Horror Film Still Studies

Study of a scene from Alien (Ridley Scott 1979)

Study of a scene from Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon 2012)

I did these lighting studies of horror film stills weeks ago and completely forgot to post them!  I really liked the atmospherically lit smoke/blinding white light of the flamethrower in contrast with the dark foreground in the above scene from Alien. (1979) I also really liked the dramatic lighting of the chosen scene from Cabin in the Woods (2012) where the two creepy subjects featured ominously step out of a dark elevator.

Ripley's face looks a bit potato-like in that first study and the rendering of the details are very messy and sort of muddy.  I need to keep my brush strokes a lot simpler and take better care when blocking in shapes.  However I feel I've learned a bit more about creating horror lighting in scenes.  For instance I feel the lighting was much more effectively rendered when starting out with a shape blocked out in a dark silhouette (this is what I did for Ripley's body, unlike the background) which helps to easily emphasise shadowed areas.  This is a technique I went on to use when creating the textured forest scene (image 2) in my previous post.

In the Cabin in the Woods (2012) study, it was interesting trying to re-create depth of field with a field blur filter.  Although the left figure's face is off proportion-wise, I feel a bit more comfortable creating images with very contrasting tones, which is found in a lot of horror imagery.