Tag: J-Horror

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10 scary pictures for Halloween 2025

 

 

It’s October 31st, 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 19th 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!

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Ghosts of Fort Canning

 

 

Halloween is almost upon us, so this is an appropriate time to post an account of what happened when my partner and I, plus a friend, went on a ghost tour around Fort Canning.

 

Fort Canning is both a 48-metre-high hill in Singapore’s bustling Central Area and a park with a range of recreational facilities and historical landmarks and a lot of pleasant greenery.  To be honest, we didn’t go on a fully-fledged ghost tour.  It was advertised as The Fort Canning Conspiracy Tour.  Our guide also talked about rumours, reports and whisperings from the place’s past that concerned such Dan Brown-esque things as buried kings and treasure, curses – it was known at one point as the Forbidden Hill – and colonial-era secrecy and skullduggery involving the British.  But along the way, we also heard plenty of stories about ghosts, superstitions and the weird and unexplained.  And, generally, we had a great deal of fun.

 

The tour’s participants met up at 6.30 PM at the entrance of Singapore’s lovely Peranakan Museum on Armenia Street.  Our guide introduced himself as Eugene Tay, who’s an author (his book Supernatural Confessions: You are not Alone was published in 2015), the founder of the tourism group Haunting Heritage Tours, a YouTuber, a podcaster and, according to the online Singaporean / Malaysian publication Vulcan Post, ‘the only licenced tour guide in Singapore running ghost tours.’  For this evening’s tour he had five people in his party.  He began by asking each of us to introduce ourselves and say why we had an interest in the esoteric and paranormal.  No sooner had I mentioned my Irish roots than one of the other tour-members, a Singaporean, asked me about ‘leprechauns’.  I retorted that Ireland’s leprechaun industry is mainly aimed at gullible American tourists.  Five seconds after I said that, I remembered my beloved better-half, standing next to me, is American.

 

 

We kicked off by hearing some stories about the Tao Nan School building – the handsome old structure that houses the Peranakan Museum – and the Substation, the currently derelict building next door to it that, for a few decades, was home to ‘Singapore’s first independent contemporary arts centre’.  (A remnant of the Substation’s past glories is the message “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable’, graffitied on a boarded-up window.)  These involved staff-members in both buildings having weird experiences and encountering inexplicable figures at times when there shouldn’t have been anyone there.

 

Standing outside the museum entrance are statues of a man and a little girl, the girl waving up at a balcony on the museum’s façade.  I got a jolt when I glanced up at the balcony and spotted a spectral figure there, standing within an archway.  Really, though, it was just another statue, of an old lady waving down at the girl.  It was still daylight, but Eugene’s tour was evidently starting to unsettle me.

 

 

Then we went around the corner onto Hill Street and into the grounds of the Armenian Church of St Gregory the Illuminator.  This was consecrated in 1836 as a place of worship for Singapore’s members of the Armenian Apostolic Church and was designed by the architect George Drumgoole Coleman – responsible for many of Singapore’s early colonial buildings and a name that would crop up again on the tour.  From a ghost-tour point of view, its eeriest feature is the Memorial Garden at the rear of the grounds, where there are tombstones, graveyard monuments and ledger stones arranged in two semi-circles, one horizontal, one vertical.  They were moved here from the Christian Cemetery at Fort Canning when it was cleared to make a park, and also from the Bukit Timah-Cavenagh Road Cemetery.  (The human remains weren’t moved.)

 

As the dusk gathered, the elaborately sculpted headstones and stone statues gave the location an atmospheric vibe.  Supposedly, their arrival here inspired some creepy stories about taxi drivers picking up folk outside the church late at night, being asked to drive the passengers to certain disused cemeteries around Singapore… and, when they got to their destinations, discovering that those passengers had mysteriously vanished from the back of their cabs.  Though such tales obviously riff on the old urban myth of the ‘vanishing hitchhiker’.  Incidentally, it was nice that the church’s supervisor joined us at this point and answered our questions about the building and its history.

