Tag: Halloween

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Jim Mountfield eats his neeps

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

We’re now into October, a month that climaxes with the festival of Halloween.  Thus, it’s appropriate that I have just had a Halloween-themed short story published in the October 2023 of the online fiction publication Schlock! Webzine.  Entitled The Turnip Thieves, it appears under the name of Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I use for horror, ghost and generally ‘dark’ stories.

 

The Turnip Thieves takes place on a Scottish hill farm in the early 1980s.  It begins with a farmer noticing strange activity on a distant strip of ground where he’s planted turnips – ‘neeps’ as they’re called in the Scots language.  As it’s one day before Halloween, he thinks he knows what’s afoot.  Kids from a nearby town, he assumes, must be trying to steal his neeps, so they can make lanterns from them for the upcoming festival.  And, vengefully, he sets off to intervene…

 

The story is a nostalgic invocation of a time before pumpkins became widely available in Scottish supermarkets and when Scottish trick-or-treaters – or ‘guisers’, to give them the correct Scottish terminology – had to make do with the turnip, the pumpkin’s humble root-vegetable cousin, as a substitute for fashioning Halloween lanterns.  Actually, the shrunken, wizened visage of a turnip lantern is, to my mind, much creepier than that of a pumpkin one.  On the other hand, howking the hard, pale flesh out of a turnip required a lot more effort than gutting a pumpkin did.  And once you had a candle burning inside it, a turnip lantern stank…  Or, as they say in Scotland, it reeked.

 

The main page of Schlock! Webzine’s October 2023 edition – Volume 17, Issue 15 – can, for the next few weeks, be accessed here.  The Turnip Thieves itself can be read here.

 

And during the run-up to Halloween, I hope to post a few things relating to the macabre, ghostly and generally dark on this blog, in keeping with the spirit of the season.

 

© Dave Cockburn

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10 scary pictures for Halloween 2022

 

© Dave Cockburn

 

Today is Halloween.  As usual, I’ll take advantage of the creepy spirit of the occasion and display ten pieces of macabre art that I’ve come across and liked during the past year.

 

I’ve sometimes heard the work of the great 18th / 19th German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich described as ‘occult’ and, yes, there is something strikingly metaphysical in his depictions of puny-looking humans confronted by the huge, bleak awesomeness of nature.  I’ve never found his art particularly disturbing, though, until I encountered his 1814 painting The Chasseur in the Forest.  It features the always foreboding image of someone – here a lost dragoon – about to venture into a mass of dark, towering, primordial-seeming trees.  What awaits him in there?  Something cosmically evil and terrifying?  Quite possibly.

 

From commons.wikimedia.org

 

From the sublime to the (splendidly) ridiculous.  Here’s a very different rendering of a spooky forest, courtesy of Catalan artist Vincenç Badalona Ballestar, who died in 2014.  Ballester was responsible for the covers of many of the schlocky John Sinclair stories – Sinclair, according to Wikipedia, is “the name as well as the protagonist of a popular German horror detective fiction series (of the pulp fiction or penny dreadful variety).  Sinclair, a Scotland Yard chief inspector, battles all kinds of undead and demonic creatures.  The series appears weekly and has been running since 1973.”

 

From unquietthings.com

 

And more, sinister woodland appears in this pen-and-ink work by German artist Fritz Schwimbeck, which was inspired by – I don’t know if it actually illustrated an edition of – Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).  Drawn in 1917, it presumably depicts the bit near the beginning where Jonathan Harker is picked up by the Count’s mysterious coach and coachman.  The tiny scale allowed for pictures on this blog doesn’t do justice to the glorious detail of the picture so, to appreciate it properly, please go to this entry on the horror-art website Monster Brains.

 

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com

 

Speaking of Dracula, I feel I should show something by Swiss-born, UK-based artist Oliver Frey, who passed away in August this year.  As a kid, I was very familiar with Frey’s work, since it adorned the covers of Hamlyn Books’ compendiums – ‘encyclopaedias’ is rather too sensible a word for them – of spooky stuff aimed at juvenile readers: The Hamlyn Book of Horror (1976), Hamlyn Book of Ghosts (1978), Hamlyn Book of Mysteries (1983) and Hamlyn Book of Monsters (1984).  These commonly featured monsters and supernatural creatures of popular folklore and popular culture glaring out from their covers and going “Grrrr!”, as frighteningly as was permitted for children at the time.  I recall Dracula on the cover of The Hamlyn Book of Monsters having a stake stuck, surprisingly bloodily, in his chest.  Here’s a later picture by Frey of the vampirical Count, this time from the cover of issue 32 of Fear magazine in 1991.  It’s done with Frey’s impressively melodramatic and sinewy flair.

