Before I discovered the painterly workflow that now defines my short film, I spent time looking at other possible aesthetics for the project. One of the strongest early influences was analog glitch art, like the six images in the reference grid I was studying. These images became an important part of my visual research, even though I eventually moved away from glitch and towards paint.
The top left image shows a distorted face almost dissolved into coloured static. There are no deep blacks in this one. Everything is built on a bright base, and yet the eyes and nose are still readable. The only reason we can recognise them is because we are human and we have been trained our entire lives to understand faces. That instinctive recognition is related to the uncanny, which is something I am very interested in. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the uncanny in the context of graphic and media design, and I see it as central to horror. I wanted to play with that moment where the brain says “this is a face” even though the image itself is almost gone.
The image to the right is of Gengar from Pokémon. Here the outline is defined by thick blacks, and the body is full of dense, colourful lines that ripple and vibrate. Whites are replaced with reds and the whole thing feels like a piece of pop art that has been fed through a broken television. I find this appealing because it combines simplicity of design with a complex texture. In a way it predicts what I am doing later with my painterly style, where blocks of colour are broken up and given depth through strokes and noise.
The top right image is the one that stayed with me the most. It shows a television and a face inside it, surrounded by a halo of colour. The centre of the image is dark while the edges are bright and almost cloud like. It feels nebulous, and that is what I like about it. There is a sense of possibility. The creature or figure inside the screen could be helpful, harmful, or completely neutral. It leaves room for the viewer to project their own beliefs and experiences onto it, which I think is a core quality of strong artwork. Televisions already play a large role in my short film, and this image helped me think of them not just as objects but as presences.
The bottom left image appears to be a ballerina suspended in a dark, wavy field. Her body is almost swallowed by the background. She is both figure and ground at the same time. This blurring of boundaries between character and environment echoes what I later try to do with paint, where characters feel partially absorbed into their surroundings.
The bottom middle image is the most directly related to horror. It shows a man with his eyes closed or looking downward, his face framed by intense colours against near blackness. It is the opposite of the bright, white based top right image. This aesthetic is something I carry forward, especially the idea of a single head emerging from darkness with colours picking out its features.
The bottom right image experiments with inversion and silhouette. The bright, saturated colours sit against a deep black background, and the form is just recognisable enough to read as a person. Again, this plays into my interest in perception, where the viewer is doing part of the work of completing the image.
At this stage of the project, my intention was to use glitch effects as a language of demonic influence. The demon would act through television screens, warping the image and effectively knocking down the fourth wall. This made sense to me technically because I have a lot of experience with glitch effects in After Effects and Premiere Pro. Glitch felt like a natural direction to explore, and it fitted with the idea of analogue distortion.
Over time, though, the glitch approach started to feel one dimensional. It surprised the eye at first, but the surprise faded quickly. There was not much subtlety to it, and it risked overwhelming the story rather than supporting it. Around the same period, my story was still underdeveloped. The glitch aesthetic existed more as an opportunity than as a necessary extension of the narrative.
That changed when I discovered the painterly workflow during the experimental unit. Using geometry nodes to generate strokes and texture on three dimensional objects felt like a revelation. It clicked instantly. It gave me more control and let me blend the digital and physical worlds in a way that felt more honest to the story. Glitch art has an appealing analogue quality, but a painting is even more rooted in the physical. It carries a sense of labour and care. Most of the paintings we encounter in our lives are made with love or at least with effort, and that human touch comes across even when the image is unsettling.
Paint also has the ability to lull the viewer into a sense of safety. We are used to seeing paintings as calm, contained objects. By framing every shot in my film as if it were an intricate painting, I can use that expectation against the audience. They feel at home, and then the content or the movement inside the frame quietly undermines that comfort. Glitch, by contrast, shouts its presence from the beginning.
Looking back, these early glitch based references were still important. They changed how I thought about colour, especially the use of strong whites and blacks as anchors alongside saturated hues. They encouraged me to use black as a backdrop and to embrace areas of darkness as active parts of the composition rather than just empty space. They clarified my fascination with faces that are almost lost in noise, silhouettes that bend into their environments, and screens that seem more alive than the people watching them.
In the final film the demon no longer expresses power through visual glitches on a screen. Instead the world of the film itself takes on a painted quality, and the canvases inside the story become part of the plot. People are eventually freed through fire that burns these canvases, which reads as an uprising from below, a raw elemental force that challenges the demonic presence. This connection between cloth, cotton, burlap and paint emerged naturally and only later did I realise how well it tied together. The glitch research may not be visible on the surface any more, but it guided me towards a richer, more flexible painterly language that feels right for the kind of horror I want to make.
Research Notes
Why Glitch Initially Appealed to Me
Before I committed to the painterly workflow, I was genuinely pulled toward analogue glitch because of how unstable and hostile it feels. Artists like Nam June Paik were already using distorted television signals to break the viewer’s sense of security, and that energy was exactly what I wanted in the early stages of the film. Looking at the glitch references made me realise how the demon could “speak” through malfunction – the same way broken CRTs feel alive.
