I sometimes contribute to the various publications of Graeme Philips, which all have Lovecraftian content of some kind. In the booklet "Forbidden Knowledge" I found the poem "Forbidden Words" by Frank Coffman and decided that it would be a perfect addition to my cosmic horror selection on my YouTube channel. After I got Frank's permission to adapt his poem, I set to it.
I wanted to do something that had the atmosphere and look of the AIP Roger Corman Poe adaptations, which meant over-embellishing certain colors, using bombastic music, and a gothic setting with overdressed rooms.
I was briefly contemplating finding a real location for this, but I quickly realized that wherever I went, I'd have to augment the place in After Effects anyway to get the look I wanted. So instead I went with completely digital 2D backgrounds, composed in Photoshop. I mainly used a bunch of stock images found on depositphotos.com, with additional elements added.
For the main character, a man searching for taboo knowledge (aren't they always?), I recruited my stalwart actor Andreas Pettersson, whom you've seen in a number of productions by now.
I shot all of his scenes in his living room in front of a green screen. By now we have this process pretty much down to a T.
The occult book our hero reads from is just an old book -a cookbook if I remember correctly- with a printed-out spread placed into it. The pages are a Photoshop mash-up of parts from a 19th-century astrological calendar.
In the end, our protagonist conjures up a demonic entity, and I could've gone with a number of creatures, but for some reason, I decided to go with a hovering skull. I had a bag of plastic Halloween bones lying around and I thought the included skull had the right dimensions.
As props bought from dress-up shops often are, this skull was made from rather flimsy plastic, and I had to reinforce it by mixing a batch of Burro casting plastic (from FormX in Holland) and lining the insides of the skull with it. After that, I cut loose the jaw and re-attached it to the skull with aluminum wire hinges. In the eye sockets, I placed two tentacles made with aluminum wires wrapped with soft yarn and dabbed with latex, and a long tongue made the same way. The tongue was rolled up and pushed up into the roof of the mouth when not lolling out to be animated. I placed screws on the inside of the skull to help attach the tentacles, the tongue, and the jaw joints. A wooden dowel was also attached to the rear of the skull as a support rod.
The whole skull was then covered with a mix of cotton and latex. This created an organic-looking surface and a base for creating more elaborate shapes.
Using more cotton and latex and using a pointy dental tool I built up a textured skin, with bumps and wrinkles.
I also made teeth with the cotton / latex mix.
I also used yarn to create some of the shapes. This whole procedure is pretty quick and very economical since you don't have to make any molds, but since the latex/cotton mix dries to a sturdy leathery quality it's only applicable to projects where flexibility isn't necessary. using this technique on a full stop-motion puppet would not work at all.
Here's the finished skull before the paint was applied.
I started off with a mix of latex and red pigments sponged on with a bit of foam. This created a very organic-looking base.
Other colors were mixed the same way and dry brushed on with more sponges (bits of foam from an old cushion). I used I light layer of white acrylic paint over everything to get a glowing effect. Lastly, blue acrylic airbrush paint was hand-applied with a brush to offset the other colors and augment the psychedelic effect.
Here's the finished skull puppet. The stand is simply held fast with a glue clamp when animating the puppet.
This is how it looks when piecing together the various elements that make up one of my monster scenes. In this case, I have the animated skull in the front layer, and behind it, I've added layers of smoke and a cloudy luminous background. I've also added a part of the billowing smoke pillar over the skull to create a sort of widow's peak coming out of the top of the head.
The skull only makes a brief appearance, but that's the only thing it should do. This was a very quick project but I'm quite happy with it. Stuff like this is perfect for experimenting with creating mood, which is one of my favorite challenges.
When YouTube started marketing its YouTube shorts as an alternative (and a rival) to TikTok, a lot of people jumped at making very short content in a standing format. There were promises of funds handed out to YouTubers trying out the format, and it seemed the concept gained popularity among watchers. For a weak moment, I considered what I could bring to the table, and thought up a few story ideas adapted for this new format. However, after doing a poll among my own watchers, as well as doing a bit of research among YouTubers trying out making shorts, I decided that it probably wasn't for me. Instead, I simply made shorter-than-usual youtube videos, and they seem to have been well received.
"Yum, Yum Said the Moon" is the first of these shorts-wannabees. The story is childishly simple: A jogger is eaten by a creepy man in the moon. The setting is a bit of nighttime landscape in the countryside, and it never changes during the run of the short film. The setting is a photo adjusted in Photoshop to suit my needs for the film.
