So, I'm mulling around some ideas in my head for modeling stuff, and the key theme to them is that they need to be really creepy/scary/awesome. This has lead me to wonder, what makes something scary?

As best I can tell, scary things include:

- Human-like things you can't empathize with. Not being able to see someone's emotions on their face is deeply unsettling to the psyche. It's why bad guys wear masks.

- Abominations. Human brains like to have things set in their ways, so when they see something they consider unnatural, it's deeply disturbing. This includes good things twisted to being bad (like clowns), or regular, mundane things being different and horrifying (Oh, that's just a dog. No, wait! It's a werewolf!).

- Things unknown. This is sort of like the first one, where human beings like to know what's going on at all times. When they don't, it's scary. Have you ever swum deep out in the ocean? There's thousands of feet of inky blackness that you're floating on with billions of creatures swimming right below you. Terrifying.

What I need here is some advice from designers and psychologists. I want to make models that are scary, or at least unsettling and disturbing.

So what should I do?

(note: this would also be a good time to link to pictures of things you consider scary)

Make it female.

Soladrin wrote:Make it female.

+1


Twist it, in no way in any reality could it exist, humans I believe are naturally repulsed by this, or a deformed warped human, like many horror games. Although making a 'scary' mini is tricky.

What about these deamons from the films constantine.

http://gracelimsm.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/demons-3.jpg

They have the tops of their heads missing, below the eye, so they give off no emotion and shouldn't be able to live with out a brain.

The only miniature i find remotely frightening is the New hellpit abomination. This is mainly disgust, the folds of flesh are obscene espeicially with the piebald cow paint scheme. Your first point as well as discussing the 'Faceless' idea also seems to be trying to articulate the philosophical concept of the 'Uncanny valley' or 'Similacra' unfortunatley alot of this is conveyed through movement (why puppets/marrionettes are often 'horrified' in pop culture). Obviously movement is something you cant really convey in static unless you are one of the great masters. Something i personally find VERY frightening is 'the face in the bed sheet' floating veils hiding something sinister that wold otherwise be completely invisible.

This is the scariest miniature I could find

Small changes. You've mentioned it already, but I always think it's pretty important not to overdo it (see: every mutant GW has ever made). Something like a human face with blank space where his eyes should be can be terrifying. Replace the whole head with something grotesque, and you lose the 'wrongness' - it just looks like a monster, rather than something that could be human. Plus it combines points 1 and 2 that you made, so bonus there!

Like Perkustin said though, a lot of the 'uncanny valley' problem is in movement and facial expression, which will be very hard to convey at 28mm

Hope that's helpful!

Hmm, those constantine demons are pretty cool.

I should also note that I've been thinking about this through the eyes of the Chaos gods. They all try to be scary, but...

Khorne has angry dudes with spikes and glowey eyes and skulls. They pass on the unempathetic, and slightly do abomination (who collects skulls anyways?), but they're very known. They have big weapons, and they're trying to kill you. Got it.

Slaanesh is good for the riotous, perverse, abomination factor, as even the bright pink color scheme is offensive to the eyes. There's also a bit of unknown, but, in the end, they're just a bunch of crazy partiers. I've seen nearly as crazy at frat parties. Admittedly, that's part of the allure of slaanesh, which means the meme is very well done, but it's not exactly scary

Nurgle is also really good, with the rotting abomination factor. Once human, now putrid, and, let's be honest, disease is scary. The problem with nurgle stuff is that it doesnt' kill off empathy all the way. While I may be instinctively freightened of sick people, it also makes me feel bad for them. Done wrong, nurgle armies look to me like my troops should be rushing up to them with glasses of orange juice and pillows...

Tzeench is all about the unknown, which it obviously pulls off well, but the problem is that there isn't anything to anchor it to reality. It's not perverting anything, it's just making stuff up. As such, most tzeench stuff doesn't come across as any scarier to me than other made-up stuff like unicorns or hobbits.

Also, to prime the pump a little more, here are some pictures I found.















... and such. The problem is this is about as good as I can do with my limited google fu.

Oooh, and see anything by francis bacon for disturbing and distorted human forms:

Thats the problem with Google. Unless you know exactly what you want, you never really get anything.

It seems your into the twisted reality thing rather than something completely unknown, What about an escaped mental patient, gone on a rampage, but he floats of his own free will and attacks with mutated limbs that have burst from his straight jacket but his real limbs are still restrained. and have him completely emotion less, and his eyes have gone leaving just empty sockets.

I know I wouldn't hang around to chat with him...

That skulls is gorgeous.

Oooh, and the necromorphs from "dead space" - recognisably human, but horribly distorted. Though again, a lot of that was in the way they moved and the sounds they made :/

So when are the scary pictures coming?

Lack of eyes is always good.

Or to many eyes/oversized eyes.

do a guy in a lawsuit with his briefcase and some pens in his blazer...and a cheery smile on his face...with just that bit more of a smile thats beyond the comfort line...would creep me out to no end...

same is with cheery dentists...

vik

I like this guy from Jacob's Ladder

CrazyMez wrote:What about these deamons from the films constantine.

http://gracelimsm.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/demons-3.jpg

They have the tops of their heads missing, below the eye, so they give off no emotion and shouldn't be able to live with out a brain.

those things reminded me of Eddie on Seventh Son of a Seventh Son album cover

Yeah, that's some creepy stuff.

Head crabs are always scary:



But interestingly enough, their nearby cousins, the brain slugs, are not:



Because that's the difficult thing with this all. Both horror and comedy only work well when the play off the unexpected.