 

© Newsfield / Oliver Frey

 

There’s more biting, and painful-looking clawing, going on in this work by the 19th / 20th century Polish painter Boleslaw Biegas, whose output included – I’m quoting Wikipedia again – “mythical, monstrous and female chimeras, which symbolised a battle of the sexes.”  That’s a battle that the female chimera in this graphic and muscular picture is definitely winning.  It’s entitled Le Baiser du Vampire, but come on – that’s not a vampire, but a harpy, a half-woman, half-bird creature from Greek mythology, who tormented the hapless King Phineus in the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece.  You may be able to see this picture for real in the Polish Library in Paris, which contains the Boleslaw Biegas Art Collection.

 

From oldpaintings.tumblr.com

 

From Greek mythology to Norse mythology.  I like this elegant, anime-style depiction of Hel, the female goddess of death who rules the Norse underworld, which appears in the book Norse Gods (2017) by Swedish illustrator Johan Egerkrans.  But who’s the giant, fearsome-looking canine beside her?  Is it her brother Fenrir, the monstrous wolf who, it’s prophesised, will gobble up the sun on Ragnarōk, the Norse Day of Judgement?  Both Hel and Fenrir were the off-spring of the giantess Angerboda and sneaky trickster god Loki, presumably before Tom Hiddleston started to play him in the Marvel superhero movies.

 

© Johan Egerkrans

 

In Christian mythology, Loki’s nearest equivalent is of course Satan, which brings me to my next pick.  This is The Devil Skating When Hell Freezes Over, by the 19th / 20th century English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Collier – no relation to the writer John Collier, famous for his sardonic short stories, who was born 50 years later.  I like this painting not only for its cheekiness – I love how that tail slips out through the split in the back of the overcoat – but also because it seems to be an ironic riposte to the celebrated painting by Henry Raeburn, The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch (or The Skating Minister), often cited as Scotland’s most iconic painting.

 

From tumblr.com

 

Still on the subject of Christian devils, here’s 17th century Italian painter Salvator Rosa’s take on one of the most popular art-subjects in Christendom – The Temptation of St Anthony, which he painted in 1645.  Rather than have the long-suffering saint under attack from a whole army of ghoulish creatures, which has been common in other renderings of the story, Rosa provides him with one main adversary.  It’s a hideous-looking thing.  Although it’s an amalgamation of different animals, with a bird’s body, horse’s skull-head, rat’s tail, boar’s tusks, plus a tiny set of human genitals, these disparate parts meld together and create something that looks disturbingly whole and unified.  Indeed, it resembles something that could have crept out of the hold of the space-cargo-ship Nostromo in Alien (1980), had Ridley Scott decided to enlist an Italian Baroque painter to do the production design rather than H.R. Giger.

 

From linusfontrodona.com

 

This next item, which I believe is the work of modern Turkish artist Soner Çakmak, evokes the devil too.  In its subtle, strangely melancholic way, it captures the childhood terror of being alone in your bedroom at night, when you’re still too young to figure out what’s real and what’s imaginary in the world around you.  You can especially relate to that feeling if, like me, you spent your childhood somewhere like Northern Ireland in the 1970s, where there were plenty of loud-mouthed, red-faced religious idiots around you assuring you that some frightening concepts indeed, like Satan and his demons in hell, were real.

 

© Soner Çakmak

 

Finally, straight after Halloween comes Mexico’s delightful, skeleton-crazy Day of the Dead festival.  In recognition of that, I usually try to include a picture featuring skeletons, bones and skulls.  So, here’s an illustration from the 1901 calendar of the Antikamnia Pharmaceutical Company of St. Louis, Missouri, which supplied doctors and druggists with tablets for combatting fevers and reducing pain.  It’s one of many skeleton-themed pictures by artist (and doctor) Louis Crusius that the company used in its marketing materials.  It seems bizarre that a company peddling a medical product – meant to fight off ill-health – would use such an obvious symbol of death to promote itself.  But then, the story of the Antikamnia Pharmaceutical Company was pretty bizarre.  It was prosecuted and shut down after the discovery that its tablets contained a banned substance called acetanilide, which reduced the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen, which among many other bad effects caused takers of the tablets to turn blue.

 

From dangerousminds.net

 

And that’s it for another year.  Happy Halloween!

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Jim Mountfield goes guising

 

© The Sirens Call

 

Halloween is nearly upon us and, currently, I’m indulging in one of my traditional Halloween activities.  That activity is getting cranky at British, or more accurately, English journalists, columnists and commentators who are doing their usual thing at this time of year and complaining about British people being too enthusiastic about Halloween.  This shouldn’t be happening, say those journos, because Halloween isn’t a ‘British’ festival.  Rather, it’s something that’s been ‘imported’ from America during the past couple of decades.

 

That’s right.  Supposedly, there was no Halloween in Britain, ever, until British kids saw Hollywood movies like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982) and decided that American trick-or-treating looked such good fun that they wanted to try it too.  Here’s the latest of these ‘Halloween-is-American-not-British!’ moan-a-thons, published the other day in the Guardian.

 

Complete piffle, of course.  Maybe the south of England, where Britain’s mainstream media and its scribblers are based, didn’t pay much attention to Halloween until recently, but it was always a thing elsewhere in Britain.  After all, the concept of Halloween was originally brought to the USA by Scottish and Irish immigrants.  All right, Ireland is not part of Britain, but technically Northern Ireland is part of the ‘United Kingdom’.

 

Way, way back in the 1970s, when I was a kid in Northern Ireland, I remember doing such Halloween-y things on October 31st as dunking for apples, trying to take bites out of other apples hanging on strings, and carving Halloween lanterns out of turnips.  (I don’t think I laid eyes on a pumpkin until the late 1980s.)  Also, I recall the local Young Farmers club using Halloween as an excuse to run amok – seemingly appropriating the customs of Mischief Night, which in many places had traditionally taken place the previous evening, on October 30th – uprooting signposts, stealing people’s gates and generally making arseholes of themselves.

 

And a little later, my family moved to Scotland, where…

 

But here I have to change the topic slightly.  Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym under which I write horror stories, has just had a short story published in issue 59 – the Halloween 2022 edition – of a dark fiction and poetry magazine called The Sirens Call.  The story is entitled Guising and is set at Halloween in Scotland in the early 1970s.  Here’s what the story has to say about the venerable Scottish custom of guising:

 

“Scottish people will tell you that guising isn’t the same as trick-or-treating, though it involves children dressed as ghosts, witches and monsters going to front doors and receiving confectionary or small sums of cash from householders. The Scottish custom is transactional. The children have to earn their rewards. This means putting on a show for whoever they’re visiting. A brief show, admittedly, like telling a story or singing a song. Guising has its roots in the activities long ago of mummers who’d turn up at houses and taverns on special days such as Christmas, Easter, Plough Monday and All Souls’ Day, stage short plays, and afterwards collect money from their audiences…”

 

Obviously, because Guising is a horror story, the kids who go out guising in it get rather more than they bargained for.

 

287 pages along, crammed with macabre goodies, and free to download, issue 59 of The Siren’s Call  is available here.

Posted on

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2021

 

From unsplash.com / © Nicola Gambetti

 

It’s Halloween today and as usual I thought I’d celebrate the occasion by displaying ten of the most interesting pieces of macabre art I’ve come across in the past year.

 

And what better way to start than with this illustration by the Italian-born, American-reared artist Joseph Mugnaini for Ray Bradbury’s 1972 fantasy novel The Halloween Tree?  Never having read that novel, I don’t know what the winged, cadaverous, hooked-nosed figure represents, but he makes an elegant and cosmically weird image.

 

© Yearling Books / From monsterbrains.blogspot.com 

 

In these art-themed Halloween posts I usually include something featuring skeletons, as a nod to the festival that comes immediately after Halloween – Mexico’s skeleton-obsessed Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, at the start of November.  This year’s skeletal number is by Vincent Van Gogh, no less.  Known as Skeleton with a Lit Cigarette in its Mouth, it now resides in Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum.  The museum’s website describes it as “a juvenile joke”, painted by Van Gogh “in early 1886, while studying at the art academy in Antwerp…  Drawing skeletons was a standard exercise at the academy, but painting them was not part of the curriculum.  He must have made this painting at some other time, between or after his lessons.”  I find the painting discombobulating, not just because of the cigarette or, indeed, the revelation that Van Gogh, associated with intensity and misery in most people’s minds, actually had a sense of humour.  No, it’s more that the skeleton is such a complex assemblage, of corners, ridges, crenels, shelves and slats.  It’s almost machine-like – slightly reminiscent of the lethal, metal endoskeleton that pops up at the climax of The Terminator (1982).

