Portrait of H.R. Giger copyright 1998 by Dana Frank/NYC from hrgiger.com
If you are not familiar with the works of Swiss artist Hans Rudolf Giger, you are probably familiar with movies that use his art: the Alien series, Poltergeist II, Batman Forever, and Prometheus among others. Though his works are considered surreal or of science fiction rather than horror, to me there seems to be something of an unstated horrific element to them and therefore I have included them as tonight’s post.
Perhaps a more tangible connection between Giger and the world of horror is that his book, upon which the original Alien design was based was entitled H.R. Giger’s Necronomicon, after, of course, the fictitious Necronomicon of H.P. Lovecraft. Here I quote a short article on it from Wikipedia:
“Necronomicon was the first major published compendium of images by Swiss artist H. R. Giger. Originally published in 1977, the book was given to director Ridley Scott during the pre-production of the film Alien, who then hired Giger to produce artwork and conceptual designs for the film.
“The book was originally published by Sphinx Verlag and was republished in 1993 by Morpheus International with additional artwork from Giger’s Alien designs. A subsequent collection of his images followed as H. R. Giger’s Necronomicon 2, printed in 1985 by Edition C of Switzerland.
“Giger’s Necronomicon is named for H. P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire Lovecraft invented and used as a plot device in his stories. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon was a compendium of pre-human lore compiled by the fictional mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, circa 700.[1]“
Giger’s works are a fascinating foray into the surreal, erotic, and horrifying possibilities of the world of biomechanics. A quick search in Google images for “Giger art” or a vist to hrgiger.com will prove quite rewarding. Here are a few examples to whet your appetite (please note that all images used in this post are copyrighted by the author/artist and are used here only under US “fair use” guidelines) .
The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch Museo del Prado, Madrid
Long before I developed an interest in the literature of horror, I developed an interest in painting (though I am not much of a painter myself). One of the painters who has always fascinated me is Hieronymus Bosch, a Dutch painter who lived from circa 1450 to 1516. The work above is typical of his style: surreal, fantastic, horrible. Bosch did many paintings of the horrors of hell as a consequence of sin.
Earlier tonight, I was searching for a subject for tonight’s quick post and I did a quick search in Google images for “horror art” thinking I would post some modern visual image of horror that captures what horror is for me. However, most of the images I found relied solely on the shock value of some singular instance of torment to communicate horror: the visual equivalent of a slasher flick. With one exception (which I did not post here tonight, but maybe will later) nothing captured the suspense that I feel is necessary in a work of horror.
Then I remembered Hieronymus Bosch.
Although I cannot say there is any inherent suspense in Bosch’s works, there are other, hard to verbalize, elements that seem to speak horror to me better than any depiction of a single, bloody act. One is the breadth of horror in his works. There is no single act, instead there may be a hundred or more monsters and terrifying horrors in a single painting, raising the horror from a personal one-on-one level with the viewer to that of a awe-inspiring spectacle. Second, there is a tremendous level of complexity in each work, which forces the viewer to examine the work in detail to dig out each individual torment and focus on it, thereby immersing the viewer in the infernal landscape as if he were a participant in it. Third, I sense a mystery in Bosch’s works that is hard to express. There is an extremely complex symbolism in each work, that I personally cannot fathom, but that intrigues me nonetheless, perhaps because I cannot fathom it. Perhaps an expert in symbols, such as the fictitious Robert Langdon in The Da Vinci Code, could understand the motifs at work in Bosch’s painting, but I can only catch a glimpse of something occasionally and realize that something well beyond my limited understanding is. To paraphrase the comedian Adam Carolla, I feel like “a baboon trying to understand a thesaurus.”
If you have an interest in the visual art of horror, please do a quick search on Google images for “Hieronymus Bosch”. You won’t be disappointed.
Though not actually horrific in itself, I thought this cartoon might have special meaning for aficianados of horror, suspense, mystery, or of speculative fiction in general. Enjoy.
