How to Make a Character Creepy

[Music] what is up everybody welcome back to my video today I wanted to discuss what makes a character scary and I want to build a character with you as an example yeah maybe by scary I mean more creepy any more unsettling if you want to do something subtle as opposed to like just outright dark gritty bloody red if you want to do the things that just make things ever so slightly frightening so to strike this off I started looking at kids I looked at things that kids are afraid of because kids haven't been affected by things that are in media they haven't been affected by things that are happening right now they're just sort of afraid of things because they're wrong and I'm gonna explain that so think of things that kids are afraid of kids are afraid of mascots kids are afraid of mannequins kids are afraid of balloons why are they afraid of these things well if you think about it a mascot is a birdie it's a puppy it's something but it's human sized it's not supposed to be that big so kids are afraid of it mannequins it's like mom looks like dead but the skin is wrong it's plastic it's not moving at all balloons things fall things are supposed to follow balloons don't and there's an unsettling stillness to them so you can imagine maybe after I've explained it why kids would be afraid of these things resistance of wrong and stuff and if something is wrong it's generally something that's going to trigger our fight-or-flight and it's going to cause us to be afraid or to be unsettled at the very least so a good guide for adding wrong to a character is the uncanny valley if you haven't heard of the uncanny valley it was invented in the 70s by a Japanese robot assist named mutta Hiro mori now this guy he was making robots and he was showing them to people because he show things to your friends he show them like hey look at this cool thing I did and he found that as he added more human features people liked him more he's like yeah that makes sense that's more like people you can talk to people and then he added skin and eyes and teeth and people did not like this one and he's like huh why and so he kind of figured out the reason that people don't like things that are not quite human but things that are sort of human is that if it's something that's clearly trying to present itself as human but it's just ever so slightly off we can only see the things that are off and it makes it frightening so let me break down some examples so I've put a little graph on the screen if you want to look at it in the a section we have a flashlight flashlight is totally innocuous it's just an object in Section B we have cars people tend to anthropomorphize their cars they tend to treat them like pets the two headlights look like eyes the grille looks like a mouth the forward wheels can be like legs you get that I hope you get that see at the peak of that hill there's wall-e now everybody loves wall-e wall-e has cute little eyes and cute little hands but he's still just a box in a robot if he Belov him in the pits of deep we have sophia the AI want to be clear I love Sophia from the bottom of my heart I think she's incredible but people are unsettled by her because she's just ever so slightly less than human she doesn't present that way quite yet she's not fluent she's not smooth like humans are and she's still getting a grasp of social concepts and that's not her fault she's still learning she's an AI it's not her fault I think she's incredible but she just isn't human and we can tell and then at E when you go straight up to the top of the next peak you get something that's nice indistinguishable from humans like Christopher Walken so how can we use this uncanny to make characters let's look at a character and we will dissect him for a bit so I'm just gonna warn you that I'm gonna put a picture up of the smile dog so if you are super creeped out I'm gonna give you a countdown and then I'm gonna put it up okay three two one okay so the smile dog is an image a creepypasta that has been circulated around that is unsettling to people and sometimes it's genuinely terrifying to some people it depends on what you're used to so now if you look at the individual parts of the image it's not scary stuff if you take out the graininess it is a dog it is a human smile and it is a handprint we love dogs dogs are great I love my dog that dog if you took the teeth out he would be super friendly you look at look at him he's smiling people smile at us all the time we like to smile we like to laugh and like smiles with teeth because it means someone's super happy and there's a handprint it just means this so think I'm messy and someone put their hands somewhere he's three completely innocuous things combined and put a great filter on them and it is something Jenny when we horrifying you may look now the dog is gone three things is a good general rule for the number of creepy things that you can put together to make something horrifying thing about Slenderman he is just a guy in a suit but he has no face he lives in the woods and he's unnaturally tall so because of these three things added up we're terrified of him people in suits should not be in the woods should not be super tall and should not not have a face if you notice some of these things are kind of silly some of these things are kind of absurd things that you can combine and that's a great place to start so don't think that it's silly when you first start you might want to mess with it a little bit mod mad made this great post about how comedy and humor are kind of the same thing it is absurdity and the only thing different between the two of them is how you present it it's how people react to it so if you were to present CatDog hyper realistically he would be terrifying they would be careful they they would be terrifying if you saw that on the street you would be terrified so the three innocuous things that I put together to make a creepy sort of story a creepy sort of character let's see if you can guess what they are let's get started you live in a nice neighborhood you've lived here for a while and your neighbor across the street is a super nice lady you see her every day when you walk her dog because she is getting her groceries out