#spellman mortuary sims 4 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

anxiousarchitect · 4 years ago

Text

SPELLMAN MORTUARY - Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’s house in the Sims 4

[THIS LOT WILL BE UPDATED AND AVAILABLE SOON.]

This is my first post ! Yay !! Let’s be honest. After season 2, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina started to be...weird. But the show had some amazing sets like the Spellman Mortuary, that I decided to reproduce in the Sims 4 ! I like to dive into the history and symbolic of movie sets so we’ll have a little chat about this too.

The mortuary

The original house set is amazing and full of details, art, symbolic and occult secrets. It’s a perfect vintage Halloween decor, with it’s granny chic and spooky vibe, and all the vibrant, dark colors.

The interior of the house is a labyrinthic set of rooms inspired by the notorious Winchester haunted house in San Jose as well as H.P Lovecraft aesthetic. The exterior in particular was inspired by the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion, a gabled house in Salem, Massachusetts, also known as the ‘House of Seven Gables’ in the Nathaniel Hawthorne’s book.

The set was created by Lisa Soper, a real-life pagan who infused the house with her magic. She was born on Halloween, which is just one of the many coincidences she ran into while working on the house. She indeed put a lot of her personal power in it like a protection spell on the house, calming sigils, carved runes... You can read more about this there, there, or there.

Exterior at night - the fog of Forgotten Hollow suits the house perfectly !

The mortuary itself was built for the show and the exterior doesn’t exactly match the interior sets (which are bigger), which makes it impossible to reproduce it perfectly in game. I had to make some sacrifice to keep the exterior look close to the original, like reducing the size of the kitchen and add some rooms.

The house was built in a shape of a spiral (every room you enter leads to the next one) and get more magical and magical as you go deep into the house.

I wanted to get as similar as possible to the original to make it a truly witchy place, even in the Sims. In every room in the set we can find several pieces of occult and fantasy art which participates a lot to the atmosphere. I reproduced some of them like the big Francisco Goya’s painting above the fireplace in the living room. We can also spot a lot of John Bauer’s paintings, or other famous artists.

The main hall

The entrance was a challenge because of the stairs. It was hard to make and I used multiple platforms and modular stairs to get the feeling right. The decor crew said they wanted to represent the choice between the mortal world and the magical world that Sabrina must face, and made the stairs split in two to represent the two possible options.

In here we can see a representation of the medieval tapestry “Unicorn in captivity” that we can also see in Harry Potter in the Gryffindor’s common room. There’s also a lot of art in this hall but we don’t see the details of all of them, so I chose some pictural representation of famous witches like Circe, Medea or Morgan le Fey.

Zelda and Hilda’s office

The office is where the ants receive customers (and also where my sims go to play on the computer when they’re bored). Zelda and Hilda share a chair here. Lisa Soper said that she had a theory about them being siamese twins in the past, which also explains why they sleep in twin beds. We can spot two John Bauer’s painting in it, as much as multiple death-related objects, like old urns, and the amazing auntie’s metronomes. I couldn’t get it for the game, but here’s a picture from Tv Addict.

Foyer

This is probably my favourite room. It’s so inconic and there’s just so many different things to see in it. I think the multiple doors make it the true magical center of the house. The wallpaper is actually a representation of the Gibson Girls. The main painting is Francisco Goya’s ‘El Aquelarre’ (The Ritual). Satan is everywhere in the house as we will see ! On the left of the painting there’s a John William Waterhouse painting of Medea that I added. I love the vintage TV and obviously the wonderful Tiffany lamp. In the original set, there’s a big stained glass ceiling which is a nod to the 1978 horror movie ‘Suspiria’. Obviously it was impossible to reproduce it in game, which is sad !

Conservatory

It’s too bad that we don’t see more of this room in the show as it is beautiful. It was hard to reproduce, I wanted to get that lush, vegetal, oppressive feeling as if you were in the forest - which is hard to do in the Sims if you don’t want to overwhelm a room and keep space for you sims to walk. This is a place where the Spellman keep some magical herbs, and even if we don’t really see it in the show there’s a cute reproduction of a Baby Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors.

Kitchen

The kitchen is full of plants and jars, like a proper witch’s kitchen. This is where Hilda spends most of her time cooking. The room is divided in two parts and has quite a symetric vibe, which might be another metaphor for Sabrina’s difficult choice. There’s a lot of porcelain and rabbit imagery in it, which is the Spellman’s totem ! It represents both innocence and fragility as much as witchcraft and occult mysteries, which is a perfect choice in my opinion.

