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Working with Photoshop has been a part of my work since the 1990s, but I’ve only used a little of the software’s potential. I thought I’d see if I could take a picture of a house and turn it into something different.

I started with this photo from Wikipedia, of the house shown in the background of Grant Wood’s famous “American Gothic” painting:

I wanted to turn this into a haunted house, using characters from some silent scream classics. Here’s what I came up with:

For those unfamiliar with them, the characters are Lon Chaney as the man in the beaver hat from “London After Midnight”, at left; Charles Ogle as the monster in Thomas Edison’s “Frankenstein”, in the lower window; Conrad Veidt as Cesare and Lil Dagover as Jane in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, right; and Max Schreck as Graf Orlok in “Nosferatu”, top window.