Institute of Art Design + Technology Dún Laoghaire
Ireland’s campus for the Creative Industries

Kate Minogue 

 
BA [Hons] Animation

Kate is a Wexford-based artist with a great interest in the visual development aspect of the animation pipeline. She an avid fan of suspense thrillers and ghost stories and has spent much of her final year at IADT developing visuals for film projects with horror themes. For her final project, she created a series of illustrations based on folk tales of the Banshee from her native County Wexford. This showcase reflects Kate's love of stories with mystical and macabre themes. She is excited to continue building on the artistic skillsets she acquired during her time at IADT and hopes to join the industry as a visual development artist post-graduation.

The Banshee's Comb

This series of artwork is inspired by a bit of mythology from where I live in County Wexford, particularly as collected in "The Folklore of Wexford" by Michael Fortune. As children growing up, we were taught to be wary of any lost or discarded combs we happened to find outside as we were told that they belonged to the legendary Banshee spirit. According to our local folklore, if someone was foolish enough to take a comb found outdoors The Banshee would follow them home, where she would scream and bang at their doors, walls, and windows until the comb was returned to her. The only way you could safely return the comb to The Banshee was to hand it to her on the end of a pair of iron fire tongs, otherwise she would rip your arm off along with the comb when she took it back. The above illustrations are my interpretation of this tale as a horror/thriller in which a naïve girl accidentally invokes the wrath of the Banshee after stealing her comb.



"Shiver With Anticipation" A Study Of Suspense In The Horror Film Genre.

Suspense is the core driving force behind a cinematic narrative. Any film can introduce a character and give them a problem to solve but suspense is the key to creating the necessary tension that keeps the audience engaged and interested in finding out how that character’s problem will be resolved. While suspense is a greatly valued narrative tool utilised across multiple genres, there is arguably no other cinematic genre that relies on the use of suspense more than Horror. The ultimate goal of every horror filmmaker is to have their film elicit feelings of palpable fear and tension in their audience. However, the achievement of that powerful sense of fear and tension which they strive for is unquestionably tied to their ability to successfully generate suspense within the events of the film. Most filmmakers could reasonably come up with a suspenseful premise for a horror film. However, it is the execution of that premise through the careful crafting of Visuals and Sound that can make or break the experience of such a narrative for the viewer. My thesis investigates patterns of suspense building in classic and contemporary horror films with the aim of identifying particular methods by which it is most successfully achieved in such narratives.