equinox
I find this a lot creepier than most “scary” monster designs. It seems that far too many movies and video games rely on a hackneyed formula that boils down to: “the audience won’t know that the monster is supposed to be scary unless we cover every inch of it in blood-drenched fangs, claws, blades, horns, and spikes so that it looks dangerous.“ When every other game or movie trots out monsters with the same edgy, try-hard, pointy, bloody aesthetic, the result becomes mundane, predictable, and decidedly not scary.
Sometimes a change as simple as flipping part of an everyday animal upside-down can have a much more unsettling effect. Equinox may not look physically intimidating (at least not any moreso than a regular horse), but it looks disturbingly, fundamentally wrong. It looks like something that could not and should not exist, something that upends humanity’s very comprehension of physics and reality. That, to me, is much spookier than a monster made of sharp, pointy, deadly things.
If I was running away from a snarling, bloody, zombie/bear/tiger/shark/dinosaur monster and I happened to cross paths with this horse as it was casually trotting along the ceiling, I would be more focused in the moment on the immediate physical danger posed by the former creature, but you can bet that the latter is the creature that would haunt my nightmares long after the physical threat is gone.
Mooncustafer 