On the first official week back in year 2 of the animation course we were sat down and told the brief for our assignment for character creation. Being honest about my reaction I knew that I would enjoy this assignment the most for the year. Instantly when we were left alone to start brainstorming our characters I knew that I wanted to create some sort of horror themed creature, since I had vowed to create a brand new Halloween character every year from last year since I created my first annual character Dickie.
I had a loose concept I’d been playing with a while back for a pair of twin kitten characters that were spawned from a challenge in a silly random generator game I play named Clan Gen. The challenge itself entailed that the “clan” as the group is referred to, moves into a cursed territory that houses a wilted willow where the curse stems from and slowly but surely all of the cats become infected with this curse and either die from it or survive by miracle. As you can probably tell, this is already a very dark sort of challenge and I decided in my little twisted Halloween loving mind that I would make it even creepier by making the curse caused by a pair of twin kittens that had been murdered near the willow tree and have come back as vengeful spirits to target the adults of the clan… So this would be an amazing place to start as a basis for my creature concept for this project!
So a few doodles in I decided to take the idea of undead cats with no eyes a step further and started to experiment with small details that may or may not add to the creepy factor I wanted to keep somewhat. slowly the duo turned into a single cat, the creature went from walking on 4 legs to just 2, it got starved for about 20 years and it’s mouth was erased and replaced with an optional melted grin that appears when it becomes hungry for human souls… Yep I don’t think I should actually be left to my own accord to create a character. Just a thought… maybe a small hint I’ve realised? Anyway!
slowly but surely after a lot of twisting and corrupting of the concept I ended up with a creature worthy of the label of Halloween creature for 2023.
Soon the spooky boy himself was brought to life. A few talks and brainstorming later with someone that has a slightly more sane mind than mine and he was dubbed “Redacted” and his story was altered from a spirit that haunted a wilted willow tree in some random woods, to a contained laboratory subject that is being investigated due to the danger he poses to humanity.
He remained a spirit like entity who is summoned to the world now through the use of those all too fun mirror games which we humans play since we are such adrenaline junkies that the fear of an evil spirit inhabiting our mirrors excites us. His name was taken from the fact that those mirror games often entail saying the name of the entity so many times to summon it into the mirror you are playing with, such as chanting “bloody Mary” or “Blue Baby/Baby Blu” into the mirror etc, so before his name would have been known as something else that you would chant into the mirror so many times under a certain set of instructions however due to him becoming a global threat with the amount of deaths he would cause with people playing his game, the government have taken precautions to censor EVERY mention of his name in any documentation that remains of him, leading to him being known simply as “Redacted” now.