Showing posts with label species. Show all posts
Showing posts with label species. Show all posts

Monday, September 6, 2021

10 Bizarre Hand-painted Horror Movie Posters

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

 Artist Heavy J.( Source: Deadly Prey)

In the 1980s, Ghanaian entrepreneurs seized upon their country's recent importation of VCRs to show movies to members of neighborhood video clubs. Local artists who went by their first names or pseudonyms, including Leonardo, Heavy J, Farkira, Salvation, and Magasco, to name only a few, likewise benefited from these new enterprises, since club owners commissioned them to create original posters to advertise the films.

Using flour sacks for their canvasses, the painters offered their own garish interpretations of their subjects. Often combining violence and gore with bizarre interpretations of both Ghanaian movies and foreign films, including Hollywood blockbusters, the artists' work generated excitement about the movies, and the video clubs became huge hits.

Simple in design and execution, the outrageous hand-painted Ghana posters look nothing like the slick, mass-produced lobby cards seen in traditional movie theaters. Instead, the Ghana movie posters are truly one of a kind, offering those who may be unfamiliar with the nation's culture a window into the nature of Ghana's entertainment business, its local art, and the innovative nature of its entrepreneurs.

Cujo

Although Ghana posters advertise all film genres, many of the most shocking examples promote horror movies. Surprisingly, though, even movies that are designed to horrify are not always imagined as horrific by the Ghanaian artists who paint them, usually with little or no knowledge of the plots of the movies the posters are supposed to promote.

For Cujo, Lewis Teague's 1983 cinematic adaptation of Stephen King's 1981 novel of the same name, which pits a rabid St. Bernard against an isolated family, the theatrical release poster shows an isolated house under a dark, threatening sky; the neglected white picket fence in front of the distant residence bears, in dripping, blood-red paint, the warning, “Now there's a new name for terror: Cujo.”

 

Source: CNN

By contrast, the Ghanaian poster shows an adult female figure standing behind a male child. The sky is blue. An oversize dog, more closely resembling a Basset hound than a St. Bernard, lies across the bottom of the poster, the very picture of harmless calm—except for the blood slathering the canine's muzzle. Despite the blood, which appears almost an afterthought, the poster conveys more a sense of serenity and domestic bliss than it does an aura of dread and danger.

The reason for the differences in the theatrical release poster and its hand-painted counterpart is suggested by a question raised by writer Peter Shadbolt: “How would you design a movie poster for a Hollywood blockbuster you’d never seen, filled with characters you knew nothing about and actors you’d never heard of?” The Ghanaian Cujo poster is one answer to this question.

Fright Night

Such adjectives as “simple,” “unsophisticated,” “cartoonish,” “gaudy,” and “lurid” are often used to describe the strikingly original artwork displayed in Ghanaian movie posters. They were not intended to be masterpieces. Instead, they were commissioned with but one purpose. The artists paid to paint the posters were given much the same instruction as Frank Armah, who “began painting posters for Ghanaian movie theaters in the mid-1980s”; the goal of his posters was simple: “Sell as many tickets as possible.” The way to accomplish this objective was also simple: exaggerate. “If the movie was gory, the poster should be gorier (skulls, blood, skulls dripping blood). If it was sexy, make the poster sexier (breasts, lots of them, ideally at least watermelon-sized).

During the 1980s and 1990s, the posters sold the movies. Today, they are sold to collectors for as much as $2000 each and grace the walls of American and European art galleries. In addition, the “cult following” of the artists' fans keep the painters busy creating copies of the original posters for sale to eager customers.

The fact that the posters so little depict the contents of the films they promote is the reason that they are in such demand as collectibles, art dealer Ernie Wolfe believes. “These posters appeal to people because [they] invite this really incredible dialogue—a comparison between what you know of a film and how the painter imagined it. And they’re also just really good art.”

The Ghanaian poster for Fright Night (1985), directed by Tom Holland, is a good example of this poster-movie disconnect. The theatrical release poster shows a group of ghastly apparitions hovering over a house. Inside, framed by the residence's only illuminated window, the silhouette of a standing man is visible. Apparently, the resident is oblivious to the presence of the maniacal spirits raging above his house. The darkness of the night sky, illuminated only by stars and a full moon, the darkness of the man's silhouette, and the darkness of the shadowy lawn in front of the isolated house reinforce the poster's caption: “There are some good reasons to be afraid of the dark.”