 

 

From there, we went around another corner into Canning Rise and ascended past Singapore’s Masonic Hall – Freemasonry was brought here by the British – and then the National Archives building, which was previously the site of Singapore’s prestigious Anglo-Chinese School.  At both places, we stopped and heard more tales.  We heard the first mention of conspiracies.  What had the Freemasons been up to in the the 19th century?  And, though their original number contained such prestigious figures as Stamford Raffles, founder of contemporary Singapore, and William Napier, its first lawyer, why wasn’t the architect who did so much to fashion the early city, George Drumgoole Coleman, invited to join them?  We’d hear more speculation about that later.  Then we entered the park itself – through the Spice Garden, to the edge of Fort Canning Green, and up to Cox Terrace behind the majestically floodlit Fort Canning Centre.  By now it was fully night-time.

 

 

Rather than do all the talking, Eugene handed out cards with printed testimonies by people who’d had frightening and baffling experiences in the vicinity and encouraged his tour-members to read them aloud.  Among the stories I read out was one from a person who, as a child, had encountered a strange Western figure at Fort Canning’s old cemetery.  The figure lamented, “I shouldn’t have brought her here!  I should never have trusted him!” and then disappeared by the grave of George Drumgoole Coleman.  In fact, Coleman married an Irishwoman in 1842, brought her to Singapore in late 1843 – and died just three months later from an alleged ‘fever.’  And within seven months of that, his wife had married the lawyer William Napier.  Which all sounds a bit fishy.

 

Meanwhile, the friend we’d brought with us, a sometime-actress, added to the mood by embellishing her readings with truly blood-curdling cackles.

 

 

Also in the park, we got a look at Kermat Iskandar Shah, a wooden pavilion with a tiled roof that was once a shrine.  It’s associated with Parameswara, who was supposedly the fifth and final king (Raja) of Singapura, the kingdom believed to have existed here during the 13th and 14th centuries.  At the very end of the 14th century, Parameswara had to flee when the Majapahit Empire launched an invasion.  He ended up further north along the Malay Peninsula, at the mouth of the Bertram River, and founded what is now Malacca.  Kermat Iskandar Shah has been claimed to be Parameswara’s burial place, but this doesn’t make sense if he really did escape the island and re-establish himself in the future Malacca.

 

Indeed, there are stories about all five kings of Singapura being buried under the hill, which raises questions about what treasures and riches might have been buried with them.  (Archaeological excavations have taken place near the pavilion, but according to Wikipedia they mainly uncovered Chinese coins and porcelain fragments from the Tang Dynasty.)  I wondered if this was why the place was once known as the Forbidden Hill where, supposedly, trespassers were cursed and would die.  Was it a strategy to frighten off potential tomb-robbers?

 

 

When Stamford Raffles arrived in 1819, he may have heard about the curse.  Rather than go up Fort Canning himself, he cannily sent Scotsman Major William Farquhar up it first, along with some Malays, to plant a gun and the Union Jack at its top.  When Farquhar arrived back in one piece, Raffles evidently decided it was safe and subsequently had Coleman design him a bungalow to live in atop the hill, which was completed in 1823.  Eugene observed that perhaps some bad karma from the place did rub off on Raffles because, back in England, he died when he was only 45.  (Farquhar, on the other hand, outlived his old boss by 20 years.)  He also noted that the British did a lot of mysterious digging on the hill.  Were they secretly trying to locate the treasures of Singapura’s former kings?

 

We got a look too at the outside of the Battlebox, officially known as the Fort Canning Bunker or the Headquarters Malaya Command Operations Bunker.  Here, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival, Commander of the British Commonwealth forces, and 500 officers and men holed up after the Japanese attacked Singapore in 1942.  Percival ended up surrendering, an event Winston Churchill described as ‘the worst disaster and biggest capitulation in British history’.  Subsequently, the Japanese, the new, if temporary, masters of Singapore, took over the Battlebox.  However, they didn’t stay there long and vacated it again.  Could this have something to do with supernatural goings-on deep in the bunker?  No.  According to Eugene, the Japanese didn’t like it because the British had left it like a pigsty.

 

 

What I enjoyed most about this tour was its improvisational nature.  Tour-members and even passers-by were welcome to contribute.  At the National Archives building, the former Anglo-Chinese School, one of our party mentioned that he’d been a pupil there when it’d been a school… And he’d had a spooky experience on its third floor.  The building was still open, so Eugene took us in, we went up to the floor, and the man told us what’d happened to him at the actual location.  He’d been alone in a music room when the air around him had inexplicably turned cold.  Later, he’d heard that the room was supposed to be haunted.  Wonderfully, the building’s security guard, noticing us, insisted on telling us about a creepy, inexplicable experience he’d had there, doing his rounds, a few years earlier.

 

Later, when we were passing through the old Fort Canning Gate, an elderly gentleman out for a walk approached us.  He’d recognized Eugene from his YouTube videos and wanted to tell us about an evening when he’d seen a ghostly figure near that spot.

 

Many more stories later, we found ourselves descending the far side of the hill, towards Fort Canning MRT Station.  As Eugene finished up, we heard the eerie creaking of a swing in a nearby playground.  While it cranked back and forth, I nervously looked towards it.  First, I was relieved to see a human figure using the swing.  Then I realized it was a female figure whose face I couldn’t see, but who had long black hair – like a character from a Japanese horror movie.  And, momentarily, I was supremely spooked.

 

Another sure sign this tour had been a success.

 

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Malaysian macabre 1: My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons by Tunku Halim

 

© Penguin Books

 

Here’s another entry for the run-up to Halloween…

 

The horror stories in Malaysian writer Tunku Halim’s collection My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons (2022) don’t hint at what, for much of his life, he’s done as a career.

 

In fact, Halim qualified as a barrister in England and then practised corporate and conveyancing law in Malaysia and Australia.  That’s why his Wikipedia bibliography contains not only such titles as Dark Demon Rising (1997), Blood Haze: 15 Chilling Tales (1999) and Gravedigger’s Kiss (2007), but also Everything the Condominium Developer Should Have Told You But Didn’t (1992) and Condominiums: Purchase Investment & Habitat (1996).  Also, he’s published children’s fiction, children’s encyclopedias, books on losing weight and books on playing golf.  Though Halim has been described as ‘Asia’s Stephen King’, I don’t believe Maine’s word-slinging ‘Master of Pop Dread’ has ever got around to penning tomes on watching your waistline or improving your handicap on the golf course.

 

Similar variety is found among the 15 tales in My Lovely Skull.  They range in tone from the highbrow and elegiac to the unashamedly hokey.  In the latter category is Karaoke Nightmare, in which a woman with a love for performing Mariah Carey but a hopeless singing voice – personally, I find Ms. Carey’s output hideous whether it’s sung in tune or not – finds some weird singing lessons on YouTube.  She falls under the spell of the singing teacher, known simply as ‘Air’, who has ‘intense, mysterious, coal-black eyes’ and ‘looks a bit like Jin from BTS except that his hair is greasy black’, and who addresses her directly from her TV screen.  Air ensures that her next get-together with her friends in a karaoke box is, literally, murder.

 

Also amusingly schlocky is The Festival, in which some dog-lovers take umbrage at an event they see advertised as a ‘dog eating festival’ and turn up at it to protest.  They discover, to their horror, that they’ve misunderstood the event’s semantics.  What’s being eaten, and what’s doing the eating, are not what they think.  I read somewhere that Halim is scared of dogs, a fear that no doubt inspired this tale.

 

More serious are his stories of psychological horror.  In the tale that lends the book its name, My Lovely Skull, the narrator describes his descent into madness after finding a human skull on a beach.  It isn’t long before he believes the skull – a female one – is speaking to him, crooning sweet but creepy words of seduction at him one minute, exhorting him to commit murder the next.  Meanwhile, Cathedraphobia contains another descent into madness, and more murder, as the phobia of the story’s title gets the better of its main character.  Cathedraphobia isn’t a fear of cathedrals, as you might expect, but a fear of chairs.  Chairs have featured occasionally in macabre fiction – electric chairs, obviously, and haunted rocking chairs that move by themselves, and there’s Edogawa Rampo’s brilliantly morbid The Human Chair (1925) – but this is the first story I’ve come across involving someone being irrationally afraid of them.

 

I prefer, though, the collection’s stories that seem inspired by Halim’s local folklore.  Waiting for You features a woman walking her dog whilst trying to forget the horribleness of her domestic situation – she’s married to a drunken, abusive husband – who stumbles across a grove of banana trees growing by a wall on the edge of some jungle.  There, she unwittingly provokes a terrifying demon that resides among the trees: “…wearing a white smock, squatting, back propped against the wall. The face was hidden by long black hair that draped like curtains to the ground and merged with the mocking pools of blackness.”  Although this fearsome entity is referred to only as the ‘demon’, I assume from its description, and the fact it’s found living among banana trees, and the fact it’s accompanied by a foul stench, that it’s a pontianak, “a mythical creature in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore… often depicted as a long-haired woman dressed in white.”

 

Also unidentified is the monstrous baby in Dream Baby.  It’s found by a couple, ironically a childless couple who’ve tried IVF treatment in their desperate attempts to have offspring, after their car breaks down in the middle of the jungle.  This time, I assume the beastly wee creature, the back of whose head is ‘a sickly grey’ and who has ‘several ugly bumps like tumours’ protruding from its spine, is inspired by another being from Malaysian and Indonesia folklore, the toyol.  But while the normal toyol scuttles around and commits crimes on behalf of anyone who manages to tame it, talking advantage of its small size to break into other people’s homes, rob them and bring back their riches, the infant creature in Halam’s story just wants to drink blood… and kill.

 

Incidentally, there’s a pleasing riff on a more recent type of folklore, the urban myth, in The Elevator Game.  The hero of this story is a social-media influencer who decides for his latest video to test the claim that by pressing a certain sequence of numbers in a lift – ‘G-3-1-5-1-9-4-G’ – you’ll eventually make the lift-doors open onto the afterlife and its ghostly inhabitants.  This game is said to originate in ‘Korea or Japan’ and, appropriately, the story’s uneasy atmosphere resembles that of one of the numerous Japanese horror (‘J-Horror’) movies based on modern legends.

 

For me, My Lovely Skull’s best two stories come at the end.  Moongate is set on the hillwalking trail of the same name on Malaysia’s Penang Island and features a couple who, whilst hiking there, have some disturbing experiences with a recurring, and rapidly aging, figure dressed in yellow.  Their increasing panic leads to an accident – and one of them disappearing.  The other member of the couple is left trying to figure out what happened.  A story that impressively combines the sinister, the disorientating and the tragic, Moongate benefits from being set near the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.  The grief depicted here, at the unexpected and bewildering loss of a loved one, echoes how many felt during the pandemic when family members and friends were snatched away by a virus that suddenly seemed to arrive from nowhere.

 

Equally good is the ultimate story, Water Flows Deepest, where perhaps there is a suggestion of Halim’s legal background and his expertise with condominiums.  It’s set in a globally-warmed future where rising sea-levels inundate the world’s coasts, especially at high-tide.  The story’s characters are a handful of people still stubbornly living in “a drab grey tower that stood high up against the ashen sky.  It was once touted as a luxury seafront condominium but now it was a towering island citadel under constant siege… The guard house, its walls water-stained, stood empty…”  Its driveway “was littered by sea debris which scattered up past the small roundabout to the lobby and then down to the basement parking.  The parking entrance was dark like an open mouth and completely flooded.”

 

If this dystopian vision of future condo-living calls to mind, say, the works of J.G. Ballard, the story also contains a strong element of Stephen King.  The characters have heard disturbing rumours of a deadly amorphous creature, ‘like a black curtain or an oil slick’, lurking in the steadily-rising, steadily-advancing seawater.  This calls to mind King’s short story The Raft, which appeared in his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew and was adapted as the middle instalment in the three-story anthology movie Creepshow 2 (1987).  I found the ending of Water Flows Deepest a little over-the-top, but the build-up to it is impressively, and wetly, ominous.

 

My Lovely Skull and Other Skeletons, then, is nicely varied in tone and content, and if a few tales are plainly not to be taken seriously, they have the saving grace of being good fun.  The collection is also visceral.  The horrors populating Halim’s short fiction are indiscriminate and though bad people meet gruesome ends, so too do morally neutral and decent ones.

 

Finally, Halim writes in a brisk, crisp and to-the-point style that looks easy to reproduce and makes the art of short-story writing look easy to do.  That he makes them look so is a testament to his skill because both things aren’t easy.  (I know this as a short-story writer myself.)  Also, five of the 15 stories here are written in the present tense, a stylistic affectation I often find intrusive and annoying, but Halim carries it off so well that I didn’t even notice while I was reading them.

 

From tunuhalim.wordpress.com 

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10 scary pictures for Halloween 2023

 

From pixabay.com / © socialneuron

 

It’s Halloween today.  In keeping with tradition on this blog, I’ll celebrate the occasion by displaying ten pieces of macabre, spooky or unsettling artwork that I’ve come across and liked during the past year.

