Today’s prompt, “swamp citizens” seemed designed to steer the artist towards some knock-off of DC’s Swamp Thing. I tried to avoid that by trying to think of other bits of Louisiana folklore, but all I was aware of was the Loup Garou and zombies (and I cant do that because the voodoo sketch comes up on the 25th) I eventually came up with this one about frog hunters. I think It came out okay… though part of me feels like I’m ripping off this Farside cartoon… and I have slight misgivings since there’s going to be a prompt about toads next week… But I’ll cross that bridge when I find it.
For this week’s Halloween selection I returned to the Hammer Horror films and watched the first two sequels to Christopher Lee’sHorror of Dracula.
In the Brides of Dracula, we have Mariane Dannielle traveling to her new job teaching at a girls’ finishing school in the heart of Transylvania. She’s abandoned by her driver at a small inn. There she is taken in by the Baroness Meinster (played by Yvonne Monlaur) who takes her to her castle. At the castle, she meets the baroness’s son, who the Baroness keeps imprisoned. Mariane falls in love with him immediately and frees him.
However, we discover he is a vampire and disciple of Dracula who quickly begins a reign of terror turning beautiful women into vampires. It’s a good thing Professor Van Helming (Peter Cushing ) is on the scene to save the day.
This was… okay. I especially liked the presence of Moniaur as the Baroness and of course one can’t get enough of Peter Cushing. But Baron Meinster comes off as a cheap knock-off of Dracula.
And while the villain it defeated both of the brides escape.
It’s been seven years since Van Helming killed Dracula. We meet some Brattish tourists who are touring the Carpathian mountains. They are abandoned by their driver before the sun sets (see a pattern here?} and take shelter in the Castle Dracula where food and rooms have been prepared for them by Dracula’s servant Clovis.
This turns out to be a trap and Clovis uses one of them in a blood sacrifice to raise Dracula and once Dracula rises he turns another into a vampire.
I liked this one better than the last one. Christopher Lee as Dracula has great screen presence though since two-thirds of the film are dedicated to bringing Dracula back the amount of screen time feels anticlimactic. Especially since he’s dispatched easily in the end by being drowned in a moat.
I think whoever came up with”Martian Mayhem” for today’s topic was thinking UFOs. I went with War of the Worlds. It’s an interesting challenge since Wells doesn’t go much beyond “towering tripods” in his description. I’ve seen tons of variations and I tried to do something that wasn’t ripping any of them off too much.
I’m mostly happy with it. My biggest problem is the way the death ray doesn’t seem quite clear enough against the blocked out night sky.
I was out of town on business all of this weekend that started on Thursday. I managed to complete my daily quota but beyond photographing everything on Instagram, I didn’t get the chance to post anything. So here’s t
So here’s the lot of them. First, “Full Moon Follies” featuring Werewolves, kind of plagiarizing a popular illustration that’s in all of the folklore books. “Folklore Friday” a title that could mean anything, but I went with Bigfoot. “Cobweb Crawlers”, with spiders, obviously. “Deep Sea Denzians”, I went mythos with Cthulhu and some deep ones. Finally, today’s was “Fanged Fiends”. I didn’t want to go with vampires like the
Finally, today’s was “Fanged Fiends”. I didn’t want to go with vampires like the name insinuates. I finally went with some bat-like creatures.
Today’s drawing is labeled “Pumpkin Wicked This Way Comes”. The pumpkin sketch that you inevitably have to do is always the hardest. It’s not that there’s something wrong with pumpkins. It’s just there’s not much you can do with them without just making them a greeting card with a jack o lantern on them. In the past, I’ve managed to get around this by trying different approaches. In one I went with the Wicked Jack story and in another, I did a play on the Great Pumpkin.
But today I was stumped.
I briefly thought I’d try to pun on the punny title. But in regards to its original search, Macbeth, there’s a witch sketch coming up, and as for the other most known use, the Ray Bradbury story and movie… What’s so scary about a Merry-Go-Round out of context?
For my next selection of films for this Halloween season, I decided to do another foray of “old versus new” with yet another classic film I somehow never got around to seeing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The original 1956 version of Invasion of The Bodysnatchers, directed by Don Siegal tells the story of the small town of Santa Mira California. Where local doctor Miles Bennell (played Kevin McCarthy) starts having multiple patients claiming that their parents, friends, and spouses aren’t who they say they are. While it is tempting to claim the whole thing is mass hysteria everything changes when a friend finds a half-finished duplicate in his greenhouse. It is now apparent that they are being invaded by strange pod-like plants that duplicate and replace their victims. But now that they now this who can they trust and who is going to be replaced next?
Back in its day, the original version of Bodysnatchers as a metaphor for the red scare that ran rampant in the fifties. Siegal does a great job with cranking up the feeling of paranoia and dread, in a setting where you can’t tell the difference between a well-meaning person who can’t help you and an alien who’s stonewalling you. I was impressed by how well it creeped me out with hardly any special effects at all.
It’s not completely perfect though, the happy ending that’s part of the framing device is painfully tacked on (fortunately easy to crop) and I kept wondering how much creepier it would be without the soundtrack.
I’d been hearing about The 1978 Philip Kaufman version of Bodysnatchers as one of the great remakes ever so I was very much looking forward to seeing how it would go.
I find that the best remakes don’t try to completely remake the original but try to serve as a cultural translation for the previous films. This is very much how the 78 version feels. The small quiet San Mira is replaced by the Large and bustling San Francisco. The metaphor of the red scare is replaced by the me generation of the seventies.
It also does a better job showing the difference between people and duplicates. In the first film, for all of the talk about the pods being unemotional, this isn’t completely obvious with the straight-laced fifties demeanor. Here the way a character changes literally overnight is disturbingly obvious.
It also takes time showing the process of replacement with the pod people with some very impressive pre CGI effects, though personally I found most of them very gratuitous and for the most part unnecessarily.
