As I mentioned in my first Halloween sketch challenge, one of my greatest desires is to make mermaids scary again. This is easier said then done because most people are distracted by the sexy while forgetting that’s just what the mermaids want you to do. For me the scariest mermaid scenes are not the ones where the mermaids drop the glamour and reveal a mouth full of sharp teeth and claws, It’s the subtle ones like in Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary where the beautiful woman appears almost from nowhere leaning against your boat and you wonder how since you’re nearly a mile out from shore.
Unfortunately it’s hard to capture that kind of subtlety in one image… but I try.
It was a busy day yesterday which include anticipating a big storm, that turned out to be a false alarm. That’s my excuse for not posting this until now… Mia Culpa!
So anyway on my this years list I had two cat entries and planned to toss the second one once I pulled one to avoid repetition. I was really hoping today’s topic, H.P. Lovecraft’sCats of Ulthar would be the second.
While The Cat’s of Ulthar is a great story as far as the mythos is concerned it’s little more than a footnote, and I wasn’t sure that I would capture the level of scariness.
On a side note I kind of screwed up on this one. I reread the story after I did the story and was reminded that Ulthar was just a small town in the dreamlands… not the city I show here… The best excuse I can give is that this is Ulthar a few hundred years after the original story happened.
I wasn’t sure about today’s picture, because quite frankly I’ve never found spiders scary. My father is an ecologist who studies crab spiders (he’s sited in the article I just linked) he used to pay me and my sister a 25 cent bounty for all the ones we could find. Creepy cobwebs on the window were a spectator sport and we used to feed them. I’m one of those people who lets the spiders out of the house when I find them in the kitchen.
So whenever I see movies like Tarantula and Eight Legged Freaks I laugh and nitpick the science.
But a lot of people are creeped out by them so I guess that makes them fair Halloween game.
Dzunukwa is an interesting figure in Kwakwaka’wakw mythology on one side she’s a bogey figure meant to keep children out of the forest for fear of being captured and put her basket to be eaten. but at the same time she is occasionally seen as a wise woman and an ancestor figure for the Namgis clan.
She’s a common feature in native art I see every time I browse in galleries every time I go downtown. So it was fun to try and create a “real” version of the wooden masks.
When the magic Tupperware told me I was I had to draw a vampire I was almost tempted to cheat and see if it had something better to offer. I’v already done vampires two years in a row and for the most part They don’t really offer much in the way of a challenge creatively. A friend of mine had suggested that I look at this as an opportunity to try examples of vampires in different folkloric traditions. But the whole point of this exercise is to knock off an idea with no prep time and I couldn’t think of anything. So I pretty much went back to basics of a classic vampire coming out of his coffin.
Well for this week’s selection I probably bit off a bit more than I could chew. A friend of mine told me about the Blind Dead series by Spanish director Amando de Ossorio. Like a complete idiot, I decided to watch all four of them.
The Blind Dead were a sect of devil worshiping Knights Templar straight out of medieval conspiracy theories. When they were finally executed for their crimes they are blinded. Now in the present day, they have returned as undead revenants to carry out their reign of evil.
The first film Tombs of the Blind Dead we are introduced to the dead in a flashback where they are carrying out their diabolic ceremony, killing and drinking the blood of a beautiful sacrifice.
From there we are brought to the present where a woman having, abandoned her friends during an outing in the country ends up camping in the ruins of the Templar estate. As the sun sets they inevitably rise from their graves and make short work of her. When her friends come looking for her the real fight begins.
The film is about as simplistic as it sounds. But the general look of it is effective. The Blind Dead are especially convincing through a combination of effective costumes and puppets. They look especially effective when show riding through the graveyard in their undead horses.
In the second film. Return of the Blind Dead, the Templars are loose again. In the previous film, they only seemed to be a threat to those who were foolish enough to enter their territory. Here they attack a town who had executed and blinded them in the past. After the predictable slaughter, with the town’s resistance being futile, this leads to a siege of a church with the remaining townfolk reminiscent of the night of the living dead (except the Blind Dead are armed to the teeth with swords and have horses.)
Of the four films, this is the only one that really takes advantage of the Templar’s blindness. (Most of the time this is a moot point since everybody starts screaming the instant they see them and thus giving themselves away) This leads to a tense climax where the surviving cast tries to sneak out of the church while trying to keep a child quiet by blindfolding her so she does not see the dead.
The third film, The Ghostly Galleon gives us a change of scene. Two models out in a small boat as part of a publicity stunt run into a sixteenth-century galleon. When they go in to investigate they become the Templar’s latest victim. When their employers come looking for them their luck isn’t much better.
This film was the weakest for me with the horror becoming nearly pornographic as the Templars dismember their victims one at a time.
The final film Night of the Seagulls tells the story of a married couple who move to a secluded primitive town to be its doctor. The inhabitant’s are standoffish and don’t want them there. Soon it’s revealed that the town has been sacrificing their maidens to the Templars. (and with the number they require, even every seven years the biggest mystery of the film is how the village lasted past the middle ages)
In this movie, de Ossorio seems to reboot everything we know about the blind dead from the past three films. He doesn’t seem to remember that the dead are blind anymore as they go after their victims even when they keep their mouths shut (yes it has been said they are drawn to your heartbeat but the films were never consistent about that anyway.) and in this one they worship what looks like Lovecraft’s Dagon (and strangely after the losing battle that goes through the whole movie all takes to stop them is destroying its statue.)
All in all, while the concept of this film was interesting at first, I would have been fine stopping at the first one. I had hoped for an extended storyline but instead they mostly all stood alone. Everything that was impressive about the first film, like the dead rising was repeated over and over again never adding anything to the core concept. In the end, the whole thing degenerated into something little better than sexist snuff films.
As I mentioned in my first Halloween sketch challenge, one of my greatest desires is to make mermaids scary again. This is easier said then done because most people are distracted by the sexy while forgetting that’s just what the mermaids want you to do. For me the scariest mermaid scenes are not the ones where the mermaids drop the glamour and reveal a mouth full of sharp teeth and claws, It’s the subtle ones like in Hunter Thompson’s The Rum Diary where the beautiful woman appears almost from nowhere leaning against your boat and you wonder how since you’re nearly a mile out from shore.
