horror

When I was 16 I couldn’t find a poster of this so I drew it myself as large as I could

Image | | Paul Greer

RIP Hans Ruedi Giger

 

“O’Bannon introduced Scott to the artwork of H. R. Giger; both of them felt that his painting Necronom IV was the type of representation they wanted for the film’s antagonist and began asking the studio to hire him as a designer. 20th Century Fox initially believed Giger’s work was too ghastly for audiences, but the Brandywine team were persistent and eventually won out. According to Gordon Carroll: “The first second that Ridley saw Giger’s work, he knew that the biggest single design problem, maybe the biggest problem in the film, had been solved.” Scott flew to Zürich to meet Giger and recruited him to work on all aspects of the Alien and its environment including the surface of the planetoid, the derelict spacecraft, and all four forms of the Alien from the egg to the adult”

H.P. Lovecraft’s Monster Drawings: Cthulhu and “an open slice of howling fear”

Image | | Paul Greer


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“On March 23rd, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium.”

via nearsightedmonkey


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“Mountains featured several species of forgotten, intelligent beings, including the ‘Elder Things.’ The sketch on the right side of this page of notes (click here to view it in a larger format), with its annotations (‘body dark grey’; ‘all appendages not in use customarily folded down to body’; ‘leathery or rubbery’) represents Lovecraft working out the specifics of an Elder Thing’s anatomy.” That such things lurked in Lovecraft’s imagination have made his state of mind a subject of decades and decades of rich discussion among his enthusiasts. But just the body count racked up by Cthulhu, the Elder Things, and the other denizens of this unfathomable realm should make us thankful that Lovecraft saw them in his mind’s eye so we wouldn’t have to.”

from openculture

American Vampire

Quote | | Paul Greer

“Here’s what vampires shouldn’t be: pallid detectives who drink Bloody Marys and work only at night; lovelorn southern gentlemen; anorexic teenage girls; boy-toys with big dewy eyes.
What should they be? Killers, honey. Stone killers who never get enough of that tasty Type-A. Bad boys and girls. Hunters. In other words, Midnight America. Red, white and blue, accent on the red. Those vamps got hijacked by a lot of soft-focus romance.”

— Stephen King

Hausu (1977)

Video | | Paul Greer

“The film company Toho approached Obayashi with the suggestion to make a film like Jaws. Influenced by ideas from his daughter Chigumi, Obayashi developed ideas for a script that was written by Chiho Katsura. After the script was green-lit, the film was put on hold for two years as no director at Toho wanted to direct it. Obayashi promoted the film during this time period until the studio allowed him to direct it himself. The film was a box office hit in Japan but received negative reviews from critics.”

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

| Paul Greer

Recorded this film off the telly on ye olde VHS when I was a child, and it was one of the films, (along with the Terror of Mechagodzilla)that I watched over and over again. Bela plays Ygor, who’s neck was broken in the Noose at the end of “Bride”. I remember the sound it made when he tapped it, to let you know it was actually broken and he was actually still alive.

Images courtesy of Obscure Hollow.


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See more great stills from this film here.

19th-century ghost scrolls

Image | | Paul Greer

“Every August, as Japanese spirits return en masse from the otherworld, Tokyo’s Zenshoan temple (map) exhibits a spine-chilling collection of 19th-century ghost scroll paintings.”

Kaidan Chibusa Enoki: The Ghostly Tale of the Wet Nurse Tree

 

“This painting by Ito Seiu, the godfather of Japanese bondage (kinbaku), depicts a scene from Kaidan Chibusa Enoki, an old horror story in which the ghost of a dead painter returns to protect his baby from his murderer, a wandering samurai who fell in love with his wife while he was away painting. This scroll shows the ghost holding the baby while standing under a waterfall at Juniso (where Tokyo’s Shinjuku Chuo Park is now located).”

The Ghost of a Blind Female Street Singer

“Utagawa Hiroshige’s “Ghost of a Blind Female Street Singer” portrays the restless spirit of a street performer, one white unseeing eye wide open, carrying a shamisen as she drifts above the surface of a river on the way to her next performance.”

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