Dissecting Dead Space's Grotesque Visuals with Art Director Ian Milham.

“For the Necromorphs, we went straight to human anatomy and trauma for reference. We have reference image folders that half the team doesn’t have the stomach to look in.”

Resident Evil shaped the world of survival/horror, and Resident Evil 4 later redefined it. Silent Hill interjected its own brand of creepy, while Fatal Frame showed us that anything can be scary -- even photography. But what these and most other survival/horror games have in common is that, no matter how fun, definitive or just plain cool, very rarely do they introduce a new monster that makes you step back and wonder, "Where did that come from!?"

Dead Space, EA's first major venture into survival/horror, plans to change that with a new breed of vicious creatures. To find out how the developers pulled it off, GameZone turned to Dead Space's Art Director, Ian Milham. "Getting a new look and ideas into Dead Space was really hard, especially when such great other work has been done before us," he revealed. "The key I think was to not look at other games and movies too much, but instead look at real life. For horror, we thought about what types of things scared us, what made us uncomfortable, and we integrated those real-world influences into the game. We found that these ideas were usually pretty universal, so if we were scaring ourselves, we’d probably scare other people as well."