At the Mountains of Madness – Blood and Porridge

October 31, 2025November 3, 2025

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2025

It’s October 31^st, the day of the spooky festival known in Ireland as Samhain and elsewhere as Halloween. As is my custom each Halloween, I’ll celebrate the spirit of the occasion by posting on this blog ten of the creepiest or most unsettling pieces of artwork I’ve come across during the year. By the way, the above photos are of a house in my immediate neighbourhood in Singapore. Its inhabitants must really love Halloween.

Let’s begin with a great, old-school horror illustration where an unwary boatman has an encounter with a marsh-monster. This was painted by the late Angus McBride, an artist who was born in London to Scottish parents but spent much of his professional career based in South Africa. McBride’s resume included work for the educational magazines Look and Learn (1962-82) and Worlds of Wonder (1970-75), the Men-at-Arms series from Osprey Publishing and the tabletop game Middle-earth Role Playing inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In fact, it’s from a collection of those last illustrations – Angus McBride’s Characters of Middle-earth (1990) – that this ghoulish picture comes. The hideous beastie is actually a Mewlip, which The One Wiki to Rule Them All describes as ‘a fictional race, made up by Hobbits of the Shire, mentioned only in one poem.’

© Iron Crown Enterprises

Onto something more elegant. I love old posters and illustrations advertising that most decadent of alcoholic drinks, absinthe. These were often the work of Art Nouveau artists, most famously, Alphonse Mucha. But away from the gentle curves and nymph-like belles dames of Art Nouveau, there’s a darker school of absinthe artwork, which suggests the drink’s more sinisterly seductive and ruinous side. These feature green devils, black cats and, depicted in this painting from la Belle Epoque, a splendidly vaporous green lady-ghost. It’s entitled Absinthe Drinker and is the work of the Czech artist Viktor Oliva, who reputedly quaffed much of the stuff in Paris in the late 19^th century. Absinthe Drinker now hangs in the Zlata Husa Gallery in Prague.

From wikipedia.org

You get the impression la Belle Epoque passed by the great Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whose paintings – most famously The Scream (1893) – often suggest he lived in a state of perpetual, nerve-jangling anxiety. During his childhood, he suffered the trauma of losing his mother and sister to tuberculosis and getting a bout of it himself when he was 13: “One Christmas Eve, when 13 years old, I lie in my bed,” he recalled. “The blood trickles from my mouth – the fever rages in my veins – fear cries out deep within me. Now, now, in just a moment, you will meet your Maker and be sentenced for eternity.” In 1893, drawing on those experiences, he painted By the Death Bed (Fever) with pastels. He would do further versions of it, with oils in 1895 and 1915 and as a lithograph in 1896. It’s the 1915 By the Death Bed (Fever) that I find most disturbing. The white-skinned, almost skull-faced woman on the right could pass for the Angel of Death, while the appropriately diseased-looking wallpaper resembles a close-up of a yellow handkerchief, into which a TB victim has just coughed globs of blood. Actually, the décor puts me in mind of one of the best horror short stories of all time, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892).

From archive.com/artwork

Another all-time classic horror short story is M.R. James’ Casting the Runes (1911), which taps into the fear there’s something monstrous and nasty following you, and following you, and all the time getting closer… The story was filmed as Night of the Demon in 1957, 21 years after James’ death. I think James would have approved of the creepy atmosphere and build-up created by director Jacques Tourneur, but not of big, shonky-looking demon that’s doing the following and appears at the movie’s climax. Apparently, it was shoehorned into the film by its producers, against Tourneur’s wishes. Still, I really like this colourful poster for the movie, painted by Spanish artist Enrique Mataix. Mataix produced movie posters for almost a half-century, from 1939 to 1988, including ones for Bringing Up Baby (1938), Waterloo Bridge (1940), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), Lust for Life (1956), North by Northwest (1959) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Yes, his Night of the Demon poster gives prominence to that silly demon, but it’s slightly blurred, which hides its shonkiness. And the surrounding, infernally psychedelic colours are striking.