Source: The Atlantic

One Ghanaian version shows neither apparitions, house, occupant, night sky, nor dark lawn. Instead, it depicts a winged serpent in a blue business suit, complete with bloodstained necktie. The creature's pair of scaly human hands, one red, the other orange, reach toward a blonde; the tip of its tongue, between her lips, drools blood. The claws of the scaly orange hand reach inside the woman's mouth. Her brow, face, and neck are lacerated and bleeding, and the flesh of her upper right arm is torn. A young man's head rests against her side. The movie's title appears above the man's head. There is no darkness—at least no literal darkness—of which to be afraid, and the woman looks more exhausted than horrified, despite her wounds.

Rituals

During the 1980s, the video clubs showed mostly imported movies (horror and splatter movies from the U. S., kung fu pictures from Hong Kong, cannibal films from Italy and France, and Bollywood comedy productions from India), but, beginning in the next decade, especially in Nigeria, the clubs included both Ghanaian and Nigerian films, with the establishment of the Ghallywood and Nollywood film industries.

This more local fare sometimes reflected historical conflicts between Christianity and local religions in which, often, the former displaced the latter. These movies had a proselytizing mission. To convert their audiences from “the natural religions,” the films depicted the spirits of the local religions as “evil forces,” such as demons, or “pagan” forces, such as those of voodoo, which were overcome by God or a Christian priest. Often, the churches themselves financed these films.

Other themes include human sacrifice; cannibalism; and evil deeds involving children as victims, “perpetrators,” and witches. One of the posters promoting Rituals, a Nollywood movie (director unknown) that includes references to human sacrifice, is typical of the sensationalism of the Ghanaian horror movie posters. The poster depicts a semi-nude man, bandoleers crossed over his chest, setting a large bowl containing a bloody, decapitated man's head on a table occupied by six human skulls and a human bone. No caption provides any hints as to the situation; the sole clue that viewers receive is that which is supplied by the film's title: the head, skulls, and bone, are involved in “rituals” of some sort. Only a reference, external to the poster itself, relates these rituals to human sacrifices.

Jurassic Park

 


While Ghanaian movie posters do not always depict the actual contents of the films they promote, this discrepancy is not considered a flaw among art collectors and experts. “They're not just film posters,” says Karun Thakar, the curator of the African Gaze exhibition in London, England. The exhibition showcased over a hundred posters that, along roads and in markets and other “public spaces,” advertised screenings of Bollywood, Nollywood, Ghallywood, and Hollywood films by “mobile video clubs.”

Like others of their kind, these Ghanaian movie posters were “gruesome and gaudy,” and they usually did not have much to do with the actual plots of the movies they promoted. They also zeroed in on films' minor elements rather than key features of the movies if such elements were provocative. For example, the poster promoting Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) focused on the prostitute with three breasts who appears in only one short scene of the film.

Even when the posters deigned to feature the movie's protagonist, the main character was often illustrated as performing an action that is unrelated to the movie's plot, and the scene frequently differs drastically from the images in the film itself. The Ghanaian poster for Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) is a good example. The poster “features a freakish dinosaur,” resembling a hybrid Tyrannosaurus Rex-brontosaurus—“gobbling up a man and a person playing golf, indicating that the artists painting these posters might not have seen the films.”

Mandy

Brian Chankin, the proprietor of a video rental store in Chicago, Illinois, is a fan of Ghanaian movie posters. He not only collects and sells them, but he has also commissioned quite a few original paintings by noted Ghanaian movie poster painters. Chankin tours the United States, showing his collections from the mobile art gallery he operates. In addition, he partners with Ghana artists who make “huge tattoo flash paintings in the same style as the movie posters.”

Although the movie posters themselves seldom reflect what the films they advertise show, that's not an issue for fans, nor are the posters' occasional “misspellings and plot inconsistencies.” What counts, for admirers and collectors, is the posters' “eye-catching” qualities. 

Proceeds from the sales of the shop's prints of original art and a book, Deadly Prey, featuring photographs of the “earliest commission paintings” and essays by Chankin, commission agent Robert Kofi, and Terry Zwigoff, director of Ghost World, Bad Santa, and other horror films, support “artists in Ghana.”

In the Ghanaian poster for Panos Cosmatos's Mandy (2018), the man with the amputated right arm, the slashed left arm holding a decapitated head, and the slashed left leg who flees a chainsaw-wielding killer and a man with a knife does not look exactly like Nicholas Cage. However, the poster otherwise succeeds in conveying at least the essence of the horror movie it promotes.

The film concerns a couple, Red Miller and Mandy Bloom, who are living alone in a forest when they are attacked by a cult of hippies and demonic bikers. The sadistic attacks motivate Red to strike back, and his vengeance is predictably terrible, violent, and bloody. Red's wounds, cult member Marlene's decapitated head, Brother Klopek and his chainsaw, and Klopek's accomplice and his knife, like the sliced head and the woman with the gaping hole in the center of her abdomen, suggest the orgy of violence that the movie presents, and, although the action is compacted in the collection of images, as if they occur simultaneously, rather than successively, the poster is mostly true to the picture's plot, a relative rarity among Ghanaian movie posters.

