Manga – Blood and Porridge

October 31, 2024October 31, 2024

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2024

It’s that time of year again – October 31^st, Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween.

As is customary on this blog, I’ll mark the occasion by displaying ten items of creepy, frightening or unsettling artwork that, during the past year, I’ve stumbled across in my Internet wanderings and taken a shine to. And this time, I’ll feature a few pictures that aren’t just dark in tone but actually relate to Halloween.

So, to set the mood, here’s a picture called Halloween by the Ohio artist Maggie Vandewalle who, her website explains, “has used watercolour or graphite to convey her love of the organic world and that of a really good story.” This has led to her producing many images of animals linked to the occult: cats, bats, crows, hares. She also does a good job of drawing trees, and I find this landscape particularly gorgeous. Few things are more evocative than looking at the colours of an evening sky through a mesh of darkening tree-branches.

© Maggie Vandewalle

Earlier this month – October 7^th – was the 175^th anniversary of the death of America’s premier writer of macabre fiction, Edgar Allan Poe. Here’s something Poe-esque, an illustration for his story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by the New York-born, New Jersy-raised and Connecticut-dwelling writer and illustrator Robert Lawson. Lawson’s speciality was children’s books – his work adorns such classics as Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938) – and as this gallery page for the Goldstein Lawson Collection shows, he had a flair for drawing fairy tale and mythological creatures. However, in 1931, he won an award for creating an etching for Poe’s famous tale of familial decline, madness and destruction. As my digital copy of the etching is murky and wouldn’t look good in the cramped confines of this blog, here’s the clearer, preliminary pencil-drawing Lawson made for it. As the late Roger Corman, director of the famous 1960 film version House of Usher, once commented, “The house is the monster.” It certainly looks it in this.

From feuilleton / © Estate of Robert Lawson

From Edgar Allan Poe to Bram Stoker. With yet another Dracula film adaptation, Roger Eggers’ Nosferatu, scheduled for release at the end of this year, I thought it timely to include this illustration featuring Stoker’s legendary vampire count by Spanish painter and illustrator Fernando Vicente. It depicts the scene where Dracula crawls down his castle wall, “face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings”, fingers and toes grasping “the corners of the stones”, descending “with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.” In keeping with Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula is still an old man at this point – but Vicente’s version is an old man who looks like he can take care of himself and whom you wouldn’t want to mess with. Indeed, he makes me think of the late silver-haired American character-actor Dennis Farina, who specialised in playing tough mobsters and cops (and who’d been a Chicago police detective before taking up acting). Though it’s Dennis Farina with red eyes and fangs.

From bookpatrol.net / © Fernando Vicente

And from Bram Stoker to H.P. Lovecraft. Just over a year ago, the Scottish actor David McCallum – best known for his TV roles in The Man from UNCLE (1964-68), The Invisible Man (1975), Sapphire and Steel (1979-82) and NCIS (2003-23) – passed away. In the tributes that followed, there wasn’t much mention of the fact that McCallum was also a musician and writer. And nothing was said about his prolific career as an audiobook narrator, a career that extended to the weird, baroque and morbid world of legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Among the Lovecraft stories he narrated was The Rats in the Walls (which can be heard here on YouTube). I like this cover illustration from the original LP of the recording, designed by Brooklyn artists Leo and Diane Dillon, with its giant skull (composed of normal-sized skulls and other bones) and an insane green face, seemingly spewing yellow bile, emerging from the bottom of the wall behind. More on the Dillons can be found here and here – the latter site featuring some cracking cover art they did for the 1972 Ray Bradbury novel The Halloween Tree.

From pinterest.com / © Leo and Diane Dillon

Old bones are also on view in this image, which I’ve seen called The Boy in the Skeleton on social media. It’s by the Dutch engraver and woodcutter Christoffel van Sichem the Younger, who lived from the late 16^th to the mid-17^th century. I presume the panic-stricken lad, inside the larger and rather insouciant-looking skeleton, serves as a metaphor for how the human soul is imprisoned within a cage of flesh and bone, despite that cage being a fragile and ultimately perishable one.

From x.com

Right, back to the theme of Halloween. I love this picture by the Paris-based illustrator Nico Delort. Entitled It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, it’s obviously inspired by the much-loved, animated TV Halloween special of the same name, which was based on the cartoon-strip creations of Charles M. Schultz and first broadcast in 1966. It shows the thumb-sucking, security-blanket-clutching Linus Van Pelt venturing into his local pumpkin patch to await the coming of the alternative Santa Claus, the Great Pumpkin. Linus can be discerned in the middle distance of Delort’s composition, while the Great Pumpkin – possibly – can be glimpsed on the end of a faraway cloud. But it’s the satanically-grinning pumpkins in the foreground that command your attention.

© Nico Delort

Also satanic is this picture by British artist Dave Kendall, who’s worked in collaboration with talents as diverse as Pat Mills (founder of the world’s greatest sci-fi comic, 2000AD), heavy metal titans Metallica and the late Lovecraftian author Brian Lumley. Among Kendall’s dark, brooding and frequently twisted creations, I find this one of the most disturbing. Its image of a bloody-faced nun, with grotesquely elongated fingers, is inspired by a short story called The Hands. This was penned in 1986 by the esteemed Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell and can be read here.

© Dave Kendall

More female monstrosities are displayed in this picture. All I can determine about these bat-ladies is that they’re the work of an Austrian artist called Robert Loewe and appeared in the February 11^th, 1913 edition of the weekly satirical magazine Die Muskete.

From thefugitivesaint.tumblir.com

Meanwhile, it’s a female doing the screaming – in impeccable, wide-mouthed and wide-eyed Japanese manga style – on this cover illustration for the appropriately named Halloween Comics. The artist is Kazuo Umezo, known in Japan as ‘the god of horror manga’. For inspiration, Umezo has often drawn on traditional Japanese folklore and legends and he’s made this argument against the many people – parents, editors, educators – who’ve urged him to ‘think of the children’ and tone down the horror content of his work: “Old Japanese folk stories and fairy tales could be unflinchingly brutal. They come from a time when tragedy and carnage was an everyday part of life. Now we have people calling to water them down, which essentially whitewashes history. It’s insulting to the memory of those who suffered to bring us these stories.” More of Umezo’s work, definitely not toned down, can be viewed on this entry dedicated to him on the website Monster Brains.

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com / © Kazuo Umezu

Finally, to end things on a gentler note, here’s a picture I appreciate both as a cat-lover and as someone who finds graveyards fascinating – one of a cat (black, of course) exploring a graveyard at night. It’s from the cover of a ‘cozy mystery’ novel entitled Witch Way to Murder (2005) by Shirley Damsgaard and it’s by the New York artist Tristan Elwell. A more recent and better-known cover illustration by Elwell, which also involves a cat, is the one adorning John Scalzi’s bestselling and award-winning satirical novel Starter Villain (2023).

From unquietthings.com / © Tristan Elwell

Enjoy Halloween!

October 31, 2023November 13, 2023

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…”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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