 

From vangoghmuseum.nl/en

 

Going further back in time, I have to say I love this depiction of a devil, which occupies the front side of the right-hand panel in the triptych Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation.  It was painted in the 1480s by the German-born, Bruges-based artist Hans Memling and is now on display in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Strasbourg.  It’s the merriment with which the little fellow is dancing, on top of those sinners suffering in eternal hellfire, that gets me.  Why, he’s practically riverdancing.

 

From musees.strasbourg.eu

 

Now for a devil from a different culture and different part of the world.  This bloated, pustular apparition is what’s known as a ta-awi, a Philippine ogre / demon.  I happened across it on Cryptid Wiki, which describes the beast as “a large hideous humanoid from Philippine mythology.”  It “raids villages and devours people alive, but doesn’t eat their eyeballs because it can’t digest them for some reason.”  All I can determine about the artist is that his name is Isaiah Paul and he has a page on deviantart.com here.

 

© Isaiah Paul

 

Less in-your-face and more ambiguous – the figure depicted may not even be supernatural, but just an odd person who likes to immerse herself among water lilies – is this painting, which I believe is called Hidden Things and is by modern-day Welsh artist Kim Myatt.  In fact, I’d say it evokes the subtle strangeness of the fiction of Robert Aickman.

 

© Kim Myatt

 

In 1980, when I was both a spotty adolescent and an aspiring writer, the first stories I ever submitted were to a handsome little magazine called Fantasy Tales. (The stories weren’t accepted, but the editors were kind enough to write back and offer me advice like “When you’re typing, try leaving a space after commas and full stops,” or “It’s probably not a good idea to have six single-sentence paragraphs in a row.”)  What made Fantasy Tales so visually appealing was that it featured the artwork of Lancastrian Jim Pitts, whose exquisitely detailed and atmospheric illustrations, often in black-and-white, recalled the great artists of the 1930s and 1940s pulp-fiction magazines such as Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok. Here’s a gothic and vampirical item that Pitts did for issue four of the magazine Dark Horizons.

 

© Jim Pitts

 

Another English illustrator I remember fondly from my youth is Les Edwards, whose work adorned the covers of paperbacks like Karl Edward Wagner’s Bloodstone (1975) and Robert Holdstock’s novelisation of the movie Legend of the Werewolf (1975).  I like Edwards’ work for being unpretentious and upfront – you certainly knew what sort of book you were getting when you saw his art on the cover – but also for its precision and colour.  This piece is called The Shade and achieves a chill despite its graveyard scene being pictured in daylight.  There’s a suggestion of mist creeping ominously in from the distant trees and the stone angel in the foreground adds to the discomfort.

 

© Les Edwards

 

A third illustrator whose work was familiar to me in my teenage years was the American science fiction and fantasy artist Rowena Morrill, who sadly died in February this year.  Morrill blazed a trail as a rare thing in 1970s paperback illustration – a woman.  Her work graced the covers of the first collections of stories by H.P. Lovecraft that I managed to lay my hands on, The Dunwich Horror (1978) and The Colour Out of Space (1978).  Her depictions of Lovecraft’s ‘Elder Gods’ as amalgamations of bits of wildly-different creatures may not be how most people imagine Cthulhu and company nowadays, i.e., with lots of tentacles, but they’re grotesquely and baroquely weird.  Here’s the picture that adorned The Dunwich Horror.

 

© Jove / HBJ Books

 

I’ve seen the Czech artist Jindra Capek described online as a ‘children’s book illustrator’.  Hmm.  I don’t know if the following picture, showing a hungry ghoul-type creature (though one civilised enough to be wearing what looks like a pair of boxer shorts) taking a bite out of a newly-dug-up corpse, is what you’d expect to see in the pages of a children’s book.  Come to think of it, though, my ten-year-old self would have been delighted by it.

