Movies
Check Out an Early Concept Drawing for ‘Insidious: The Last Key’ Demon
Lipstick-Face Demon. The Bride in Black. Key Face.
Adam Robitel’s Insidious: The Last Key introduces a new franchise demon in the form of Key Face, played by Javier Botet and notably equipped with keys for fingers. It’s not all that clear in the film, but Key Face seems to be a sort of super-villain in The Further, holding the keys necessary to unlock other malicious demons that reside in that place.
He’s also able to possess people in the real world, making them carry out his evil deeds.
As Robitel explained to us last week, Key Face was not in the original script.
“The earlier draft that Leigh had did not have a demon in it,“ he told us. “And I said, ‘Guys, to be honest, when I think of Insidious I think about Lipstick Demon and the iconography of the franchise. You guys need a demon that is kind of evocative of prison and locks and keys.’“
Robitel continued, detailing the origin of the new demon, “So, out of those first couple of meetings I got the job and then we ended up coming up with Key Face.“
Working with concept artist Jacob Hair, Robitel came up with an early take on Key Face that was shared over on Facebook by Hair today. “[The illustration] was done super early on to help sell them on Adam’s take on the movie,” Hair explained to us. “It was inspired by some leprosy reference Adam had.”
“[Adam] and I relayed a bunch of ideas that ranged from far-out and fantastic to very grounded and real. This direction seemed to split the difference nicely.”
This early concept is a bit different than the finished design, as Key Face doesn’t yet have keys for fingers and is bald. The coolest thing about the early design is that Key Face literally has a giant key hole embedded into his face, which isn’t really conveyed with the final design; I didn’t even realize that’s what they were going for until I saw this art.
Two things that have proven to be pretty dependable at the box office in recent years are horror movies and Christopher Nolan movies. With Nolan’s The Odyssey absolutely dominating the box office this past weekend, many fans of Nolan’s work have been left hungry for a Nolan-directed horror movie. After all, The Odyssey does whet the appetite for Nolan nightmare fuel.
Christopher Nolan has brushed up against the horror genre in the past with 2002 thriller Insomnia, but does he have any interest in someday making a full-on horror movie?
Nolan tells the Empire Podcast in a new chat, “I’ve always been interested in doing a horror film.”
“But horror is most successful when the conceptual framework of whatever the story is is just so undeniable. I think there are very few really great horror movies,” Nolan continues.
So why hasn’t Christopher Nolan directed a horror movie yet?
He explains to Empire, “I’ve never clicked with a particular idea or concept that worked for me. I love the genre. Of all genres, it’s the most visceral. Where the direct response to the audience is the most important. That is to say, you’re trying to make people literally feel something in their bones about what’s going on on-screen.”
Nolan calls horror “a genre in which experimentation is demanded.” He explains, “I go to see a lot of horror films with my kids these days, and you’ll see things in the first half an hour, 45 minutes of any horror film that you’d never see in another genre. Risks that are taken. Dangerous approaches to things. Admittedly, a lot of movies can’t sustain that to the end. But in the horror genre, that kind of innovation is not just respected – it’s really demanded.”
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters.
Cillian Murphy as Scarecrow in Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)
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