The Fly – Blood and Porridge

October 13, 2026October 13, 2026

More things that terrified the young me

From wikipedia.org / © Group Three Productions

Here’s the second half of my account of things that scared me, to the point of scarring me, when I was wee.

Space: 1999 – Dragon’s Domain (1975)

Even as a kid, I knew the TV show Space: 1999 was silly. I already had enough awareness of science to realise the ridiculousness of its premise – a titanic explosion on the moon in the then-future year of 1999 sends it, and 300 human beings crewing a base there called Moonbase Alpha, careering out of earth’s orbit and into deep space. Particularly ridiculous was how every second episode the moon hurtled into a new solar system and came close enough to an earth-type planet for the Moonbase Alpha folk to explore it. Space: 1999 depicted the universe as a giant pinball machine with the moon bouncing between earth-type planets like the silver ball bouncing between the machine’s flippers and bumpers.

And yet… A Space: 1999 episode called Dragon’s Domain petrified me. It has the runaway moon approaching a sinister graveyard of abandoned spaceships in which a horrifying, one-eyed, tentacled monstrosity lurks. Okay, seen today, the monster in Dragon’s Domain doesn’t impress, being a mass of wavy tentacles obviously animated by wires. But the barrage of things that accompany it still inspire fear – it initially materialises as a swirling pattern of lights, it makes hideous shrieking noises and its victims are battered by gusts of wind. Most horribly, moments after those victims are dragged into its maw, they’re spat out again as desiccated corpses, apparently drained of all their moisture.

There’s something about the episode’s ineluctability that got me too. It focuses on a Moonbase Alpha member (Gianni Garko) who’s encountered the monster before. While he was captaining a mission into deep space, it ate his crew and only he managed to escape. Now stuck on the moon after its unexpected departure from earth’s orbit, fate has cruelly decreed that he’ll meet the thing again.

The pictures in The Horrific World of Monsters (1974)

I might have been terrified by monsters like that Space: 1999 one, but I was also fascinated by them and in the mid-1970s I bought a hardcover, kids-orientated book called The Horrific World of Monsters by Dulan Barber. This provided an A-Z of monsters from myth, folklore, cryptozoology, movies, TV and comics.

© Marshall Cavendish

Lavishly illustrated, a couple of the book’s page-sized movie-stills troubled me, lodged themselves in my psyche and occasionally caused me nightmares. These depicted the mummy, played by Lon Chaney Jr in 1944’s The Mummy’s Ghost, throttling a victim; a fanged, hairy Michael Landon pouncing on a victim in I was a Teenage Werewolf (1957); and, in unflinching close-up, the title character of The Return of the Fly (1959), the second film in the series about a scientist experimenting with a teleportation device who gets his molecules mixed up with those of a fly and acquires a massive, insectile head. Just as well it wasn’t a close-up of Jeff Goldblum from late in David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly. That sight would have left me gibbering.

Eventually, I sold the book to a schoolmate called Geoff Simmons, who was a gifted artist and who used some of its illustrations as inspiration for pictures – I remember him showing me one he’d drawn based on the mummy. Geoff is now a graphic designer (and also a community historian) in London. I’d like to think The Horrific World of Monsters played a small part in shaping his future career.

Bodega Bay gets attacked in The Birds (1963)

By the mid-1970s, someone had informed me that the Americans and Russians both had ‘bombs that could blow up the world’, so I had a new thing to worry about – the end of humanity. Accordingly, apocalyptic movies frightened the bejesus out of me. For example, Steve Sekely’s Day of the Triffids (1963), a cheap adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel, scared me with its depiction of a world where nearly everyone has gone blind. Even at 10 years old, unfortunately, I could tell how shoddy its special effects were, especially the ones involving the triffids.

But the apocalyptic movie that traumatised me was 1963’s The Birds, directed by the impeccable Alfred Hitchcock and based on a 1952 short story by the equally impeccable Daphne du Maurier. Most traumatic for me was the part where Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor find themselves in a diner in the middle of the little coastal town of Bodega Bay, trying to convince the locals – who react with varying degrees of scepticism – that the area’s feathered population is behaving very strangely. After seven minutes of conversation that mingles humour with growing unease, and is brilliantly performed by character actors like Doreen Lang (as an increasingly frightened mother), Charles McGraw (as a gruff fisherman), Ethel Griffies (as an elderly, know-all ornithologist) and Karl Swenson (as a Bible-quoting Irish drunkard), all hell breaks loose.

