{ feuilleton }

The sweet sound of hell | Goblin and Dario Argento.

An ad campaign which can’t possibly be ignored given the present train of obsessions. Andrés Ramírez photographs a collection of tight packages for underwear manufacturer, Macho. I’m not sure what a group of Roman gladiators would be doing sparring in what appears to be a Bollywood boudoir like the one in Moulin Rouge! but, ya [...]

Suspiria: Jessica Harper and a bird with crystal plumage.
For this year’s Halloween playlist I’ve let Mark Pilkington from Strange Attractor make the selection. The following is from a CD-R collection of Italian horror soundtracks that Mark sent me some time ago. Not everything here is easy to find but the superbly nerve-jangling racket created [...]

Beowulf wrestles with Grendel, Lynd Ward (1939).
There’s nothing new in pointing out Hollywood’s crimes against literature, the film business has been screwing up book adaptation since the earliest days of silent cinema. But sometimes the wound is so grievous you can’t help but speak out, in this case against Roger Avary’s Beowulf which [...]

top left: artist unknown (1969); top right: Patrick Woodroffe (1975)
bottom left: Peter Elson (1988); bottom right: artist unknown (1995)
The Men with snakes post at the weekend finished on a note of Freudian melodrama with a picture of Doc Savage battling a giant python. Lester Dent’s brazen hero has appeared a number of times in the [...]