{ feuilleton }

Weekend links 801

The Magic Circle (1886) by John William Waterhouse.

• The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic has just been published in France by Editions Delcourt. A preview here shows how carefully they’ve managed to translate and reletter my page designs.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Algernon Blackwood’s stories of John Silence, occult detective.

• Relevant to some of my recent reading: The Necronomicon Wars, an examination of the many attempts to give life to HP Lovecraft’s fictional grimoire.

Altered States is tremendously exciting to watch—and not only during its psychedelic interludes when goat Jesus is being crucified and writhing red figures are toppling, Hieronymus Bosch–like, into hell and abstract splotches give the impression of cells endlessly dividing or murky membranes dissolving and beautiful women stare into Magritte skies and waves of lava crash as though the molten core of humanity itself were erupting. Even in its quieter moments, it is a beautiful film, with Hurt’s every appearance shot by cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth to emphasize his character’s alien otherworldliness.

Jessica Kiang explores the creation of Ken Russell’s flawed but fascinating psychedelic feature, Altered States

• A new catalogue of lots at another After Dark: Gay Art and Culture online auction. Homoerotic art, photos, historic porn. etc.

• Tarot decks through the ages: a video showing some of the cards from Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection.

• More psychedelia: Neuroscientist Grigori Guitchounts asks “What is your brain doing on psychedelics?”

• At the Daily Heller: Ryan Hughes has published a weighty collection of his typeface designs.

• Old music: Caged (25th Anniversary Edition) by Ian Boddy & Chris Carter.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty selects 10 great Technicolor melodramas.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: The Old School Horrors of Terence Fisher.

• Photographs from the 2025 Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

• Ambientblog celebrates 20 years of existence.

• RIP Dave Ball.

• Necronomicon (1970) by Les Baxter | Liriïk Necronomicus Kahnt (1975) by Magma | Necronomicon–The Magus (2004) by John Zorn

Here at last is something I’ve been waiting many years to see. Vampira is a strange German TV film which shouldn’t be confused with the horror comedy from 1974 that shares its name. Descriptions of the German Vampira make it sound like a drama-documentary but it’s really a kind of illustrated lecture with vampires as the predominant theme. George Moorse directed for the WDR TV channel which broadcast the film in 1971. Vampira is almost solely of interest today for the soundtrack by Tangerine Dream, a unique collection of short pieces totalling around 34 minutes which have never been officially released. The music offers the same spectral timbres that you hear on the group’s early kosmische albums—Alpha Centauri (1971), Zeit (1972) and Atem (1973)—and is close enough to the atmospherics of Zeit to sound like rehearsals for their droning meisterwerk.

The existence of the music always raised the question of what Vampira might actually look like, especially when the musicians sound as though they’re playing more for themselves than accompanying anything on a screen. Moorse’s film is stranger than the low-budget horror I was expecting. The first thing we see is Manfred Jester, a bespectacled man surrounded by old books, who proceeds to describe (in unsubtitled German) the history of vampires. After a minute of two of this there’s a cut to the first interlude which illustrates the preceding sequence—or so I’m guessing since I had to rely on my rudimentary schoolboy German to understand what Herr Jester was talking about. The rest of the film follows this format: a minute or two of Jester’s lecturing (with references to the Tarot, Montague Summers, Baudelaire and so on) separated by dramatised interludes, all of which are scored by Tangerine Dream. The dramatisations are the oddest part of the whole enterprise. Aside from the music these sequences are almost completely silent (with one brief exception), and acted in a manner which is more symbolic than conventionally dramatic, giving the appearance in places of Kenneth Anger directing one of Jean Rollin’s vampire films. Moorse’s visuals are quite striking in places; if you clipped out all the Jester sequences you’d have 34 minutes of languid Gothic weirdness with a kosmische soundtrack.

The remaining mystery is why the film and its music have been buried for so long, especially when the Tangerine Dream estate has been releasing old recordings for the past few years. I’d guess that the tapes have been lost, but then the same might once have been said about the 1974 Oedipus Tyrannus score until the whole thing was released for the first time six years ago. Vampira was so scarce that I thought it too might have been lost for good, or destroyed like many of the BBC productions from the early 1970s. The music was at least available in unofficial form in the Tangerine Tree bootleg set, a fan-made series which still circulates today if you know where to look. Many of the Tangerine Tree concerts have since been officially reissued, as have other soundtrack recordings the group made for German television. More recently, the Vampira score turned up on another bootleg, a vinyl release limited to 38 copies. All the isolated cues don’t provide a great deal of music for a standalone album but any future release which added the short Oszillator Planet Concert (which also dates from 1971) would push things to a more substantial 42 minutes. It’s likely that the Vampira music was originally a single improvised piece that was then edited to match the film; the pieces certainly blend very easily if you mix their beginnings and ends together.

George Moorse followed Vampira with many more TV films including HP Lovecraft: Schatten aus der Zeit (1975), an adaptation of The Shadow Out of Time starring Anton Diffring. Now that I’ve finally seen the vampire film I’m a little more inclined to see how Moorse treats Lovecraft.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Cosmic music and cosmic horror
• Tangerine Dream in concert
• Drone month
• Pilots Of Purple Twilight
• A mix for Halloween: Analogue Spectres
• Edgar Froese, 1944–2015
• Tangerine Dream in Poland

Modern Pen Drawings, 1901

Rustum and the Simoorg (1897) by Patten Wilson.

A new arrival at the Internet Archive. Modern Pen Drawings: European and American is a special number of The Studio magazine, one of several such numbers which they published in book form. The magazine’s editor, Charles Holme, edited the volume which maintains the high quality typical of all these publications, with excellent reproductions and informative notes about the artists and their works. Holme’s choices in collections such as this are always varied, mixing imaginative illustrations with comic drawings and nature studies. For a reader, the books are still useful today for showing you drawings that you might not see anywhere else, even when the artist is a familiar name. When the works themselves are familiar the reproductions are invariably better than you’ll find elsewhere. Such is the case with Patten Wilson’s “Rustum and the Simoorg”, an illustration of a Persian folk tale whose fine lines and details are often spoiled by poor printing. Elsewhere there are two pages of Théophile Steinlen’s inevitable cats, a drawing by Fernand Khnopff that I don’t think I’ve seen before, and Edmund J. Sullivan’s rose-bedecked skeleton which Alton Kelley later “repurposed” (or swiped) for the cover of the Grateful Dead’s second live album.

Continue reading “Modern Pen Drawings, 1901”

Weekend links 800

Plate 43 from Los Caprichos: The sleep of reason produces monsters (El sueño de la razon produce monstruos) (1799) by Francisco Goya.

• At Senses of Cinema: An interview with Jacques Rivette from 2001 in which the director passes judgment on a variety of feature films, old and new. Having read a couple of Cocteau-related books recently, I was pleased to see his comments about the importance of Cocteau’s example for his own film-making. Via MetaFilter.

• “Why is sleep, which literally occurs daily on a planetary scale, so often taken for granted, and not only by most people but even by scientists? Perhaps because its essence, its key property, is to be elusive, out of sight?” A long read by Vladyslav Vyazovskiy on the nature of sleep.

• “Often one cannot be sure if an object in a Welch picture is drawn from life or from other depictions of it, in sculpture, porcelain, woodwork or embroidery.” Alan Hollinghurst on the paintings and drawings of Denton Welch. (Previously.)

• At Colossal: Sinister skies set the scene for derelict buildings in Lee Madgwick’s surreal paintings.

• New music: The Mosaic Of Starlight Slips Back Like The Lid Of An Opening Eye by Paul Schütze.

• At Public Domain Review: Charles le Brun’s Human-Animal Hybrids (1806).

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – October 2025 at Ambientblog.

• At the BFI: Anton Bitel chooses 10 great French horror films.

• Winners of the 2025 Photomicrography Competition.

• RIP Diane Keaton.

• Sleep (1981) by This Heat | Sleep (1995) by Paul Schütze | Sleep (2006) by DJ Olive

Innsmouth, Japanese-style

When it comes to film and TV dramas based on the writings of HP Lovecraft I’ve always been very selective, to a degree that I avoid most adaptations unless they receive reviews good enough to provoke my curiosity. I do, however, keep an eye out for unusual (or unusually inventive) adaptations whose shortcomings I’m prepared to forgive if they promise to be more than another wearying trudge through cinematic cliches. Such is the case with this Japanese TV adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth which was written and directed by Chiaki Konaka in 1992.

Konaka’s adaptation isn’t immediately attractive, being shot entirely on video, a very unsympathetic format for horror productions when the harshness of the image works against any attempts to create an eerie atmosphere. (Even The Stone Tape suffers in this area.) Konaka presents a sketch of Lovecraft’s story which he updates to the present day and moves to contemporary Japan, with no explanation as to why the Japanese coastline is a home to towns with names like “Innsmouth”, “Arkham” and “Dunwich”. Lovecraft’s detailed history of the blighted backwater and its inhabitants is also ignored. Konaka’s narrative begins with an unnamed photo-journalist (Renji Ishibashi) securing a job at a travel magazine where he convinces the editor that the remote coastal town of “Insumasu” is worthy of a feature. As with the anonymous narrator of Lovecraft’s story, the photographer is drawn to the place as much by ancestral impulses as by his curiosity about a place where a strange fish-human corpse has been washed ashore.

Konaka’s direction is more functional than suspenseful, with the photographer’s biographical history telegraphed so much in advance that none of the revelations come as a surprise. The soundtrack is also very uneven, being a collage of music borrowed from other films: there’s a brief snatch of Goblin’s Suspiria score at one point, and I think the repeated flute refrain is borrowed from a Preisner score. This is a well-made adaptation all the same even if the Japanese Innsmouth isn’t as deteriorated as the decayed fishing town that Lovecraft describes. (To be fair, any film depicting Lovecraft’s Innsmouth would require a serious budget to do the place justice.) Fishy details abound, and Konaka uses green light as a recurrent motif that refers to Innsmouth’s secret history, like an inversion of the emerald glow that signifies magic or the supernatural in John Boorman’s Excalibur. I was especially pleased to see borrowings from the George Hay Necronomicon during a cermonial invocation to Dagon that takes place in a cave. Later on we see a copy of the Hay book being perused by the curator of the Innsmouth museum. This makes a change from the tiresome ubiquity of the “Simon” Necronomicon whose sigils are always turning up in Lovecraftian adaptations when people are at a loss to create symbols of their own. The symbology in the Hay book was the work of Robert Turner, an occultist with an aesthetic sensibility more finely attuned to the world of the Cthulhu Mythos.

Chiaki Konaka has been described as bringing a Lovecraftian influence to his other work but when most of this is anime scripts for juvenile fare like the Digimon franchise you can’t expect very much. One of his credits is for something called Cthulhu’s Secret Record but I’ve no idea what this might be. Konaka’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth many be viewed in full here. The translated subtitles are larger than I prefer (and in vivid green) but I’m still pleased that someone went to the trouble of making this curio available to a wider audience.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive