horror

Showing 34 posts tagged horror

Webcomic Wednesday: The art and comics of Lala Albert The third eye is a symbol of enlightenment, usually. After all, it’s a new opening through which to literally let light in. With more eyes to see, you can see more – that’s how the symbolism is... High-res

Webcomic Wednesday: The art and comics of Lala Albert

The third eye is a symbol of enlightenment, usually. After all, it’s a new opening through which to literally let light in. With more eyes to see, you can see more – that’s how the symbolism is supposed to work. But in the context of fantastic fiction, the act of seeing can carry a negative charge. If seeing is believing, what happens to the seer when confronted with the unbelievable? Dave Bowman passing through the stargate. Danny Torrance rounding the corner and discovering two little girls. Bran Stark forced into contemplating the enemy when he’s not even up to the task of walking. Sally Hardesty tied to a chair and forced to witness a nightmarish tableau of cackling cannibals gathered together in a sick Norman Rockwell pastiche. Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood forcing their eyes shut lest they be annihilated by the glory of God. These characters are given a glimpse of some true thing, and in some cases they’re even better off for. But their vision comes at a cost.

In her illustrations and comics, Lala Albert has been poking the third eye for years. Her art style can change, depending on the nature of the project at hand – from scratchy, murky, horror-tinged black and white work to lush, glowing, sensual sci-fi; from bold stand-alone images to dense and demanding narratives; from elegant eroticism to manic mark-making. But two elements remain near-constant presences. The first is a predilection for curvilinear forms that suggest a wavy world where geometry is dominated not by straight lines but by s-shapes, often augmented by a ripple-like pattern of image repetition. And the second is the third eye – unfurling in the center of the forehead, it is the center of her work. It can spread across the faces of her alien characters like a lesion, it can riddle them like holes in a lotus pod, it can bifurcate like an amoeba, it can serve as the vanguard of an entire new face beneath the one we’ve already seen, it can contain multiple irises or none at all, it can be radiant and serene or alive with anger. She comes at the image from a variety of angles, but she arrives in the same place.

Which is not to say she’s a one-trick pony. Indeed, just the opposite: Her obvious conviction that the third eye is saying something important comes with a sense of duty to find a variety of ways to say it. Albert’s sheer bloody-minded willingness to return to this image again and again suggest that it’s not a crutch but a compulsion. “I use the third eye in my work because of what it feels like to me," she says. "I’m not necessarily thinking of the origin or religious/spiritual meaning. I draw it because I feel like it needs to be there and I can create my own mythologies around it.” The eyes of Lala Albert exist because they must, because there are beautiful and terrible things out there to be seen and this is how you see them. What happens to the seer is a question left open, like an eye.

Webcomic Wednesday: Gut Feelings (excerpt) by Leah Wishnia

Bloody, savage, vulgar, and extremely intelligent, this one-page preview of a short story from cartoonist Leah Wishnia’s forthcoming collection Gut Feelings deploys a powerful array of weapons in its quest to convey both physical and emotional violence – it’s just that some of them are silencer-equipped. Wishnia’s fierce, insistent line; the goggle-eyed madness of her character designs; the coarse and direct language and the artfully artless lettering with which it’s delivered; the sanguinary act at the sequence’s center – these are all readily apparent. Tougher to discern on the surface but no less crucial to the comic’s impact are Wishnia’s intrapanel layouts, heavy on dramatic diagonals that force the eye to dart across the page like a lightning bolt, like a knife fight. In the top panel, the attacker’s arms and legs, her knife, the nearby step, and the orientation of her looming head to her victim’s smaller one slash the panel from the upper right to the lower left. In the middle tier, the arm, the knife wound, and (most vitally) the gutter dividing the two panels at the page’s dead center angle back in the opposite direction. The climactic bottom panel is a discordant synthesis in which legs angle outward, arms are thrown inward, the look of terror on the victim’s face is offset by the prominence of the attacker’s grasping limbs, and the vaginal stomach wound and incongruously old “baby” form a V shape at the center of it all. Wishnia’s playing each panel like a drummer building a rhythm, and the rays radiating out from behind the victim in that final panel are the cymbal crash. The tale she’s telling is a tale of terror, but it’s a tale that lies in the telling just like any other.

Webcomic Wednesday: “Out of Skin” by Emily Carroll By this point, harrowing new horror comics by Emily Carroll are a hallowed Halloween tradition. “Out of Skin,” her latest, is also her scariest, which is saying a great deal. Much of what you need to... High-res

Webcomic Wednesday: “Out of Skin” by Emily Carroll

By this point, harrowing new horror comics by Emily Carroll are a hallowed Halloween tradition. “Out of Skin,” her latest, is also her scariest, which is saying a great deal. Much of what you need to know about it you can gleam from the initial image, which you’ll find above: a sylvan setting, a sophisticated approach to color and lighting, cascading lettering that implies a certain graceful flow, and a pile of dead bodies that stops it like an axe to the skull. Reading “Out of Skin” is a matter of enduring several shocks of that sort – not jumpscares, but worse. They’re images that subvert and corrupt the material into which they’re inserted: Eyeballs rendered as circled asterisks, alien and uncommunicative; a friendly man and comfy forest converted to a butcher and his slaughterhouse by a red shift in the color palette; a cozy cabin transformed into a Boschian temple of flesh; a human face rendered as porous and violable as a blanket slung loosely over a bloodied bed. Scrolling through this comic is a dreadful experience, in the best sense of the word. “Out of Skin” will get under yours. 

Roots and Beginnings: Nightbreed (dir. Clive Barker) Behold: Baby’s first real horror movie. I say “real” in order to draw a distinction between the classics (Universal, Godzilla), the stuff for teenagers (The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys), and... High-res

Roots and Beginnings: Nightbreed (dir. Clive Barker)

Behold: Baby’s first real horror movie. I say “real” in order to draw a distinction between the classics (Universal, Godzilla), the stuff for teenagers (The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys), and genre-unto-himself Stanley Kubrick (The Shining) and the hard stuff, the gross stuff, the stuff that would make me feel queasy and uneasy just seeing the boxes at the video store. But one late night during my sophomore year, flipping around the channels in my parents’ living room and landing on Cinemax (no doubt looking for something else entirely), I came across the striking opening visuals of Ralph McQuarrie and music of Danny Elfman that marked the opening sequence of Nightbreed, directed by splatterpunk/dark-fantasy visionary Clive Barker in a quixotic attempt to create a contemporary horror film in which the monsters were the good guys, and everything changed.

I knew what I was in for, I could tell right away. The monsters had that grotesque, rubbery, overripe, insides-on-the-outsides look that was the hallmark of prosthetic makeup and practical effects at the time. People were screaming, undergoing mutilation, dying in horrible ways. A man in a mask with buttons for eyes stabbed a child to death within the film’s first five minutes. There was going to be no out here, no way to look at this as a fun time at the movies or a historical artifact or a milestone in cinematic history. This movie existed for one purpose and one purpose only: to horrify. (David Cronenberg was an actor in this thing, for chrissakes!) And though I knew him only by reputation at the time, Clive Barker had an imagination uniquely suited to the task — a mind dedicated to devising new monsters, and new ways of interacting with the monstrous. Whatever this was, it was going to be fresh; not even the conventions of genre could save me here. I had to look away. I couldn’t look away. It took my hard-R, mega-gore virginity, and I’ve been a slut for the stuff ever since.

Roots and Beginnings: Zombie, aka Zombi 2 (dir. Lucio Fulci) The video store was a five-minute walk from my house growing up. It was called Video Quest, and the owner — Tony, I think his name was — was like our private cinema concierge. Via our... High-res

Roots and Beginnings: Zombie, aka Zombi 2 (dir. Lucio Fulci)

The video store was a five-minute walk from my house growing up. It was called Video Quest, and the owner — Tony, I think his name was — was like our private cinema concierge. Via our sainted mother he’d guide us to comedies, action movies, cartoons, you name it. But there were two sections of the store I’d recoil from as if they were a hot stove. One was the shrouded “ADULT” section, a chamber of partially glimpsed bikini babes cordoned off by a folding door. The other was in plain sight, if you had the courage to look: HORROR.

Despite my love of Godzilla and the classic Universal Studios movie monsters, and despite my later predilection for horror in all its forms, I could not have been a wimpier kid about “real” horror movies. During sleepover parties, when the kids would put on a Poltergeist sequel or, god help me, a Nightmare on Elm Streetmovie, I’d hide behind a couch, cowering in my sleeping bag, pretending to be asleep. So my only contact with the genre in its full post-Psycho/Night of the Living Dead flowering, fully three decades long at that point, were the posters and cassette covers visible in Video Quest. And none of those stood out in my mind or my memory more clearly than this little number.

Years later I’d actually get around to seeing Zombie — originally and confusingly titled Zombi 2 as an unauthorized way for director Lucio Fulci to cash in on the success of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which despite being a sequel to Night of the Living Dead was simply called Zombi in Italy — and I’d be very disappointed. Alternately turgid and exploitative, its much-ballyhooed splinter-through-the-eye scene, despite strong staging and lighting, was embarrassingly phony even for the era (an apples-to-apples comparison to the practical effects pioneered in Dawn by Tom Savini does the film no favors), and the shark-vs-zombie fight just made me feel bad for the shark. Honestly, the only chill-inducing scene was the moment the rotting, worm-riddled zombie above rises from the grave. For perhaps the first time, the real horror of a reanimated corpse was communicated on screen, in a way it would take American cinema years to catch up with. (Unexpectedly, it was Michael Jackson and John Landis who’d take this image to the masses in the “Thriller” video.)

But you really don’t need to see the movie to understand this creature’s power. One look at that make-up, taken in tandem with the incredible tagline “WE ARE GOING TO EAT YOU!” provided by some anonymous copywriter, is all you need, whether you’re a little boy hiding behind your mother while she rents Clue for you for the tenth time, or a 35-year-old man writing about it years later.