Jimmy ScreamerClauz and the Blasphemous Church of Uncanny Animation
Aesthetic benchmarks for 3D design are continually pushing “forward” towards the goal of realism, or even realistic non-realism: a depiction of fantastic worlds grounded in the immersive qualities of seeing a resemblance of reality reflected back at you. And while the craftmanship and creative labour that goes into realistic design work is undoubtedly something worth appreciating, realism is neither the sole nor the supreme qualitative attribute to which all 3D graphic modelling should aspire to. The AAA games industry sadly does not often see it that way, and efforts to push the latest pre-built gaming hardware to its limits have — within critically-commercialised discourse anyway — encouraged the scrutinization of works which do not live up to the aesthetic benchmarks set by titles before it. There is a trend of open-world geographies that emphasise stale scale — compare the decorative emptiness of Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos to the comparatively-compact resplendence of God of War’s Midgard. Naughty Dog’s commitment to realistic cine-reminiscent character design over the past decade with Uncharted and The Last of Us is great, but this should not used as a way of devaluing the imaginative mechanics of FromSoftware with Dark Souls and Bloodborne — titles which, I would argue, far outshine Naughty Dog’s achievements in character conceptualisation even if they do not commit to Naughty Dog’s same level of polished realism. Aside from the faux-progressive sense of artistic linearity that realism has been granted, its presence has a profound impact within the labour of the games industry itself. “Crunch” has become the buzzword of the industrialised gaming world for a while now, unnervingly accepted and worryingly expected as a part of the industry’s keyboard-powered production line. Realism demands polygons — and while this may seem like an oversimplified statement when you consider the complex coding that goes into a solitary frame — the industry’s advanced polygon fetishism and unfair commercial deadlines have pathed way for a generation of games that are, as is often stated, “fundamentally broken”. Day-one patches are the norm for big titles now, and no longer just part of the in-joke for Bethesda releases. One need only look as recently as CD Projekt Red’s awkward Cyberpunk 2077 launch, built up by the spectacular reception of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and years of marketing placating to a synthwave trend which died out somewhere around the release of Kung Fury. CD Projekt Red have become a company who are not shy in letting their audience know of their desire to compete with the “best” of the industry: EA, Ubisoft, and Rockstar to name but a few.
All this speaks to the nature of the games industry but the trend does extend over to the world of film. However, 3D animated movies are not as dependent on the strength of a GPU as most games — their images, once mastered, are already rendered into a moving image format that does not require the computer to map out and generate a three-dimensional image that responds at the speed of human interaction. This grants designers far more time and creative economy to focus on those extra polygons and means they can simply cut-down on the more unnecessary and immaterial renderings. There is no need to focus on making a seamless world environment if only a portion of that world is going to be visible to the viewer. However, three-dimensional animated design — especially cinema — has not entirely come to terms with one important affectation: its tendency towards the realm of the uncanny. One of the major criticisms levelled at Robert Zemeckis’ ImageMovers production company was its devotion to a motion-captured animation style that slipped far too often into the uncanny valley — with particular criticism levelled at The Polar Express. The only real issue with this slip is in its execution. The Polar Express’s style did not work because its inherent uncanniness conflicted with the emotional register of the narrative. Only two years later, ImageMovers would bring out Monster House — a film where that stylistic uncanniness actually plays into the liminal terror of its clearly horror-inspired story (to an, admittedly, rather restricted extent). However, this uncanny affectation has not been embraced in the mainstream — its ability to expose the artifice of the viewing experience is far too disturbing in its potency to maintain commercial traction. The likes of Illumination Entertainment, Disney Animation, and post-Shrek DreamWorks practically endorse an anti-uncanny sentiment throughout their films now, pandering to an ultimately conservative animation style. Pixar have played with uncanniness before — but this has largely been restricted to the Toy Story series, likely given the franchises appeal to a broader generation of fans than many of their other Disney-financed productions. Recent efforts like Coco, Soul, Inside Out, and The Good Dinosaur still overshadow their animated contemporaries in numerous ways but remain bundled in with this recent brand of predictable CGI conservatism. Even physical stop-motion animation has found itself giving into these aesthetic demands, with Laika Studios shift from Coraline and Corpse Bride to The Boxtrolls and Missing Link signifying as such — the implication that they will one day return to these designs seems more and more distant.
And thus I bring you to Jimmy ScreamerClauz. As a 3D artist, he embodies the polar opposite end of the spectrum to the conservative domestics that mainstream CGI works so commonly pander to. In content, his works deal with the carnal overlaps of sexuality and violence, usually set against the backdrop of a corrupted domestic environment. His films often involve the physical and spiritual submission of one being to another’s violent self-motivations — through deception, manipulation, or pure dominance. In his short film, Recluse, a young girl welcomes a wild creature into her house, only for the creature to then exploit her generosity by using her lifeforce to fuel its own metamorphosis while she sleeps, disfiguring her in the process. In The Scuzzies, a subterranean race of humanoid rat creatures attempt to overpower the human that lives above them: a sexually-deranged and violent recluse existing within the four bodily-fluid-painted walls of a crumbling children’s room. His second feature-length film, When Black Birds Fly, takes place in a walled-off quasi-suburban community called Heaven, dictated by the omnipresent and militant-authoritarian Caine. His entire philosophy of leadership is defined in antagonistic relation to that which exists beyond the wall: a psychedelic chaos-world ruled by The Evil One. In each case, Jimmy ScreamerClauz bends the perceived rationalism of institutions — of Western domesticity, corporate capitalism, organised religion — to expose the self-serving sado-masochistic brutality that bubbles beneath them. Comfort is obliterated, and libidinal horrors are reified and realised, through the continual visual manipulation and transgression of our culturally-coded reliefs. Yet the thematic content that informs his tales are but one part of his transgressive machinations.
It is fairly common for ScreamerClauz to be called out for the amateurish qualities of his animation style. Blacktooth, writing for Horror Society, is fairly dismissive of When Black Birds Fly’s animation quality, claiming that it reminded them of “cut scenes from various PS2 games”. Many of the more popular reviews on Letterboxd are similarly critical: “the animation can seem a little jerky” says user ‘unclenugget’, and “ragged around the edges” says Jason Coffman. I agree with all of these comments, but I certainly do not view them as the criticisms they are intended to be, as the horrifying uncanny specialities of ScreamerClauz’s animated spectacle arises from these exact qualities. As his filmography has evolved, those jerky animations and ragged geometries have remained; and the criticisms of PS2-ish traits appear to project a dismissive vision of technological linearity onto ScreamerClauz’s efforts. His characters never move like real creatures, more like puppets with tangled strings — bloated corpses necromantically revived, jerking through their terrible non-existences. The words they speak barely ever match up to how their lips move, as if their bodies are the crude slaves of voices existing beyond them. The camera (and thus our perspective of Jimmy’s hellworlds) are hardly ever stable: usually focused on a centrally-framed character like a distant snorricam; as if we have become psychologically-ensnared by the mere presence of these beings. His more realistic forms — glowing teeth, gyrating eyeballs, blood-pumped penises, tendrils, spider-legs, tree-branches — are disturbed of their right to exist within the comforts of realism through broken or jagged polygons and chromatic over-saturation. It is certainly true that, looking upon his aesthetic trajectory, there have been some “improvements” — but these “improvements” arise from new visual concepts that he has begun to embrace and explore. One of his latest works, The Scuzzies, shows ScreamerClauz’s fantastic employment of texture into the fabric of his uncanny extremes. His humanoid rat bastards possess veiny exposed flesh, covered in fibrous green lichen. His human is covered in rough pustuled skin; and a close-up of its smegma-blemished penis reveals an entangled mass of sinewy humanoid rat parts and bulbous fountains of blood. Green and blue ectoplasms glisten brilliantly. All these textures are gruesome enough in their own right, but it is through ScreamerClauz’s trademark juxtaposition that the truly uncanny potential surfaces. The ectoplasm flows like no normal liquid would, blobby and luminescent against the otherwise harsh necrophiliac tones that dominate this film. Perfect meaty renderings are distorted from graphical stretching, with jiggle physics employed in a playfully-disturbed nod to its erotic conventional trend. Black tendril masses, exquisitely writhing like a pit of wet eels, spatially overlap each other and exist unbound by the physics of the creature that wears them. Violent purple-and-green cruciferous appendages merging through solids, while dull beige bubbles froth up through its geometrical boundaries. Organic rhizomes emerging from a caved-in face, but its fleshy umbilical-cord textures remain suspended in one eternal form — oozing but never flowing, like long trails of raw sewage instantly freezing in the air.
Jimmy ScreamerClauz is not the internet’s only practitioner of this style, but he is certainly becoming one of its masters. The likes of Cool 3D World, Cole Kush, and Meat Dept have also championed this style of utilising 3D animation’s ability to render the uncanny through the uneasy juxtaposition of realism and abstraction. Of course, these works are the results of labour from a handful of people as opposed to the teams of tens and hundreds that collectively commit their many valuable hours towards developing grand-scale video game and motion-picture projects. Undoubtedly, the work they do is commendable, and the results are so often staggering. Few can deny that the PS4’s Shadow of the Colossus remake is one of the console’s most outstandingly-beautiful works of graphic design — but for all that love and labour, that outstanding beauty is nothing without the context of its execution. Great emptiness not as an emergent fault of quantity-over-quality world design, but as an expression of a universe beyond the frail limitations of our desperate protagonist. After every ancient colossi you destroy, you return to the hall — an ethereal light extending down upon the plinth once again, a grand reminder of the sheer divine breadth of your quest: to defy the forces of natural order and bring back the dead. Likewise, Jimmy ScreamerClauz’s guttural stylisations — far from the work of an “amateur” — are the works of an artist acutely aware of the unique visual affects that come with his medium. An artist who has actively sought to push computer-generated imagery away from the turgid realms of convention, and in his own grim depraved style, reopen the field to the endless possibilities that top-down culturally-sanitised condescension has repressed for far too long.
You can access and found out more about Jimmy ScreamerClauz’s work here.
