I suppose we file this one under art imitating life too closely. Or perhaps not bothering to “imitate” at all, just “cut and paste.” A tourist dungeon in London, UK discovered recently that some of the bones displayed proudly in their “Satan’s Grotto” — I gather it’s an annual, Mid-December feature, y’know, for the holidays — were actual human remains. I believe I’ve seen that situation in at least three separate TV shows. The most interesting part of the article to me is that the dungeon could have continued to display the remains if they paid an annual £ 2,000 “license fee” to the “Tissue Authority.” Now THAT’S a work-related sit-com I’d like to see on TV. Part tax-collectors / part CSI, they’re The Bone Guard.
Jessica Harrison, a UK artist, made these wonderfully reconfigured / disfigured porcelain figurines in a series called “Broken.” What I love particularly about the series is how she takes a gesture or pose of the original piece and adds that little extra horrifying bit that perfectly follows the form, yet completes it in a quite surprising and disturbing manner. They’re more than a cheap chuckle, IMHO. Harrison’s work suggests a quiet violence already implicit in the placid pastel colored kitsch.
No it’s not some twisted scalp-hunt through the zombie infested streets. It’s something much more civilized. It’s Alive, a fund raiser for St Jude hospital in Orlando Florida got 80 artists to do their thing on a life-sized bust of Frankenstein’s monster. Some are clever. Some a little dumb but some are purely inspired like the Frankenberry I post above.
My traveling companion “Igor” and I stopped in at the first annual Flint Horror Convention yesterday and had ourselves a blast. Since it was the first year for this convention, we knew the edges might not be brightly polished but we didn’t know if they’d be jagged and bloody, if you dig what I’m saying. I’m very pleased to say that for a small con, the inaugural Flint Horror Con was both well run and pretty darned satisfying.
The dealers’ room had a nice mix of vendors from across the state, each one hopped up and enthusiastic about their work. Sure they were selling something but most of them need to have a day job to fund their participation in the horror subculture. Like at any con, it was more about passion than cash. Readers of the DailyNightmare will have detected my predilection for artsy snob horror – not to diss the schlock-meisters and camp-crafters but it’s just not my thing. Let me note a couple artists who really delivered what I was looking for:
• Ash of 13 Foot Fall.com snaps graveyard photos that transcend the well-worn “ooky-spooky” feel so prevalent in other tombstone photography I’ve seen. As to be expected, he’s mastered and moved beyond capturing the sombre colors and rich textures of memorials left to the elements. His most effective work, for me, focused on toys left at the graves of children. At their best, they achieve that yearning tug of loss and nostalgia, with a nice dollop of revulsion and creep-out.
• Steve Jenks of Lost Highway crafts movie posters for classics of the genre – I snapped up his “Hellraiser” and “Halloween.” What delighted me about Steve’s work was how it used immediately recognizable subject matter but did more than simply reproduced a familiar screen capture. His posters express a synoptic vision of the movie as a whole encapsulated within the vernacular of the drive-in movie poster. That’s art school-speak for “he makes posters for well-loved horror movies that are both familiar and fresh.” Digital illustration gives him a clean precision and his clever use of color mimics the printing techniques of yore.
• Steven J Bejma of Classic Horrors is a generous, warm-hearted guy who memorializes horror greats in the classic media of oil paint and stretched canvas. My favorite piece of his was a portrait of Tor Johnson. In life, the face of Tor Johnson scares me about as much as a pile of cold mashed potatoes but Steven’s portrait transformed it with a greenish cast and subtle warts to a visage that is truly scary. Well done.
I also picked up discs from several Michigan film makers that I hope to view and review in the coming months and a few other trinkets here and there. I was really encouraged to see so many bright eyed horror creators from my home state venturing out from their crypts to support a new convention.
My eyes were still dripping full of movies from the Three Corpse Circus the night before, so I didn’t spend much time in the movie room, sad to say. “Igor” described a situation where the sound cut out on one of the films and an audience member familiar with the production rose to the occasion to lip-sync the missing dialogue. Sounds like a hoot.
I knew I just had to catch the panel discussion with Lucifer Fulci, a musician whose work I knew literally *nothing* about. Call me superficial, but I thought to myself, someone who looks that cool MUST be serious. Lucifer’s remarks didn’t disappoint if for no other reason than they go against the stereotypes some have about “those darned rock-n-roll types.” He’s vocally and un-apologetically anti-substance use. He holds down a respectable day-job in social work. He’s family man – heck Lucifer’s proud parents were sitting in the front row…. which is a sentence I never thought I would have the occasion to write. I appreciated his insistence on the theatricality of horror, the art and artifice, if you will. Horror is not about cruelty as it is about persona and presentation. A foundational influence on Lucifer’s work was, you guessed it, KISS.
Igor and I had a séance to get to so we had to bug out early. I would have liked to hear the panel about making movies in Michigan. Alas. The Masonic Temple was a cool, lightly creepy location for the convention and personally, I *loved* the opportunity to lunch again at the original Halo Burger. Next year, the Flint Horror Convention promises to be even better and I already plan to be there. And to stay the whole day.
I am a serious fan of skeletal systems, those bits of organic sculpture / architecture that each of us carry around inside us — pardon, of course to the readers of this blog that are cephalopod or who have exoskeletons. You critters are too wonderful for mention. Don’t go changing.
Theatre Bizarre had the best spread at the Maker Faire Detroit this weekend. These humble photos don’t do proper justice. Six foot tall hand-painted banners. Carefully decrepitized ticket booths. The works. They were so awesome my first assumption was that they weren’t local. But I was wrong. Theatre Bizarre host (ed) a miscreant Halloween party down by the old Michigan State Fairgrounds. The parties went on for nearly a decade until they were shut down last year.
Your position on the utility of hexes or the authenticity of these particular would-be pagans is not the point. We humans need to feel as if we are doing something that is meaningful, that our actions have an effect especially during times of distress. During WWII, we had collections for scrap metal. We grew “victory gardens.” Contemporary reflection somewhat pessimistically notes that these activities didn’t really help the war effort as much as they bolstered the moral of those on the home front. So why not “hexes?”
There was great recent controversy when someone planned to burn multiple copies of the Qu’ran. It prompted folks across the Muslim world to burn effigies of just about everyone they didn’t like… even though, as I read it, it’s a cultural proscription, if not cardinal no-no to make graven images of humans. This emphasis on non-representative art is a contributing factor to the splendor of Islamic geometric mosaics, I’m told. Would there have been such an outrage if the American protest only burned – or put a hex – on representations of Bin Laden?
If you’re getting hung up on the whole black magic thing, perhaps because of christian baggage, then call it an “imprecatory prayer.” Lord knows there are enough bible-belters using such language as veiled threats against the president. You’ve maybe seen the bumper stickers that say “Pray for Obama – Psalm 108 8 & 9″ Look those lines up, will ya? They’re not the cuddly Loving Shepherd. They say “May the days of his reign be few; let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.” Ah, explain to me how that’s NOT outright sedition?
Three Corpse Circus took over the historic Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, MI last night, Devil’s Night and presented four hours of short horror movies. Yup, four whole hours of films, contests and costumed tomfoolery. If you weren’t there, you done goofed up bad. I spoke briefly with one of the organizers Jonathan Barkan who says they hope the Circus will grow to be more than just a film festival, that Three Corpse Circus might become a rallying point for the horror community in Michigan. Last night was a excellent start.
The films were better than I’d feared, a notch above the mixed bag you’d expect from a college town. A couple were real gems. Others were arty and experimental. Some cute and amusing. And to be frank, some were unspeakable, trite, poorly shot, not acted at all… dumb. Bad even for Youtube. But what I saw last night were movies I never would have seen elsewhere. Most of the pieces had some aspect that was pretty interesting. Their failures were mostly in consistency. Technically, I suppose many of the movies were “mediocre” but I mean a kind of expectant and exciting mediocrity. They left me with a sense of anticipation, that I’m really interested in seeing the NEXT movie by these film makers.