Night of the Demons 3

The studios in which Ghanaian artists worked were simple by the standards of the countries in which the films were produced that were shown by the video clubs, as were the facilities the entrepreneurs used to exhibit the imported pictures. A 2005 photograph of a Ghanaian artist known as Leonardo shows the painter seated in a plastic chair, cans of paints and other supplies on a shelf behind him or stacked against the wall below the shelf, in crates, a galvanized steel tub, and plastic trash bags. Wearing only overalls and flip-flops, he sweats in the heat of the day inside concrete walls decorated with words in red, blue, and green paint. His tools—a hammer, brushes, cans, and large rectangular cuts of cotton for use as his canvases—are visible among the other stored items.


In another photograph, one of Leonardo's colleagues, Heavy J., stands beside his poster for Jim Kaufman's Night of the Demons 3 (1997). In his vision of the movie, a male lamia, or snake man, is wound around a kneeling woman who frantically tries to remove the monster's coils. The creature holds its arms up, as if it is about to claw an attacker. The poster is displayed at the front of one of the video club's theaters, advising audiences that the movie is scheduled to be shown at “6:30 PM.” The single bench shown in the photograph suggests the nature of the theater's seating, which is confirmed by other photographs apparently typical of the arrangements of seats.

In another photograph, a showing of a movie is seen in progress in Tema, Ghana. An audience of nine are present. Two stand, their hands raised overhead; the others sit, one or two to a bench, several with their hands raised as well, and all watch the television set on a high shelf inside a cabinet. Although plenty of seats remain along the six half-empty benches visible in the photograph, those in attendance seem to be enjoying the picture.

The Guardian

Source: Ernie Wolfe Gallery

The Ernie Wolfe Gallery is an online exhibition hall on which “Golden Age Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana” are on perpetual display. The collections show a variety of film genres, including horror, which seems as popular with Ghanaian audiences as it is with other moviegoers across the globe. Since the artists typically painted the posters of the movies to be presented before the films were actually shown to video clubs’ audiences, their art is almost always strikingly different than the actual movies the posters supposedly represent, offering viewers fresh perspectives on the films themselves. Although often lurid, the art is also highly imaginative.

Source:  Ernie Wolfe Gallery

The poster for William Friedkin's The Guardian (1990), features a personified tree that attacks adults and children alike. One victim hangs from a branch. Another struggles to free himself from the mouth in the tree's trunk. A third, armed with a chainsaw, the blade of which is smeared with blood from one of the tree's uncanny roots, is entangled in a looped branch, from which the party's fourth victim, while lying on the ground, wound in the coils of another branch, seeks to free him. The poster suggests that the movie is about an animated and malevolent forest. In reality, although a somewhat similar scene occurs in the film, the picture is about a nanny whom a young couple hire to care for their newborn baby—a nanny who is also a goddess intent upon protecting her domain.

Braindead

Besides the fact that Ghanaian artists often did not know, in any detail, if at all, what a movie actually showed, they were also handicapped by the facts that they did not have access to the foreign studios' posters for the movies or to reproductions of the original posters, since Ghana's “military rulers restricted the import of printing presses.”

To get prospective audiences into the buildings and tents in which the video clubs' cinematic offerings would be shown, local artists were instructed to pull out all the stops. They did so, starting with the dimensions of the paintings. Like the style of the art itself, the “canvases” the artists cut from flour sacks were larger than life, measuring “40 to 50 inches in width, and 55 to 70 inches in height.”

The artists were so successful in selling the movies that, “by the 1990s, the height of the movie club business, several dozen artists were employed to produce the posters.” By the 2000s, the demand for video clubs began to disappear, since “home viewing became more widespread and printing became more practical than commissioning original artworks.”

 

During the heyday of Ghanaian movie poster production, however, some truly fantastic, if bizarre, works were created, including artist Salvation’s poster for Braindead (1992), directed by Peter Jackson, which suggests the bloodbath that ensues when a woman who dies, after having been bitten by a Sumatran monkey, returns to life to feed on both animals and people, including her former friends and neighbors.

Source: Deadly Prey

Salvation's poster features a Lon Chaney look-alike with fangs and a missing eye, a pale ghoul spewing green bile, a beast that resembles a cross between a dog and a monkey, and a gang of vampires in pursuit of a brawny man wielding a sword. With no reference to the movie's plot in the artist's picture, potential viewers would likely have plenty of questions about the scene Salvation depicts, which is just what the video club owners would have wanted in commissioning the work.

