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The head and torso of the baby-napping revenant were actually originally made for the walking sea corpse of my film "The Stalk the Night."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

Nattravn

The story in "Nattravn" is based on local Swedish folklore, but I have added a few bits myself. Briefly, the Nattravn ("the night raven") is a pretty generic folkloric creature. The Nattravn is a supernatural monster belonging to a group of beings in Swedish folklore called "kyrkogrimmar", basically meaning "the grim ones of the church." They are spirits created from animals sacrificed at the location where the church was being built. The Nattravn exits the churchyard and flies about chasing late-night walkers, while other kyrkogrimmar stay around the church. There are a few versions of the Nattravn. Sometimes it looks like a big raven; in my local parts, it looks more like a pterodactyl. I added the part of the shining eye, and its purpose is to hunt the dead who leave their graves. The stories of my local version of the Nattravn say that if you look up when it's passing the moon, you'll see its bones through its skin, and that will turn you very ill. So don't look at that part of the video too many times!

This is an illustration of my local version of the Nattravn I made for a Swedish horror RPG a couple of years ago. I used this as a template for my Nattravn puppet.

The only new piece I sculpted for this puppet was the head, which had a fair amount of details. The sculpture was made from medium-grade Monster Clay and cast in latex from a dental plaster mold.

Here's the armature for the Nattravn, mostly made from 2 mm aluminum wires. You can see that parts of it have been covered with a mix of cotton and latex, soft polyurethane foam, and yarn. Under and above the tail, two bits of 4,76 mm square brass tubes have been attached with blobs of thermoplastic. Into these, a 3,96 mm brass tube attached to a flying rig will be inserted to hold the puppet aloft during flying scenes. After all the animation was finished, the shoulder joint for the right side wing broke. During all my years of stop-motion animation, this was the second time an aluminum wire joint had snapped, so the material is actually quite sturdy. The problem with this particular joint was that it was too short; there wasn't enough length of wire between the two hard sections -the upper portion of the arm, and the shoulder. The aluminum wire gradually became frayed from being bent up and down, and it eventually broke. I'll cut open the latex skin and fix it, but I'll also remember to make longer wire sections for my joints.

The puppet is getting close to being finished. All of it has been covered with patches of tinted latex cast in skin texture molds. The chest area is a latex cast from a mold originally created for the demon puppet in the film "Memory." I have shamefully reused this chest piece a couple of times.

I usually make wing membranes by submerging the wing armature in soft plaster and then adding latex over both the plaster and the armature. But since this puppet was so big, I used another method to save on the plaster. For each section of the wing requiring membranes, I made a simple recreation of the two relevant armature bits holding the latex skin using clay on a flat plaster mold backside. I then painted on latex over clay and plaster using cotton Q-tips. After two layers of latex, the skin could be removed and attached to the wing armature. Having the latex follow the shape of the armature helped place the membrane along the centre line of each armature "finger", making it look very natural (I hope that made sense.) 

I didn't use any tinted latex for the wing membranes, just standard latex straight out of the bottle. I didn't add any textures either. I only placed a few holes in the latex here and there to make the wings look old and worn.

 

The finished Nattravn was painted with tinted latex applied with a sponge, and then touched up with an airbrush and acrylic colors. The wings were given a mottled look and subtle veins with the airbrush. Teeth and claws were made from tissue paper and latex. Tufts of synthetic fur were glued to the body using liquid latex as a bonding agent. The glowing red eye is a piece of UV resin cast in a silicone mold. Red resin pigments were added to what would otherwise have been a clear dome. Radiating lines were etched into a piece of aluminum foil with a pointy sculpting tool. The resin dome was then stuck to the foil using transparent glue. The eye has the effect of glowing when a light is pointed directly at it, due to the reflecting foil at its base.

I did get a few questions on YouTube about this shot, where the puppet passes in front of the full moon and becomes transparent. Here follows a description of how that shot was made.

When I animated the puppet flapping its wings, I held off a few seconds, just having the creature glide through the air. I grabbed a screenshot of a frame where the puppet is still, and edited it in Photoshop. I drew a black skeleton on the image and removed the green background I used during animation. Since the puppet remains still during animation, attached to the flying rig, I have to keyframe the monster flying across the night sky in After Effects. Using the animation footage as a parent layer, I attached the skeleton image to it. The reason you don't see the skeleton layer until it passes the moon is that I added a mask on the layer following the shape of the moon. The skeleton layer is invisible outside of that mask.

