella of The Whalestoe Letters, it's not at all implausible that he could also have access to Johnny somehow, even though Johnny is on the run (it'd be even more plausible if Johnny got caught and was now locked in a nuthouse, given that Wyrtha is in the mental health profession). He contacted Mark, who was looking for a good story, hence the edits he puts in (encoding his name into one of the footnotes).
The house and the book are, in fact, one and the same thing.
The inside of the book's jacket says
"Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth — musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies — the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children."
The last part, "who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children," is exactly like what happens to Will Navidson in his final journey into the house - he brings along a copy of a book called House of Leaves and burns it as he reads it. He then gets out of the house for the last time after having completely burned the book.
Pelafina is the Minotaur.
Pelafina commits suicide in late 1989. The Navidsons move into the house the next year. Coincidence?
Johnny is Zampano, and both of them are dead -or- fun with numbers
If you assume each letter equals a number, such that A=1, B=2, etc., and you add up the numbers in JOHNNY and ZAMPANO, they both equal 86.
86 is popular slang for "get rid of" or "ignore". Grasping at straws, yes, but this book has a habit of not disregarding strange connections like this.
The house is an abandoned TARDIS that grew mean.
Bigger on the inside than the outside, linking to bizarre worlds humans cannot understand...
It doesn't matter that it's fiction
Okay, so the book's fiction, right? But... Johnny knew that The Navidson Record was fiction, written about a movie which didn't exist. And that didn't help him much. Maybe I should check my doors...
The book doesn't exist.
It's all in your head. You need help.
It's an IHOP
See XKCD for the truth.
The house is inhabited by (or is in itself) a Lovecraftian entity
Tom Navidson is the Witch-King
Haha!
Navidson is Zampano is Johhny Truant is the Minotaur.
He never made the film. He's not even a real photographer. Which means he was never, ever able to prove that the House was real, that he didn't just invent it all - not even to himself. So he rewrote the book as a way to try to create the reality that he wished had happened, and tacked on the happy ending that he thought he deserved. Like how Johnny Truant does several times. And he's the monster in his own story, and he has dreams about being deformed in the maze - it all fits, people.
The Minotaur is Nidhogg.
If the house is Yggdrasil, then the creature inside it can only be Nidhogg, the giant dragon that gnaws on the roots of the tree in order to bring it, and the universe down. Nidhogg's name means "tearer of corpses" and notice that only dead bodies dissapear into the house. (In fact, only one person is directly killed by the house). Thus, we should probably start writing this as Nidhogg
Not to mention Chad's School Drawing of the house show a Dragon in the "Labyrinth" that is the house
The Minotaur knows about this Wiki.
And now it's come to make this place its home as well. Never shall we ever know peace. The eyes are always watching. Always watching, and never shall we ever see them. Oh, you blind, blinkered fools. Do you have any idea what you've done? What you've unleashed?
This Wiki is the House
Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Think about it: we have here a huge labyrinthine mess of related ideas and footnotes and strange twisty passages leading into places you don't really want to be and dark non-euclidian geometries. It is a world that will swallow you whole, devour you alive and leave nothing left at all, not even a shattered husk. We are all the Minotaur. We are all Zampano. And we are all Johnny.
The House is God
The House is the World
Redwood is the Minotaur.
And Zampano is in denial that he is. Why else would he list redwood as the first type of wood that's apparently not in the house?
The Minotaur retired with the money made from the book.
And then he got bored, so he opened a china shop.
Zampano is Johnny's real father
Or at least he's connected to him in some way. One of Zampano's writers has the initial P and makes reference to "a son (sic) to rend the dark". Johnny's mother's name starts with P.
Zampano was a time-displaced troper.
One word, one color: House.
Johnny is Navidson's son.
He tried to burn the house without letting everyone escape in order to destroy the evil, messed up his arms, and changed his name and the end of the story so he would never be suspected.
The Labyrinth is shaped by the minds of its occupants
Evidence:
The labyrinth is a punishment that the explorers inflict on themselves.