Species

How might Roger Donaldson's Species (1995) be interpreted by an artist who had not seen the film? Thanks to the survival of the Ghanaian movie poster for this movie, we do not have to wonder.

 

Source: Wikiart

Although there is no evidence that the poster's painter knew of Rene Magritte's surreal paintings, the poster for Species resembles Magritte's oil painting The Harvest (1943). Just as Magritte paints the figure of his reclining female nude in several colors, with arms of different hues, a head of a tint that matches no other part of the figure's body, and legs of mismatched shades, the body of the Ghanaian artist's blonde-haired female alien is various shades of blue, green, and peach.

The painting's surreal quality is also evident in the inclusion of the naked man who crawls on his knees, eating one rat as he wraps his impossibly long, slender tongue around a second rodent. Although the poster's art has virtually nothing to do with the plot of the film it promotes, the warning presented by its caption, “Men cannot resist her; mankind cannot survive her,” is probably true enough.

Cannibal Terror

A largely panned French contribution to the fare the video clubs showed was the 1981 film Cannibal Terror directed by Alain Deruelle. The plot is simple. After their kidnapping goes awry, two inept kidnappers, Mario and Roberto, hole up in a friend's house in the jungle. In the process, Mario rapes the friend's wife. (With friends like these, who needs enemies, right?) Afterward, the criminals encounter a tribe of hungry cannibals.

The plot doesn't seem to have given the artist much with which to work, but the painter made the most of what he had, showing one of the criminals lying on the ground, on his back, as three members of the tribe, seated beneath the tree, dig in. One munches on the victim's calf; another devours his left forearm; and the third chows down on a length of intestines that he pulls from the gaping cavity carved into the dead man's abdomen. It's a bloody feast, and the rapist's vital fluid dribbles down his severed limbs, his slit-open belly, the stump of his amputated left leg, and the chests of those who make a meal of him. Despite the movie’s meager plot, the film rewards its audiences with plenty of blood and gore, according to the poster, at least.

 

Ghanaian movie poster artists (left to right):Salvation, Heavy J, Mr, Nana Agyq, Fakira, and Stoger

Source: Nerdist

Unfortunately, the artists who created these lurid masterpieces of tasteless, often violent and gory art, were probably underpaid, since their work took them as many as three days, “depending on the subject matter and what the artist could find out about the movie.” To expedite the painting process, artists relied on such “well-worn tropes [as] snake women, skeletons, zombies, witchcraft, and even the occasional giant fish” and sometimes mixed images from one movie with those of another film.

 



Sunday, March 8, 2020

Damsels (and Villains) in Distress

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman 

 
Horror movies often put characters in compromising situations—circumstances or conditions in which they are, for one reason or another, vulnerable, if not, indeed, helpless. Often, these characters are young women, both because many devotees of the genre are young men and because people, in general (at least according to horror maestro Edgar Allan Poe), find “the death of a beautiful woman the most poetic woman . . . unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” (“The Philosophy of Composition”).


Writers employ an array of devices to render their damsels in distress vulnerable or helpless, including, among others, youth and inexperience (Carrietta White of Stephen King's Carrie), being disabled (Marty Coslaw of Dan Attias's film adaptation of Stephen King's Silver Bullet), being injured (Paul Sheldon of Rob Reiner's adaptation of Stephen King's Misery), being unconscious (Nancy Thompson of Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street), having an overly active imagination (the narrator of H. G. Wells's “The Red Room”), having sex (Tobey of Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth), being lost in unfamiliar surroundings (the Carter family of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes), being confused (Emily Callaway of John Polson's Hide and Seek), and having a debilitating condition (Berenice in Edgar Allan Poe's “Berenice” and the narrator in his “The Premature Burial”).


Such conditions not only render a victim or a potential victim vulnerable or helpless, but these circumstances also make the characters in jeopardy sympathetic to readers or moviegoers. To be stalked and injured or killed is, of course, terrifying in itself, but to be hunted and attacked while one is inexperienced, disabled, injured, unconscious, in flagrante delicto, lost and disoriented, confused, or suffering from a debilitating condition only adds to the sense of panic readers and moviegoers experience on behalf of potential or actual victims.


Making a character vulnerable or helpless through circumstances, conditions, or situations isn't the only way that writers of horror heighten suspense. They can also create villains who are so unusual or who suffer from such extreme conditions themselves that their own compromising situations make them uncontrollable. Some of the ways that writers use to accomplish this end include making their villains psychotic (Jack Torrance of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining), making them possessed by the devil or demons (Regan MacNeil of William Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist), and showing them to be confused (Grace Stewart of Alejandro Amenabar's The Others). Of course, there are also the two traditional standbys: making the villain an extraterrestrial (Sil of Roger Donaldson's Species) or of supernatural origin (the ghost in Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist).