The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article (as of April 17, 2013) gives a good, very basic introduction to Hanns Ewers:
“Hanns Heinz Ewers (3 November 1871 in Düsseldorf – 12 June 1943 in Berlin) was a Germanactor, poet, philosopher, and writer of short stories and novels. While he wrote on a wide range of subjects, he is now known mainly for his works of horror, particularly his trilogy of novels about the adventures of Frank Braun, a character modeled on himself. The best known of these is Alraune (1911).[1][2]“
The article continues on to describe some of his literary achievements:
“This was followed in 1911 by Alraune, a reworking of the Frankenstein myth, in which Braun collaborates in creating a female homunculus or android by impregnating a prostitute with the semen from an executed murderer. The result is a young woman without morals, who commits numerous monstrous acts. Alraune was influenced by the ideas of the eugenics movement, especially the book Degeneration by Max Nordau.[4]Alraune has been generally well received by historians of the horror genre; Mary Ellen Snodgrass describes Alraune as “Ewers’ decadent masterwork”,[2]Brian Stableford argues Alraune “deserves recognition as the most extreme of all “femme fatale” stories” [4] and E.F. Bleiler states the scenes in Alraune set in the Berlin underworld as among the best parts of the novel.[3] The novel was filmed several times, most recently by Erich von Stroheim in 1952.
Bleiler notes “Both Alraune and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice are remarkable for the emotion the author can arouse” and that Ewers’ writing is, at its best, “very effective”. However, Bleiler also argues Ewers’ work is marred by “annoying pretentiousness, vulgarity, and a very obtrusive and unpleasant author’s personality”.[3]“
So far I have read only two of Ewers’ short stories: “The Spider”, described as his “most anthologized work”, and “Fairyland”. I will need to read more of his works to be able to speak with some degree of confidence that I know what I am talking about, but my first impression of Ewers’ works is one of disappointment.
I read both works in English (though I speak German with moderate fluency), and his command of composition, organization, language, clarity, and suspense are competent enough, but at least the stories noted above seem to fall apart at having a comprehensible denouement, and in the area of having good taste.
“The Spider” starts off well enough with a great opening paragraph that sets the stage for suspense:
“When the student of medicine, Richard Bracquemont, decided to move
into room #7 of the small Hotel Stevens, Rue Alfred Stevens (Paris 6),
three persons had already hanged themselves from the cross-bar of the
window in that room on three successive Fridays.”
As the story develops, Bracquemont volunteers to work with the police in finding out why the three previous residents killed themselves by reporting what he sees during his stay. He records his observations in a diary. Over the next three or so weeks, Bracquemont begins observing a girl in another room across the street, who constantly spins at an old-fashioned spinning wheel. He begins to be attracted to her, he waves to her, they develop games to play over the distance (mimicking each other, etc.), he becomes infatuated with her, and obsession sets in all the while there are subtle hints of analogies between her and a female spider luring her mate to its death. I will not spoil the ending for you, if you want to read it (I read the version at Project Gutenberg Australia), but I will say that the story seemed rather drawn out and the ending was confusing with no real explanation as to why the story ends as it does. I suppose one could say it was “black magic”, as one critic noted, but there is nothing alluding to black magic anywhere previously in the story. The ending is sort of deus ex machina and very unsatisfying.
“Fairyland” is worse. It’s only virtue is that it is very short. It is the story of a cute little girl on a tramp steamer in Port-au-Prince who is the darling of the crew and who tells them of wonderful monsters she has seen ashore, monsters with enormous heads and limbs and scales. She offers to show them to the crew and the crew agrees to go along wondering what she has found. Not far from the docks, she shows them the local beggars who have enormous limbs from having contracted elephantiasis or scales from leprosy or a similar skin disease. While the crew is obviously overcome with disgust, the little girl prattles on about how cute the monsters are.
I am not one to berate anyone else over a lack of taste, but whoever published this deserved a good horsewhipping for deciding to put this atrocity in the public view. It is one of the more tasteless things I have ever seen. However, I will discourage anyone from reading it. After all, it is a matter of taste and we are dealing with matters of horror.
So far, Ewers is the one author of horror I have been most disappointed by. Still I will read at least a few more of his works before I solidify my opinion. At some point I may read Alraune only because it is his best known work, but from what I have seen of its reviews, it may be a struggle for me to wade through horrors which only the Marquis de Sade would appreciate.
Perhaps Ewers does deserve his accolades. I will only know by exploring his works further. So far though, I am not looking forward to the journey, which I make only out of intellectual curiosity.