 

To start on a musical note…  Here’s a flutist painted by the late Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski, whose work suggested Hieronymus Bosch combined with H.R. Giger and frequently depicted apocalyptic hellscapes populated by wraith-like figures.  By Beksinski’s standards, this is a fairly sedate and playful piece.  Its ochre-bathed figure is characteristically skeletal, but what impresses is how its multiple fingers, knuckles, joints, bones and tendons fuse chaotically to the flute and become a grotesque mechanism that’s an extension of it.

 

Beksinski met a tragic end in 2005 – after a traumatic few years during which he’d seen the death of his wife and the suicide of his son, he was murdered in a dispute over a small sum of money.  Still, interest in his art has burgeoned since his death and there’s now a host of stuff about him on YouTube.

 

© Zdzislaw Beksinski

 

Moving eastwards from Poland to Ukraine – yes, a place that’s suffered plenty of real-life horror in the past two years.  Yuri Hill is a Kiev-based artist who specialises in digital painting and whose work often depicts things worryingly pagan and primordial lurking in the forest.  This piece is particularly good.  As you study its crepuscular grey-blue murk, more and more details filter into view – not just the drooping, feathery branches of towering conifers, but the strange, bestial furriness of the figures and the Herne-the-Hunter-like antlers sprouting from their heads.  The fact that they’re moving about on stilts just adds to the strangeness.  For those of you wanting to see more of his work, Hill’s Instagram account is accessible here and his page on artstation.com here.

 

© Yuri Hill

 

From folk-horror to J-horror, i.e., Japanese horror, whose psychological, supernatural and urban-myth-derived traditions clearly inform this painting.  Entitled Red Laugh, it’s the work of Yuko Tatsushima, who’s been described as both a ‘rockstar’ and an ‘outsider’ in Japanese painting.  Even before we get to the grotesque subject matter, with the face missing an eyeball and some prominent, autopsy-like stitches running up its throat, the scratchy paint-strokes almost make you wonder if the artist did it with broken, bloody fingernails.

 

Indeed, the composition has a howl of rage about it that’s common in Tatsushima’s work.  It frequently addresses sexual oppression, harassment and assault, things Japanese society – all societies, for that matter – often tries to look away from and things the artist has been a victim of herself.  Such is the Francis Bacon-style intensity of Tatsushima’s creations that this YouTube film about her comes with a warning that its images might be ‘too disturbing for more sensitive viewers’.

 

© Yuko Tatsushima / From sugoii-Japan.com

 

That seems far, far removed from my next picture, which celebrates the cosy tradition of classical British horror fiction, set in wooden-panelled Victorian and Edwardian drawing rooms and populated by crusty, tweedy gentlemen.  It’s by Charles W. Stewart, one of the few people who can claim to have been born in the Philippines but brought up in Galloway in Scotland, and whose enthusiasm for illustrating was apparently matched for his enthusiasm for ballet and costume design.  Stewart, clearly a man of many interests, selected the stories and did the illustrations for a 1997 collection entitled Ghost Stories, and Other Horrid Tales, which was published four years before his death.  The volume includes fiction by Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, Lafcadio Hearn, Vernon Lee, M.R. James and Walter de la Mare.

 

Stewart’s illustration here, which shows an antiquarian discovering he has unexpected company whilst engaged in some nocturnal research, is presumably for M.R. James’s Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book.  The story ends with the fictional equivalent of a cinematic jump-scare: “…his attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his left elbow…  Pale, dusky skin, covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down, grey, horny and wrinkled…”

 

© Folio Society

 

One of the greatest early scares in film history occurred in the 1925 silent version of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, which starred the remarkable Lon Chaney Sr in the title role.  The mysterious masked phantom gets unmasked whilst playing at his beloved organ.  Unable to stop herself, the singer Christine (Mary Philbin) whips the mask off from behind. The audience is confronted by the phantom’s horribly gaunt, stretched and skull-like face in the screen’s foreground – at this point, supposedly, some 1925 audience-members fainted.  Then he turns around and the audience is traumatised a second time as they see Christine reacting in horror to his deformed visage too.  Anyway, here’s a regal portrait of Chaney Sr’s Phantom of the Opera, sans mask, courtesy of Pittsburgh artist Daniel R. Horne, who’s painted a number of classic movie monsters.