Saturday, February 16, 2019

Darwinian Horror

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Frankly, no, I've never wondered what's in a Navy SEAL's survival kit until I saw Time's online article, “You're a SEAL Stranded in Hostile Territory: What's in Your Survival Kit?

If you're a Navy SEAL, this is what's in your survival kit (contents change on occasion):


  • Mini-multi tool
  • Button compass
  • lED squeeze light
  • Fire-starting kit
  • Water-storage device
  • Water-purification tablets
  • Electrolyte tablets
  • Signal mirror
  • Thermal blanket
  • Kevlar line
  • safety pins
  • P-38 can opener
  • Stainless-steel wire
  • Duct tape
  • Fresbel magnifying glass
  • Waterproof notepaper
  • Ink pen
  • Broad-spectrum antibiotic ointment
  • Cotton pad
  • Hacksaw blade
  • Ceramic razor blade
  • Moleskin adhesive patch
  • Kevlar thread
  • Fishing leader and downrigger cable
  • Suspended navigation magnet
  • ferro cerium rod
  • Cotton ball
  • Bobby pins
  • Handcuff shim (pick)
  • Universal handcuff key
Of course, each item must conform to Navy specifications. To give you an idea of the nature of such specifications, here are the ones for a few of the items listed above:
Mini-multi Tool
  • Stainless-steel mini-multi tool that can function as pliers, wire cutters, a file, or an awl in a rattle-proof package.
  • A quality AA, 14-millimeter, liquid-dampened button compass with at least eight hours of luminous capability.
  • LED squeeze light equipped with a red lens and a switch that allows selection between continuous and momentary use.
  • A fire-starting kit which includes a ferro cerium rod no longer than three inches and no wider than eight millimeters packaged in a reclosing bag.
  • A two-inch by three-inch signaling mirror with an aiming hole, the non-mirrored side of which is covered with an infrared-reflective material and the mirror side of which is protected against scratches; the mirror's protective cover must be removable with one hand.
What goes into a survival kit depends on what sort of enemy, terrain, or other type of threat the kit's carrier is expected to encounter. Although the Navy SEALs' survival kits are doubtlessly helpful in assisting them in surviving the threats they are likely to encounter in the performance of their missions, the contents of their kits wouldn't probably be much aid for, say, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Instead her survival kit would likely contain such items as the nineteenth-century vampire kits that really did (and, in some cases, still do) exist. Although the contents varied somewhat from one kit to another, these items would have appeared in a fully stocked kit:
  • Wooden stakes
  • Mallet
  • Crucifix (for Roman Catholic vampires)
  • Cross (for Protestant vampires)
  • Bible
  • Derringer
  • Vials of garlic
  • Vials of holy water (again, for Roman Catholic vampires)
  • Knife or sword (presumably for beheading vampires)

Buffy, although as dutiful as any Navy SEAL, is sometimes lax in keeping rules, so, instead of a vampire kit, she often makes do only with a wooden stake or two, carried in her purse, or with whatever weapon she happens upon, conventional or not, during the course of a fight, and, instead of using a mallet, she simply stabs her prey, driving the stake into its heart with nothing more than her own superhuman strength. She is, after all, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (The stabbing tactic didn't work too well, at first, against Kakistos, though.)


Although Charles Darwin never used the term—Herbert Spencer introduced it, based on Darwinian concepts—“survival of the fittest” has been used to summarize the gist of evolution as it pertains to the continuance of species competing with one another for survival. Just as clarification concerning who originated the phrase is often needed, so is the definition of the phrase itself: “Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean ONLY the physically or mentally strongest survive. It means the organism with traits most fit for survival in a given environment survives, thrives, and procreates regardless of what trait makes it most fit.” (Notice the phrase “traits most fir for survival in a given environment”? This is a key qualification; upon it are many horror movies based, even if some of the filmmakers themselves were unaware of the Darwinian basis of their films. By definition, a film concerns itself with only one type of antagonist and with one dominant setting; these elements often determine the type of threat to which the hero or heroine is exposed, the type of threat that tests the survivability of his or her traits.)

Survivors survive against a specific type of threat—in horror fiction, usually this threat takes the form (or formlessness, as the case may be) of a monster. This threat tests the survivor's fitness; if the hero or heroine is fit enough, he or she survives; if not,
well . . . .

