I had originally vowed I wouldn’t use “Thriller“ in my playlist, and if I bothered to plan ahead a little bit I probably would have. But hey whatever I may think of Michael Jackson I am a fan of director John Landis’s work and Vincent Price’s voice over forgives much.
Well I did it! 31 monsters in 31 days! So the last sketch is that of the Gill-man from The Creature of the Black Lagoon (If anyone is curious my remaining two options were spiders and kitsune.)
Anyway this one was the usual challenge of not wanting to crib the original but at the same time having no time to design anything new so I went for soothing that was kind of a cross between my version of a Deep One and a Mudpuppy. On top of that I was just a little inspired by how much I hate the promotional stills of the female lead screaming in the presence of the looming creature. Not getting into why the creature would be interested in a female human for any reason besides food. I really get tired of women screaming over the slightest threat. Now I’ll defend some of these situations in these movies (after all it’s not like I’d handle a lot of these situations any better) but having said this, this should be a case by case situation and not the rule. On top of this as the son of a biologist I’ve known lots of female assistants and field workers so this makes the whole thing doubly insulting.
Anyway I decided to do this to show how a real scientist’s beautiful assistant would react to her first encounter with a strange mysterious scientific anomaly (though more likely at a safer distance.)
Well today the slip of paper said to do Kaiju. Not any specific kaiju just… kaiju. Since one of the rules of this exercise is to do it in the ballpark of a half hour that means I didn’t have any time to design anything. So I went with something vaguely tyrannosaurid fighting a foo dog.
I’ve never seen Nightmare on Elm Street and because of my general wimpiness for this kind of movie I probably won’t. But Charles Bernstein wrote a wonderfully creepy soundtrack.
I almost wanted to tear this assignment up and pull another one, but I think that would have broken one of my unwritten rules. But while stories of Will-O’-The-Wisps, Jack-o’-Lantern, Foxfire, or whatever you want to call them, mysterious lights that will lead you to drown in a bog or walk off a cliff, may seem scary, wince again how do you portray that in a single image. And even if you could drawing lights in the dark feels a little bit like cheating.
But I have a busy day before me and have to be out the door for a meeting in a half hour so I’ll take it.
