Ghost Girls Makeup: Day Four of Filming

The aim of this makeup look was to create a shocking and scary appearance considering my character, the 'ghost girl', is one of the two antagonists in our horror film. This particular look was for the 'mirror scene', one of the main scenes in our film we designed to inflict fear on our audience.

Firstly, I applied a heavy layer of white pressed powder all over my face as a base for the rest of the makeup and to also give me a pale complexion in order to give me a ghostly appearance. I then gradually built up a mixture of brown colored shades in areas such as my cheekbones, my temples and the sides of my nose in order to give me the illusion of a skeletal appearance as overall this gave me a sinister look for the scene. I further emphasized my frail appearance by using the same technique on my collar bones and neck line. I took my inspiration for this look from Tim Burton's 'Corpse Bride' mainly focusing on the appearance of the character Emily.

I applied the same mixture of brown shadows underneath my eyes in order to give me the appearance of dark under eye circles which connotes death and decay, adding to my fearful look. As well as this, I extended the arch on my eyebrow to give me a similar shape to those of popular Disney villains such as Cruella Deville, Maleficent and the stepmother from Cinderella as high arched eyebrows seem to be a popular feature, used by successful film producers such as Disney, to connote danger in a certain character and to signify that the particular character is villainous which is an advantageous feature to have when considering my character was an antagonist.

To complete the look, I applied a fake wound in the form of a split neck using fake blood and a mixture of various brown and purple colored shadows to add to the verisimilitude of the cut. Blood is a typical convention of horror films and we wanted to live up to the expectations held by the audience watching our film considering it is very stereotypical of horror to contain a scene featuring blood. I thought that this would be a useful element in relation to amounting toward the overall fear factor of our film.