See the source image

Laurie Strode,  Halloween's final girl

In many horror movies, though, survivors don't have any ready-to-hand weapons except those which nature or nature's God (depending upon one's point of view) equipped him or her or traits and skills he or she acquired along the way: brains, brawn, courage, decency, loyalty, and so forth. In such cases, fitness, Darwin's sole prerequisite for survival, is a matter of physical, intellectual, and emotional suitability. One character, in particular, has what it takes to survive against monsters and pretty much all other odds, even without ready-to-hand weapons or survival kits: the final girl.

The good girl (and other horror movie survivors) makes it possible to analyze and evaluate horror movies from a Darwinian point of view. These movies' settings and the monsters who originate or dwell therein represent the environments that test the hero's or heroine's traits, determining whether the traits are such as would survive in such an environment.

Note: just because a survivor is shown to possess the traits that enable him or her to survive against the threats of one environment does not necessarily mean that he or she would survive in another horror movie's environment. Take Buffy, for instance. She does well in Sunnydale, against the minions of the Hellmouth, but how would she make out against Pennywise, the dreaded Dormammu, Namor the Sub-Mariner, Anti-Monitor, Doomsday, or Mister Mxyzptlk?)


With mixed results, scientists can use computer models to test hypotheses when it's impractical or impossible to test them through actual experiments. It's too bad that human experience is too complex to be tested in the same way. The best we can do, perhaps, at present, is to envision situations, characters, and settings which, at least in theory, allow us to see which traits might sustain us in struggles to survive against specific, albeit fictional, threats in a variety of particular environments. One of the problems with such an approach was pointed out by Edgar Allan Poe, in a different context, well over a century ago: by definition, fiction's plots are inescapably tautological, their beginnings predetermined by their ends, which, we might add, is not at all how evolution works. Do we see because we have eyes, or do we have eyes because we see? Which is cause, and which is effect?

This article lists some of horror movie characters who have survived against all odds; each is a version of the final girl.


Just as the Navy SEALs' and the nineteenth-century vampire hunters' kits (and Buffy's wooden stakes) give their owners tools and abilities they don't have naturally, so does human culture, with its emphases on such traits as brains, brawn, courage, decency, loyalty, and so forth. By nurturing these traits, by emphasizing them with role models (may of whom are fictitious), and awarding their expression, we, as a society, seek to ensure their survival, because they have helped to ensure our own. With human beings, humanity itself has become a factor in evolution, human and otherwise, because we have learned that our actions influence our fate. If we are not yet fully masters of our own destiny, we are members of a crew sailing upon the cosmic sea in which our survival as a species is determined not only by the blind forces of evolution but by the contributions we make to the direction these forces may take. Nature or nature's God has given us a part to play in the cosmic play unfolding before us each moment, every day.

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

H. R. Giger: A New Approach to Horror Fiction?

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman


H. R. Giger's biomechanical art combines the organic with the mechanical, human bodies with machines, biology with technology. Typically, his bodies are female. Dehumanized, they lack consciousness; sometimes, they appear to be catatonic or even dead. Were they analyzed according to Martin Buber's categorization of relationships, the female figures in Giger's art would be involved in—not participating in, but involved in—an “I-it,” as opposed to an “I-thou,” relationship. In Giger's art, women are not flesh-and-blood creatures, or not entirely; rather, they are biomechnical hybrids, more dead than alive, and they are more subsumed by the mechanical than the mechanical is subsumed in them.



Often, the female figures' involvement in these associations with mechanical systems is compelled, rather than voluntary; the females are restrained, held in place by mechanical arms, pipes, vises, form-fitting chairs, needles, or masks. They appear to be nothing more than human hosts to industrial parasites or to a system comprised of interacting mechanical parts. Often, their eyes are closed or completely white, lacking both irises and pupils. It is as if their humanity has been extracted along with whatever the needles, tubes, pipes, coils, clamps, suction hoses, hydraulic devices, cables, pumps, phallic appendages, beakers, and baths extract from their mouths and other, more intimate, bodily orifices. Giger's paintings are impersonal, detached, disinterested, and, in this sense, inhuman, depicting scenes that involve actions resembling rape, although it is questionable whether the machinery of technology can commit such an offense in any real sense of the word.



Of course, someone had to create these fantastic hybrid female-machines. The existence of biomechanical factories dedicated to exploiting human females implies that other human beings, perhaps men, since their sex is almost completely absent in Giger's work, designed and operate this system for their own benefit, albeit for mysterious purposes. If men are in charge of the system, if they have converted the females of the species largely into a power supply or an exploitable resource of some kind—chemical, perhaps, or sexual—they must be inhuman; they must be monstrous, indeed, to have deprived women of their lives, of their liberty, of their pursuit of happiness—and, indeed, of their very humanity itself. One would not be surprised to find someone like Josef Mengele in charge of the sadistic, clandestine, mechanized operations.



