Our household starts celebrating Halloween around the middle of September. We have a special group on Facebook we started this year to share with other people. Listening to their commentary about the different movies we've watched has been inspirational in a major way. When I came up with the idea for this image, it was from reading how freaked out some people were over the films we watched and some of the scariest of the stories we've indulged so far.

The vast majority of the work for this image happened in Daz3D. Lighting proved to be the biggest challenge to get that creepy basement look without the monsters being totally lost in the darkness. Luckily, I have a basement that's almost this creepy so when the moon was particularly bright, I went down and studied how that light worked through the small windows. I simulated that here by using primitive shapes and sticking them in the holes where the windows were for the basement.

These I cooled the temperature to give them the night time look. It still wasn't enough to bring the monsters out so I used soft box spotlights to provide a little more detail for him. 

The vampire girl on the stairs (which it might be hard to notice, she does have fangs) was not too difficult. I gave her the candle and played with the brightness until I liked the effect. Half her body was still silhouette in the original version so I added some lights to the top of the stairs, just out of sight. One is a primitive with an emitter and the other is a soft box spotlight casting a very low emission strength down on her.

Finally, to get the background behind her to not be a shadowy mess, I used yet another primitive. This one I warmed up to give it that 'candlelight' look. Since it was so small and it wouldn't really be seen, that part didn't need to be tweaked too much. It just provided the sense that she was definitely stepping downstairs from a room and not a nebulous black hole.

All tolled, the longest part was setting up the lighting and the scene.

Scene Setup: 4 hours (timed by watching two movies)

Render Time: 5 hours

Post Production: 2 hours (this one didn't need a lot)