The Start of my Project

Victorian Mansions in horror

The Victorian mansion ghostly presence relates back to paintings from the 1920s. The painting above on the left (House by the railroad 1925) was painted by artists Edward hopper, which shows an large house abandoned and in isolation. Throughout the 20th century pop culture imagery of similar spooky houses have reoccurred and most famously the mansion in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and even the home of a Adams family.

The Victorian era in the America was known as the Gilded age. In this time after the civil war there became a new wealthier class. The choose home at the time would be these new grand houses with added extensions and extravagant exterior to show off the wealth of the owner. Inspired from Europe’s gothic architecture theses houses were designed to stand out and make a statement of wealth. As time changed and after ww1 the idea of America changed turning into much more the ideal American dream, inspired by progress and innovation. the new wave of architecture turned into simplistic clean lines and the Victorian mansion was out of style. The houses then became associated with death and as people moved on the houses the houses deteriorated. In Psycho the mansion sits above a hill away from the motel itself. the film sets up the mansion to be sinister and that something there is not quite right. His Inspiration the Edward hopper painting.

To create a smaller version of a Victorian mansion I thought about using dollhouses. Creating an eerie spooky Victorian like house. Through research I came across this police detective and artist, Frances Glessner Lee created small scale dollhouse dioramas of crimes and deaths. drawn from real crimes and incredible detailed. Becoming a training tool for young detectives to help solve crimes. this reminded me of some of the work I did before in the build up to the work in the interim. I looked into forensic blood splatter analysis.

Hereditary -2018

The Movie Hereditary is another film by director Ari Aster also the directed Midsommar. A huge part of this movie is the miniatures involved in it. Thought out the film the mother is creating her own miniatures for a gallery. as the film progress her passions sways towards recreating the scenes of her daughters murder and eventually destroys all her work. Not only was it a key part of the films plot what was also a part of the cinematography within the film. Steve Newburn was in charge of all the prosthetics and models for the film. Miniatures models are used all the tie in movies often in a away to make theme look like a life-size object, often with the intent in not to notice that it is small scale, however in Hereditary the mixtures became part of the story. There was multiple miniatures that matched the life size sets used for filming. All of the furniture was either handmade of 3d printed.

After discussing ideas with my tutor and the technician we’ve decided the next best step is to start making but instead of going big straight away, I will start with a shoebox sized room and progress from there. I want to create a miniature set from some of the films I have watched the most poignant for me so far in my research has been psycho and the most famous scene from that was the bathroom scene. Knowing from my reseach that this was infact a set that they had made for the film i was trying to find some better images from that and i stumbled across “The Portable Psycho Shower Scene Stage Set Party, Part I-V”.

a traveling sculpture, installed at several locations between 2010 and 2012. The sculpture was made in collaboration with Dutch artist Laurent Malherbe. The sculpture contained a complete, fully working replica of the film set used for the famous shower scene in his movie “Psycho”. The sculpture an almost exact replica of the original set. As its my first time creating these miniatures I will be using this as my guide to creating my own model I also have some stills from the film to use as reference.