Let's go over to the evil moon, the only puppet in the film. I should warn anyone with Trypophobia (a phobia of holes) that you should probably stop reading now since the moon is covered with tiny craters.
This is the main sculpture of the moon, made with medium-grade Monster Clay. I actually sculpted both sides of the face but only covered this side with craters, wrinkles, and other small details. I knew I'd only shoot the moon from this side, so no need to spend time detailing both.
I used simple hobby plaster to create a mold around the sculpture. Four layers of tinted latex created a flexible face.
For the crater-marked skin of the rest of the puppet, I sculpted an oval filled with craters on a flat piece of clay.
Again, hobby plaster was used to make a simple skin texture mold.
And again, a few layers of tinted latex created bits of skin that could then be attached to the body of the puppet.
The moon only has one eye on the side shown to the camera. It's a plastic pearl painted with acrylic airbrush colors and sealed with clear varnish. Here it's placed in a matrix of silicone paste, which allows the eye to be swiveled around by putting a needle in the "pupil" and turning it.
Here the moon has been padded with soft polyurethane foam. Under the foam, there's a 2 mm aluminum wire running through the puppet all the way out into the horns. This is so the moon can curl up and grab its prey with the points of the horns. There's also a 1,5 mm aluminum wire circling the jaw, so the moon can talk and chew.
Here's the moon with patches of pock-market latex skin covering all of the foam padding.
I should also add that a threaded 3M nut is placed at the back, joined with the main 2 mm aluminum wire. This is so I can attach the puppet to a ball-and-socket flying rig, holding the moon aloft.
The puppet is painted by dry brushing tinted latex onto it using sponges, and applying the paint in thin layers. The teeth are made from tissue paper dipped in latex and rolled into pointy shapes with my fingers.
The puppet was animated against my puppet stage green screen backdrop, with green screen tape covering up the flying rig.
The jogger assaulted by the moon is a looped digital animation of a man running in a tracksuit. I simply keyframed him being grabbed by the stop-motion moon and sped up his movement to look like desperate leg-kicking as he was eaten. When the moon licks its mouth I used a bit of pink oil-based clay bought in a toy shop.
So that was "Yum, Yum, Said the Moon", a short bit of silliness. But, it's been surprisingly well received. One viewer commented: "Now THIS is the kind of surreal and niche horror I admire so often!" I can't ask for a better reaction than that.
If we are to believe old Lovecraft himself he has a family tree to give you nightmares. If you go far enough back you'll encounter various cosmic abominations in his lineage. Closer to our time, but still very far back in history, we find the name Yogash the Ghoul -apparently one of the first, if not the very first, of that very creepy breed of creatures.
You can study the Lovecraft family tree in one of the volumes collecting Lovecraft's countless letters. The tree was included in a 1933 message to James F. Morton. My fancy had been tickled by the name Yogash the Ghoul for a while since it was both very descriptive (It's a ghoul) and open to endless imaginative story possibilities.
For those of you who remember bits of my previous work, you'll recall that I did make a ghoul puppet way back in 2013 for a film called The Lovecraft Alphabet. The puppet was very detailed and as it happens also very expressive when animated. It was a combination of a sculpture that I was happy with and an armature that did the job.
In that film, the puppet is shown very briefly to illustrate old ghoul painter Pickman. His art comes alive, turns around, and makes a face at the viewer. That's all the puppet did, so I figured I should do something more with it before it started deteriorating, as all latex puppets eventually do. At this point in time, the puppet is in surprisingly good shape, so I thought I'd give it the starring role it deserved. Now, the making of the ghoul puppet has already been covered in an older blog post, so I'll direct you over to that one instead. You'll find it HERE.
The story I came up with for the film set out to show the horrific world the ghouls live in, but in that world, the ghouls themselves might not be all that bad. In Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath they're quite heroic characters.
To illustrate the weirdness of the ghoul world I added a few other creatures. First up is a transforming sorcerer the ghoul spies in a ruined temple. This puppet was inspired by a previous puppet/sculpture I built for an online game-maker. That character was a woman standing up. The sorcerer has traveled a bit further down the line in his transformation and is lying on the ground. I sculpted the puppet's torso in medium-grade Monster Clay to get the best and most exact detailing I could on the anatomy.