Also, I'd like to add in that uniformity eliminates individuality, and thus reduces empathy, which is why ranks of soldiers are scary:

I remember reading Danse Macabre by Stephen King a long, long time ago. He discussed the fact that what's in the imagination is scary, but when fully visualised in the flesh it's not as scary as was imagined in the first place. So when you watch a movie and something is making a noise in the attic you can be scared of what it is, but when you see what's making the noise it's never as scary as what you imagined.

A good example for me is the works of HP Lovecraft. The creatures he describes are disgusting because they are unnatural, but every depiction I've ever seen of them hasn't lived up to heavy sense of dread in the descriptions.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think I could ever find a miniature scary. Grotesque, definitely, but never scary. Still, I wish you luck, if you manage it I'll buy one!

Also, I'd like to add in that uniformity eliminates individuality, and thus reduces empathy, which is why ranks of soldiers are scary:

also it is deeply built in us that we know the outcome of such massed forces...we know that harm is coming our way...
therefore we fear such massed ranks...

vik

Hrmmm. Well, in my opinion, I find something scarier all the more if you can see what it 'used to be'. In that sense, why not something along the lines of a homunculus? you know, a kind of hideous disfigured child or some such?

Or... hills have eyes muties were a bit scary, maybe some basis off them?

What lovecraft fails at is creating perspective, he attempts the "fear is in your mind" angle but just goes into "it is so damn scary you cannot even understand how scary it is" which fails to provoke fear in me.

Dead space has some clever uses of music to suggest an encounter when there really isn't one to build your paranoia but ultimately fails to make the encounters themselves scary enough partially due to you just dying and trying again and partially because you kill so many necromorphs by the end of the game.

Also, I've got to put a plug in for LoTR. They did a pretty good job

Horror and comedy are interchangable IMO.

if in doubt, copy H.R Giger or silent hill

I think Natorum hit the nail on the head as far as the delineation between scary and grotesque. To get scary, the minis would have to look so realistic that you'd think they could come alive and you wouldn't be able to go to bed for fear that 3000 pts of wrongness could be waiting for you under the covers. So I suppose I'll mostly be addressing the grotesque.

Distorted proportions are definitely good for the scary effect though. The dead space pictures are certainly effective. One of the big problems here though is that it's hard to make a mini stand out as distorted when the proportions on everything else are so far out of whack.

As far as the hellpit abomination goes, there's something about the few patches that have rotten through and hang off the rest of the model that really squick me out. The thought of flesh sloughing off an otherwise living model puts it past the effectiveness of orange juice and pillows. But if you go too far you just have zombies, and they're hardly scary anymore.

Things working in ways they shouldn't are scary. A few things I considered in an aborted attempt at my own hellpit abomination were things like tearing muscles and bones out of their usual alignments and tying/pinning/sewing them back together in unnatural way beyond just combining different animals together. For instance, tearing ribs out of the chest and pinning muscles to them to turn them into primitive legs. That one always seemed to get some good reactions. Bandaged, bleeding eye sockets with eerie glows coming out of them. Things like that, and there are countless examples in gads of horror stories and movies and whatnot out there. Extra points for destroying empathy if the affected is responding in an entirely unnatural way to all this. Huge creepy cheshire cat smiles +50. Like with zombies though, keep it in moderation or you end up with OTT goresplosion that's laughable.

One of the problems with the huge ranks of faceless soldiers is that the tabletop is already saturated with them. Hell, GW even uses them as the main "protagonists," as that's really what the space marines are, as well as half of the guard armies. To pull off a creepy vibe, you'd have to make some, if not all, soldiers slightly "wrong," but as you said before you need to make it unexpected or else you're just another chaos army. You might could try to do this entirely with painting-a high-contrast, largely monochromatic color scheme might work well for this, maybe? Or maybe I'm just thinking that because of the black and white pictures.

Anyway, hope that my stream-of-consciousness thought-vomit at least gives you some stuff to think about. Does this mean you decided to start a chaos army afterall? Also- props for showing some of your own troops as an example

--I've taken a while writing this, and I don't feel like going back to try to shoehorn it in--

The ringwraiths are good because they manage to throw the unknown at you in a way that regular ol' face masks don't. The black abyss that is a nazgul's face could really be hiding anything.

clowns and dolls....arhh and the news

The beasties from The Thing are pretty scary, but that might just be from their initial unexpectedness (especially the damn chest mouth thing!).

Flinty wrote:The beasties from The Thing are pretty scary, but that might just be from their initial unexpectedness (especially the damn chest mouth thing!).

No kidding that scared the crap out of me the first time. The whole movie gives me goosebumps still whenever i watch it.

But i think some of the best scary "stuff" in general can be when things are noticeably off without being "hurr huge monster".

The zombies from resident evil. I couldn't find any pictures, but when you pop off a head, every now and then a creep jaw like thing with tentacles will pop out from the next and the damn thing will still chase you. (Esp. in 4)

Also, distorted limbs are a must. Like the creepy old demon from the unborn -

Also, no idea where this is from but its creepy as all hell

This Artist, Keith Thompson, also has some creepy images, browse the whole website

Lol, SO MANY EDITS

Also, the movie Virus. Its a really bad movie but the biobots are freaking creepy.
In one scene, they though they killed one and it was on a table for observation then some big waves hit and everyone fell to the ground. One fell next to the bots body and she looks at and its head rips apart and a skull with creepy mechanical teeth pop out.

I would say something along the lines of this:

A child with blank eyes, clutching a bloody teddy bear and smiling. Perhaps a knife near her.

Buffalo heads on the wall.

Deformities, abnormalities, grotesque mutated proportions. These things scare me more than zombies and Dead Space necro things.

I'm going to cast a vote for upside down heads.

Also, I found this kinda funny

corpsesarefun wrote:What lovecraft fails at is creating perspective, he attempts the "fear is in your mind" angle but just goes into "it is so damn scary you cannot even understand how scary it is" which fails to provoke fear in me.