Multitudinous seagulls swoop down and cars and petrol pumps explode (thanks to fuel spewing from a dropped hose), more cars crash, horses run wild and many townspeople get clawed and pecked. Hedren spends a nightmarish minute trapped inside a telephone booth with birds, plus one unlucky human victim, smashing into its sides. Taylor rescues her and gets her into the diner again, but… The atmosphere there is suddenly less welcoming.

From wikipedia.com / © Universal Pictures

Hitchcock’s orchestration of this blew me away. The telephone-booth bit was possibly the first time I’d been exposed to what film-fans would describe as ‘pure cinema’. But Taylor and Hedren’s return to the diner provides the chilling coup de grâce. The people inside are cowering in terror, including Griffies’s no-longer-cocky ornithologist, and already a superstitious irrationality is taking hold of them. This crystalises when a now-crazed Lang accuses Hedren of, basically, being a witch: “Who are you?” What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil. Evil!” No doubt a young Stephen King was taking notes at this point. Similar things happen in his 1980 novella The Mist, with many of its characters reacting to another apocalyptic event by succumbing to medieval-style hysteria.

Doctor Who – The Seeds of Doom, episode 4 (1976)

I could write a whole article based only on moments from the BBC’s long running science-fiction / fantasy / horror series Doctor Who (1963-89, 2005-25) that scared me: the shop dummies coming to life in the serial Spearhead from Space (1970); the killer plastic chair in Terror of the Autons (1971); the murderous Morris dancers in The Daemons (1971); a scaly hand appearing over a boat’s gunwale in The Sea Devils (1972); an infected crewman removing his hand from his pocket and revealing it transformed into a slab of glistening green slime (okay, it’s really green-painted bubble-wrap, but hardly anyone at the time knew what bubble-wrap was) in The Ark in Space (1975)… But scariest of all was the 1976 serial The Seeds of Doom, about alien seed-pods that infect humans and transform them into malevolent, carnivorous plant-monsters. Episode 4 of The Seeds of Doom, to be precise.

One alien pod becomes the possession of an insane millionaire plant-lover called Harrison Chase – played by character actor Tony Beckley, who’d been in The Italian Job (1969) and Get Carter (1971) – and at the start of episode 4 it germinates, infecting one of Chase’s minions, a hapless botanist called Arnold Keeler (Mark Jones). Ignoring Keeler’s pleas to be taken to a hospital, Chase has him chained to a bed, purring in delight, “The rate of increase is astonishing… Protein absorption from the animal, of course… We shall have to give you some food soon… You’re changing into a plant, Keeler… a marvellous new species of plant!”

© BBC

With Keeler turning green, then fibrous, then tentacular, and Chase trying to speed up the metamorphosis by feeding him pieces of raw meat, what I was witnessing here was the icky sub-genre of horror known as ‘body horror’. But it was the performances of Beckley and Jones, one disturbingly malevolent, the other distressingly pathetic, that truly conveyed the horribleness of the situation.

Legend Horror Classics, issue 4 (1976)

The same impulse that made me buy The Horrific World of Monsters inspired me to purchase issue 4 of a British film magazine called Legend Horror Classics, edited by Gent Shaw, who’d also edited the scary-movie magazine World of Horror in 1974-75. Issue 4 of Legend Horror Classics was devoted to zombies, which until then I’d understood to be dead people brought back to life by voodoo and put to work on Caribbean sugar plantations. By the 1970s, however, thanks to the influence of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), zombie stories and films had become less voodoo-reliant and a lot grislier and more visceral. This issue contained several gruesome photos that, like those in the Monsters book, gave me nightmares.

However… Since then, I’ve discovered, indignantly, that the yuckiest pictures in the issue weren’t actually from zombie movies! There was one of the mouldering, prehistoric ape-creature inhabited by an evil alien intelligence in the Christopher Lee / Peter Cushing horror film Horror Express (1972); and one of a rotting corpse (not reanimated as a zombie) from another 1972 movie featuring Christopher Lee, Deathline. If you’re reading this, Gent Shaw, I’m accusing you of breaking the Trade Descriptions Act.

© Legend Publishing

The Nationwide report about the Hexham Heads (1976)

The Hexham heads were two little stone heads, possibly Celtic in origin, discovered in the northeast English town of Hexham in 1971. Reputedly, the heads triggered paranormal activity in the homes of whoever had custody of them. And that paranormal activity manifested itself spectacularly in the form of a werewolf that was glimpsed stalking through their homes after dark.

Infamously, Nationwide (1969-83) – normally a family-friendly TV current-affairs programme, which aired on the BBC every weekday evening after six o’clock – featured a report on the story in 1976. The makers of the report had the not-so-family-friendly idea of spicing it up with ghastly screams, images of severed human heads and an unexpected jump-cut of Oliver Reed lurching towards the camera in 1961’s Curse of the Werewolf. This approach traumatised every kid who happened to be watching, me included.

One eyewitness reported seeing the Hexham Heads werewolf after arriving home late at night – allegedly she spotted it prowling about her dark house before she switched on the lights. Soon afterwards, my family moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland. My parents frequently received invitations to Sunday lunch and dinner at the homes of Northern Irish folk they knew directly, or knew as friends of friends, who were now living in Scotland. After much food, whisky and blethering, we wouldn’t get home until late on Sunday evening. While my parents unlocked the front door and we entered a black, silent house, I’d think of the Nationwide report and wonder, “What if there’s a werewolf waiting in there?”

From wikipedia.org / © Archaeology Data Service / Dr Anne Ross

Footage of that legendary 1976 TV report on the Hexham Heads was long believed lost but it’s now been discovered and restored – see here and here.

Jon Voight’s dream at the end of Deliverance (1972)

By the time I was 12, I believed I was a mature, hardened type who’d seen everything and couldn’t be frightened anymore. But then on TV one evening I watched John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), about four Atlanta business men whose canoeing holiday in remote north Georgia turns into an ordeal, and was freaked out by it.

Oddly, it wasn’t the notorious sequence where some hillbillies rape Ned Beatty’s character and insist that he squeals ‘like a pig’ that upset me most. Maybe I wasn’t old enough to fully understand what was happening. No, it was the bit near the end where Jon Voigt’s character has a nightmare about the river they canoed on – which has since been dammed and turned into a lake – and sees a pale, bloated hand rising out of its water. The image of that emerging hand haunted me for weeks afterwards. I obviously wasn’t as tough as I thought I was.

© Elmer Enterprises / Warner Bros.

Thinking about it, I suppose I must have been a complete scaredy-cat whose childhood was one long procession of moments of terror. So now, half-a-century later, why do I write short horror stories under the penname of Jim Mountfield? I’ve had nearly 70 such stories published.

Perhaps it’s a case of ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em.”

July 10, 2026July 16, 2026

The 100-year-old Mel

From wikipedia.org / © Angela George

Last week saw much hype and noise about the United States of America celebrating its 250^th birthday. Under the leadership of Donald Trump, the USA marked the 250^th anniversary of its independence from the British by holding a Great American State Fair on Washington DC’s National Mall. This featured empty booths, cancelled musical performances, racist flags, power outages, collapsing roofs and a plywood model of the victory arch Trump wants to build on the Potomac that cracked, crumbled and oozed yellow gunk. How odd that hardly anyone wanted to go to it.

In other moves to celebrate America’s 250^th Independence Day, Trump refurbished the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool, also in Washington DC, so that its water would shine a patriotic blue, though it immediately shone a less patriotic green thanks to a sudden and unforeseen algae bloom. He also tried to extend the USA team’s run in the 2026 Football World Cup by arm-twisting Gianni Infantino and FIFA into breaking the sport’s red-card rules so that a key American player could play in the team’s next game – which they lost, courtesy of a 4-1 drubbing by Belgium, causing their exit from the competition.

The sound and fury about the 250^th anniversary of American independence, and the Trump-esque shenanigans accompanying it, have obscured the fact that, one week earlier, the USA witnessed another important three-digit birthday. June 28^th saw the 100^th birthday of the legendary American filmmaker, comedian and general funnyman Mel Brooks. By the time he turned his hand to making movies in the late 1960s, Brooks already had impressive comic credentials – devising the famed 2000-Year-Old Man comedy sketch with Carl Reiner, for instance, or creating the classic spy-comedy TV show Get Smart (1965-70) with Buck Henry. But it’s fair to say his films are the body of work for which he’s most beloved.

Like much of the comedy I experienced from an early age – the Carry–On movies, or those starring Abbott and Costello, or the telly career of Ronnie Corbett – I’ve had a complicated and changing relationship with the oeuvre of Mel Brooks. As a youngster, I thought it was brilliant. As a young adult, who took himself much too seriously, I dismissed it – certainly, the later films Brooks made – as crass, cringeworthy guff. Now, in my old age, I can find pleasure in the entirety of Brooks’s canon and appreciate the artistry displayed in even what are, by general consensus, his lesser efforts. A bad joke might provoke a groan rather than a laugh, but to engineer that groan you still need a certain, warped skill.

I think I passed from my youthful period of Brooks-disdain to my more mature period of Brooks-admiration in the 1990s. This was when I was attempting to woo (with a total lack of success) a lady from New York whom I considered, for a while, the coolest thing on earth. We were chatting one evening about our favourite films and the object of my affections suddenly astounded me by saying she was a huge fan of… No, not Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967), or Terence Mallick’s Badlands (1973), or Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), but… Mel Brooks’s Spaceballs (1987).

From wikipedia.org / © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer / Brooksfilms

“Seriously?” I spluttered. I’d seen this science-fiction / Star Wars piss-take shortly after its release and thought it was dreadful. But, patiently, the lady explained to me the sociological depth and cleverness of some of Spaceballs’ jokes that I’d missed – for example, when Bill Pullman and John Candy rescue the princess (Daphne Zuniga) and Pullman remarks, “That’s all we needed… A Jewish princess!” I had to concede there was more to Brooks’s humour than I’d thought.

So, I had my moment of epiphany. I decided, to misquote a line in The Producers, “Don’t be stupid, be a smarty / Come and join the Mel Brooks party.”

Anyway, it’s a fortnight late for the great man’s 100^th, but here is a belated guide to the funniest bits, in my opinion, of his movies. There’s no mention of The Twelve Chairs (1970) and Life Stinks (1991) because I haven’t seen those two.

L.S.D. gets auditioned in The Producers (1967)

The movie that put Brooks on the cinematic map, The Producers has had quite an afterlife, becoming a successful Broadway musical that, in 2005, was turned into a film itself. For me, its highlight isn’t the famous song-and-dance number Springtime for Hitler that’s the centrepiece of the show that impresario Zero Mostel and accountant Gene Wilder stage in the hope it’ll be a massive flop (allowing them to make a fortune from the shares they’ve sold in it). No, the highlight comes earlier.

That’s when hippy Lorenzo St. DuBois – L.S.D. to his friends – stumbles into the show’s auditions by mistake and performs, with his female guitar / keyboards / sax backing band, a funny-terrible number called Love Power. (“And I give a flower to the big fat cop / He takes his glove and he beats me up!”) Played by Dick Shawn with thigh-high furry boots and a Campbell’s soup-can hanging on a chain around his neck, the hapless L.S.D. is hilarious – and the sequence reaches a perfect conclusion when Mostel bellows ecstatically, “THAT’S OUR HITLER!”

From instagram.com / (c) Embassy Pictures

The campfire scene in Blazing Saddles (1974)

If I was more sophisticated, I’d nominate as the funniest moments in Brook’s smash-hit comedy-western the scenes where he skewers the residents of frontier town Rock Ridge for their bone-headed racism. (“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons.”) However… I’m nominating instead the sequence in Blazing Saddles where Slim Pickens’s men sit around a campfire and stuff themselves with traditional cowboy fare – beans – with flatulent results.

I first saw Blazing Saddles when it played on a big screen in the assembly hall of my school as one of the movies chosen for the school’s Film Club. When the farting began, the teenaged audience, including myself, laughed like drains. We were still roaring our heads off minutes after the sequence finished. No other film shown during the several years I was a member of that Film Club – not Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), not Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), not Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) – provoked so tumultuous a reaction. I’m not proud.

The monster meets the blind hermit in Young Frankenstein (1974)

The most genuinely affectionate of Brooks’s genre parodies, Young Frankenstein pokes fun at the black-and-white Frankenstein movies made by Universal Pictures in the 1930s. My favourite part of it is when Brooks sends up the sequence in Bride of Frankenstein (1936) where the Frankenstein monster (Boris Karloff) is touchingly but briefly befriended by a lonely blind hermit (O.P. Heggie) who’s unaware of his monstrousness. Here, the well-meaning but, well, blind hermit (Gene Hackman) accidentally and repeatedly scalds and burns the unfortunate monster (Peter Boyle) whilst trying to offer him broth, cigars, etc., until the latter flees from his cottage in terror. Despite the gleeful bad taste of the gags, the Young Frankenstein sequence retains some of the sweetness and sadness of the Bride of Frankenstein one. It also makes you wish Gene Hackman had played more comedy roles.

From wikipedia.org / © Gruskoff / Venture Films / 20^th Century Fox

The boardroom table in Silent Movie (1976)

This was another movie shown at my school’s Film Club and another sequence that sent us – uncivilised little oiks that we were at the time – into paroxysms of laughter. Evil corporation Engulf & Devour intends to take over the studio of filmmaker Mel Funn (Brooks) but that won’t happen if the new movie Funn is making becomes a hit. Engulf & Devour’s board of executives hatch a fiendish plan to sabotage Funn and his movie – they’ll send sultry nightclub singer Vilma Kaplan (Bernadette Peters) to seduce, then dump Funn and re-kindle the massive alcohol problem he had previously. When a picture of Vilma is unveiled to the executives, sitting around the boardroom table, they’re so impressed that the table rises by several inches.

The line Funn / Brooks inspires when Vilma does dump him, and he goes on a massive bender to drown his sorrows – “He is truly the lord of the winos!” – is pretty funny too.

The orchestra in High Anxiety (1977)

Brooks’s next film takes fond aim at the thriller movies of Alfred Hitchcock. Its hero, Dr Richard Harpo Thorndyke, again played by Brooks himself, suffers from the titular disorder, the vertigo-like ‘high anxiety’. While travelling in the back of a car, Thorndyke / Brooks suffers a moment of ominous foreboding, which is accompanied by an equally ominous swell of Bernard Herrmann-like orchestral music – the sort that Hitchcock liked to insert into his films to augment the mood. This being a Brooks film, though, Thorndyke’s car then passes a bus that contains, as passengers, the orchestra playing the music.

Yes, this is the second time Brooks has used that gag. It originally appeared in Blazing Saddles and involved the Count Basie Orchestra performing in the desert, But the orchestra-on-a-bus joke in High Anxiety works better, I think.

The Spanish Inquisition in History of the World, Part I (1981)

A truly hit-and-miss collection of gags and sketches, History of the World, Part 1 depicts five chapters in world history from the Stone Age to the French Revolution. Its undisputed highlight is a segment about the Spanish Inquisition. This features Brooks as Torquemada – his victims are warned not to try to talk him out of torturing them because, “You can’t Torquemada anything!” – and an elaborate Busby Berkeley-like song-and-dance number in a torture chamber which, with its exuberant bad taste, is as impressive as Springtime for Hitler in The Producers.

© Brooksfilms / 20^th Century Fox

Snotty’s line in Spaceballs (1987)

Spaceballs spoofs Star Wars (1977) but also contains some elaborate send-ups of Planet of the Apes (1968) and Alien (1979) – the latter even drafts in John Hurt to reprise his role as the unfortunate Kane. But the funniest, or groan-iest, bit in it for me is a simple pun. A Scottish character called Snotty (Jeff MacGregor), obviously based on Scotty from Star Trek (1966-69), is in a control room flicking a series of switches. “Lock One!” he shouts. “Lock Two! Lock Three! Loch Lomond!”

The abbot in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

You have to be a connoisseur of long-ago comedy double-acts to appreciate my favourite joke in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Brooks’ irreverent take on the then-recent and hugely-successful Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991). An abbot (Dick Van Patten) is walking in his finery outside his monastery and enjoying the adulation of the local population. Then a guy who looks and sounds suspiciously like Lou Costello yells at him, “Hey, Abbott!” Van Patten grumbles, “I hate that guy.”

Dracula tries to control Mina’s mind in Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995)

I don’t hold it against Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which stars Leslie Neilson as the legendary vampire count, that it isn’t great. After all, there have been many attempts over the years to spoof vampire films and hardly any of them have been funny – see Roman Polanski’s Dance of the Vampires (1967) or Stan Dragoti’s Love at First Bite (1977). In fact, it wasn’t until Jermaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows (2014) that I encountered a vampire-movie parody that made me laugh.

However, Dracula: Dead and Loving It has one funny part where, from a distance, Dracula / Neilson exerts his willpower over the bitten and partly vampirised Mina (Amy Yasbeck) and tries to summon her: “Mina… Open your eyes… Arise… Come to the door…” The operation goes less smoothly when the mind-controlling vampire discovers there’s a confusing closet door in the way, and a hazardous footstool, and an inconvenient maidservant who’s also picking up his telepathic instructions: “Mina… You are in the closet. Open the door and come out… Watch out for the footstool… Stand up… Not you, sit… No, you sit… You stand…”

And just before I finish, some praise is due for Brooks as a producer too. He’s the man who oversaw both David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980) and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).

From wikipedia.org / © Angela George

October 31, 2025November 3, 2025

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2025

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

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

© Iron Crown Enterprises

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

From wikipedia.org

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

From archive.com/artwork

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

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com / © Columbia Pictures

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Happy Halloween!

October 31, 2021November 1, 2021

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2021

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!