A dental plaster mold was made over the sculpture and tinted latex was added to the mold using sponges and q-tips. The dental plaster catches and keeps all the delicate textures and details, something that the cheaper and more easy to get hobby plaster usually doesn't. A total of four layers of latex were added, in some parts of the mold, it was ladled on thinly to give the rubber skin more flexibility.
The rest of the puppet was built up using a combination of soft polyurethane foam, cotton, yarn, and latex. The tentacles were aluminum wires covered with soft yarn, then dabbed with tinted latex. All moving parts had joints made from bundles of aluminum wires held together with polymorph thermoplastic. The teeth are paper dipped in latex. The red monster eye is a plastic pearl with a blue iris created by grinding down a section with a Dremel tool, then painting the concave surface blue and covering it with UV resin. The normal eye is a tiny doll's eye made from acrylic plastic. I bought a bunch of those from eBay years ago. The arm was gradually built up with thin layers of latex over an aluminum wire armature padded with thin strips of foam. The flower-like growths on the hip are cotton tufts dipped in latex and rolled between my fingers.
As you can see, the back of the puppet isn't much to write home about. Since you'll never see that part of the character I just didn't finish it. You can see the tie-down point coming out of the back. It's a threaded bolt attached to a metal rod using super glue and baking soda to fix it in place.
Journeying further with Yogash we come to the valley of the behemoths, chubby vaguely humanoid giants. We see two of them in the film. I sculpted one with both face and torso, while the other only got a head sculpt. I re-used the flabby body of his friend for him as well when casting latex skins for the puppet bodies.
The puppets are fairly small, about eight inches tall. I forgot to snap photos of their armatures, but they're very simple constructions using aluminum wires and thermoplastic. The foam padding over the armatures was made using foam of various densities depending on where on the body they were placed.
The finished puppets are covered with patches of latex skin cast in skin texture molds, as well as latex casts made from the clay sculptures using plaster molds. They're painted with tinted latex and acrylic colors applied by dipping an old toothbrush in color and spraying it on by dragging my thumb over the bristles. The eyes are mother-of-pearl scrapbooking acrylic domes.
Eventually, Yogash comes to a human city and encounters a dying boy lying on the floor in a pauper's hut. Yogash asks the boy if he'll come with him to become a ghoul himself, or if Yogash should just leave him there to die. This little chap is Hannes Johansson, whom you've seen in a few of my other films by now. I just filmed Hannes lying on the floor in my buddy Andreas Petterson's flat. Hannes lives above it, so he just stopped by on his way home from school.
Probably the toughest shot in the film, the little challenge I try to put into all my projects so I'll grow and learn something new with each effort, is when Yogash leaves the town carrying the boy. It's a combination of Photoshop and After Effects trickery.
To place Hannes in the arms of the puppet I picked him up and twirled around in front of my video camera, to get views from all angles.
Pulling stills from the video footage, I then cut out Hannes in Photoshop and added another photo of the ghoul puppet with its arms in the right position. I animated the puppet walking towards the "camera", cut away the top half of the animated ghoul with the masking tool, and added the Photoshopped image instead. The trick to making this work was to use keyframes at certain points to make the Photoshop image follow the animated lower half of the body. It's a short enough clip that I think I made it work -barely. There is a tracking tool to make one image layer follow the movements of another layer, but I've never been able to make it work satisfactorily.
All the settings of Yogash's world are various stock photographs pulled apart and re-assembled in Photoshop, usually to work in a number of layers in conjunction with stock video effects such as fog or fireflies. I thought this building looked sufficiently crypt-like to work as Yogash's abode. A guy on YouTube called me out on it and explained it's part of an old waterworks complex just s stone's throw from where he lives.
The graveyard around Yogash's crypt is, I believe, an old French graveyard. I had a stock video of a squawking crow shot against a green screen, so I added that to one of the tombstones.
The town itself was a gaggle of photos of the old Mongolian town Sarai-Batu. I thought it had a vaguely Asiatic or eastern look, which would go well with the esthetics of the proto-fantasy tales that Lovecraft and his pals, like Robert E Howard.
All in all, Yogash the Ghoul got a very good reception on YouTube, which delights me. In fact, people have asked for a sequel. They want to see more exploits of Yogash and "ghoul boy", as they've nicknamed Hannes. And I have given that some thought. Hannes is certainly up for it, and the ghoul puppet is still looking well enough. I'd also like to give other characters from the Lovecraft family tree a spin, such as K'baa the serpent, or Goth the Burrower.
