When I was first coming up with my idea for this project and was looking into themes, styles and films that inspired me, originally one of my main pieces of inspiration was the horror franchise Saw. When I was initially planning the idea of my project and looking into what would be best to research for it, I decided I wanted to focus heavily on the SFX and create something extremely gory. This was mainly because SFX is something I am quite confident with and feel like I can illustrate quite well in film, and as I am completely self taught so have developed my own skills and techniques through the many years I have been learning and practicing SFX. Since my original ideas I have decided, although I do still want some gore, I do not want to use it as a main focus point like I had first thought and rather than make it a ‘torture porn’ type of film, I have decided I would rather use only a few being of SFX but make them more memorable. An example of this kind of use of SFX where it is not overdone but extremely effective is one of the short films I looked at called “The Smiling Man”, and so in many ways I would like to take inspiration from their attitudes towards the SFX in this short film. However, despite Saw being more of a torture porn franchise, I am still and have always been blown away with the quality and realism of their SFX and so wanted to look at some of the work in this film as reference points for my work.
The Saw franchise started with their first film in 2004 and have recently added to the collection of classics with Jigsaw in 2017, because of their increased growth in popularity, and therefor budget, and the quality of their films, the SFX is noticeably better, more imaginative but still very much realistic in their later films and so I will be looking mostly at the last few films. When looking at some behind the scene clips and interviews of Jigsaw, the directors mentioned they are “big fans of doing things practically,” and go on to mention that most of the film is done for real rather than through CGI and animation etc. This makes it much better to take inspiration from because then, in terms of the make-up, I can be sure that the majority of it, if not all is real make-up and not anything computer generated. Although a lot of their make-up is very over-the-top, there are a few injuries that focus more on the amount of blood to hint towards the extremely of the injury rather than showing too much detail or ‘accuracy’ of the actual wound, for example, these two screenshots taken from Jigsaw.
This first screenshot is taken from the beginning of the film, we are aware – from the scene prior – that this woman has had a back injury caused by blades, but throughout the whole film we are never actually shown the wound, rather we are just shown the excessive amount of blood that is coming from the wound and the pain it is causing her. I don’t want to create something exactly like this injury in my short film, but I do like the simplicity of just showing blood and pain to suggest a very major injury. I may use this technique around my characters head to suggest some kind of attack or possibly just the blood platters around the scene to hint to a great deal of violence surrounding the location and/or the antagonist.
This second image was taken from near the end of the film after a gunshot (kind of) wound to the head, although this is a little more detailed than the first screenshot as there is some actual SFX rather than just blood, it is not overly ‘detailed’ and is more just messy which in some ways makes it that more gory and disgusting. Some artists illustrate gunshot wounds in a much more minimalistic way, for example just a hole as the entry wound and a slightly messier exit wound, as to create something a little less gory. An example of this less gory gun shot wound is shown in the picture below the one from Jigsaw, it is from the 2005 remake of The Amityville Horror.
The more gory SFX, like in the Jigsaw work, tends to be used to depict more recent and physically violent injuries, shown by the brighter colours in the blood (too make it look fresher) and the amount of blood used to show that it is still bleeding. The more subtle SFX, like the Amityville Horror work, is usually used on dead bodies, or in this case a ghost. The colours tend to be a lot darker and more purple in tones, and sometimes browns, greys and greens to show rotting or decay, and there is noticeably less blood as the wound is no longer fresh and has been there for a long time and so is no longer bleeding in the say that an open and fresh wound would. I will be sticking mostly to the more fresh woulds as I want a lot of the violence to be in real time, however, I will be looking back at this idea and possibly making changes once planning commences. For example if I decide I wanted one of my cult-satanic-demon-ghost things to have an injury I would have to stick to the more purple rotting style SFX.
As I just mentioned, I want to finish my plot first (this will be done this week) so I can decide on the specific injuries and ways they are inflicted, but I may have to look into other SFX resources that I do not have. I have all the basics to create realistic looking wounds etc but if I decided to incorporate gore like guts etc I would possibly have to go as far as to get in contact with my local butchers and use a pigs intestines or something along those lines as I just don’t know how to create something that would look that realistic from scratch.
Jigsaw. (2017). [film] Directed by M. Spierig and P. Spierig. United States: Twisted Pictures.
The Amityville Horror. (2005). [film] Directed by A. Douglas. United States: Dimension Films.
Emily Bennett 