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.
According to the list, today’s sketch is “tombsday” which I suppose was meant to be Vampires but I like to think outside the box. Besides, sometimes the best way to get ideas is not to take these things seriously…
My only concern is after I finished this I looked at the rest of the list and saw that “Crypt Creeps” comes on the 18… and while the two words are very similar this is probably technically more of a crypt than a tomb…
Ah well, I guess I’ll just have to switch them out.
For this week’s Rhapsody we have Johan Swendsen’s first Norwegian Rhapsody Op. 17 (slightly out of order I did his second Norwegian Rhapsody way back here.)
The list said that the drawing for the day was “summon day” which could only mean draw a summoning, right?
Summoning a demon is one of the oldest chestnuts around and I haven’t seen it done seriously by anyone who isn’t a Christian evangelist, for years… (case in point)
When this happens, the only thing to do is go back to basics and do things completely straight.
Well, the Halloween season is officially here and with it this year’s Inktober sketch challenge. Usually, I go completely random picking monsters out of the magic Tupperware, but this year I’ve been trying to pass it off as a group event with some of my fellow cartoonists. So I’m using the list from this year’s Drawlaween in order. For the most part, I like this list, mainly because it’s extremely vague so there’s plenty of ways to interpret the labels.
So anyway, today’s picture suggestion is “Return From The Dead” which I suppose I could have done something zombie related, but instead, I went with something a little more upbeat with the Day of the Dead.