I think this is the kind of thing where we're seeing part of the problem in creating scary. What works on me, doesn't work on corpsesarefun, we find different things unnerving. I find spiders scary but have no problem with snakes. Yet if you did the best job in the world on creating a scary spider miniature it wouldn't scare me.

This is a fascinating thread, looking forward to seeing what people are coming up with.

I'm not sure if its scary, but it creeps the hell out of me. In Once Upon A Time In Mexico, Johnny Depp with with eyes missing. Perhaps its the fact that he still functions well with no eyes...

I find this guy quite creepy (from pan's labyrinth)

powerslave84 wrote:

Deformities, abnormalities, grotesque mutated proportions. These things scare me more than zombies and Dead Space necro things.

Definitely creeped me out the most. Real photos, old photos of distorted/ghostly things is what gets me the most.

How adout Justin Beiber?

I'm suprised you've not done it before, Zombie Guard! they'd be a piece of cake with your GS skill.


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bagley wrote:I find this guy quite creepy (from pan's labyrinth)

And +1 to this too!

Look at Giger, Silent Hill, The Pale man, The Slender Man, Dead Space, and the bastards from Amnesia.
They are creepy because they were human but aren't now, or are nearly human but not quite, or aren't human now but will be soon.

The main bad guy/girl in the 'The Grudge" was terrifying, even though it was basically just a dirty looking human. One of the secondary character that got killed, came back as a ghoul normally looking except her bottom jaw was ripped off. Very creepy looking.

To me that's way scarer that say the aliens from 'Aliens'.

I know other people have already mentioned it, but some of the Silent Hill games have great examples of near-human baddies:

Sometimes malevelont intelligence can add to the scaryness as well. When I saw Return of the Jedi in a theatre (probably too young - what was my mother thinking?), I didn't have nightmares about the Emporer just because he was a scary looking dude, and his face was half hidden half the time, and he shot lightning bolts from his hands. No, it was the laughter, the glee, and most of all the look in his eyes as he gives Skywalker shock therapy that says he knows exactly what he's doing when he's coming to get you (endlessly through shopping malls in your sleep )

I think it was a mistake for me to look at these pics right before I'm going to bed :(

One of the simplest ways to make something scarry is to take away its eyes, and I don't me hollow them out or simplly cover them up,I mean remove them entirely, make it like they were never even there.
I do this with my 'Nids whenever possible.

having read the whole thread through before yesterdays going to sleep i can asure you that i have sleeped well and thus we haven´t reached a point of scaryness yet...

vik

Children are scary... especially creepy little daemon girls...

A Black Ram wrote:Buffalo heads on the wall.

Dont make me call up Brutus.


Just put Barbie doll heads on your tanks and that should do it.

When converting my Abaddon I tried to make him scarier by going for a more vampire look. I pretty much tried to make him look like Raziel. He looks awesome now.

It's very hard to convey genuine horror in miniature form. Your principles are all sound descriptions of what frightens people, but when you're talking 30mm scales it's very hard to get that across. There are so many mutations and distortions and monsters out there that to be honest I'm a bit numb to them. That, and a lot of movie/video game monsters are scarier because elements to them other than their visual design: the way they move, the way they sound, the inability to ever get a clear look at them (so the viewer's imagination fills in the details better than the designer ever could). You can't really achieve that in miniature form.

I think subtlety is really more effective. Honestly I can only think of one miniature that I would even remotely call scary- the Wet Nurse mini- no, not the boobie-covered part of it. The nude women surrounding it. Those women I thought conveyed genuine horror, especially the kneeling figure. When we first see her from behind we see a shapely nude female figure and it conjures to mind all of the titillating fantasy slave women we've all come to expect from the genre, then when we finally get to see her from the front we are immediately drawn to her slack jaw and dead expression.

To me that conveys everything the overall wetnurse model is all about. Something about her has been drained and used, and she is empty now. Like all of the women around her, she is helpless. But while some men can enjoy exploring power and domination with submissive women (see for example, slave Leia) this wetnurse victim is so hopeless as to be repulsive, and to me instead conjurs to mind a greater overall slavery that humans must be experiencing in that world.

And that's all ideas I've pulled out of my from looking at the model. But that's how horror works. To quote the Charismatic Stallion: "all a good horror game needs to do is hand you a piece of sandpaper and shout encouragement as you vigorously massage your own undercarriage". That's how I feel about horror in general. Confrontations with the unknown are always scarier to me than some guy with tusks coming out his eyes for some reason.

I would agree with JOHIRA - less is usually more in horror. Most of the best horror movies don't show monsters and things; it is all in the atmosphere and with subtle wrongness (probably why I find evil children so scary is that they are often portrayed as relatively normal looking with a hint of wrongness about them).

It is that subtle difference, and the mind's inner workings getting knocked off course by it that makes something truly scary.

None of these things you have posted so far don't even creep me out.

cbosw5 wrote:None of these things you have posted so far don't even creep me out.

So, why don't you show us how big your internet willy is by posting something you find scary and cause us all to loose our minds in terror?

thats scary!!!

It's very tricky to make models look scary. Allow me to explain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_Valley



A person's response to a human or human like object is shown in the graph above. People respond positively to other people, or to abstractions of people like cartoons or stuffed animals. The Uncanny Valley itself however refers to the huge dip in response just before actual humans; a corpse, zombie or human-like monster (like have been posted all over this topic) cause a very negative response, despite superficially being very close to human.

The issue then, is that to make things scary, you need to make it fall in the uncanny valley. The problem is that a model of a human is unlikely to achieve a response equal to a human anyway, instead coming closer to the stuffed toy on the diagram, so reducing its humanness will just move it further to the left of the diagram, but not into the uncanny valley.

