{horror} – Page 119 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 72

If Jean Cocteau had made a horror film it might have resembled George Franju’s dreamy and disturbing body-horror masterwork Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960). I’ve not been able to trace the artist for this poster but it’s a good example of the diluted Surrealism which was still prevalent in poster graphics at this time.

If I were asked what’s needed today, I’d say innovation, and greater timbral variety. If you truly want the audience to experience the clammy thrill of the grotesque, the uncanny and the fearful, you have to reach for the unfamilar, the perplexing, even the ugly; there’s an infinite Lovecraftian sound-world out there waiting to be explored. We need new combinations, new textures in film scoring. Horror has a licence to be weird – it’s supposed to mess with our heads. (more)

Stephen Thrower.

Stephen Thrower is an ex-member of Coil, a current member of Cyclobe, was the editor of a great magazine, Eyeball, devoted to horror cinema and what Kim Newman (casting about for a wider, non-generic label) calls “nightmare movies”, and is the author of Nightmare USA and Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci. In other words, he’s more than qualified to write about horror film soundtracks. The reason is an event at the South Bank Centre, London, two weeks from now, Sound of Fear: The Musical Universe of Horror, one of the highlights of which will be a performance by John Carpenter’s soundtrack collaborator Alan Howarth. Related: my post about Italian horror soundtracks from 2008.

Art by Justin Lovato.

• Mind Over Matter: Alan Fletcher’s The Art of Looking Sideways. “The Art of Looking Sideways captures the sensory overload of contemporary visual culture, while also acting as a primer in visual intelligence.” Related: Alan Fletcher profiled at the Design Museum.

• More music and more psychedelia: Past Present Future Space-Time “Wysing Arts Centre explores the legacy of psychedelia in this year’s annual music event”.

• The Coilhouse International Silent Auction is GO and ends Sunday night if you want to bid for some rare and special things.

• The Garden of Kama and Other Love Lyrics from India (1901), illustrated by John Byam Shaw.

• Chris Marker’s take on the recent London riots: Overnight.

• Bristol’s graffiti artists are redecorating the city’s streets.

• Women and knives: a Dario Argento poster gallery.

• Inferno (1993) by Miranda Sex Garden, from their album Suspiria.

The fantastic and apocalyptic art of Bruce Pennington

The Pastel City (1971), the first in M. John Harrison’s peerless series of Viriconium books.

Today’s post is another guest entry over at Tor.com. I’d been intending on writing something about Bruce Pennington‘s art for some time, having already covered the work of Ian Miller, my other favourite genre cover artist of the 1970s. (By coincidence both artists have illustrated the work of M. John Harrison and HP Lovecraft.) My hand was forced this month by the news of the first ever exhibition of Pennington’s paintings which is being held at Britain’s foremost occult book emporium, the Atlantis Bookshop in Museum Street, London. There’s a catalogue of the works on display here, many of which will be for sale. If I had the cash I’d consider buying one, Pennington’s work made a big impression on my imagination when I was reading many of the titles he’d illustrated for the first time. His art was unique for me in its occasionally Surrealist overtones, and as a cover artist he was unusual in working across a range of genres. Like Frank Frazetta his imagination and technique were able to suggest a great deal with a minimum of brush strokes.

The Mask of Cthulhu (1976).

This post can be taken as an appendix to the Tor one which I didn’t want to overburden with pictures. The Derleth cover is purloined from Jovike’s excellent Flickr collection which includes several Pennington covers. Below are some pages from Pennington’s first book, Eschatus, a large-format collection of paintings interpreting the prophecies of Nostradamus as an apocalyptic science fiction narrative taking place in the 24th century.

Pennington has many examples of his work on his website, and there’s also a feature about his paintings in this month’s Fortean Times. The Atlantis exhibition runs to August 27th.

Eschatus (1976).

Continue reading “The fantastic and apocalyptic art of Bruce Pennington”

Any Gun Can Play by Kevin Grant

This was something I put together last year for FAB Press but the book has only been published in the past month. The design was little more than an assembly job on my part, with Harvey at FAB requesting a montage of the three poster-art gunmen plus suitable Western typography. We went through a number of generic fonts then I added a little creative touch with the background for the title type which was a sheet of paper scorched and stained using tap water, a tea bag and a gas-ring. Forget Photoshop filters, you still can’t beat the trusty tea bag for random stains.

Cynical and stylish, bloody and baroque, Euro-westerns replaced straight-shooting sheriffs and courageous cowboys with amoral adventurers, whose murderous methods would shock the heroes of Hollywood Westerns. These films became box-office sensations around the world, and their influence can still be felt today.

Any Gun Can Play puts the phenomenon into perspective, exploring the films’ wider reaches, their recurrent themes, characters, quirks and motifs. It examines Euro-westerns in relation to their American ancestors and the mechanics of the Italian popular film industry, and spotlights the unsung actors, directors and other artists who subverted the ‘code’ of the Western and dragged it into the modern age.

Based on years of research backed up by interviews with many of the genre’s leading lights, including actors Franco Nero, Giuliano Gemma and Gianni Garko, writer Sergio Donati, and directors Sergio Sollima and Giuliano Carnimeo, Any Gun Can Play will satisfy both connoisseurs and the curious.

Despite my minimal contribution, this is a very handsome volume to be connected to. I’ve had Christopher Frayling’s Spaghetti Westerns (1981) book for years so I’m already disposed towards the subject. Frayling’s book is a semi-academic analysis which for a long time was the only serious study of the subgenre. Additional studies by Frayling and others have followed but Kevin Grant’s book, subtitled The Essential Guide to Euro-Westerns, looks like a tough one to beat: 480 pages, detailed analyses, a who’s who section, filmography, and a huge quantity of photos and poster graphics, many in colour. There’s also a foreword by actor Franco Nero, threatening everyone on the cover in his Django guise. To test the author’s thoroughness I looked up Se sei vivo spara (1967) (If You Live, Shoot!), a film also known as Django Kill! even though it’s nothing to do with the Django series. Giulio Questi’s film is a very bizarre (and occasionally inept) blend of Spaghetti tropes and horror-style scenes of graphic gore, featuring (among other things) a crucified hero, a vampire bat, and a band of black-clad homosexual cowboys. Frayling’s book devotes a few paragraphs to the film while Grant gives it two-and-a-half pages plus pictures. IMDB may tell us the facts about a film’s production but the barely-literate reviews and troll-filled discussion boards on that site are useless. For authoritative review and analysis you still need a book like this. Any Gun Can Play can be ordered direct from FAB Press where they’re selling a limited number signed by Franco Nero and the author.

Clive Barker, Imaginer

Sea Captain by Clive Barker.

The inhabitants of Carlisle in the north of England are fortunate that the town’s Crown Gallery is hosting the first exhibition of Clive Barker’s artwork outside the US with a show entitled Clive Barker, Imaginer which opens this weekend. The artist will be attending the opening this Saturday, July 16th, and there’s also a signing planned the day after. Tickets are required for both these events so anyone interested will need to contact the gallery. No details as to what will be on display but the exhibition will run to August 23rd, 2011. Barker’s paintings, drawings and photo prints can be purchased through Bert Green Fine Art, Los Angeles.

Cthulhu under glass

Having had two separate visitors to the British Library’s Out of this World exhibition tell me that some of my work was featured there, it’s been a good to finally discover what was on display. Many thanks to John Keogh for notifying me of his exhibition photo set which includes the above shot of the relevant display case. This is an odd collection for what’s been widely advertised as a science fiction event. Pages from my 1988 adaptation of The Call of Cthulhu are in there along with other fantasy and horror titles including Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Incarnate by Ramsey Campbell, an edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction with Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood on the cover, and a Sidney Sime illustration for Lord Dunsany’s Gods of Pergana. Cthulhu originates out of this world, of course, and that phrase is general enough to encompass other genres.

This page from the climax of Lovecraft’s story was the first drawing I made of the living Cthulhu, all earlier representations following Lovecraft’s scheme of the creature manifesting throughout history in different human artworks and religious icons. Since most of those representations are highly stylised I wanted to make the awful reality seem a lot more visceral and even incoherent, hence the mass of flailing tentacles and ropes of slime. This is also the only full view you receive, everything else is fragmentary and allusive so there’s space for the reader’s imagination. I think the book in the library display is the Lovecraft anthology The Starry Wisdom but The Call of Cthulhu is also present in my Haunter of the Dark collection which includes a couple more portraits of “the green, sticky spawn of the stars”.

Out of this World is a free exhibition which will run to September 25th, 2011.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive