A Midnight Visitor

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The head and torso of the baby-napping revenant were actually originally made for the walking sea corpse of my film "The Stalk the Night."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. 

For the puppet crawling, I decided to try a different approach. I turned the animation stage on its side, leaning one end on the green background, and the other end was placed on a pedestal with drawers (containing cables, lights, microphones, etc) and held secure by placing a couple of handlebars on the legs of the stage.

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.

Doctor Who Taran Wood Beast

I love classic Doctor Who, and I especially love its monsters. There are many celebrated creatures from the golden age of the TV show, but not all of them are met with love.

Take this shaggy fellow, for example. This is the dreaded Taran wood beast, encountered by Mary Tamm's time lady Romana on the planet Tara. It rears its ugly head in the very first episode of the serial "The Androids of Tara" (1978), itself a part of the longer story cycle "The Key to Time".

This might be a face only a mother can love, for most Who fans certainly don't. Even the serial's director Michael Hayes hated the damn thing, and cringes audibly when it appears during his DVD commentary to the episode. I, however, love this goofy-looking monster and I think it has been given an unjustifiably large amount of badmouthing.

This opinion has now resulted in me making my own doll of the critter, just for the fun of it. Sometimes when I work on a puppet project that drags on and is in some ways taxing, I take a break and relax by -making another puppet.

This doll is really no different from my usual stop-motion puppets, except that it isn't built for animation (though it can certainly be used for that). So, there are no tie-down bolts in its feet, and the hands, feet and head are cast in plastic, and therefore completely stiff. I started with making chavant clay sculptures for these parts of the body.

The sculptures were pressed down onto chavant bases, and encircled with clay walls. DragonSkin FX was poured into each confinement, and tinted SmoothCast 325 poured into the finished silicone molds.

As you can probably see this is my standard aluminum wire armature, held together at the vital sections with Friendly Plastic. The head was cast in a bright orange and the hands and feet in a blue-grey hue. The hands and feet were cast solid, but using a Dremel tool I quickly dug out deep furrows where I could stick the aluminum wires. Quick-setting epoxy holds the wires in place.

I used an ordinary hobby brush to apply washes of airbrush colors, adding depth and skin patterns onto the plastic cast. As you can see, the bottom part of the teeth are dark brown. This is because air got trapped in the silicone mold during the casting, and the bottom of the fangs were missing from the casting. Heavy duty sculpting epoxy was used to finish the fangs.

The body of the doll was wrapped in thin polyurethane foam to build up bulk, and yet have it retain great flexibility around the armature.

I used a cheap but nice-looking fake fur to cover up the doll's body. A textile pattern pencil is used to draw an outline around the doll.

The basic wood beast fur cover pattern -very simple as you see. I made two of these, one for the back, and one for the front.

Flexible and durable contact cement joined the body with the fur. Starting with the back, I then added glue to the foam padding of the doll's front side.

Adding the two halves of the fur covering was really easy. I squeezed out some glue along the joins, and simply pressed the fur tightly around them.

The wood beast has a short mane around its head, and a rather 1980's synthpop-looking fringe hanging over his face. A small piece of longer fake fur was added and "styled."

So, here's the finished doll or puppet -I don't really know what the correct term for such a project would be.

He found his home on one of my book shelves, next to a Who monster colleague, and a stack of Doctor Who Target books.

I actually made a DeviantArt fan illustration the other year, showing the moment when Romana is ambushed by the little monster, and shortly before she is rescued by the villainous, but swashbuckling count Grendel. Is there any longer any doubt that I'm a fan of this curious beastie?

But what was the fate of the actual wood beast? Well, it was almost sold at a Who memorabilia auction a few years ago, but unfortunately nobody wanted the now rather ratty-looking suit, so it went back to its original owners.

Green Man Mask

Instead of doing stuff I had originally planned to do this past weekend, I took a vacation from my ever-consuming film projects and made something completely different. I like the image of the Celtic Green Man or Jack-In-the-Green; The human face with leaves for hair and beard. It's a powerful but cheerful symbolic image of the symbiosis between nature and man, or at least it's a reminder that we should be connected to nature.

I thought a Green Man mask would look just right on the staircase wall in my house, so I sculpted one in Chavant clay on top of a plaster cast of a friend's face.

When the sculpture was good enough for me I built a clay wall around it and poured in DragonSkin Q silicone. The silicone was slushed around over the sculpture until it set (in about seven minutes)

I applied some more silicone, with added thickener, to cover all areas properly. I tinted the new layer green so I'd see exactly where I'd put it.

I put a reinforcing plaster shell over the silicone. This shell created a "cradle" to put the silicone mold into, making sure it maintains its shape while the casting process is going on.

Here's the first-ever casting of my Green Man mask in SmoothCast 325 plastic.

And after some clean-up and acrylic airbrush painting it looks like this. Those are my eyes peering through the mask. It was a quick, fun thing to do, although I really should've spent this weekend doing some puppet work instead.