By the Pricking of My Thumbs...
I’m discovering that this Creature Feature is rather a crock. Where are the creatures? It looks as though I prefer monster hunters to monsters... that the ‘monsters’ I do draw are more often than not human, ones where any monstrosity hides in their dual nature, people wearing masks that hint at some great deformity of body or mind.
I was listening to Fangoria Radio as I was putting together some of last week’s posts. They had a great interview with Writer/Director Larry Fessenden (Wendigo, The Last Winter) and his Visual Effects Supervisor Glenn McQuaid. Well, McQuaid is working on his own film called I Sell the Dead. It’s about graverobbers. Anyway, McQuaid said something tremendous about what he was going after in his own film. It was something along the lines of having more fog than blood. Tremendous. Atmosphere over gore.
Kinda what’s going on here to some degree. I seem to gravitate toward a more psychological horror than a creature-centered splatterfest. At least, that’s how it looks from this side of the blog.
Mr. Dark from Something Wicked This Way Comes kinda works with the whole creepitude-of-man idea. He’s a guy with an evil menagerie of tattoos all over his body but they’re well-covered by his barker’s suit. He wouldn’t have much luck plying his trade and gathering up souls if his tattoos were able to writhe and wriggle in plain sight. He needs to looks somewhat respectable to dupe the unfortunate to their doom. Don’t ever let the suit fool you!
With this dude I put a tattoo on his arm, some kinda of a sea monster of which we can only see a tentacle or two. It slithers up his arm to some evil and hideous form (probably somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder). We just get a hint of it’s horrible aspect. About the most horrible, on-the-surface thing about this Mr. Dark is his hat hair.
Sidebar: For those of you who don’t know the story of Something Wicked there’s a character, a blind soothsayer lady with a uncanny sixth sense, called the Dust Witch who’s a part of Dark’s carnival (by the way, someone’s got to have made a movie with the title of Carnage-ival or Carnavorival). So, that name... the Dust Witch. I hope that at some point in the writing of the story Bradbury had her down as the Sand Witch. Just for a giggle. Hee hee.
Friday, October 19, 2007