Each painting depicts a nightmare world unto itself, disconnected from any other. Each of the paintings suggests a narrative, but none connects to any other, and none explains the situations it depicts. It is as if each one is the start of a tale which begins in media res, but never progresses beyond its beginning. Therefore, each scene is without context and without meaning, an existential nightmare devoid of significance from which, like Jean-Pal Sartre's No Exit, there is no escape. Perhaps this is Giger's vision of modern life, a world in which men operate a vast system of machinery, preying upon helpless, dehumanized females like parasites feeding upon hosts, for purposes unspecified, but likely involving, at the very least, sex and exploitation.


Most of Giger's work is unique, in a class of its own, but a few pieces, those he designed for various film projects, do have a context, although not one created exclusively, or even primarily, by Giger himself. However, he often expressed his enjoyment of the movies' scripts. His comments on some of his work on specific motion picture projects may suggest insights concerning his overall intentions as an artist. 


Giger was commissioned to create some potential designs for the movie Dune, including Harkonnen, a castle symbolizing “intemperance, exploitation, aggression, and brutality”—all elements commonly featured in his work. The castle is equipped with a “drawbridge which can be lowered like an enormous penis to admit visitors,” Giger explained. (Many of Giger's paintings also include phalli, most of which are mechanical, rather than organic.) His castle “is a gigantic Moloch, which functions by converting living beings into energy. Every visitor is materially or spiritually exploited.”



In describing the castle, Giger could be describing almost any of his own paintings:


Whoever enters the castle stays there for the rest of his life, which in any case can only last a few seconds. The belly of Harkonnen is a gigantic, senseless Gothic, empty space in which corpulent beings swing through the abyss on their suspensors. The thin, plump external skin is supported from inside by a bone-like structure in the form of gigantic vertical plates. The egg in the desert, a symbol of fertility and reclusion—nothing but a fragile, empty sham.


Although his contributions were not used in the film, the fact that Giger had “a completely free hand” in designing Harkonnen suggests that, in developing the castle's designs, he may have used the same ideas and themes he'd expressed in his other work. If so, in Giger's comments about the work he did for various movies, we may have an insight into some of the views the artist sought to express through his own biomechanical paintings. 

Giger designed aliens for the Alien film series, Species's Sil and Ghost Train, the Batmobile for Batman Forever, art for the poster promoting Future-Kill, creatures for Tokyo: The Last Megalopolis, and murals and other work for Prometheus. He also served as a creative consultant for set designs for Killer Condom. We'll consider those works which pertain to our own interest, the new approach for horror fiction that may be represented in Giger's work.



Batmoble Art describes Giger's Batmobile as an “'X'[-]shaped design” that included “articulated front legs/mandibles, retractable fins, and Gatling gun emplacements on each of the four pods on the sides of the vehicle,” noting that Giger's “design also combined side and forward intake ports with organic spines and a central pod connecting the four legs.” 

The result looks more like a living organism than a vehicle and, apparently, it was considered too avant-garde for the Caped Crusader, despite Batman's own penchant for the grotesque. It does indicate, though, that, for Giger, with regard to objects that have a definite, definable purpose, function determines form, where design is concerned.

Angela Cartwright, who plays the navigator of the Nostromo in Alien, describes the set that Giger created as the spaceship's interior as “visceral” and “erotic”: “it's big vaginas and penises . . . the whole thing is like you're going inside of some sort of womb.” Such a description could be applied to many of the backgrounds and settings of Giger's own paintings, Penis Landscape in particular. 

According to David Edelstein,


Alien remains the key text in the “body horror” subgenre . . . and Giger’s designs covered all possible avenues of anxiety. Men traveled through vulva-like openings, got forcibly impregnated, and died giving birth to rampaging gooey vaginas dentate . . . . This was truly what David Cronenberg would call “the new flesh,” a dissolution of the boundaries between man and machine, machine and alien, and man and alien, with a psychosexual invasiveness. [One might add that the film also dissolves the divide between male and female, since male characters are impregnated and give birth.]



Another of Giger's works, the so-called space jockey, was included to depict the dead alien pilot of a spaceship that enabled its crew to drop his species' eggs onto a planet whose life the parasitic hatchlings could then use as their hosts.


In designing the alien “facehugger,” Giger ultimately decided “on a small creature with humanlike fingers and a long tail.” He may have had its means of locomotion and its sexuality in mind. The alien assumes this form during “the second stage” of its “life cycle,” using its eight legs to “crawl rapidly” and its tail to assist it in “making great leaps.” Its legs and tail also help the facehugger to “hug” its victim's face: it grips the host's head with its legs and wraps its tail around the victim's neck. Once it has done so, the creature “administers a cynose-based paralytic,” which causes the victim to lose consciousness and the ability to move. The creature is also equipped with a tubular proboscis, which it introduces into its human host's mouth and esophagus to implant its embryo—reproduction by oral (and nasal), rather than genital means. It seems that, for Giger and the others who designed the facehugger, the creature's function determined its form.



For Sil, the female alien in Species, Giger was interested in maintaining her beauty while portraying her as deadly. She would change colors as she transformed into an assassin, and she would use her barbed tongue to kill her victims:

The character is to go through four distinct stages of evolution [Giger explains:] “She's looking for good-looking, healthy men to breed her race on Earth. If her lover's not healthy, she sees a green aura around him. When she gets angry she first becomes dark red, then orange-red hot. Her clothes and hair burn off and on her back there are these sharp spikes coming out. Her body weapons are like red glowing steel. Then she cools to transparent carbonized glass and you see her inside bone construction: veins, body organs and discs.” It is at this stage when her killing cycle begins and she loses her transparency.

Giger also wanted Sil to have a tongue “composed of barbed hooks. Sil would kiss her lovers, forcing her tongue into the victim's mouth and down their throats, then yank the insides out.” Instead of using her proboscis to impregnate men, Sil would use her tongue to disembowel them. This idea, like the idea of having Sil change colors, was rejected.


While it seems that, during collaboration with others, Giger considers carefully the effects he wants to create, allowing the forms of his designs to follow the functions of the films' fantastic characters, it may be that he is guided more by intuition than by intention. Since nearly all of his paintings and drawings have similar qualities and express similar themes and emotions, Giger may operate from an unconscious template in which bondage, masochism, sadism, and the “intemperance, exploitation, aggression, and brutality” his Harkonnen castle embodies provide a palette for creating the forms that allow various characters to accomplish the tasks assigned them by a particular movie's script.



Indeed, in creating his own paintings, Giger appears to rely largely on intuition, with no preconceived notions about function or purpose, although current events and fads may, like his own dreams, play a role:


I just start from one side and go to the other. I paint whatever comes to my mind. There is no pre-planning. For instance, the ones that feature penis imagery and grotesque baby heads, I just felt like doing that. People have said that I look like these babies a little bit. At the time, 1973, there was a problem with oil and gas—the energy crisis. You can see burners in some of my paintings. The other images must also have some reason behind them. Condoms, of course are very “in” now.



He has also admitted to having been inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon, a fictional book of spells and magic, and Lovecraft's cosmicism, the view “that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as God, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence.” 


Giger, who died in 2014, left quite a legacy in his works of art, which include his remarkable, disturbing, and fascinating drawings, paintings, and sculptures, as well as in his style, which mixes the fantastic with such concepts as Lovecraft's cosmicism and the existential angst of Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, and other existential philosophers. However, his work also suggests a new approach to horror fiction that could breathe new life into a genre that has, of late, become predictable and stale.


Too often, horror is about acquiring new knowledge about a bizarre anomaly or singularity, often of an origin that is otherworldly (Alien), paranormal (Paranormal Activity), supernatural (The Exorcist), or abnormal (Psycho). For most of such movies, the strange is emphasized, but, once characters learn, through discovery, education, or revelation, the nature of the beast, the alien, ghost, demon, or madman (or woman) is neutralized or eliminated, and all's well again with the world. Since the 1950s, this approach has worked well in horror, as it has in science fiction, but, after well over half a century, this plot has become more than a little threadbare.



Giger's art offers a new approach, one in which there is no discovery to be made, in which education cannot provide answers, in which revelation is not forthcoming. Every story is a story in progress, so there is only what is happening now. There is no context, so everything is a mystery, which means there is no certainty, no security, and, quite possibly, no safety, and, certainly, no meaning. Characters may act by reason or faith or out of compassion, guilt, fear, or a desire for vengeance. They may act blindly. At times, they may triumph, but over what will remain unknown, and reason, faith, love, or other motivators may just as easily fail as succeed.




Giger's worlds are dark, mysterious, dangerous, disturbing, strangely erotic, meaningless, and compelling. They are worlds in which anything may happen and the only certainty is that there is no certainty. Such worlds may be mad. They may be pictures of hell. They are full of exploitation, violence, existential absurdity, hopelessness, helplessness, and terror—just like “real life” itself. Nihilistic worlds, they are devoid of heroes. They are worlds in which unseen, monstrous managers rule, unseen and unknown, faceless, nameless, and inhuman.



They are perfect settings, in other words, for horror fiction, whether written or performed.

Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


Popular Posts