I reckon the best bet is to spend time getting a very human-like model first. Then work on subtly de-humanising it. It's no use de-humanising something which isn't close enough to human anyway.

Stuffed toys, you say?

Found on the dakka gallery, by a guy named skrulnik. Amazing painting!

cbosw5 wrote:None of these things you have posted so far don't even creep me out.

Who are you trying to impress? At least post something you DO find scary to help out the OP...

Of course, the chattering adds to the scariness, and you wouldn't be able to get that on a mini... Still... *shudder*

SilverMK2 wrote:

cbosw5 wrote:
None of these things you have posted so far don't even creep me out.

So, why don't you show us how big your internet willy is by posting something you find scary and cause us all to loose our minds in terror?

Slight problem there i can't really think of anything that scares me.

Scarper wrote:

cbosw5 wrote:
None of these things you have posted so far don't even creep me out.

Who are you trying to impress? At least post something you DO find scary to help out the OP...

I am not trying to impress anyone. I have actually been looking for something that does scare me.


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I haven't been able to find a image that scares me but i did find one that reckon is creepy.
Here is the link. http://thepirata.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/scary_dolls07.jpg
Sorry i don't know how to upload pics.

Well, I wrote a long essay for my bachelor of film arts on the subject of monsters. Do you speak by any chance German?

To keep things short:

Monsters need to be anthropomorphous, you have to be able to relate to it. A shapeless blob of slime or a huge rock isn't half as terrifying as some twisted version of a person or animal. People I've asked fear very different things and the monsters they find the most terrifying depended on when they were born. Some found King Kong be a source of nightmares, others the xenomorph - and Pennywise the clown was named most often. Personally, I believe that the most horror comes from something that is sickly looking and has a lot of asymmetries but still remains a vaguely human shape. Kinda like the Fly (in the 86 remake by Kronenberg) - that thing was nowhere near a fly but rather a sickly looking mutant.

As for the shapes.... Humane looking ones are best. Add in the typical source of fears like old-fashioned fangs and claws (these are fears we have from our time as little monkeys ) and you got something.. something classic. But we all know the old concepts like Vampires already. So you need to distort it even more to make it terrifying. Personally, I'd make something that has a sickly huge head and reminded you of a fetus. It's one of those lines that wasn't crossed yet truly. Look at necropmorphs, the monsters from Silent Hill, The Thing (John Carpenter), Hans-Ruedi Giger (!!!!!! Xenomorph), the Fly, stuff like that for inspiration. And for the twitching and inspiration behind Silent Hill watch Jacob's Ladder.

The Xenomorph was hugely successful because it was a kick-ass design, it looked good. But what made it a perfect design was the fact that it reminded you of things. In this case sexual subtones. The xenomorph was a predator and violator and the first and best alien film had a lot of rape subtones going on (like the X kinda raping Cartwright). The facehugger had a vagina for a mouth, the alien designs a long penis shape. Freud would've been proud.

Anyways, the part that is most terrifying about monster movies is the part where you haven't seen the creature. Once you know what's going on, it's only half as creepy. Look at Dead Space. The first part is pretty scary, after that it's not very scary anymore at all. That's why people should stop explaining every little detail from horror stories.

It's not about looks that are scary, it's the atmosphere. Locations or things that make you think " need to get away from this thing" or "this thing is going to kill me" that are truly scary IMO (silent hill does an amazing job of doing this)

The Ghoma wrote:It's not about looks that are scary, it's the atmosphere. Locations or things that make you think " need to get away from this thing" or "this thing is going to kill me" that are truly scary IMO (silent hill does an amazing job of doing this)

Very much agreed but in the case of minis, that atmosphere is irrelevant for the most part. Now for movies and books, it's way more important than what the monster looks like.

Things that are creepy are things that really shouldn't be and if they caught up with you they wouldn't kill you quick. Stuff like walking babies with scythe arms, crawling little monsters, hot girls with no skin on there backs, arachnid attachments to humans, drill fingers.....

Bat Manuel wrote:Things that are creepy are things that really shouldn't be and if they caught up with you they wouldn't kill you quick. Stuff like walking babies with scythe arms, crawling little monsters, hot girls with no skin on there backs, arachnid attachments to humans, drill fingers.....

Have you checked out any of the Malifaux stuff?

I was always haunted by just pale eyes, its as much psychological then just making them bloody. So to add more cents to the pile, I would suggest doing something twisted; you know have a chaos space marine holding childs severed leg, or head. After all the only movies I ever get scared from are satanic movies, and twisted movies ie, silence of the lambs. I hope I added at least 2 cents.

Flinty wrote:The beasties from The Thing are pretty scary, but that might just be from their initial unexpectedness (especially the damn chest mouth thing!).

Oh jesus, the part where the guys ribcage bites off the other guys hands is the single thing in any media to this day that has disturbed me and made me feel physically sick with disgust.

corpsesarefun wrote:

Flinty wrote:The beasties from The Thing are pretty scary, but that might just be from their initial unexpectedness (especially the damn chest mouth thing!).

Oh jesus, the part where the guys ribcage bites off the other guys hands is the single thing in any media to this day that has disturbed me and made me feel physically sick with disgust.

Barfing dinosaur in jurasic park 1... thing gave me nightmares for 3 months. I was 6.

The monster for Alien is probably the scariest monster in cinima IMO. My father and i watched when when i was 12 and i literly did not go in my basement for a whole year. Its because it has the mystery of being unkown on top of the fact that when you finaly get a good look at it, it just has this smooth emotionless dome with a mouth instead of a face..... Plus it lays eggs in your stomache.

