THE CHALLENGE
HELLSPACE isn’t just a sci-fi horror film; it’s a psychological dive into the chaos of psychosis. The protagonist is a woman on a deep-space mission, slowly unraveling as she starts to sense something hunting her on board. Is it an alien? Or is it all in her head?
The story is a metaphor for living with a mental health disorder. It explores what it means to question your own perception, to survive the spiral of paranoia, and to rebuild trust in your gut instincts. The real twist? She’s right. There is a monster. But she’s also battling her own mind while navigating her mental health, taking her meds, and coming back stronger.
The design had to hold all that tension. It needed to sell the genre and carry the weight of the message. The goal was to create a title treatment and poster that felt fractured, atmospheric, and undeniably human.
THE SOLUTION
I designed the title treatment to evoke distortion and duality with clean sans-serif type with a degraded, ghosted effect that mirrors both static and disassociation. The key art composition pairs a tight, mirror-like reflection of the protagonist with a hidden clawed creature behind her, slowly coming into view. It’s meant to make the audience question what’s real.
The palette leans into a synthetic, phosphor green—cold, saturated, and unnervingly digital. It channels the unease of surveillance footage and sci-fi horror, layered with glitch-like textures that suggest reality breaking down. This isn’t just color—it’s a signal. A visual metaphor for psychological collapse, identity distortion, and the creeping sense that something unnatural is watching. Every layer deepens the descent.
MY PART
As Creative Director and Designer, my contributions included:
✔ Designing the title treatment to convey psychological fragmentation and sci-fi grit
✔ Creating key art that blurs the line between hallucination and threat, placing the viewer inside the protagonist’s paranoia
✔ Building cinematic compositions adaptable for both portrait and landscape formats
✔ Choosing a color palette and texture treatment that matched the film’s themes of isolation, fear, and resilience
✔ Collaborating closely with the filmmaker to ensure the final design honored both the genre and the deeper message: that survival sometimes means trusting yourself, even when no one else does
The result? The final key art plays with perspective, mirroring the story’s blurred line between reality and delusion. The portrait version isolates the protagonist in a claustrophobic frame, hiding the looming alien threat just outside the crop. In the landscape format, the creature’s hand is revealed, reframing the scene entirely.
This duality builds suspense while echoing the film’s core tension: is the danger real, or is it imagined? The result is a campaign that’s both cinematic and psychological—grounded in genre, but layered with meaning. A visual identity that says: she’s not just seeing things. She’s surviving them.