of the car so in the past couple of months you've noticed that she's been a little lighter you don't know very much about her but you know that she's been happier she complains about her husband a little less she's just a little lighter she talks about how her crafting is going and you also noticed that with her groceries she's bringing in a lot more buckets of paint you kind of shrug and think that oh the housework is keeping her occupied it's even or something to do it's making her happy so one day you get invited into her house she asked if you want to come in for lunch the kids are out at school it's all fine it'll just be you two so you go in you do you sit down in the living room while she goes into the kitchen and in the living room you see where she's been painting you see mat um you see a mat on the ground you see paint buckets and you you kind of you kind of think about it you kind of look at it a little bit the paint the wall is all one entire color but the paint is only new in one spot you look at the mountain of paint cans and I do mean a mountain of paint cans there are so many paint cans and you think they're all the same color why would you be painting the same color over and over again does it just get messy so you kind of go up to the wall and you examine it a little bit so you get up and you go to the wall and as you go to the wall you start to smell something other than wet paint you smell something sort of sour and you can't tell what the smell is so you kind of you kind of investigate the wall and you realize that where the wet paint is where that one section of what pain is it's kind of it's almost domed over it's almost like they've been painting and painting and painting in that one spot non-stop and nowhere else and you're kind of like huh what is up but then the wife comes in and she has tea and you kind of forget about it for a second you talk for awhile you chitchat you swirl your tea and eventually you're like okay so what's with the wall and she's like oh what wall and you're like oh just don't know you've been painting it and she's like oh yeah it's just just a project that I've been working on and you're like must be one heck of a project you know what have you put seventy coats on it and she kind of she falters her smile kind of fades and she looks kind of kind of terse and you immediately reread asking about it so she says I'm gonna I think I think the casseroles burning I'm gonna go get that she stands up and she walks out of the room and you wonder how she can smell casserole over the wet paint and other smell yes because of her kind of weird acting because of the way she you responded to it you decide to get up and you decide to go over and check the wall again and you you kind of you kind of think about the smell you kind of think about the snow that's kind of mixed in and it's like it's rot you you decide that it's something rotting but not not like mold more like rot so you kind of tack on the wall despite the wet paint and it's Hollow where the wet paint is and so you you kind of wonder you step over to where the paint is dry and you tap it again and there it isn't Hollow and you keep checking and keep checking and sure enough everywhere the paint is wet the wall is hollow suddenly you are pulled from your little investigation by an angry shriek what are you doing you turn around and you see the house why if your friend and she is absolutely livid she her eyes are bulging from her head her face is contorted and if when you look down you see a knife in her hand she runs charging at you and she stabs the knife into the wall as you dodge out of the way just in time and fall to the floor from where you are you look back up and you see that she is stabbing the wall she is repeatedly repeatedly with so much anger just stabbing the knife into the wall and she's shouting she's yelling why couldn't you just shut up why couldn't you just be quiet you need to be quiet you need to be quiet or they'll find out you need to be quiet shut up shut up so she's stabbing the wall and she's yelling this and you're noticing as the little splinters you don't think walls are supposed to splinter but there's there's a hole you look in and you see two empty eye sockets and you sort of realize that she's been she's been complaining about her husband less but his car has been covered in leaves for weeks that you haven't seen him and you are looking at an emaciated corpse in her wall she stops her rampage and she turns to you very slowly and she points the knife and she says but you he will be quiet won't you and seen what were the things that happened before the knife came that made you unsettled can't yes here they are it was paint a homely wife and a smell so these three things all combined to make something that was that was frightening like people always say twice is a coincidence three times is a pattern so it's a good way to tell if something is wrong so I really hope this helped if you ever wanted to make something scary if you ever wanted to write a creepypasta if you ever wanted to make something genuinely like just unsettling I really want to know what you guys create please leave a comment leave show me show me what you make please leave them I want to see them I want to see what you make leave a like if this video helped do you share with your friends just just share the love share share the spooks with everybody share how to make the spook so that the world can just be a spooky er place we got a love gotta love the spooky place that we live on so thank you very much for watching and I will see you again in the next one [Music]

Channel: DoorstopLord Draws

Views: 374,639

Rating: 4.9784279 out of 5

Keywords: creepy, how to write a scary story, how to draw, scary, how to create a character, how to write a short scary story, how to write a screenplay, how to make one night at flumptys not scary, how to write characters in games, funny, creepy pasta, character creation, characters, horror, halloween, how to, art, artist, digital art, horror art, art analysis, speedpaint, paint, photoshop, adobe photoshop, uncanny valley, spooky, unsettling, disturbing, scary story, horror story

Id: 2MzAIFXM-6g

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 24 2018