We already have xenomorphs in warhammer, they are called Tyranids xD

Soladrin wrote:We already have xenomorphs in warhammer, they are called Tyranids xD

speaking of which, one of my friends who plays nids painted them dark dark blue and black just to skrew with me because they do look so much like the xenomorphs

Personally, as a horror infused fantasy as well as straight up horror writer, there are many things that I like to use and manipulate to freak readers out. Mostly, it's already been said, but something mostly human with something horribly, horribly wrong is downright terrifying. I also like to take other things that are familiar; like dogs, cats, household layouts, trees, etc; and distort/mess with them to make them disturbing. Something I use often is the concept of a great dog or wolf with piercing eyes and seems to be made entirely of living, moving, pulsating shadows. It never attacks, just follows people, makes its presence known to really get under their skin. A nice thing I find, to make humanoids creepy is to remove/horribly enlarge eyes or a mouth (think about it, a man with blank eyes whose mouth opens up to both sides of his face), or eyes/mouth sewn shut. Maybe even combine them, my favorite is to have the eyes sewn shut with an impossibly large mouth.

Maybe it's worth mentioning, my freakiest creation yet (mostly because he's mostly left to the imagination) is a horribly mangled corpse (or is it corpses?) that is alive, guts hanging out, face gone, little skin, constantly dripping blood/organs. Yes, I'm fethed up.

Two odd things that I find slightly creepy.

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.darkrealmfox.com/film_reviews/wp-content/images/pandorum_pics/pandorum_18.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.darkrealmfox.com/film_reviews/2010/06/16/blu-ray-screencaps-pandorum/&usg=__02T4t-X3yML9HnRb968isJth0Xs=&h=1080&w=1920&sz=925&hl=en&start=66&zoom=1&tbnid=JDHdleC7y6jTtM:&tbnh=114&tbnw=203&ei=PYk4Tav_BsOclgexprH-Bg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpandorum%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1280%26bih%3D844%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C2280&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=939&vpy=392&dur=2037&hovh=168&hovw=300&tx=140&ty=85&oei=FYk4TcWWHcOclgfnl-zcBg&esq=4&page=4&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:14,s:66&biw=1280&bih=844[/img]

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_zswvgN3NvdY/TQLfAUGsQuI/AAAAAAAADSw/P0lwIzlJRNY/s1600/pandorum_15.png&imgrefurl=http://horrorthon.blogspot.com/2010/12/pandorum.html&usg=__UIz_B6Y1nOGHuj4_PoapDVuRwro=&h=900&w=1600&sz=1760&hl=en&start=33&zoom=1&tbnid=p8K6PjsidstRFM:&tbnh=162&tbnw=228&ei=wYk4TbDiA4OclgeMyYzUBg&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpandorum%2Bmonster%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1280%26bih%3D844%26tbs%3Disch:10%2C855&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=390&vpy=529&dur=673&hovh=168&hovw=300&tx=201&ty=69&oei=u4k4TfLaGYLGlQex0PHLBg&esq=2&page=2&ndsp=20&ved=1t:429,r:16,s:33&biw=1280&bih=844

This last one kind of gets me because I have a strange almost phobia of bears. Why? No idea, but they terrify me more than any fictitious monster/demon/abomination ever could.

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/15810/preview&imgrefurl=http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/15810&usg=__pvX0qpUtEx7GLRqftd2j0wMdTAU=&h=520&w=640&sz=34&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=qNFIZZUF8LeEBM:&tbnh=154&tbnw=210&ei=oIs4TciaMMb_lgeVyo3-Bg&prev=/images%3Fq%3DBear%2Bdemon%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1280%26bih%3D844%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=541&vpy=306&dur=963&hovh=202&hovw=249&tx=139&ty=93&oei=dos4Tf_pAoH6lweclO3lBg&esq=12&page=1&ndsp=26&ved=1t:429,r:9,s:0

Edit: The Iron Maiden from Resident Evil 4 was a bit creepy too.

Id deffo say anyhting that came out of the hellraiser films! also anything from in the night garden kids show... holy sh*t it freaked me out the 1st time i watched it with my daughter... you thought the teletubies were bad!!!!

Liam

The perversion of the normal (gonna spoiler it, cause it scared me at least )



Also, just conveying that something is unstoppable/unkillable can be pretty scary; just knowing that you have no power whatsoever against it.

S_P

Not being a shrink or a designer of any kind, i can only speak of own experience;

What i feel revokes the most disgust in me is seeing something humane turned bad - like SUPER bad. If you can resemble it with a human, you create a foundation, i think, that makes the mind want it to be good and righteous. If it has human shape, we've given the viewer a basic understanding of what it is. After we've done that, we're free to make it FUBAR (F**ked up beyond all recognition).

On the other hand, if you give it the appearence of something supernatural or beastlike, it loses that foundation - the psyche (i think) figures, that this is something evil or beastlike, and adding gore, torn up bodies etc. is no more frightening than watching a pack of Lions feast on a downed Gazelle.

I personally feel alot more frightened by humans that are capable of evil, than i feel about a creature (fiction or not) that kills out of instinct. The difference is the choice, and hence why it's frightening, 'cause; Here's a person, that's evil... He's intelligent, and his basic instinct isn't about carrying out evil deeds - it's about survival and adaption. What a mass murderer does is killing/maiming/shreading/cutting up people out of lust - not a survival instinct, and therefore unspoken questions arises: "how is this person able to do that? He's just like me!!!".

Most of all, what we fear is what we don't understand. So my suggestion is: Make it resemble a human, but make it do evil deeds out of lust.

Billinator wrote:Not being a shrink or a designer of any kind, i can only speak of own experience;

What i feel revokes the most disgust in me is seeing something humane turned bad - like SUPER bad. If you can resemble it with a human, you create a foundation, i think, that makes the mind want it to be good and righteous. If it has human shape, we've given the viewer a basic understanding of what it is. After we've done that, we're free to make it FUBAR (F**ked up beyond all recognition).