There is one interesting sidelight about Ewers for fans of cinematic horror. One reviewer commented somewhere (I forget where) that Alraune was the original inspiration for genetically-mutated femme fatales like the alien in the Species trilogy.
I had never heard of Maurice Level (the pseudonym of Jeanne Mareteux-Level) before tonight, but after reading a couple of his short stories and a few critques of his work in general, I shall have to find more of his stories.
Level was a French writer known for his macabre stories, which were sometimes staged in the renown Theater of the Grand Guignol. Wikipedia says this about him:
“…Level’s short stories may be weak in characterization and motivation, but they are strong on obsession and violence. Their surprise endings are reminiscent of the stories of Guy de Maupassant. Many of Level’s stories were translated into English in the magazine Weird Tales. [1] As editor John Robert Colombo noted in Stories of Fear and Fascination (2007), Battered Silicon Dispatch Box French critics see Level as the heir of the Symbolist writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam; British critics, as the successor of Edgar Allan Poe; American critics, as the contemporary of H. P. Lovecraft. Of this fiction, Lovecraft himself observed in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1945), “This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself–the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalizations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors.” Critic Philippe Gontier wrote, “We can only admire, now almost one hundred years later, the great artistry with which Maurice Level fabricated his plots, with what care he fashioned all the details of their unfolding and how with a master’s hand he managed the building of suspense.” Level’s stories, with their gratuitous acts and mindless brutality, may be seen as precursors of “thriller” fiction and “slasher” films.”
A few of Level’s works can be found on the Internet. I read two tonight: “Under the Red Lamp” and “Last Kiss”. They are quite brief and quite terrifying. In my view, the Wikipedia article above provides a good assessment of what I have read so far. Level begins a story with a first sentence that grabs your attention, then sustains the mystery throughout the tale, until you reach a sudden, horrifying, denouement.
I highly recommend investigating his works when you have the time. He is an excellent writer that deserves more recognition than he has.
Here are a few places to start:
“The Last Kiss” at Moonlightstories.magick7.com A husband, blinded and hideously deformed when his wife threw vitriol in his face after he threatened to leave her, intervenes on her behalf when the case comes to court, preventing her from receiving a long jail sentence. At his request she pays him an emotional visit in which she begs his forgiveness and somehow even manages to kiss him, whereupon … Well, not for nothing is Level feted as a master practitioner of the conte cruel. (Synopsis from vaultofevil.proboards.com)
“In the Light of the Red Lamp” at amalgamatedspooks.com “In the first shock of grief, you sometimes have extraordinary ideas … can you believe that I photographed her lying on her deathbed? I took my camera into the white, silent room, and lit the magnesium wire. Yes, overwhelmed as I was with grief, I did with the most scrupulous precaution and care things from which I should shrink today, revolting things … yet it is a great consolation to know she is there, that I shall be able to see her again as she looked that last day.” Now, six months after his beloved’s death, accompanied by the narrator he prepares to develop the photographs of the dead woman. Slowly the images appear – and a horrible tragedy is revealed. (Synopsis from vaultofevil.proboards.com)
“The Grip of Fear” at Google Books (I haven’t read this yet, but it looks interesting.)
Apparently, many of his works are still available only in French, but some (notably those mentioned above) are available in English. His better known works are: Those who Return, Tales of Mystery and Horror, Tales of the Grand Guignol, Les Portes de L’Enfer, The Grip of Fear, and L’Epouvante.
I was lazily drifting through the web tonight, when I came upon a bit of interesting trivia. According to HPLovecraft.com, one of Lovecraft’s favorite films was “Berkeley Square”. He is quoted as saying about it:
“But with all its defects this thing gave me an uncanny wallop. When I revisited it I saw it through twice – & I shall probably go again on its next return. It is the most weirdly perfect embodiment of my own moods & pseudo-memories that I have ever seen…” (to J. Vernon Shea, 4 February 1934)
According to the Internet Movie Database, the storyline is: “A young American man is transported back to London in the time of the American Revolution and meets his ancestors.”