 

© Jindra Capek

 

One sort of image I’ve always found unsettling is that of an insect, or general creepy-crawly, sporting the facial features of a human being.  I’m thinking of David Hedison in The Fly (1958), playing a hapless scientist whose experiments with teleportation go astray and end up grafting his head onto the bug of the title; or the scuttling, insectoid, human-faced aliens in The Zanti Misfits, the famous 1963 episode of the TV anthology show The Outer Limits.  Needless to say, I find this item disturbing.  It’s by the Belgian artist Henri Lievens, who in his lifetime created the covers for more than 200 books.  Entitled L’Araignee, its lady-faced spider is icky-looking but also, with those large doe eyes, worryingly fetching.  The lurid blue and black palette heightens its effect.

 

From unquietthings.com

 

And that’s it for another year.  Happy Halloween!

Posted on

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2020

 

© Alex Barnard / From twitter.com

 

Thanks to Covid-19, Halloween this year is likely to be shorn of its normal traditions, like trick-or-treating, or guising as it’s known in my part of the world.  However, the virus won’t stop me from indulging in my traditional activity on Halloween, which is to post on this blog ten of the most interesting creepy pictures, paintings and illustrations that I’ve come across in the past year.

 

I recently watched the much-admired 1989 TV adaptation of Susan Hill’s grim 1983 ghost novel The Woman in Black, directed by Herbert Wise and scripted by Nigel Kneale.  I was put in mind of The Woman in Black when I saw Listen from Salem, a lushly gothic picture by the American painter, illustrator, comic-book artist, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Menton J. Matthews III.  In particular, it evokes those disturbing shots of the woman standing distantly but ominously on the flatlands around the haunted Eel Marsh House.  The figure in Listen from Salem is rather more glammed-up than Hill’s spectre, and has a touch of Helena Bonham Carter about her, but it’s still chilling.

 

© Menton J. Matthews III

 

The stories of Edgar Allan Poe have been illustrated by many people over the years, but for my money the most distinguished work was done by Irishman Harry Clarke, who provided pictures for an edition of Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination in 1923.  Here’s Clarke’s depiction of the climax of The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, one of Poe’s most transgressive stories.  It has a mesmerist hypnotising a dying man and keeping him ‘alive’ in an ongoing hypnotic state for seven months after the supposed moment of his death.  The experiment ends when the mesmerist finally decides to lift the spell, at which point the patient promptly decays on his deathbed into a ‘nearly liquid mass of loathsome… detestable putridity.’  And presumably leaves a terrible mess on the sheets.

 

© Brentano’s

 

I’ve always been interested in Scottish folklore and particularly in the bestiary of fabulous creatures that populate old Scottish folk and fairy tales: kelpies, selkies, redcaps, bean nighe, the Blue Men of the Minch and so on.  Surely the most hideous of these legendary creatures is the Orcadian sea monster the nuckelavee which, part humanoid and part horse, has something of the appearance of a centaur.  However, it’s a centaur – eek! – without any skin.  According to Wikipedia, its “black blood courses through yellow veins” and “pale sinews and powerful muscles are visible as a pulsating mass.”  Plus, it has “an enormous gaping mouth that exudes a toxic smelly vapour, and a single giant eye like a burning red flame.”  Here’s a depiction of the dreaded nuckelavee by the St Peterburg-based illustrator and digital artist Artem Demura.  Though it dispenses with the cyclopean single eye, Demura’s imagining of the nuckelavee gives its humanoid and equine parts fleshless (as well as skinless) skull-faces and is pretty disturbing.

 

© Artem Demura

 

Still on the subject of Scottish folkloric creatures, here’s the Edward Atkinson Hornel painting The Brownie of Blednoch, inspired by an 1825 poem by William Nicholson.  The Australian-born, Scottish-reared Hornel was part of the Glasgow Boys circle of painters in the late 19th century and was best known for his renditions of flowers, trees and children.  Thus, The Brownie of Blednoch, which hangs in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, is atypical of his work.  However, despite its subject being a frightful thing with mud-brown skin, Spock ears, three-fingered claws and a long tangling beard, it’s actually benevolent.  As a brownie, a type of fairy that does chores for human beings, it’s depicted here performing a public service, which is guarding the local shepherds’ flocks at night-time.