A great example of this category is “The Lair.” (http://www.thelair-movie.com/) The acting was more than good enough, much better than many commercial horror movies. There was evidence of actual script composition and, egad, character development, again a relative rarity in short horror. Competent editing built actual suspense and didn’t rely on cheap jump scares, well, not excessively. OK so the setting was the tried and true deserted campground and, granted, the premise wasn’t the most original. But the piece was generally effective. If I had to be a dick – and critics are supposed to be dicks, right? – the footage shot at night was too grainy. But where else would I have had the opportunity to see this film except at a film festival like Three Corpse Circus?
A gem of the evening was “Connected,” one two offerings from Denmark. (http://www.ov43.com/) Clocking in at barely 8 minutes, “Connected” gets in, does the job and gets out and it does so ENTIRELY WORDLESSLY. Great futuristic costumes, a convincing post apocalyptic backdrop and a clear situation, conflict and bleak resolution. It was probably dark science fiction more than straight out horror but, damn, it was a joy to watch. And again, I never would have even heard of it if I hadn’t attended the Three Corpse Circus.
The true highlight of the evening for me was the other Danish film Opstandelsen (“Ressurection”) which was as good a zombie movie as I’ve ever seen – and this is coming from someone who doesn’t find zombies particularly compelling. The movie is shot in and around an old austere church and incidentally, they shot the HELL out of this location. There are scenes in the sanctuary, the basement, UNDERNEATH the basement, the bell tower… I’ve whined in the past how easy access to fantastic ancient locations can make even crappy European movies into something watch-worthy, but the makers of Opstandelsen squeeze every bit of ambience from this place. It’s not just a cheap and easy backdrop. The prosthetics were first rate and relatively understated. The blood and gore was believable and I think the tone of its color grew progressively darker until the blood was nearly black by the end. The make up especially on the female survivor was exceptional. By the end of the movie, she was basically wearing corpse paint – her skin so pale as to be nearly white with drippy spatters of dark blood around her eyes. Lovely! The script showed off nice characterization with juicy familial strife. All three of the primary survivors had character arcs that led to satisfying conclusions. Damn, it’s hard to find something to complain about but, perhaps the range of the acting was a bit constrained – one character always stuck on high, another on low with the coke-snorting protagonist being a nice blend. I’d have to see it again before I said it was perfect but since it’s a 50 minute movie, a length too short to distribute commercially and too long for the internet, there is likely NO chance I would have been able to see it at all except at a film festival like Three Corpse Circus.
You’ve picked up on my take-home message by now. If you’re into horror and you’re in Michigan, get to the next Three Corpse Circus. It was well worth while this year and every indication is that it’s just going to continue to get better.
“…it just doesn’t accomplish much to claim certain phenomena are “real” while others aren’t. The real task is to determine what kind of reality they possess and what kind of meaning that implies…”
I’ve often wondered if my 1990 Electra Glide will take me to the grave but didn’t think it might be the actual vessel used. Shows how little imagination I sometimes have.
This youngun’ – shot dead while young enough to leave a beautiful corpse – was allegedly embalmed and mounted on his favorite motorcycle to lie in state. Even if this is a hoax, it’s a pretty fun one, eh?
Can we call the whole zombie craze, ah, “dead” so to speak, now that eight year old kids are asking that their birthday cakes be made in the shape of an undead corpse? Continue reading →
The violence of everyday office life – punched paper, sheets pierced with staples, envelopes ripped open – is lovingly expressed by this set of stationery designed for 13th Street (a German horror and crime channel.) Continue reading →
In this age of digital manipulation of everything, the old school craft shown on this blog of fully staged photographs is truly impressive. Oh, and they’re scary as all get out.