Building off of the last one, each person consumed by the house has some kind of sin that they feel guilt over, or at least are aware of. Navidson, for instance, is wracked with guilt over the photograph he took of a starving child in Africa, the photograph that made his career. For Tom, it's his alcoholism, and so on for everyone.
Everything is a painkiller-induced hallucination by an unmentioned third party.
This would explain the dreamlike bizarreness of the house, as well as the special attention to that particular word.
The House and the Labyrinth are not the same entity.
The Labyrinth is cold, passive, infinite and, as long as it is observed, stable. The House is warm, aggressive, finite and unstable. The House kills those who live within its walls; the Labyrinth only does so as a side effect of its simple existence. When the House attempts to murder the family, it does not open the door of the Labyrinth; it does not attempt to free whatever may or may not exist within it. Finally, Navidson manages to kill the Labyrinth, but the House is still quite alive.
The Labyrinth is killed by Navidson filming it.
The Labyrinth abhors being categorised and finalised, and dies when that happens; Navidson's expert photography captures essence that his early attempts did not. After he starts his bike ride, he basically transfers the Labyrinth to film. He films all of the hallways, and so the hallways cease to exist. He films all of the doorways, and so the doorways cease to exist. He films all of the floors, and so the floors cease to exist. In the end, he films the last parts- the small house, the stairs, the crawl space, the ledge, and finally the platform- and so, those too cease to exist. In the end, he films the darkness. And, just at the last frame, the darkness has ceased to exist.
Johnny IS the Minotaur
Seriously. Read Johnny's dream sequence and then go back to the Minotaur chapter. Zampano describes Theseus as a frat boy, and says that ole Miney was probably just a deformed human rather than a half-man-half-bull thing. Johnny describes how he is all deformed in the dream, then he gets attacked by a frat boy.
Zampano is Navidson is Johnny's father is from a parallel universe
The Navidson family went to our universe using the house because they wanted to distance themselves from thier experiences in the house. They took on false names and seperated from eachother to hide from the house. Will became Zampano, Karen became Pelafina, and Chad became Johnny. Zampano raised Daisy and Pelafina raised Johnny (who both forgot about the house). To further hide from the house, Pelafina married Johnny's "father" and they both only communicated to each other through hidden messages. Unfortunately for Zampano, that wasn't enough.
The house was designed and built by Discworld's Bloody Stupid Johnson
Although it isn't very obvious, anyone familiar with the Discworld shouldn't be too surprised at this. Leave it to Bloody Stupid Johnson (a man who once designed a wheel where Pi was exactly three) to build a house that was larger on the inside than the outside. It's hard to say whether this flaw is intentional or not, however it's not difficult to imagine that it was intentional and Johnson's rational behind it was something like, "I just hate it when I run out of space to put things, don't you?" or possibly, "It's so you don't have to feel all cooped up inside the house when the weather's a bit mucky out." The growling noise heard was probably caused by some Eldritch Abomination from the Dungeon Dimensions, as reality around the house would have to be stretched pretty thin.
The Minotaur is Beatrice.
Say it in red text!
This book is realated to, stay with me, Wii Fit
What? Normal text is in black, the name of your mii is in blue (so... what if you name your mii House?), and certain words are in red.
Or is that Dr. Gregory House?
If you make it out of the House...
You end up in Narnia!
The Labyrinth is actually made of the roots of Yggdrasil.
Related to the above theories. According to Norse mythology, after the Ragnarok, two humans survived by hiding in the roots of Yggdrasil. The Labyrinth is not actually a basement per say because everyone is in Nifleheim, where the base of the tree begins.
The house is a living organism.
And it eats people! The house proper is the mouth, which also functions as something like an anglerfish's lure. The subterranean regions encompass the majority of its body. The reason why objects brought into that area don't last long is because they're broken down by the house's digestive system or attacked by its immune system. The creature making the mysterious growling is, metaphorically speaking, a kind of white blood cell.
The house is inside-out.
The true universe is the inside of the house. The reason the "inside" is so scary is that the builders of the house have great taste in interior design, but neglect their yardwork.
Animals are the key to everything.
Notice that the book goes out of its way to mention how odd it is that no one has written anything about how the dog and cat aren't allowed into the labyrinth, apparently considering it not important. This is the book's contrary way of telling you it's important, like crossing out everything about the Minotaur. Remember the dog that Johnny lets one of the innumerable girls take in the middle of the nightmare, and that ends up being pointlessly and maliciously killed by her. Most of all, note that the chronologically last scene, when Johnny has come to the end of his journey that parallels Navidson's, ends with a dog coming to Johnny, and the knowledge that it's going to be all right.
The House is a TARDIS.
Well, it is bigger on the inside than out.
The House is the house in House
That is, the 1977 movie and its sequels,[1] about a house that has more in it than it should, including portals through time and to other worlds.
What's up with the animals?
Seriously, what's up with that? There are two singularities. First: animals just pass through the hallway like it wasn't there. Just phase right through it. Since they don't go through the walls of the rest of the house that must mean that the hallway is somehow different than the house itself (changing dimensions included). Second: whenever anybody brings up this fact i.e. the weirdness of the animals they quickly get off the topic. Every author that Zampano cites does it. Johnny notes that Zampano himself does it as well. And then Johnny goes off on one of his tangents and no longer talks about the animals.
Since animals can't get into the house's hallway, that means one of three things: a) the hallway is somehow a mental construct that only works with humans, b) the hallway is sentient and chooses when it exists, or c) both of the above. Why any of those would also cause those who talk about it to just give it only a moment's thought is beyond me.
The Navidson Record really happened, but ...
It all happened in a different world to the one Johnny Truant occupies. It seems to be hinted throughout the book that the House is somehow connected with Yggdrasil, the Norse World Tree which could be climbed and other worlds reached by climbing it. The Navidson Record happened in one of these parallel worlds — where celebrities such as Stephen King and Poe also exist — and Zampano (a blind seer?) somehow has access to this and possibly other worlds. This explains why none of the celebrities Johnny contacts admitted to making any statements or sharing any opinions about the House or why many of the books Zampano references can't be found — they exist in the world of the Navidson Record, but not in Johnny's. The House being bigger on the inside than the outside? It's a gateway to the extra-dimensional place between worlds. The unexplained scars on Johnny's neck and Zampano's floor? Johnny's universe ripping apart from the paradox of somebody having knowledge from another universe.
This is what Danielewski wants.
This whole page is the sort of overanalysis that Danielewski is making fun of in the book. He's laughing all the way to the...wherever authors goes after reading the Wild Mass Guessing page of their own work.
All the House of Leaves books in real are printed using the leaves/branches of Yggdrasil.
...which means that we all have a piece of the House inside our house.
The Z in Mark Z. Danielewski stands for Zampano.
This doesn't really go anywhere, it's just... spoooooooooky...
Zampano wrote the book to fuck with everyone.
He was a lonely old codger with a wicked sense of humor. Johnny gets so caught up in it because his mind desperately grasps at something to distract him from how shitty he's let his life become. Certain creepy details about Zampano's death, etc., are made up to rationalize this interest.
The Navidson Record shares the same reality / universe where some of Jorge Luis Borges stories happen.
Zampano directly refers to Pierre Menard, a fictional character in one of Borges' short stories. In Borges' story, Pierre Menard's work is set before World War 2 occurred. However, in Zampano's story, Pierre Menard is a living person and known to be alive, sipping coffee at a Parisian cafe and working on his writings post World War 2, as referenced in one of Zampano's footnotes.
Zampano himself is part of the same reality where Jorge Luis Borges's stories happen.
