Friday, 2 December 2022

Necronomicon - 80's VHS screen grabs Sci-Fi Horror

 


HR Gigers Necronomicon - 1980's Low budget Sc-Fi Horror Movie VHS Screen shots

(Obviously this film does not exist)

This low budget horror is based on the work of HR Giger, would have been After the work on Alien and around the time of Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Giger had designs around for films like Poltergeist, Future Kill, Killer Condoms and Tokyo The Last War. He never got to make his 'The Tourist' horror movie or 'The Mirror'. This project has just made me miss him more.


The movie would begin in the style of William Friedkin as our adventurers make there way through an uncharted forest that brings them to a Lovecraftian temple. Inside they discover the Necronomicon. Reading from the book brings the sculptures to life as they awaken the Guardian Sorceress who tries to scare them away. The death of one traveler opens up a portal and the survivors are dragged into another world.



Now captured, The Warlord convinces them that the Sorceress is a threat to Earth and must be destroyed but only those that opened the portal can let them into the temple to destroy her.

The film moves to the style of Sam Raimi as The Guardian Sorceress is already prepared with her army to stop them. The Warlord had planned to sacrifice the adventurers in a spell to open the portal to the modern world that they would invade and bring the ancient ones to Earth. With one of the travelers killed a few of the Warlords soldiers make it to the temple. The Guardian Sorceress had sacrificed herself to always protect the portal and unleashes one las spell to kill all living things in and around the portal to close it for good. 

   



As the film closes our last living hero escapes and she believes she is alone. Only to be watched by one of the last of the Warlords soldiers who made it through



The end, with a nice cheesy 80's style gotcha' ending. Cue the Scare Chord.. 

Obviously, this film does not exist but I really wish it did now. I wanted to have a play with MidJourney. Turns out it's really good fun imagining films that never happened. This is nowhere near as good as the Jodorowsky Tron that was up recently but it was still fun to see how it turned out.
I wish I had gone for Hi Def Blu-ray screengrabs now as some of the images are interesting. I think the grainy VHS screen shots are closer to what would have been around in the mid 80's. I still have a stack of old promo posters from the old VHS Rental shops that agree with me. Using AI to imagine a screen grab from an 1980's grainy VHS tape with a bit of coaxing here and there to make changes. This kind of made the story unfold as I saw the images emerge. Some images didn't work, looking too CG or clean but I kept anything that were almost believable. That screen burn and grainy quality really work sometimes. Didnt bother upscaling as in the early 90's websites would have only been 800x600 wide so these are way big enough for that.
And it was so addictive. I was almost feeling like I wasn't making this up but I was discovering images I hadn't seen before.
It's turned out that AI still doesn't have enough information on Giger to really go wild with the variety I know it should have but it just convincing enough for this concept of how a low budget movie would interpret his work for an 80's movie.
These were all first pass prompts in AI. The only thing I added in photoshop to the fake poster, was the Necronomicon title, using an 80's font, as AI is still terrible at text.  And a little poster wear and tear.

It's fascinating, how over a couple of nights of playing, I was able to put together enough images for a quick pitch for a movie that never happened. 


Jodorowskys Tron reviewed on DJ Food blog https://www.djfood.org/fantasy-jodorowsky-tron-visualisations-by-johnny-darrell/



No comments: