Mar 13, 2012

Fear Has No Face

I went through a few different ideas for my 2011 haunt before finally setlling on one idea. Many of these I may go though with another year, so they shall remain secret. In early 2011 I had the idea that (I believed) I would go ahead with.

I would turn the small shop window into a faux child's bedroom, complete with a window, furniture, shelves... and a terrified child hiding under the covers of his bed. And boogeymen creeping out from under the bed, peering in through the window, crawling from the closet, leaning over the boy.
Truly nightmarish.

And I had a specific look in mind for these boogeymen. Skeletal, with spidery fingers and arms, thin long necks and just a smooth surface where the face should be. Fear has no face...


As weeks passed I realised how difficult it would be to build a realistic looking bedroom. Lying in bed one night, I decided to start afresh with a new theme. Within five minutes, I had 'Black Death + Necromancer' scrawled on a little piece of paper. I had everything - down to the plaguelings and lamp - planned in less than ten minutes. Here's a post I made the next day.

I already had one half-made boogeyman which was intended to be emerging from a box of dress-ups and masks. Harmless plastic faces of monsters with a real monster hiding among them. He was eventually turned into my Necromancer. Here he is in earlier days:



I was swept up in the details of the boogeyman themed display. Things like having 'Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark' placed on the bedside table - implying that the whole thing may be a Stephen-Gammell-inspired nightmare. Shelves of Goosebumps books. And drawings the kid had done pinned up on the walls: vampires, zombies, pirates... and recurring sketches of skeletal figures with long fingers and necks, and no faces. It'd be fun to see things from my youth placed around the bedroom - halloween decorations, books, toys, pictures... 

Could the boogeymen be a product of his horror-fueled 5-year-old imagination? Or had he been visited by them each night for weeks? Months? Perhaps tonight was the last time the boogeymen visited him... and the last night he was seen before his mysterious disappearance...