On the other hand, if you give it the appearence of something supernatural or beastlike, it loses that foundation - the psyche (i think) figures, that this is something evil or beastlike, and adding gore, torn up bodies etc. is no more frightening than watching a pack of Lions feast on a downed Gazelle.

This is an excellent point.

And I like the OP so much that I'm going to indulge in another wall of text here. And this may get a bit adult. Sorry.

The problem with the Chaos Gods in WFB/40K is that once you're confined to a battlefield miniature a lot of the things that could convey the horror of their evil are not available. When the good guys have guys in 8ft tall armour carrying chainsaw-swords and mini rocket pistols led by chaplains with skull masks, it's kinda hard to say the bad guys are scary for doing the exact same thing, except their 8 ft tall armour has horns on it. And if you're playing a miniature war game, then it stands to reason that you're already somewhat aware of what warfare is like and are not exactly sensitive to the genuine horrors of war. So that miniature of a barbarian cheiftan who wants to cut off the heads of the other army doesn't elicit horror because we aren't personally empathizing with anyone who might get their heads chopped off, nor are we afraid the 30mm barbarian might chop our heads off, nor are we so squeamish that the notion of heads being chopped off in the abstract is going to horrify us.

So, how would you then go about making a Khorne miniature genuinely scary?

The Ghoma mentioned atmosphere, and I think if you made dedicated scenery for your army and used that scenery to show the results of a Khorne rampage on a civillian populace, that would create pretty good atmosphere.

On the miniatures themselves? I don't know. Horror needs to be subtle, and Khorne isn't subtle. But I tell you this, a 15 thousand year old berserker in power armour flipping out and wanting to murder everyone doesn't frighten me. Bob from accounting flipping out and wanting to murder everyone does frighten me. Because like Billinator said, you need to be able to relate to something to be scared by it. And I can't relate to a 15 thousand year old berserker, but I can relate to Bob from accounting, at least enough to be shocked that he flipped out and wonder with horror if I don't have that capacity hidden away somewhere.

So I think the first thing to make Khorne more frightening is to make his followers look more normal. That may be hard to do in miniature form because even the Imperium in 40K is pretty alien. But in WFB this is possible. An army of what look like ordinary Empire troops consumed by bloodlust would probably be pretty shocking.

The scariest faction to me in 40K has never been chaos. Chaos tries too hard to look cool, and something that looks cool can never be truly scary because you know they want to impress you. The scariest faction for me is the Adeptus Mechanicus, especially in the artwork. Imagining someone who would have their mouth chopped off and replaced with a feeding tube and a speaker box because it's more efficient is pretty horrific. We're talking someone who doesn't seem to care if they never taste another thing again, let alone make out with space chicks.

And the big fellows in mythology wearing giant suits of armour never strike me as scary either. Because effective armour is a very sensible thing to wear. The people who always scare me in fantasy/history are the (male) naked fanatics, the people who have the option of wearing armour but instead choose to run out into battle without a stitch of protective wear. So a miniature with a buck-naked barbarian covered in scars and woad, with meat and two veg flying in the wind and hair done up with pig grease, that would be a pretty scary mini. (probably not least of which because if modelled correctly it would no doubt make a lot of GW's target demographic very uncomfortable. ) But of course this would raise issues of when and where you could use or display the miniature. So that got me thinking that maybe the way to make the Khorne naked fanatic work is to put evidence on the model that it had been sexually nullified.

First, because any male is going to have a visceral reaction to seeing that. And second, because it inverts the "proper" warrior mentality that naked fanatics arose from. A "proper" warrior accepts challenges and kills dangerous opponent in order to gain renown, thereby gaining prestige, thereby gaining a shot at wealth and connections to power, which would primarily be used to either attract a high-status wife or secure a comfortable home for the warrior's wife and the children she would presumably in that time period provide for him. The killing is a means to an end for the "proper" warrior. But for our nullified naked fanatic, there will be no wife or children. Killing is the end in itself for that warrior, and forcing the viewer to imagine a life with truly no other outlet other than violence- I imagine that would be pretty horrific.

I'll go away and have a think about the other Chaos Gods.

JOHIRA, Now that's what scary should be.
Take the understandable and make it wrong, twist it until you can't see it for what it was anymore and yet you still know exactly what it is.

I like to think i've done not too bad a job on making my Horrors of Tzeetch look scary (made from Dryads). Also my Traitor Guard looks very Sinister IMO! ^_^

@Johira

I really think you're on to something, with your fine examples.

Warhammer 40k Fluff-wise, i must say, i feel much more frightened by the Dark Eldars. Most armies has some sort of brutality to them, be it Chaos Khorne with a big axe, Space Marines with a big Hammer or Eldars with a swift sword. But Dark Eldars would much rather coat their weapons in poisons that stuns it's victims.

Though i feel that what makes the big difference, armies appearences overall, is how the mind adapts to the scheme of the army, and hence we've got - as i mentioned in the previous post - the foundation. As soon as this basic foundation is set, the mind will be expecting something from that source, that is the cause to that foundation.

NOW! If you're able to play my mind in such a manner, that i would EXPECT something from this foundation, and you're able to take it further - MUCH further - then you'll be much better off at making whatever you're making scary.
(It is basically the same principle, that you as a kid gets scared of more harmless horror movies. But as you grow up, you adapt. As a result, you won't get scared that easily from the same movie. It'd have to take you by surprise to such a degree, that your "mental cap" can't soak it all up.)