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com / © Columbia Pictures

This next work, Can You Show Me the Way Home by Californian artist Brandi Milne, feels like it could be an illustration from a movie poster. Maybe one for a warped 1960s psychological thriller where children are imperiled, like Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), The Nanny (1965) or The Mad Room (1969). Of course, it also echoes that hoary old 1958 sci-fi / horror movie The Fly, whose finale has a human / fly hybrid – David Hedison’s tiny head grafted onto a fly’s body – trapped in a spider’s web, while the humungous spider crawls hungrily towards it. Rather than an attached-to-a-bug David-Hedison-head, Can You Show Me the Way Home artfully features a detached doll-head. Also, it’s disarmingly presented in a child-like palette of black, white, grey, pink and straw-yellow. Though going by the size of the doll-head, its spider must be pretty humungous too.

From dorothycircusgallery.com / © Brandi Milne

And there’s an obvious cinematic vibe – J-Horror this time – from this picture by Ohio-based concept artist David Sladek, aptly titled Waiting at the Wrong Bus Stop. It strikes a particular chord with me. During my misspent youth, I occasionally spent too long in a pub on a Friday or Saturday night and then found myself waiting for a late-night bus, in a decrepit and remote bus shelter, in the company of various unsavoury-looking characters. Though none of them ever looked as unsavoury as the characters here.

From artstation.com / © David Sladek

And now for something completely different. For depictions of the surreally ghoulish, you can’t beat Hieronymus Bosch. Here’s a detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, the legendary triptych the Dutchman painted between 1490 and 1510. Its panels depict the paradise that’d been the Garden of Eden, the titular garden with its cavorting, amorous nudes and… hell. Obviously, the hell-panel contains the images that everyone remembers. This part of it shows a knight being devoured by what Wikipedia describes as ‘a pack of wolves’, though to me they look more that horror-story staple, rats – giant ones. No doubt the thoughts flashing through the unfortunate knight’s brain are similar to the thoughts of the first victim in James Herbert’s 1974 paperback epic, The Rats: “Rats! His mind screamed the words. Rats eating me alive! God, God help me…”

From smarthistory.org

And keeping with rats, this gleeful-looking half-human, half-rat creature never fails to give me the creeps. It’s the work of the American artist Brom, originally from Albany, Georgia. His career has included illustrating the roleplaying worlds of Dungeons & Dragons and, more recently, providing pictures for as well as writing his own horror novels. This illustration comes from his 2021 novel Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery.

From bromart.com / © Gerald Brom

Meanwhile, proper wolves – though perhaps they’re werewolves – feature in this beautifully evocative watercolour, ink and pencil work done by the Swiss artist Eugene Grasset in 1892, Three Women and Three Wolves. I love everything about it: the trio of eerily floating women, who must be witches, or nymphs, or spirits, and the half-shocked, half-indignant way the nearest woman looks out of the picture at us; the three black wolves also looking, and laughing, out of the picture; the subtly-patterned russet trunks of the forest trees; the carpet of ferns. And what’s that lying in the bottom left-hand corner? A horn? A hunting horn? Have the wolves just been chomping on a huntsman? No wonder they look so jolly.

From wikipedia.org

There aren’t any wolves, giant rats, giant spiders, J-Horror apparitions or any other monstrosities in this illustration by another Californian, Michael Whelan, described as ‘one of the world’s premier artists of imaginative realism’ and the most lauded artist in the history of science fiction. (He has 15 Hugo Awards under his belt for a start.) Done in acrylic, it’s an interior illustration for a Centipede Press edition of the famous H.P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness (1931) which, as far as I can ascertain, hasn’t been published yet. It’s the pictorial equivalent of a cinematic reaction shot. But what a reaction. The screaming explorer conveys all the cosmic horror that makes this particular story, set in the wastes of Antarctica, so claustrophobic. Particularly clever are the margins of grey fur along the edges of the explorer’s garments. They’re arranged so that they resemble that most Lovecraftian of motifs – a coiling tentacle.

From dmrbooks.com / © Michael Whelan / Centipede Press

And on the subject of H.P. Lovecraft… I traditionally feature ten scary pictures in these annual Halloween posts. But this year, here’s an extra one, an eleventh, in honour of the legendary New Jersey artist Stephen Fabian, who sadly died in May this year (admittedly at a grand old age of 95). I admire the black-and-white interior designs he did for a 1998 volume entitled In Lovecraft’s Shadow, which is a collection of short stories not by Lovecraft but by his pen-friend and posthumous publisher August Derleth. Unfortunately, reproducing an entire illustration on this page would mean reducing it and shedding some of its intricate detail. So here’s part of an illustration for the 1948 Derleth short story Something in Wood. It shows a statue of Lovecraft’s ghastliest and most famous deity, Cthulhu, looking tentacle-y and baleful, as ever.

