Happy early Halloween, everybody!

I didn’t want to post this until Halloween, but fuck it, I can’t hold it off for that long. (Finished it WAY ahead of schedule.) Anyway, in the spirit of the season, I wanted to try something new by putting out a picture that’s genuinely unsettling for once. I’ve done some sad and/or dark drawings before, but I’ve never tried one that’s meant to be scary. So I created this, finally getting around to drawing Scar at the same time. A fucked up and demented version of him, of course, but still.

Normally, this is the part where I’d explain what’s going on in this or what it’s meant to be depicting. But this time, I’m changing that up. I want to leave this drawing completely up to interpretation, just to add to the creepiness with the uncertainty of it. It’s really up to you guys as to what’s happening. Even the title is supposed to be ambiguous. It could be a real thing happening to Kion, or it could also be a dream. It might be a hallucination, a premonition, a daydream, or anything of the sort. Perhaps it’s real and Scar wants to haunt Kion by horrifying him with his appearance. Maybe Kion is so scared of becoming like Scar, that he’s imagining him trying to corrupt him. Perhaps Scar is trying to deprave Kion’s own soul by merging with him, whether it be literal or figurative. Perhaps Scar is giving Kion an initiation of some sort to turn him into a demon too. Or if you really want to go balls-to-the-wall, you could say Kion died or is having a near death experience, and Scar is trying to drag him down to hell with him. There’s no right or wrong answer in this case.

While I won’t give away what’s going on in this scene, what I can say is that I tried my hardest to make Scar’s ghost look as unsettling as possible. I’ve long been familiar with the concept of the uncanny valley, and it’s always fascinated me to no end for some reason. So I wanted to apply it to Scar here, since the uncanny is often the type of horror that really sticks with people long-term. It didn’t come out quite the way I intended it to, but on the whole, I’d say it does the trick. After all, how would you react if you suddenly saw that thing moving around in the same universe as The Lion King?

Let me know in the comments what you think!