Now over to the "gast", what would be called a revenant in English. Basically, it is a walking corpse, but like the vampire, it also has ghostly characteristics. The Swedish revenant is an all-around useful being for when telling stories about the dead returning. They behave like spirits, but also have a tangible quality, which makes them creepier than a regular ghost. 

From the start, I knew that I needed the revenant in two scales; One big enough to allow for a decent amount of details, and one for when it's grabbed by the Nattravn. I sculpted two heads with a torso in Monster Clay.

I also sculpted two sets of feet, which you hardly see in the finished film. All the pieces were awkwardly clumped together on a slab of clay for the making of the mold. Dental plaster was applied over the clay.

From that plaster mold, a latex duplicate of my sculpture was cast. A 1,5 mm aluminum wire controls the jaw. Thermoplastic holds the wire in place inside the head and also adds a bit of support for the chest. 

2 mm aluminum wires folded up (so, really 4 mm) make up the armatures in arms and legs. The wires are covered with cotton and tissue paper soaked in latex. 4 mm threaded nuts are placed in the feet as tie-downs. 

All parts are held together with blobs of thermoplastic. The next step is to cover the neck and torso parts of the armature with foam padding.

The shroud for each puppet is made from kitchen tissue paper dabbed with latex. The bandage holding the jaw shut is also made from the same materials, but also has a 1 mm aluminum wire running through it, so I can animate it flapping about when the revenant removes it. There really was no need to sculpt the whole torso for these puppets, but when I started planning the film, I hadn't decided how much of the revenant's body I'd show. The finished puppets are painted with tinted latex and detailed with acrylic airbrush colors. Crepe hair (sheep's wool) is used for the head, and plastic pearls for the eyes.

I wanted threads laying like webbing over holes in the shroud, but I found that using real string wasn't doing the trick, and would take far too long to piece together.

I resorted to using "chunks o´ flesh", an old makeup FX trick used to create bits of fleshy viscera. Here's how you make it: Tint your latex in any desired color and use a bit of polyurethane foam to sponge out the latex over a slick surface. I used a plastic tray. A hairdryer speeds up the drying process. When the latex is dry, you dust it down with talcum powder or corn starch. Then you simply tear up sections of the latex using your fingernails. The latex will bunch up into web-like organic textures with elastic qualities. You can then drape the webbed latex over your puppet, using liquid latex as a bonding agent at points here and there, to keep the texture hanging on, but at the same time allowing it to move and stretch when the puppet is animated. I also used chunks o´ flesh for the frills around the edges of the shroud's arms.

When animating the Nattravn carrying away the revenant, I wanted a shot from below. To achieve this, I rigged the Nattravn puppet to basically sit straight up in front of my animation green screen. In After Effects, I then animated a night sky rolling overhead and curving slightly, the way it would if you were standing looking up at something and trying to follow it by turning your head.

The cross on the church steeple is similar to crosses seen atop some older Swedish churches. It's actually a crucifix I got from a local iron smelting business. They had cast a few things in old molds and were throwing away castings with imperfections in them. I picked up a crucifix and some other bits and bobs. After having cleaned up the crucifix with files and sanding paper, I created a silicone mold over it, into which I could then cast a resin copy.

I drilled a hole into the bottom end of the crucifix and attached a threaded 4 mm metal rod using super glue. The crucifix was then secured to my animation stage like any other puppet, using a wing not from the underside.

I knew that the Nattravn's toes wouldn't be strong enough to hold up the puppet while it was sitting on the cross, so I kept the flying rig arm attached to the puppet.

The backgrounds are a mix of AI images rendered in Adobe Firefly and photos of real locations. For example, the image above has a church from the south of Sweden mixed with bits from an AI graveyard, and a real 18th-century Swedish churchyard. It's all mixed together in Photoshop.

This stock photo of a spruce forest has a sky that contrasts with the dark trees. In After Effects, I added this to a layer of a night sky, with the animated Nattravn sandwiched in between. Changing the layer value to "Multiply" made the sky transparent and allowed the Nattravn to appear from behind the tree tops.

This little film was my contribution to the YouTube Halloween ambience. I'm thinking of making more videos on the subject of folklore, some of them local stories. There are quite a few good ones to pick from!