My chosen topic ‘Horror Myths’ with the research question ‘How have traditional horror myths changed over the years?’ was chosen because of the many avenues that can be looked into and researched. There are many sightings and glimpses into the mythical world around the globe, with many different cultures and countries having similar views on different myths that have been passed down from generation to generation. I want to explore four different myths from four different cultures through the expression of makeup, hair and artistry. By the end of the major project I aim to have four industry quality images to demonstrate my skill set and the topic chosen. Design plans and face charts will be drawn up and created relating to each final image as a starting point though these may change as new research may cause changes in the designs, to see a more in depth insight of each related research  you can look at each blog page for the images under research and design. 

I chose horror myths as I have been interested in the paranormal and scary stories from a young age. I have grown up watching creepy/ scary stories on YouTube, from stories around the world. For the four myths I have chosen to research have sparked an interest with me from those stories I used to watch and where the ones I thought could show my skill set the most as well as push me to learn new skills also. The four myths I have chosen to research are, Image 1: Kuchisake-onna the myth of the Japanese slit mouthed woman, Image 2: La Llarona the myth of the weeping woman searching for her children, Image 3: Tap, Tap, Slide the myth of the broken legged woman who kill the people who don’t believe in her and finally Image 4: Mothman the myth of a creature half moth, half man. I aim to research as much as I can about these myths as I want to demonstrate the most accurate images of what people have seen, with giving my own spin on it. 

Horror myths have been around for an extremely long time with these stories being passed down from generations to now being all over the internet, “Horror stories do different things to different people. In some cases, they act as cautionary tales; in others, they allow us to explore things that feel transgressive and gives us a safe space to do that,” Dr Marshall said. (Westbury, n.d). 

To start off my research I wanted to delve into some quick inspiration photos of each myth to get the ball rolling on ideas of what I could create with these final images. Here’s what I found :