Aesthetic Lineage – Why Glitch Initially Appealed to Me
Before I committed to the painterly workflow, I was genuinely pulled toward analogue glitch because of how unstable and hostile it feels. Artists like Nam June Paik were already using distorted television signals to break the viewer’s sense of security, and that energy was exactly what I wanted in the early stages of the film. Looking at the glitch references made me realise how the demon could “speak” through malfunction – the same way broken CRTs feel alive.
Uncanny recognition in half-destroyed faces
When I talk about the top left image being “almost gone” but still clearly a face, I’m basically playing with the uncanny. Freud links the uncanny to things that are both familiar and strange at the same time, and Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley” graph is literally about that drop in comfort when a face is almost human but not quite. In my glitched reference, the brain is doing the same work: it latches onto eyes and a nose in a mess of noise and insists “this is a person”, which is exactly the tension I want in my own work when faces are buried under paint, noise or darkness. Unsplash+1
Glitch as a kind of “broken signal” horror
The whole idea of using glitch as a demonic language fits neatly with how glitch art theory talks about “the glitch moment” as a breakdown in the expected flow of information. Rosa Menkman writes about glitches as interruptions that expose the system underneath the image, not just as a style slapped on top. That lines up with my early idea of the demon acting through the TV signal itself, attacking the image pipeline rather than just possessing a character on screen.
Haunted televisions and “alive” screens
When I say that top right TV image feels like a presence rather than just a device, I’m falling into a big horror tradition of haunted media. Films like Ring (1998) and a lot of J-horror use CRT televisions as thresholds, where something on the screen bleeds into the room and collapses the boundary between viewer and broadcast. My plan was to lean into that – the demon doesn’t just show images on the TV, it is the distortion, which is why that nebulous, haloed TV reference was so useful early on.
Figure and ground bleeding into each other
The ballerina-type image I mention, where the figure is almost swallowed by the background, connects quite nicely to basic Gestalt ideas of figure/ground. The Rubin vase illusion is the classic example: the viewer’s brain flips between seeing a face and a vase because both can be read as “figure” against “ground”. In my reference grid, and later in my painterly work, I’m deliberately blurring that boundary so characters feel half-absorbed into their environment, which suits a story where the house itself is basically an organism.
Single heads emerging from darkness
The bottom middle glitch image – just a head floating in black with colour picking out its features – overlaps a lot with painters like Francis Bacon, whose heads often feel like they’re dissolving out of darkness rather than placed in a neat space. His Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X is a good example of a face that is recognisable but structurally broken, which is close to what I want when I hold on a single head in my film and let colour and noise do most of the work.
Silhouette, inversion and the viewer “finishing” the image
The bottom right image in my glitch grid is basically a silhouette with inverted colours. It only just reads as a person, and the rest is completed by the viewer’s brain. That ties straight into ideas of perceptual closure from Gestalt psychology, where we instinctively close gaps in incomplete forms. This is the same mental trick I rely on later when my painted characters almost blur into the background – the audience is always doing that last bit of reconstruction, which keeps them slightly off balance.
Why glitch alone started to feel flat
Reading around glitch art made me realise why the pure glitch route started to feel one note. Menkman points out that glitch aesthetics can quickly turn into a “preset look” once people get used to the effect. That is exactly what I ran into: the broken TV look is strong on first impact, but it doesn’t leave much room to escalate or modulate across a 10–15 minute film. I needed something more flexible than “corrupt the image again” every time the demon does something.
Paint, aura and the “safe” art object
Once I switched focus from glitch to paint, it started to make more sense in terms of theory too. Walter Benjamin’s writing on the “aura” of original artworks talks about how physical paintings carry a sense of presence and labour that copies do not. That fits my instinct that a painted frame feels like something someone has cared about and spent time on, which makes it a better thing to corrupt slowly. Glitch screams from frame one; paint lets me lull the viewer into feeling like they are just looking at an old canvas before the horror slips in.
Colour: whites, blacks and saturated horror
Those early glitch references also pushed my colour decisions. A lot of horror scholarship points out how high contrast colour palettes – deep blacks with sudden saturated reds, purples and greens – can create a very physical, bodily reaction, and giallo films like Suspiria are a good example of that approach. In my case, the glitch grid nudged me toward using black as an active element instead of just “empty space”, and to treat saturated colour like something that cuts through the dark materially, not just decoration.
From glitch to cloth, burlap and painted worlds
The last big link between this research and the current film is how I swapped “broken signal” for “broken surface”. Instead of the demon tearing digital images apart through glitch, it now tears through canvases, burlap and cloth, which is closer to a physical glitch in the world itself. The glitch references taught me to think about interruption and distortion as a core language, and I carried that over into the painterly pipeline: cracked paint, ripped cloth, and canvases with holes act like analogues to corrupted video frames. The demonic influence still scrambles reality, but it does it through fibres, threads and paint strokes instead of pixels.