One of Zampano's footnotes states "Much later, a yet untried disciple of arms had the rare pleasure of meeting the extraordinary Pierre Menard in a Paris cafe following the second world war". This is important for two reasons.
a) Zampano is thought to be French, or at least part of the foreign legion.
b) Zampano is thought to have been a soldier, possibly during of the Vietnam War.
It makes sense that someone who is French or has a tie to France thru the Foreign Legion would visit a Parisian cafe. The fact that Zampano notes that whoever met Pierre Menard would become a soldier, and he fits that description as well, giving credibility to this idea.
The true owner of House
...is Slender Man.
Which explains why it's so ... weird. He was just pissed that his House had been moved into by some stupid and stubborn humans.
Also, ties to cameras — Slender Man can often be only seen on camera (unless you're his next victim) and the House was presumably defeated through camera.
The Minotaur is the same entity as the Minotaur from David Bowie's 1.outside.
Both House of Leaves and 1.outside are fragmented, nonlinear, post-modern narratives, and both feature a Minotaur. That can't be a coincidence!
The House is a vagina.
and since the book is the House, then that means that we've been looking inside a vagina.
Zampano is Tom.
Seems weird, but on page 320, after Wax is brought back out of the labyrinth, Zampano writes:
"Regrettably, Tom fails to stop at a sip. A few hours later he has finished off the whole fifth as well as half a bottle of wine. He might have spent all night drinking had exhaustion caught up with me."
This isn't the kind of book to make random mistakes like that. Alternatively, Zampano is admitting to making up the story (he is exhausted from writing) or Johnny is Tom and edited that part.
The minotaur killed Zampano because:
Halloway became the minotaur as punishment for being evil and failing the test of the labyrinth.
He became consumed by the darkness and transformed into the very thing he had been trying to kill all this time, and he now stalks the labyrinth with the other creatures, endlessly searching for prey.
The infinite hallway is related to China Mieville's Viae Ferae.
The wandering streets from Mieville's "Reports of Certain Events in London" shift their locations and configurations much like the hallways within the House, and it's possible to get lost in either, if such shifts occur while you're traversing them. Mieville's short tale and Danielewski's long one each take Scrapbook Story form, with well-painted Fourth Walls, and both incorporate documents that came into their narrators' possession under rather cryptic circumstances. Might mysterious hallways like the House's be a juvenile form of Via Fera? If so, the house on Ash Tree Lane may be a nursery for baby streets, and the "allways" are Varmin Way's younger sibling.
The scratch next to Zampano's body was from a cat.
Cats were always hanging around him, and he even wrote about one in particular following him. Add in the note in the appendices that implies he fabricated the entire Navidson Record, and you have an old blind guy who wrote a book as a joke and then died next to a cat.
Johnny is the same kind of creature as Johnnie
Following the theory that Johnny is the Minotaur, perhaps he is the Spear Counterpart of Johnnie. They have near-identical names, and both seem prone to unprovoked acts of gruesome violence.
Johnny IS Johnnie.
We already know that Johnny is an unreliable narrator AND has hallucinations AND a tendency for irrational outbursts of violence. Johnny himself killed the dog. He either invented or imagined that woman named Johnnie.
Johnny can see into other dimensions. The Labyrinth represents every "What If" in human history.
One of the footnotes in the book refers to the Universe pre-big bang as a place of infinite Destiny. Johnny notes that this is probably a typo, and that Zampano meant to say "Density" but look at it this way. Johnny constantly mentions things that happen in the book, only they never actually happen. The Johnny that we are following doesn't go down these paths, yet he constantly sees his own death, or sees minor things changed from what they were. Because he can see into these infinite possibilites, he starts to Go Mad from the Revelation. Zampano could also see into these infinite "what-ifs", and the houseon Ash Tree Lane was the physical manifestation of infinite possibilities becoming known. The reason Johnny can see all of these possible futures is because he, himself was never meant to exist. He was the child in the Mother's Story. In that world, he died, but in another world, he lived, and from that branch, Johnny could see into every fragment of time. Branches. Trees. Yggdrassil. In another timeline, Johnny might have become the Minotaur, or Zampano, either trying to stop himself before his mind broke under the strain of omniscience, or to give the gift of omniscience to himself through the book.