 

© Daniel R. Horne

 

There were scares a-plenty in the films of director Alfred Hitchcock.  Indeed, he was perhaps cinema’s greatest practitioner in the genres of suspense and horror.  So popular was Hitchcock among the public in his heyday that he licensed his name to dozens of collections of crime, mystery, thriller, espionage and horror short stories, whose titles ranged from Alfred Hitchcock’s Coffin Break (1974) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Hard Day at the Scaffold (1967), from Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum (1965) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Sinister Spies (1966).  These had introductions purporting to be written by the great man himself, but they were actually penned by publishing-house editors.

 

I’m partial to this cover illustration from the collection Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbinders in Suspense (1967), which includes Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Birds (alongside the likes of Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game, Roald Dahl’s Man from the South and Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper).  Hitchcock, of course, filmed The Birds in 1963.  The cover’s artist isn’t identified, but with those brutally-pecky gulls, and the victim’s screaming face, he or she does a good job of capturing the directness of du Maurier’s grim, claustrophobic original.  Hitchcock’s treatment of it is more mannered and expansive, though still brilliant.

 

© Lions, London

 

While many modern artists have taken their inspiration from the cinema, the American painter and illustrator Burt Shonberg could boast that his work turned up in movies. Most notably, Shonberg provided the disturbingly dark-eyed and corpse-faced portraits of former members of the Usher family, which Roderick Usher (Vincent Price) shows to Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptation House of Usher (1960).

 

Acclaimed as ‘the premier psychedelic artist of Los Angeles’ from the 1950s until his death in 1977, Shonberg’s work extended beyond hippy-era psychedelia and he flirted with cubism and did some fine pen-and-ink drawings.  Here, however, I’m showing a languid, sultry composition entitled Magical Landscape or Lucifer in the Garden, which depicts an unsettlingly youthful version of Auld Nick.  Obviously, representations of the Devil abound throughout the history of art, but what makes this one memorable are those particularly long pasterns and the strange little sphinx resting on his lap.

 

From cvltnation.com

 

In these art-themed Halloween posts, I also like to honour the festival that comes straight after Halloween – Mexico’s Dia de Muertos, the Day of the Dead, at the start of November, which features skulls and skeletons as a major theme.  This next picture gets straight to the point.  It’s by David Lozeau, a San Diego artist who’s dedicated much of his career to creating Day of the Dead-inspired artwork, and it shows two skeletons raucously celebrating…  Day of the Dead.  I assume that yellow stuff in the señorita skeleton’s bottle is reposado tequila, which acquires its colour from the oak barrels it matures in.

 

© David Lozeau

 

There’s also an admirable directness about this picture, of a vampire lady, by Argentinian artist Hector Garrido, who passed away in 2020 when he was in his nineties.  Put Garrido’s name into Google Images and you’ll be assailed by countless pictures of G.I. Joe toy-packaging, which he designed back in the 1980s.  However, his main work was creating book covers, most popularly for gothic and romantic novels and for the series about the wholesome juvenile sleuths Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys.  But Garrido’s CV includes covers for the likes of John Brunner, Ramsey Campbell, Agatha Christie, John Christopher, Robert A. Heinlein, Richard Matheson and Robert Silverberg too.

 

This one comes from a book called A Walk with the Beast, actually a collection of ‘vintage tales of human monsters and were-beasts’ edited by Charles M. Walker.  The stories include one by Vernon Lee, who also appeared in Charles W. Stewart’s Ghost Stories, and Other Horrid Tales.  ‘All fun’ says the book’s single reviewer on amazon.com, so evidently it ‘does what it says on the tin’.

 

© Avon Books

 

And finally, for my final picture, it’s back to Japan for something similarly fun and schlocky – not the cover of a book but one of a Japanese comic-book.  This effort by the late manga-artist Marina Shirakawa is wonderfully sinewy and eye-catching.  It’s full of typical manga-style details – see those simultaneously hideous and gleeful ghouls in the background – and peculiarly Japanese ones, such as the heroine’s sailor-suit school uniform.  Its colour scheme of dark, blue-grey hues, with smudges of blood-red at the back, is memorable too.

