Photo Manipulation

[JDBar]

It's almost a little too difficult to make out the silhouette on the right. Also it's difficult to tell that they are hooded, and if you didn't tell us they were on stairs I probably would've never realized it.

If you're going for a horrific kind of response, then you need to make your subjects just barely recognizable and I think you're just a little bit below that bar.

Here are some images I think do this well. These are photo-manips based around the internet urban myth of Slenderman.

Spoiler (Click to View)

In these photos, Slenderman is barely distinguishable but the viewer can still tell that there's a man there. But he's different, just different enough from what a person is familiar with when they think of a man (his height). They know he has a face, but they can't distinguish it, and their mind is left with questioning what it is even though it shares features of what they're familiar with. The first image even does this with the faces of the children, but to a slightly lesser extent. It's kind of hard to explain, but that bit of confusion/suspense combined with familiarity/distinguishability needs to be perfect balanced to invoke fear into a person's mind.