Ayn Rand sold the Navidsons the house
The realtor that sold the Navidsons their house was named Alicia Rosenbaum. Ayn Rand was born Alisa Rosenbaum. This is quite improbable, considering that Rand was dead long before the Navidsons moved in, but who knows what tricks that house could have played on them.
The house erased the evidence of itself
That's why Johnny couldn't find any evidence of The Navidson Record actually existing, and why none of the people he contacted had any memory of it. The house, in essence, consumed itself, like the world-serpent that eats its own tail (remember the Yggdrasil poem...Norse mythology has a world-serpent). The "Contrary Evidence" appendix is all that's left to indicate that the house ever actually existed.
The house is made from the wood of the Kite Eating Tree from Peanuts
They're both malicious little bastards who wanna kill humans. The only reason the Kite Eating Tree isn't giving people the same shit as the house is is because it's rooted in place and you can't go inside of it. The house is evilest on the inside. Also, Charlie Brown bit it once, and that scared it straight.
The labyrinth only traps beings who could understand the implications of it.
The animals couldn't get in because they don't have the level of self-awareness that humans do. The children are implied to have gone wandering around in it, but they never got lost in it. Maybe because they don't have the ability to operate on the same level as an adult, because they saw it as just another scary dark closet or somewhere to play in instead of a illogical anomaly to be conquered by rational minds, the house didn't feel the need to trap them inside and the monsters never actually attacked them.
The labyrinth is judging your soul.
Connected to the above. Animals in some religions are said not to have a soul, or at least not to be judged like human souls are. The children have not developed enough or had enough experiences for their souls to be able to be judged.
There is a piece of the begining of the universe stuck under the earth below the house .
It contains the labryinth and the monsters. When the house was built above it, it reached up and connected itself somehow, assimilating the house into it's structure.
Time Cube is actually an extension of the house .
Seriously, go to the site and look over the formatting. Seem earily familiar? Now try actually reading it* and notice the effect it begins to have on your mortal sanity. And the site's math and physics defy rational explanation, just like the house's. Gene Ray is either a fabrication or simply the first victim to succumb.
The house
is a manifestation of The Dark Tower. The Tower has been shown to have different manifestations in other universes, such as the rose in the middle of the vacant lot in New York. The house on Ash Tree Lane is another such manifestation. This is also why Stephen King was one of the few who showed interest in visiting the actual house itself, rather than merely talking about the film as though it were definitely fictional.
House of Leaves is a part of the Slender Man Mythos
Read the book from this angle and you will be surprised how well it could fit.
The spiral from Uzumaki is related to the labyrinth
When Holloway lost it
His repeating his name and birthplace over and over wasn't a symptom of insanity. That was him trying to hold on to his identity, while the House was stripping his identity away. Either it turned him into a/the Minotaur, or it absorbed and assimilated him into the nothingness inside the Labyrinth.
The House exists in the Old World Of Darkness The Labyrinth is an Umbral sub-realm. Like the Labyrinth, the environments of the Near/Middle Umbra change with the perceptions of travellers, can't be precisely measured or mapped, and don't entirely operate according to our rules of logic (except in Weaver areas). The maze beneath the Grand Staircase is connected to the Black Spiral Labyrinth in Malfeas, and/or to the Labyrinth in the Underworld. Which means that the creatures roaming the Labyrinth are probably spectres, banes, or Black Spiral Dancers. And/Or Johnny is a Cult of Ecstasy mage captured by Nephandi, and the entire book is his stream-of-conciousness experience inside a Nephandic caul, which is the Labyrinth, which is an Umbral sub-realm accessed through a house. The House
is House, had he gotten into our universe. He was a TARDIS, that's why the House was bigger on the inside. As evidenced by the episode, he enjoyed messing with people. Plus, his name is House.
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