There’s a small potion cabinet next to the kitchen. In the original set, there are real potion ingredients that Lisa Soper created herself or got from her own personnal collection.

Living-room

This is the big living room, where the Spellman came to celebrate Yule. Its main color is yellow, a symbol of cuningness and wisdom, and the original chinoiserie wallpaper in the set is incredibly beautiful and looks like the garden of Eden. We can even see an apple tree near the left exit, maybe to remind us of the episode of the Genesis where Satan tempted Eve. Maye the fruit of knowledge is a metaphor for witchcraft ?

The shoe corridor

In the show we don’t see this corridor very much, but it’s very, very cool. There’s a collection of shoes here that holds one of Zelda’s secret. Everytime she puts a hex on someone, she steals the shoe of her victim and put it here to keep the hex going (or maybe as a trophee !). There’s a beautiful nature’s themed wallpaper, with trees and pines all over (mine is quite plain, helas).

Zelda and Hilda’s bedroom

In the show, there’s two luxurious and beautiful victorian lamps in this bedroom. Two bad I couldn’t get some as pretty for the game... The dominant color of this room is blue and purple. Lisa Soper said every character had his color, a symbol of his personnality. Blue is for Hilda, as she’s a gentle and calming creature, and purple for Zelda, which shows her mystical traits and her strict personnality. There’s also a John Bauer’s painting in this room, an illustration of the fairy tale ‘Coronation of the Sea Queen’. It would be interesting to study the links that can be established between this tale and the personnality of the sisters.

Sabrina’s bedroom

This is my second favourite room ! The original bedroom is a perfect teen witch fantasy, and have a less antique feeling than the rest of the house, probably to express youth and passion.

Even if the shows deliberately doesn’t tell in which years it all takes place, there’s a big 70′s and 80′s vibe in Sabrina’s room with horror movies posters (like Nosferatu or Häxan), pictures of musicians like David Bowie, the Beatles,The Monkeys...but it is indeed the bedroom of a young witch, and we can see magical artefacts here and there, like tarot cards on the mirror, Henry Fuseli’s Weird Sisters on the wall, and of course, rabbits.

The bedroom’s color is mostly red and white, the two Sabrina’s color. They represent her dual nature, as innocent and pure as she’s fierce and dangerous. The doll’s house that we can see on the show is actually a miniature of the set, and contains a replica of Sabrina’s bedroom. It’s a nice touch and suggests, like the spiral shape of the house and the many doors in the foyer, some kind of a neverending place where we can only go deeper and deeper... Later in the show the two mirrors also reveals itself as portals to other worlds.

There’s a very cropped version of a John Bauer’s painting near Sabrina’s bed call ‘Inge by the Dark Lake’, a beautiful alias to the Narcissus myth, which adds to the mirror symbolic as a door to the unconscious, magical worlds and identity. I wanted to get the “under the roof” feeling right, so I made my own wallpaper to get the “old red” color and retexture the ceiling decor to match.

Sabrina’s bathroom

Who never dreamt to have its own bathroom next to the bedroom ? Sabrina has the most beautiful one. This is where she actually cooks a lot of different spells including the one she casts on her boyfriends ! The bathtub itself is glorious and has this kind of sensual, dramatic atmosphere.

Ambrose’s attic

This was a pain in the a** to build, because of the mess and all the objects ! But it’s a beautiful attic in the set, I especially like the booknerd feeling in it. It was designed like a onion, with multiple layers of objects from different era, to show how long Ambrose have been stuck in here and accumulated stuff ! It’s much more messy than Sabrina’s bedroom, because Ambrose is more of a crazy scientist and hippie.

Other rooms

There’s more little rooms a little bit everywhere like the morgue and a red entrance in the back where we can see John Waterhouse’s ‘Magic Circle’ (also sometimes in Sabrina’s bedroom or in the kitchen), and also more bathrooms since logically nobody else than Sabrina uses Sabrina’s. I’ll showcase the whole house in a video when I have time ! Well, here it is !! Thank you for reading this long article, I hope you enjoyed this discovery of Spellman’s mortuary. I really fell in love with this house, there’s truly something fascinating about it and it’s really cool to play in it.

140 notes · View notes