© Mycroft & Moran / Stephen E. Fabian Sr

Happy Halloween!

June 25, 2022

Literary things

© The Turman-Foster Company / Universal Pictures

I reckon John Carpenter’s 1982 movie The Thing is one of the best horror films ever. Its story of a shape-shifting alien organism that infiltrates a base in Antarctica, absorbing and assuming the forms of more and more of the base’s human (and canine) personnel, is a masterpiece of claustrophobia, paranoia and all-round scariness.

And its special effects, courtesy of make-up / effects genius Rob Bottin, massively raised the bar for what was achievable in horror movies at the time. During those moments when it reveals itself, Bottin’s alien Thing is a hellish, glistening, squirming, tentacled nightmare made of bits and pieces of all the Earth creatures it’s consumed already. It resembles a canvas painted and splattered simultaneously by Hieronymus Bosch and Jackson Pollock.

What makes Bottin’s work all the more remarkable, and believable, is that it consists of real, solid, practical effects. For The Thing was made in the days was before digital technology took over and filmmakers went crazy using cartoonish and insubstantial-looking computer-generated imagery. That’s the reason why I’ve never bothered watching Matthijs van Heijningen Jr’s 2011 prequel to Carpenter’s movie, also called The Thing. Although practical special effects were used during the prequel’s shooting, studio executives later lost their nerve, decided 2011 audiences couldn’t handle an absence of CGI and had the wretched stuff superimposed over those practical effects in post-production.

Anyway, today – June 25^th – is exactly 40 years since Carpenter’s The Thing was first released in cinemas. Which, as well as making me feel bloody ancient, makes we want to post something about it on this blog. But rather than write about the movie itself, as countless film critics, commentators and enthusiasts have over the years, I thought I’d look instead at its literary roots. Because The Thing is an adaptation (scripted by Bill Lancaster, son of Burt) of a novella called Who Goes There?, written by science-fiction writer and editor John W. Campbell and published in 1938.

Who Goes There? had already been filmed in 1951 as The Thing from Another World, directed by Christian Nyby and produced by the legendary Howard Hawks. The 1951 version keeps the story’s basic premise of the crew of a polar camp coming up against a malevolent alien. But instead of depicting it as a shape-shifting beastie, which would have been difficult to do convincingly in 1951, the Hawks / Nyby film merely depicts it as a lumbering, pasty-skinned, dome-headed muscle-man played by none other than James Arness, later to star in the 1950s-1970s Western TV show Gunsmoke. Howard Hawks’s trademark no-nonsense directorial style and brisk, punchy dialogue are much in evidence in The Thing from Another World and it’s often been speculated that he, rather than Nyby, shot much of the film.

John Carpenter was well-known for his admiration of Howard Hawks and his 1976 movie Assault on Precinct 13 in particular shows a big Hawksian influence. So, when Carpenter’s version of The Thing was announced, I suspect many critics assumed it’d be a straightforward remake of the 1951 movie. And I suspect that’s why it got such a hostile reception when it was released in 1982. For although the movie has since been reappraised and is now regarded as a sci-fi / horror classic, it initially earned Carpenter some of the worst reviews of his career. I seem to remember, for instance, the Observer slamming it under the headline JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER. Those 1982 critics got something very different from what they were expecting and didn’t react well.

What they got, in fact, was a film capturing the shape-shifting concept of the alien in the real source material, the 1938 story by John W. Campbell – a story most of those critics were probably unfamiliar with.

I recently came across and read Who Goes There? online. What did I think of it?

Well, what I immediately thought after reading it was “Phew!” Experienced in 2022, with its dollops of torturous pose and pages upon pages of dialogue-framed exposition, Campbell’s story is hard going indeed.

It’s fun to see so many character-names that crop up in Carpenter’s film – McReady (in the film spelt ‘MacReady’), Blair, Copper, Garry, Norris, Clark, Benning – but the descriptions of those characters are madly overwrought. The hero McReady is likened by Campbell to “a figure from some forgotten myth, a looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six-feet-four inches he stood… And he was bronze – his great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that matched it. The gnarled, corded hands gripping, relaxing on the table planks were bronze. Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath the heavy brows were bronze.” This Wagnerian, and bronze, version of McReady is far removed from the morose, tetchy git played in the film by Kurt Russell.

