Here's another of my really short films, adapted from the story "The Mezzotint", written by M. R. James, one of the most influential shapers of the horror story.
When you read an M. R. James story, you might be struck by how modern the actual horror concepts can feel; the creature, the cause of the mystery, whatever it might be. His "ghost stories" have very little to do with the efforts of his contemporary peers. "The Mezzotint" is a case in point. It features a framed print (the mezzotint of the title) that changes every time the narrator looks at it. A supernatural drama unfolds, where a skeletal intruder climbs into a mansion and reappears with a bundled-up baby in its clutches. It is implied that this incident actually took place in the very real mansion of the mezzotint.
I did an illustration of the mezzotint from the story a while ago for a self-published book. As I am a big fan of this tale, especially the creepy story within the print, I thought I'd do a short film adapting it.
The head and torso of the baby-napping revenant were actually originally made for the walking sea corpse of my film "The Stalk the Night." Since that puppet was covered with rubber seaweed, you couldn't really see details on its face, so I thought I'd reuse the same sculpture as a new latex casting from the plaster mold I originally created for that other puppet.
I built my usual aluminum wire armature for this puppet, following the dimensions of a human skeleton. I made this puppet slightly smaller than usual, about 8 inches tall. The reason for this was that I needed to use the full breadth of my animation stage to move the puppet from very near to the camera to very far. More about that later. Besides the latex casting of the sea corpse (here being pinched together to make this puppet thinner), the limbs, and (later) the back were padded with cotton, latex, and tissue paper.
The puppet has 3 mm tie-downs in its feet, but since it would be crawling on all fours towards the mansion, I also added tie-downs in the palms of its hands. All tie-downs are threaded brass nuts.
When all detailing was finished, I covered the puppet with a dark brown base color using tinted latex. Lighter colors were added over this with more tinted latex, and some highlights were created with acrylic paint. In the story "The Mezzotint", the crawling creature is described as almost a skeleton, but still having bits of skin on it.
Here's the finished puppet, with the hooded cape that it wears in the story. The cape is made from kitchen tissue paper dabbed with tinted latex. A 2 mm aluminum wire runs along the edge of the cape and comes out as the two cords used to tie the cloak together. The wire allowed me to animate the cloak swaying as the puppet walked, but also to press it down over the puppet's body as the character was creeping along the ground.
I added two tiny metallic red pearls in the eye sockets, so when the puppet turns its head in the animation and looks at the camera, the eyes briefly shine when reflecting the photo light next to the camera.
James's story says that the creeping ghoul has a white cross on the back of its cloak. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking this might have something to do with doors being marked with white crosses if the people living there had been struck by the plague. Also, a few spiders have a white cross-like shape on their backs, and maybe James wanted to allude to that, too. The cross on the cloak was painted with an oil paintbrush and acrylic paint.
Since the baby-napping revenant is smallish, the baby it's napping needed to be even smaller, of course. When making really small stuff, I try to make it without any molding and casting involved, since tiny details lose something of their crispness in the process. Instead, I made the baby's head out of a blob of CosClay, a semi-flexible polymer clay cured by baking it in the oven. I've found that this material can be used for a plethora of purposes. The CosClay I used here is a light skin color. I didn't put it in my kitchen oven, but simply cured it using my heat gun. It worked out well, since the sculpture was so small.
Attached to the baby's head is a 3 mm aluminum wire, wrapped in soft yarn to bulk it up. The wrapping covering the baby is kitchen tissue paper dabbed with latex, no paints added.
For the latter half of the film, the revenant puppet simply walks over my animation stage carrying the baby. But since my stage is only 15 inches deep, I had to animate the puppet from the back to the front, and then reposition the puppet at the back of the stage, going forward again.
The revenant puppet was attached to the stage using 3 mm threaded rods screwed into the nuts placed in the palms and feet, as I usually do when animating. But having to reach behind the stage to replace the tie-downs during animation made it a bit tricky. I repeated this animation twice to make the puppet move away from the camera as far as possible.
Also, to get the correct view of the crawling ghoul, I placed my animation camera very low, looking up at the animation stage.
The mansion is really a British building now functioning as a hotel. I used a photo of it and removed everything except the house, the gravel area in front of it, and the lawn. The trees and bushes surrounding the building are CG images on a transparent background downloaded from Depositphotos.com. I also cut out all the window pane areas, so I could place either a light or a dark area in a layer behind the image of the house.
The final composite image in After Effects also included a night sky layer, a full moon (it's actually a crescent moon in the story), and a layer of cloud moving past the moon using a keyframed 2D animation.
In 2021, Mark Gatiss adapted "The Mezzotint" for the BBC's annual A Ghost Story For Christmas programme. It's a fine adaptation, but it may take the story a bit too far, as you actually see the revenant climb in through a window and attack the main character at the end. In the M. R. James story, no one ever sees the creature in the flesh, but it is implied that it's out there and may have set its sights on a new victim.
