Read an excerpt here.
Big Book of Breasts (2006) – Dian Hanson
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See wiki: The Big Book of Breasts
Category Archives: grotesque
Q (1982) – Larry Cohen
Q (1982) – Larry Cohen
See also: itsonlyamovie.co.uk Google image gallery hundreds of video cover scans.
Q is one of my all time favourite films, although its been about 10 years since I’ve last seen it.
In Q (aka The Winged Serpent, 1982), the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl is resurrected and flies about New York City snatching human sacrifices off the skyscrapers. Cohen was able to employ the talents of Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Candy Clark, and the film is one of his most sophisticated, but it still manages to include such lines as “Maybe his head got loose and fell off.” and “I want a Nixon type pardon!”
See also: 1982 – video cover artwork – Larry Cohen
Un pauvre honteux – Xavier Forneret
In the 1992 British horror film, Tale of a Vampire, a centuries-old vampire and scholar (Julian Sands) approaches an occult-specialist librarian (Suzanna Hamilton) when he sees her reading an antique volume of Forneret. He tells her that his favorite poem by Forneret (1809-1884) is “Le pauvre honteux”–about a starving man who eats his own hand.
Below is the poem in question:
Un pauvre honteux
| Il l’a tirée De sa poche percée, L’a mise sous ses yeux ; Et l’a bien regardée En disant : ” Malheureux ! “Il l’a soufflée De sa bouche humectée ; Il avait presque peur D’une horrible pensée Qui vint le prendre au coeur.Il l’a mouillée D’une larme gelée Qui fondit par hasard ; Sa chambre était trouée Encor plus qu’un bazar. Il l’a frottée Il l’a pesée Il l’a touchée Il l’a baisée, Il l’a palpée Il l’a pliée, |
Quand il n’était pas grand on lui avait dit : Si tu as faim, mange une de tes mains.
Xavier Forneret (1809-1884) was a French dramaturge, poet and journalist. In the 1830s, he was a member of the Bouzingo, a group of poets which advocated a radical bohemian romanticism in life and art; contemporaries and kindred spirits included Gerard de Nerval and Theophile Gautier. His reputation was partly rehabilitated by Andre Breton, who included some of Forneret’s poems and aphorisms in his Anthology of Black Humor (1940).
Exploitation culture by region
Hank Janson pulp cover
American exploitation culture is well-known throughout the world, European exploitation culture less so.
The previous posts on Stewart Home and Richard Allen led me to Hank Janson [Google Gallery] and Reginald Heade [Google gallery], the latter two examples of 1950s British exploitation culture.
Exploitation by region: By region: American exploitation – British exploitation – European exploitation – French exploitation – German exploitation – Italian exploitation – Japanese exploitation
My interest in regional pulp culture is what it tells about the region where it is produced. In search of national stereotypes by way of their exploitation culture; regional stereotypes deduced from regional fears and desires (horror and eroticism).
The Assault on Culture (1988) – Stewart Home
The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War (1988) – Stewart Home
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Stewart Home (born 1962) is a British fiction writer, subcultural pamphleteer, underground art historian, and activist. His mother, Julia Callan-Thompson, was a model and hostess who was associated with the radical arts scene in Notting Hill Gate. She knew such people as the writer and situationist Alexander Trocchi. Stewart was put up for adoption soon after his birth.
The Assault on Culture, originally written but rejected as a B.A. thesis, is an underground art history sketching Stewart Home’s ultimately personal history of ideas and influences in post-World War II fringe radical art and political currents, and including – for the first time in a book – a tactically manipulated history of Neoism (including character assassinations of individual Neoist) that was continued in the later book Neoism, Plagiarism and Praxis. Despite its highly personal perspective and agenda, The Assault on Culture: Utopian currents from Lettrisme to Class War (Aporia Press and Unpopular Books, London, 1988) is considered a useful art-history work, providing an introduction to a range of cultural currents which had, at that time at least, been under-documented. Like Home’s other publications of that time, it played an influential part in renewing interest in the Situationist International. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Home
See also: Lettrism – Situationism – assault – culture – 1988
The Fly (1986) – David Cronenberg
The Fly (1986) – David Cronenberg
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A brilliant but eccentric scientist begins to transform into a giant man/fly hybrid after one of his experiments goes horribly wrong. A celebration of biological horror, body horror, metamorphoses and the theme of the beauty and the beast. One of David Cronenberg’s mainstream films.
See also: metamorphoses – David Cronenberg – 1986
Metamorphoses
Unknown engraving of Heliades turning into trees
Metamorphoses of any kind have always interested me because of their uncanniness. I recently re-viewed The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) by Roger Corman in which a plant becomes a carnivore, and after it has eaten a number of people, the last buds of the plant open and reveal the faces of the people it has eaten. Voilà, man is crossed with a flower –> metamorphosis.
Metamorphosis is a frightening and intriguing concept which can take many forms: crosses between humans and plants, objects and humans, etc…
A particular variety of metamorphosis is people turning into furniture. So I found two stories in which humans transform into chairs: the French libertine novel Le Sopha, conte moral (1742) by Crébillon fils and Japanese short story The Human Chair (1925) by Edogawa Rampo. In both stories a man becomes a sofa, in the former quite literally so (by a curse), in the latter, a man hides in sofa to feel the persons who sit in him.
Das Gespensterbuch (1569) – Ludwig Lavater
In search of the roots of Tales of the Dead.
Das Gespensterbuch (1569) – Ludwig Lavater
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Image sourced here.
The fullest and most influential work on angels and ghosts in the sixteenth century was Das Gespensterbuch by Ludwig Lavater, first printed in Zurich in 1569. The work was quickly translated into German and then French, Spanish and Italian. The English translation appeared in 1572 with the title, Of Ghostes and Spirites walking by Nyght, and of strange noyses, crackes and sundry forewarninges.
In a conflicting account on Wikipedia, where Gespensterbuch redirects to Tales of the Dead, there is no reference to an anterior version of Gespensterbuch (and maybe there are no similarities, but just the title, I don’t know).
The collection had its origin in Gespensterbuch (lit. “ghost book”), a five-volume anthology of German language ghost stories. The original anthology was published in Leipzig between 1811 and 1815. The stories were compiled by Friedrich August Schulze (1770 – 1849), under the pen name Friedrich Laun, and Johann August Apel (September 17, 1771 – August 9, 1816).
The latter is the one that was used by Byron and company in 1816 to scare and inspire:
On the night of June 16, after Lord Byron, John Polidori and the Shelleys had read aloud from the Tales of the Dead, a collection of horror tales, Byron suggested that they each write a ghost story. Mary Shelley worked on a tale that would later evolve into Frankenstein. Byron wrote (and quickly abandoned) a fragment of a story, which Polidori used later as the basis for his own tale. [Aug 2006]
Elijah in the Desert (1818) – Washington Allston
Elijah in the Desert (1818 ) – Washington Allston
Image sourced here.
Painted in the manner of Salvator Rosa in 1818.
Orlando Furioso and the fantastique
Ruggiero Rescuing Angelica (1819) – Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
Orlando Furioso (1877) – Gustave Doré
Orlando Furioso (“Mad Orlando” or “The Madness of Orlando” ) is an epic poem written by Ludovico Ariosto in 1516. It is a “gionta”, a sequel, to Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love), but it is quite distant from the other work in that it does not preserve the humanistic concepts of knight errantry.
Related: Orlando Furioso