The scientist Blair, meanwhile, is described with this peculiar sentence: “His little birdlike motions of suppressed eagerness danced his shadow across the fringe of dingy grey underwear hanging from the low ceiling, the equatorial quiff of stiff, greying hair around his naked skull a comical halo about the shadow’s head.” At least he sounds more like his cinematic incarnation, who’s played by the character actor Wilfred Brimley.

How the characters discover and bring into their camp their soon-to-be-unwelcome visitor is related in three pages of conversational backstory, which includes such unlikely pieces of dialogue as: “Right there, where that buried thing was, there is an ice-drowned mountain ridge, a granite wall of unshakable strength that has dammed back the ice creeping from the south.” Later, as the Thing starts to imitate the base’s inhabitants, there are many talky pages where people speculate on its biology, its capabilities and how it can be detected; and also, where they start to crack up with paranoia. “You sit as still as a bunch of graven images,” exclaims one man while his colleagues regard him suspiciously. “You don’t say a word, but oh Lord, what expressive eyes you’ve got. They roll around like a bunch of glass marbles spilling down a table. They wink and blink and stare and whisper things.”

There are moments when Campbell’s prose conveys the bleakness of the situation, recording how the Antarctic wind created an “uneasy, malicious gurgling in the pipe of the galley stove” and how “the snow picked up by the mumbling wind fled in level, blinding lines across the face of the buried camp”. But overall, thanks to its dire writing, Who Goes There? is a work to be endured rather than enjoyed. It isn’t a patch on that other famous 1930s tale of Antarctica-set horror, H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness (1936).

Still, the story provides the film with its most celebrated scene, the ‘blood-test’ one wherein McReady hits on a method of identifying who’s-been-got and who’s not. However, while John W. Campbell has McReady laboriously testing the blood of some 35 base-members, in the movie John Carpenter waits until there’s only half-a-dozen men left standing, which makes his enactment of the scene much more intense, focused and suspenseful.

And to be fair to Campbell, his story clarifies the Thing’s modus operandi. At times the film is hazy about just what the humans are up against. For example, watching The Thing, I was initially puzzled by the idea that the intruder could take the form of more than one victim at a time. In the story, it’s made clear that when it absorbs an organism it adds the organism’s body mass to its own; and when the organism is replaced, that hives off again with the original’s mass. Meanwhile, the original Thing goes back to its original bulk too, free to absorb and replicate something else.

Then there’s the sub-plot with Blair. In both the novella and film, Blair loses his mind as the horror unfolds and is locked up for his own and everyone else’s safety. It later becomes apparent that he’s part of the Thing too, has its alien intelligence, and has spent his time in captivity assembling a mysterious machine. The novella describes how he’s imprisoned in an equipment storeroom, where he uses pieces of the equipment to fashion a small anti-gravity device that’ll transport him from Antarctica to a populated continent where he can start replicating. The film is murkier about what he’s up to. We get a glimpse of some sort of capsule, like a mini-flying saucer, but there’s little explanation why and nothing about his place of incarceration being an equipment storeroom. I was left with the impression that Blair for some reason had managed to construct a spacecraft out of empty soup cans and pieces of string.

Finally, I should point out that Who Goes There? isn’t the only literary work connected with the scary world of The Thing. In 2010, Clarkesworld Magazine published a short story called The Things, written by Peter Watts, which retells the events of Carpenter’s movie through the eyes, if that’s the word, of the Thing itself.

Here, the Thing isn’t such a bad old thing. It genuinely believes it’s doing the humans a favour by taking them over, which it describes as an act of ‘communion’. It views their biology as ‘ill-adapted’, ‘inefficient’ and ‘disabled’ and wants to ‘fix’ them. At times, it’s repulsed by their physical circumstances, calling their brains ‘tumours’ and their bodies ‘bony caverns’. No wonder it’s upset when the humans respond to its kindness by using flamethrowers on it.

A thought-provoking and bleakly-amusing take on John Carpenter’s movie from the very last character in it you’d expect, Peter Watts’ The Things can be read on this webpage. Meanwhile, John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There? is available for reading here. The 2010 story is 7,000 words long while the 1938 one clocks in at a hefty 30,000 words. Comparing them, I have to say I agree with the old adage that the best Things come in small packages.