Few movie costumes are as unsettling as the one worn by Pennywise, the sinister clown portrayed by Bill Skarsgård in the 2017 horror film It. On display at the Hollywood Museum, this original costume is a fascinating example of how fashion design can help bring a character’s disturbing personality to life.
Designed by Janie Bryant, known for her work on Mad Men and Deadwood, the outfit deliberately avoids the familiar look of a brightly colored circus clown. Instead, Bryant drew inspiration from Medieval, Renaissance, Elizabethan and Victorian clothing to give Pennywise the appearance of a being from another time. Continue reading Eye On Design: Pennywise’s Nightmarish Clown Costume From It→
Imagine sitting through a forty-minute rough cut once where the product never appeared until minute thirty-eight. Nobody in the room cares. That’s the whole trick, and almost nobody gets it.
Every brand says it wants storytelling. Then the first draft arrives with a logo in the opening frame, a list of features in the middle, and a call to action bolted onto the end. The audience checks out in the first eight seconds. Here’s the promise: by the end of this article you’ll have a working method for building a story that carries a message without announcing that it’s carrying one.
Stan Winston Studio created this complex animatronic for Steven Spielberg‘s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (USA, 2001), a haunting story of a robotic child longing to be a real boy. Teddy, a loyal sidekick to David (played by Hayley Joel Osment) and likewise a robot has fifty points of motion and required at least five people to operate. In comparison, Winston Studios enormous T-Rex animatronic for the 1993 Jurassic Park has 10 fewer points of motion than this tiny bear. Computer graphics and Jack Angel‘s voice acting enhanced Teddy‘s convincing performance. The toy’s unending devotion starkly contrast with the actions of the humans in the film, who all abandon David.
Photo By Emily Shur Courtesy of the Academy Museum
Just in time for Halloween, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is getting seriously spooky with two new exhibitions exploring the movies, monsters, and movie magic behind one of cinema’s most enduring genres.
Opening September 26, 2026, The Horror Show takes visitors on an immersive journey through horror’s many forms, from Gothic castles and psychological terror to science fiction, slashers, religion, and ghosts. The exhibition begins with a sound installation before leading visitors down “The Hallway”— a setting familiar to anyone who has ever watched a horror movie and thought, I definitely should not go down there. Continue reading Get Ready to Scream: The Academy Museum Goes All-In on Horror→
In France in 1975, screenwriter Dan O’Bannon was collaborating with Director Alejandro Jodorowsky on an adaptation of Frank Herbert‘s 1965 novel, Dune, when he met the artist HR Giger. Jodorowsky had been introduced to Giger’s work by Salvador Dali, and had brought him on to create designs for the film.
While the feature ultimately fell through, O’Bannon couldn’t get Giger’s drawings out of his head. The screenwriter recalled “ending up writing a script about a Giger monster,” which would eventually become the influential franchise Alien. Continue reading Eye On Design: HR Giger’s Necronom 2005 (Alien 3 Model)→