In real-life terms, i'd be much, much more frightened by a pair of eyes staring at me, that in it's own, wordless sense tells me "when you're finished, i'm not even getting started". Hence this, i'd have to say that, fluff-wise, i'm more scared of the Dark Eldar.
- They don't just give you a quick death. They don't just bash your brains out. They don't just cut you in half. An ordinary death just doesn't cut it, because it's just too boring for them. They want you alive. And they wanna KEEP you alive, so that they can torture you. The Dark Eldars are the far most perverse minded army i've yet to come across, and if anyone was able to take the fluff further than just the ordinary, they'd be on their way of making it scary!

Pain, plain and simple. All of these things above are, to paraphrase, just regular stuff that has been twisted from the normal.

And why? for my, its because something would hurt.
Its why the Saw movies do as well as they do. If it was just...
"I'm going to cut him, should I cut him, audience? I am cuting him now, are you scared"
...no one would be. But you show a meat hook sliding into someone and it makes everyone wince.

So, I guess things that are both being hurt and hurting themselves?

Something to keep in mind on color, red (and things on the red side of the color wheel) will enhance the emotional response, blue (and things on the blue side) will suppress it.

Anything Giger inspired is bound to terrify.. But it's all about the suspense, which is a bit difficult to create with miniatures to say the least.

What about the human centipede?

Slushosaur wrote:Also my Traitor Guard looks very Sinister IMO! ^_^

That they do. Very effective.

Requia wrote:Something to keep in mind on color, red (and things on the red side of the color wheel) will enhance the emotional response, blue (and things on the blue side) will suppress it.

I think this is somewhat cultural though. IIRC, in Chinese culture red is thought to be lucky, and is worn for celebrations. Meanwhile every Chinese monster/ghost/zombie I've ever seen in movies (okay, I admit, on movie boxes) has been blue.


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Doomthumbs wrote:So, I guess things that are both being hurt and hurting themselves?

This isn't enough, at least not for me.

Maybe I'm odd, but violence in and of itself, especially gross, overt, and lingeringly observed violence, doesn't frighten me. When I watch stuff like that, I just instinctively shut off the part of my brain that relates to the character, because I know it's not real suffering. The more closely I can see the gore, the less scary I think it is.

The most nightmarish thing I've ever seen was an old news clip of I think a group of people protesting a KKK group, and someone happened to be filming it. And the protesters got a little too up in the Klan members' faces for their liking, so one of the clan members pulled out a gun and started shooting. There were no pools of blood, no gory closeups, no shots of people in agony. Just people you could relate to in a split second going from alive to dead. That was terrifying to me in a way that I don't think a Saw movie ever could be.

Don't know how that could ever be converted to 30mm miniature format though.

listen to the songs

Prothstetics, and scissors
by slipknot... creepeyest things i have ever heard


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Viktor von Domm wrote:

thats scary!!!

the shining is a great movie ;D

Papaskittels wrote:listen to the songs
Prothstetics, and scissors
by slipknot... creepeyest things i have ever heard

You sir, have impressed me with your musical taste.

Heh, listen to 'the Penelope EP' by Shabutie. Most disturbing and creepy music iv'e ever heard.

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but making a recognizable human head that is faceless would be terrifying. Kind of like deadbowl in that awful awful wolverine movie that i hope none of you saw, sans eyes.

put that on a normal human sized neck scaled down by like 15%, and then attach other scary features via the body.


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JOHIRA wrote:

Don't know how that could ever be converted to 30mm miniature format though.

Creating a corpse that has no obvious wounds but is obviously dead would do this. @ OP: if you went with my faceless idea, then having a faceless guardsman behind the model itself but still attached to the base -again, obviously dead- would be pretty frightening.

Humans are naturally terrified of the things that we do not understand. If you can create that in a model then you will make something eerie and, ultimately, scary. The facelessness brings up all sorts of obvious questions "how does it breath, how does it eat, how does it see/smell/hear etc." The dead but unharmed guardsman raises all kinds of questions. "How does that thing kill" is a question that, i believe, would be quite a startling one.


In the grim dark of 40k, its not the guys striding through a battlefield with huge guns, massive swords, and psychic powers that you fear. It's the thing walking slowly towards you, ignoring everything else. It is the thing that is striding unharmed, unhindered, and unarmed that is truly unsettling

CrazyMez wrote:What about these deamons from the films constantine.

http://gracelimsm.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/demons-3.jpg

They have the tops of their heads missing, below the eye, so they give off no emotion and shouldn't be able to live with out a brain.

Those are COOOOLLLLLL!

I just recalled another creepy thing, but again it relies on the combination of lack of sight and sound to be fully effective. Playing System Shock 2 aaaages ago when you come across the crazy nurse androids. You hear them singing nursery rhymes and then you go round the corner to have this smooth harmless looking thing tear your head off while your bullets bounce off it This combines a few of the things mentioned above, i.e. humanoid, outwardly harmless, designed to help with ultimately domestic things, turning into an unstoppable killing machine.

FredTheEvilKitteh wrote:

Papaskittels wrote:listen to the songs
Prothstetics, and scissors
by slipknot... creepeyest things i have ever heard

You sir, have impressed me with your musical taste.

Is that sarcasm XD

I always thought things that had a monstrous, terrifying form, but a normal, maybe happy, human face were pretty scary.

The most unsettling miniature I've seen thus far is probably the Wet Nurse from Kingdom Death (NSFW pics at [urlhttp://shop.kingdomdeath.com/product/wet-nurse[/url]).

As has been mentioned, I think the traditional notion of "scary" is going to be nigh impossible, what with the lack of motion and all, but you can certainly achieve "unsettling." As much as I think more subtle perversions of familiar forms are the more unsettling, something a bit overblown, like the Wet Nurse, is easier to translate at this scale. It's the acts of birth and nursing - very basic, necessary, and strongly emotional acts - that are thoroughly perverted to create the viewer's discomfort, more than the creature's grotesque construction from very familiar and private parts (which certainly doesn't hurt, either).