 

© From monsterbrains.blogspot.com

 

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

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Your last chance to see Jim Mountfield at Horrified

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

Some sad news I’ve heard recently is that Horrified Magazine, the ‘British horror website’, is closing down.  Dedicated to media – films, television, plays, novels, short stories, comic books, etc. – involving the macabre and produced in the United Kingdom, Horrified has been a prime source of entertaining reading and valuable information during the past few years.  A newly-appeared message on its main page informs readers that “From late October 2022, this website will no longer be updated with new content.  Feel free to browse until such a time as the website is taken down.”

 

Horrified contains a short-story section, in which I’ve had two items published under the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, the name I put on my scary fiction.  Both of these should still be accessible until the plug is finally pulled on the site.  Therefore, this is your last chance (at least for a while) to read the following…

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

Published in 2020, Don’t Hook Now is a story set in the near-future where advances in technology, especially in the field of virtual reality, make it possible for people to take part in scenes from movies – the technology simulates the scenes, interactively, around them.  For bona fide film fans, this would be magical.  Imagine being on that rooftop near the end of Blade Runner (1982), beside Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) when he delivers his heart-breaking ‘tears in rain’ monologue, or being at the airport for the climax of Casablanca (1942), when Rick (Humphrey Bogart) says goodbye to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman).  However, human nature being what it is, I suspect such wondrous technology would end up being used for trivial, if not sordid, purposes.  Thus, Don’t Hook Now features an app that allows people to take part in simulations of sex scenes from certain movies, and is used by lowlifes, sociopaths and perverts in pursuit of their thrills.

 

Don’t Hook Now’s subject matter was such that Horrified decided to give it a trigger warning and recommend it only for ‘mature audiences’.   In my opinion, though, the main reason for recommending it to mature readers was because only people of a certain age would be familiar with the masterly 1970s British horror movie that gives the story its grim twist later on.

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

From 2021, meanwhile, is Where the Little Boy Drowned, which belongs to a sub-genre I like to think of as ‘constant jeopardy’.  This is where the main character or characters spend the whole story, or most of it, trapped in a dangerous situation where the odds are stacked against them getting out of it alive.  I won’t give too much away about Where the Little Boy Drowned, other than to say that its plot includes include a length of rope and a flooded river.  There’s also a supernatural element to it, with a faint nod to Japanese horror films – J-Horror – and particularly to Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 chiller Ju-On: The Grudge.

 

So, for a little while longer, Don’t Hook Now can be accessed here, and Where the Little Boy Drowned here.

 

And thank you to the staff at Horrified for all their hard work these last few years.

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Hanging around with Jim Mountfield

 

© Horrified Magazine

 

I’ve just had my first short story published in 2021.  Where the Little Boy Drowned, which is attributed to Jim Mountfield, the pen-name I put on my horror fiction, is now featured in the ‘Stories’ section of the online magazine Horrified.

 

The story belongs to a sub-genre that I like to think of as ‘constant jeopardy’.  The main character or characters spend the whole story, or most of it, stuck in a dangerous situation where the odds look stacked against them getting out of it alive.

 

Examples of constant-jeopardy stories include Jack Finney’s Contents of a Dead Man’s Pockets (1956) and Stephen King’s The Ledge (1976), both of which have their protagonist trapped on a narrow ledge high up the side of a towering apartment building.  Two other examples are stories I’ve read by the Spanish writer Vincente Blasco Ibáñez and by Winston Churchill (who very occasionally wrote fiction when he wasn’t politicking) that are both called Man Overboard.  As their shared title suggests, these are about someone falling off a fast-moving ship, into the middle of the ocean, without anyone else noticing that they’ve fallen off.

 

However, the most gruelling constant-jeopardy story I’ve come across is The Viaduct, written by Brian Lumley and first published in 1976.  It’s about two boys who, for a dare, decide to cross the titular viaduct not by going along the top of it but going along underneath it – using 160 rungs, which for some reason the structure’s builders have installed there, as monkey-bars. The viaduct straddles a very deep valley and you can predict that this isn’t going to end well.

 

I don’t want to give too much away about Where the Little Boy Drowned, but one of its key plot elements is a length of rope.  There’s also a supernatural element to it, with a faint nod to Japanese horror films – J-Horror – and particularly to Takashi Shimizu’s 2002 chiller Ju-On: The Grudge.

 

Where the Little Boy Drowned can be read here, while this link will take you to Horrified’s main page.