A review by “clementj” on the same page describes it as follows:
“This is a very amusing love story with a good dash of humor. Much of the humor centers around the culture clash between Standish and the 18th century family. Standish uses modern terms and slips when he reveals things that happen in the future. The culture clash is a cautionary tale for would be travelers. This film appealed to many women because Leslie Howard was a heart throb for many of them. My mother loved this film and could watch it over and over. She was so disappointed when late in her life it disappeared from the old movies shown on TV.
“It is currently not commercially available, but a number of vendors have poor quality CDs or tapes for sale. All of these were probably made from a VHS tape from a TV showing. The tape was deteriorated and possibly copied several times so there is a lot of instability and wiggling of the image. The original broadcast used extreme compression of the video and sound. As a result the noise level rises to become very loud until dialog causes the gain to be cut. As a result the dialog is sometimes very indistinct. The music which was originally soft also rises to match the level of the dialog. Once this is restored by hand, the film is fairly listenable. The complaint of another reviewer about the music being too loud may stem from watching a copy with similarly compressed sound. In addition the broadcast severely cropped the film and did not stabilize the jitter.
This is a film that deserves restoration from the existing prints, but when and if this happens is unknown. Until then buying one of the existing CDs may be the only way to view this fine film.”
On the message board at the bottom of that page is a post by aaronjv-1 that mentions that a brand new 35mm print was slated to play at the Lovecraft film festival in September, 2011. He goes on to say about the film:
“The grandson of director Frank Lloyd will introduce the picture and talk about his granddad’s favorite, which was also H.P. Lovecraft’s favorite–he watched it four times, and it inspired him to write his own classic time-traveler possession tale, “The Shadow Out of Time”.
I was reading Lovecraft’s “Supernatural Horror in Literature” the other day when I came across this line concerning the nature of the “weird tale”:
“A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and protentiousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain — a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only daily safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.”
With me, this idea hit home. I have always thought that the more realistic I could make a story, the more frightening it would be for the reader, because it could possibly happen. Lovecraft takes the complete opposite approach. In essence, he says let’s dispense with the chains of our preconceptions of reality then see what could happen. He is right. If anything can happen, the horrors that could happen to humanity are limitless and unimaginable.
Now let’s take this line of thought a step or two further philosophically. Perhaps our concept of reality is really a sort of protective shell, a defense mechanism created by our minds that shields us from being overwhelmed by the thousands of possible ways we could meet our ends. If a person tried to conceive of all the ways he/she might die at any moment, no matter how miniscule the odds, his/her mind might be overwhelmed and paralyzed by fear or destroyed by paranoia and madness. The only way the mind could survive would then be to limit the possibilities to only those with the greatest probability of happening at that moment, in essence, wrapping itself in a protective cocoon of denial.
If there are any philosophy majors out there reading this, please feel free to bring up this idea in class. I would love to hear the arguments for and against this.
Now, let’s go a step even further. If we start to see our perception of reality as only a concept, as only a protective shell in a much greater universe, as only one alternative among thousands or millions of possibilities, then the possibility of creatures like Cthulhu, Shoggoth, Nylarhotep, the “ancient ones”, and all the other monsters contained in Lovecraft’s vivid imagination becomes very real.
Lovecraft’s world of the “ancient ones” is frightening enough when we think it has no chance of happening, but it becomes truly terrifying if we think it has even the slightest chance of actually happening.
I am a member of GoodReads.com as are several of my friends. One, a gentleman named Tim Stamps, whom I have known since my college days at Eastern Kentucky University, recently posted a review of Dracula, on which I commented. Thus began a brief conversation which I think you may find interesting for several reasons. I have quoted it below, editing out any non-relevant personal matters (after having obtained Tim’s permission to post it).
I could only read this during the Winter months, when the weather is cloudy, dark and gloomy. When I read fiction I prefer the classics, to learn how people thought in earlier times. The actual character of Dracula was the most un-interesting of the characters in the book. It turns out that Stoker only knew Vlad’s Dracula name but knew nothing of his past, and the character is actually based more on Jack the Ripper. Also it was interesting to read a book made up of supposed diary entries and newspaper articles – although most actual diaries and articles written by everyday people are nowhere near as long and detailed, especially back then when paper was scarce. I understand Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the same format, and other books of that time did the same. If you can find a copy, listen to the first half hour of this Coast to Coast show: http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/20…
Tim, if you like reading classic horror tales like Dracula, then you should definitely read Frankenstein. Others you may want to check out are The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the works of Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Arthur Machen, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. I have been writing horror lately and have established a blog on it that often discusses past writers of the horror genre. You may want to check it out at www.philslattery.wordpress.com. You may find some of the authors I discuss of interest. One who is known more as a writer of science fiction than of horror (though the boundary is often indistinct at best) is H.G. Wells who wrote The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and others.