As for general creepy tropes, you've got the application of human flesh to unnatural machines (many-armed, caterpillar-like machine with a human face stretched and pinned to it's head), overly emotive single features inappropriate to the setting (remorseless killer with an overblown smile), removal of familiar features (no eyes, no mouth, etc.), just to name a few.

Oh, and British children. NOTHING is as unnerving as completely emotionless British children.

Old timers might recognize the name Les Edwards from his contributions to a lot of GW's iconic imagery (sadly, my copy of Blood and Iron is long gone :( ). He had a couple of pieces that were flat out creepy and unsettling, which I think is the best you can really hope for in miniature and painting. To be SCARY, I believe, implies some kind of movement or change over time. A corpse is creepy and unsettling, a corpse falling out of your cupboard is scary. In other words, scary lies in a transition. You start out OK, then scary happens, and now you're not OK. Unsettling or disturbing is scary at rest, or the promise of something scary happening soon.

I couldn't find Edwards' picture of the doctor putting on the examination glove with a grind that's a LITTLE too wide, but I did come across some of the other ones I remembered:





As far as Chaos goes, I have to say that Khorne's LOOK HOW EVIL I AM! SKULLZZZ! approach is just boring. I always loved Tzeench and Slaanesh much more because of the theme of twisting and perverting things. Slapping spikes on skulls on something is far less scary to me than something like turning into a Kafka-esque skittering cockroach thing, just keeping enough of your old self alive to regret your decisions in life.

I'd always stayed away from Chaos because I didn't want to sully my list with what I considered the "lesser" evils (Khorne, and to a lesser extent, Nurgle) for the sake of competitiveness. But after seeing some of the excellent "counts as" demon armies out there, I'm thinking of taking up sculpting and casting to create my own Tzeench-themed army. And for inspiration as to what would be creepy and surreal in that regard, you only have to do a google search for Hieronymous Bosch. Just the details of the Garden of Earthly Delights alone will inspire a dozen miniatures.

Strelka wrote:To be SCARY, I believe, implies some kind of movement or change over time. A corpse is creepy and unsettling, a corpse falling out of your cupboard is scary. In other words, scary lies in a transition. You start out OK, then scary happens, and now you're not OK. Unsettling or disturbing is scary at rest, or the promise of something scary happening soon.

This is a really good point too.

I was afraid that my last post on Khorne may have killed the thread. Sorry.

So let's look at Nurgle then.

Nurgle chiefly gets its mileage from the gross-out factor. Which makes sense, because how are you going to represent Tuberculosis at 30mm? But being gross isn't the same thing as being scary (unless the gross thing wants to give you a hug), so I feel like even though drippy and green is an established part of Nurgle imagery, it's not enough to actually make Nurgle scary.

What's scary about Nurgle followers?

1. They're pretty hard to stop.
2. The "Papa Nurgle" aspect- ordinary people might voluntarily sign on with the green and drippy crew.

Number one isn't really psychological horror, but it would be good to see more often in minis. We've got all sorts of Nurgle daemons and plague marines holding their own entrails as they leak out of their abdomens, but that's just gross, not scary. These guys are supposed to be tough! Like Jason Vorhees tough! Why do we so rarely see Nurgle troops with obvious injuries that they are oblivious to? A fat, bloated Nurgle champion at the head of an army doesn't inspire fear. A fat, bloated Nurgle champion with someone's throwing axe lodged in his shoulder in a way that suggests it's an actual wound but the champion doesn't seem to mind, that would be scary.

Number 2 is more psychological. Nurgle has a unique aspect among the chaos deities because he is by far the most repugnant, and yet the least magically coercive. Khorne fills people with bloodlust, Slaanesh uses intoxicating pheromones, and T'zeentch uses super-human plotting and planning and manipulations of fate and destiny to ensnare their victims. Nurgle just uses basic human psychology. He gives people diseases, and then in their most desperate state, gives them a choice to serve him. There is nothing magical about the conversion that follows. His victims are simply so desperate that they voluntarily adopt the ways of the plaguefather. That I find pretty scary.

So how do you convey that in miniatures? I always thought that a subtler version of the Plague Cart was a good way to go. I actually think the Carnival of Chaos minis themselves take things too far. A guy shows up with a funny mask and an intestine snaking out of his gut, that's not a believable sort of corrupter. But the cart itself has about the right level of barely concealed malice. If it weren't for both the driver and the horses being obviously plagued, I'd say it just about strikes a perfect balance.

I'd like to see something like that done for 40K. Probably it would work best as scenery. Something subtle, like if every wall section had a mouldy poster on it with a crudely-drawn fly icon. If the scenery had a couple of emaciated corpses lying around, but they all had gaunt smiles on their faces (no idea where one would get the bits for that). That would suggest that there is a greater story going on than just tanks that grew tentacles and snot-squirting guns for some reason.

Papaskittels wrote:

FredTheEvilKitteh wrote:

Papaskittels wrote:listen to the songs
Prothstetics, and scissors
by slipknot... creepeyest things i have ever heard

You sir, have impressed me with your musical taste.

Is that sarcasm XD

Actually no, Metal is kinda my thing.

The Ghoma wrote:It's not about looks that are scary, it's the atmosphere. Locations or things that make you think " need to get away from this thing" or "this thing is going to kill me" that are truly scary IMO (silent hill does an amazing job of doing this)

I agree. The only times i get scared in games (other than from shock horror) is when i am so utterly freaked out by a place that i am rushing as fast i can to get away from it.

For me this normally happens underwater.