 

From Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

 

A popular theme in religious art since the Middle Ages has been the Temptation (or Torment) of Saint Anthony.  This supposedly took place while the saint was living as a hermit in Egypt’s Eastern Desert.  At one point, demons came to him disguised as beautiful, amorous young women and tried to corrupt him.  At another point, a squadron of demons ambushed him while he was in mid-air, being borne along by angels.  The scenario has allowed artists over the centuries to let their imaginations run riot in depicting the misshapen and monstrous beings attacking Anthony.  I only found out lately that the earliest known painting by Michelangelo dealt with the demons attacking the saint while he was aloft in the skies.  Painted sometime in 1487-88, Michelangelo’s The Torment of Saint Anthony is now housed in the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

 

From the Kimbell Art Museum

 

Ivan Albright was an American artist who, in the 1940s, was hired to provide a rendering of what is surely the most famous painting in the horror genre, the one featured in Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890).  For the 1945 movie adaptation of this novel, which stars Hurd Hatfield in the title role, two artists were actually commissioned.  Portuguese portraitist Henrique Medina did a normal painting of Hatfield that appears early in the film, while Albright did the utterly repulsive, debased version of it that appears later, after all of Dorian’s sins have manifested themselves on the canvas.  Although the film is mainly in black and white, it switches to colour during close-ups of the portrait.  I saw the movie on TV in the late 1970s as a supposedly hardened teenager – but I leapt out of my skin when the camera suddenly cut to a colour close-up of the hideous, wizened, festering creature that Albright had created.  Incidentally, the painting now resides in the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

From the Art Institute of Chicago

 

Still on a cinematic theme, here’s a poster designed by the British artist Graham Humphreys for a film-club screening of Night of the Hunter (1955), the masterly southern gothic horror-thriller starring Robert Mitchum, Lillian Gish and Shelley Winters, directed by Charles Laughton and based on the 1953 novel by Davis Grubb.  Prominence on the poster, of course, is given to the smirking and definitely not-to-be-trusted Mitchum.  His performance as the serial killer and alleged travelling preacher the Reverend Harry Powell, dressed in black, with the words LOVE and HATE tattooed on his knuckles, is possibly the most memorable one of his career.

 

© Graham Humphreys

 

The Australian-American artist Ron Cobb died last month at the age of 83.  He was well known for his work as a designer and concept artist on science fiction and fantasy movies such as Dark Star (1974), Star Wars (1977), Conan the Barbarian (1982), Back to the Future (1985), The Abyss and Total Recall (both 1989), with his most famous cinematic commission being Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).  While the disturbingly organic extra-terrestrial spaceship in Alien, and indeed the alien itself in its various life-stages, were designed by the Swiss artist H.R. Giger, Cobb designed the futuristic human hardware in the film, i.e. the exterior and interior of the Nostromo, the spaceship whose crew are unfortunate enough to encounter the movie’s titular, acid-blooded beastie.  Away from the movies, Cobb was also a general artist, cartoonist, designer of ‘speculative technology’ and, once in a blue moon, a painter of album covers.  Here’s his pleasantly schlocky and ghoulish cover for the ultra-obscure record Doctor Druid’s Haunted Séance which, as far as I can find out, was a weirdo compilation of spoken word performances and spooky music released to tie in with Halloween in 1973.

 

© Electric Lemon

 

This gorgeous illustration is by the British artist Ian MacCulloch (not to be confused with Ian McCulloch, the Liverpudlian singer with Echo and the Bunnymen, or indeed Ian McCulloch, the Scottish actor who played the unflappable hero of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters in 1979). It isn’t frightening or disturbing as such.  But with its wind-lashed trees, overgrown pastures and swirling flocks of black birds, it is very atmospheric and evokes the folk horror sub-genre that many (often British) horror stories, films and TV shows belong to, emphasising natural landscapes and the dark side of old myths and legends.  Actually, this picture reminds me of the opening sequence of a seminal work in the British folk horror canon, the 1970 film Blood on Satan’s Claw.

 

© Ian MacCulloch

 

Finally, I’ve recently discovered the work of Richard Tennant Cooper.  This English painter was commissioned as a war artist during World War I and also made money designing adverts for the London Underground, painting signs for the Automobile Association and illustrating motoring magazines.  But Cooper had an unusual side-line.  In addition, he created paintings inspired by diseases like leprosy, cholera and syphilis, depicting those diseases as malignant phantoms tormenting or looming over their stricken victims.  Here’s one of tuberculosis that Cooper likely painted in 1912, which I believe is now the property of the Wellcome Collection in London.

 

From the Wellcome Collection

 

And on that pestilent note, appropriate in the year of Covid-19, I shall sign off.  Happy Halloween!