True, I definitely plan to read Frankenstein. Also have been planning on getting into Wuthering Heights and the Brönte sisters books. I’ve always been a fan of H.G. Wells, also Orwell’s dystopian works – still trying to get around to reading Huxley’s Brave New World (when I find my copy) – I can also add ebooks to a kindle, but the kindle doesn’t exactly replace paper. I’ve depended on the movies too much – finding lots of extra details in the books that the films leave out. (I don’t really spend much time reading actually.) I’ll explore your site.. thanks! By the way, are there any horror films you really like? Or gothic tales. There don’t seem to be many recent ones that play into fears as well as the older ones. Some of the classics: “The Innocents” (version of Henry James’ “Turn of the Screw”), George Romero’s “Martin”, “The Exorcist”, even “The Shining” and the early “Halloween” pictures. Recent films like “The Ring” and “the Sixth Sense” have potential. I read in your blog that to be a great horror writer you need to understand the psychology and emotions of fear. Perhaps horror screenplay writers nowadays need to go back to the basics – just slashing people up and showing gruesome killings isn’t enough to heighten the sense of fear. They seem to have forgotten Hitchcock and his methods of manipulating people’s emotions, although that was a time when people actually paid attention to dialog. I don’t know what it’s going to take to make a great horror movie today. Is it even possible?
Tim wrote: “True, I definitely plan to read Frankenstein. Also have been planning on getting into Wuthering Heights and the Brönte sisters books. I’ve always been a fan of H.G. Wells, also Orwell’s dystopian w…”
Yes, you are right in all accounts, except that modern screenplay writers need to go back to the basics. They cannot go back to someplace they have never been. They need to learn the basics first. Stephen King identifies three types of horror: horror, the gross-out, and terror (the exact lengthy quote can be found on GoodReads). Modern, popular, mass-market screenplay writers use the gross-out form to excess. The great horror writers of the past (such as Lovecraft, Poe, Blackwood, etc.) never described anything gross. Yet their tales are terrifying. There is an art to horror, and Hitchcock’s concept of suspense (i.e. terror lies not in seeing something happen, but in knowing that something is about to happen) is one of the best means of achieving horror.
There are great horror movies today, but one has to veer away from the mass-market and Hollywood to find them. Independent films and small companies are your best shot: someone who cares about the art. Netflix and Hulu TV are good for finding these (and finding them cheaply at that). The series American Horror Story is quite entertaining, though it can be bloody at times. Foreign films can be an excellent source with Japan, Korea, England, Australia, and Spain coming immediately to mind. I noted that your profile says you are in the Seattle area now. Lion’s Gate Films in Vancouver, BC makes some good films (outside of the horrifyingly gross-out Saw series).
I have seen some good horror films lately, but am having a hard time recalling their names, therefore I am reviewing some lists of top horror films on line, but of course that isn’t helping much as the lists are mass-market oriented. One that pops out now is the original Swedish version of “Let the Right One In”. “Dagon”, a Spanish film based somewhat loosely on a Lovecraft story (“The Shadow over Innsmouth”) is not bad. The New Zealand film “The Devil’s Island” has some interesting ideas behind it, though it is quite bloody. That’s all I can think of on the spur of the moment.
hi Phil, Sorry about “Seattle” – don’t know how that happened (I must’ve not filled it in – the site just guessed or something.) Anyway, actually I am (still) in… I love watching foreign horror… for 70s-era foreign horror, Dario Argento comes to mind, although he leans toward the gross-out variety. Lovecraft-written films are always great. I’ll check out these you mention (and any others you run across) – if you come up with a list of interesting foreign horror for the last 3 decades or so let me know. I have one plug: watch for “Nobody in Particular”, a crime-drama I helped out on, being re-edited – should be out sometime this year.
Phil Slattery, Writer, Publisher 