Category Archives: horror

Toshio Saeki: The Early Works (1997) – Toshio Saeki

Toshio Saeki: The Early Works (1997) – Toshio Saeki
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Book Description
Before Toshio Saeki worked in his current palette of bright colors, he expressed the darker and more chaotic aspects of unbridled eroticism in black and white, with the occasional and dramatic splash of a single primary color. In this lavishly illustrated book, Saeki’s disturbing iconography reveals links to the past and simultaneously indicates the even more bizarre twists his work would take in the future. Early Works also includes the panel-by-panel replication of a Saeki manga story. Japanese Text Only

Please note that Catherine Robbe-Grillet has contributed to this book.

More here and here and more Japanese erotica here.

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

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 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]

The Venus of Ille (1837) – Prosper Mérimée

In search of le fantastique in literature and pygmalionism

Cover of unidentified audio book

Prosper Mérimée is best known for writing the opera Carmen made famous by Bizet, which has also been adapted to film by Radley Metzger, is featured here with a short story/novella about a statue that comes to life, a fantastic story.

“The Venus of Ille” is about an old bronze statue unearthed in the town of Ille, in the French Pyrenees. It is unearthed in the yard of Monsieur de Peyrehorade, a “very learned antiquarian.” He is quite taken with it, and in fact thinks more about it than about the upcoming wedding of his son. The nameless narrator is visiting Peyrehorade simply to look at the ruins in the area, but on hearing about the statue he is intrigued. Before he gets a good look at the statue he sees two townies throw a stone at the statue (while it was being unearthed it fell on the leg of a workman and broke it) only to have the stone thrower cry out in pain and say that the statue threw the stone back at him. The narrator laughs this away, but on seeing the statue up close he isn’t so sanguine. The form and body are magnificent, but its face is…not so magnificent. —http://www.geocities.com/jessnevins/vicv.html [Oct 20006]

The 1979 La Venere di Ille was made as part of a series of movies commissioned by the Italian TV station RaiDue focusing on the fantastic in 19th century literature. The texts were selected by the Italian author Italo Calvino. Mario Bava and his son Lamberto directed the film.

Excerpt

“Shortly afterwards, the door opened a second time, and some one came in who said, ‘Good evening, my little wife.’ Then the curtains were drawn back. She heard a stifled cry. The person who was in the bed beside her sat up apparently with extended arms. Then she turned her head and saw her husband, kneeling by the bed with his head on a level with the pillow, held close in the arms of a sort of greenish-colored giant. She says, and she repeated it to me twenty times, poor woman!- she says that she recognized- do you guess who?-the bronze Venus, M. de Peyrehorade’s statue. Since it has been here every one dreams about it. But to continue the poor lunatic’s story. At this sight she lost consciousness, and probably she had already lost her mind. She cannot tell how long she remained in this condition. Returned to her sense she saw the phantom, or the statue as she insists on calling it, lying immovable, the legs and lower part of the body on the bed, the bust and arms extended forward, and between the arms her husband, quite motionless. A cock crew. Then the statue left the bed, let fall the body, and went out. Mme. Alphonse rushed to the bell, and you know the rest.”

—http://frenital.byu.edu/merimee/works/TheVenusofIlle.html [Oct 2006]

Prosper Mérimée (September 28, 1803–September 23, 1870) was a French dramatist, historian, archaeologist, and short story writer. One of his stories was the basis of the opera Carmen. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosper_M%C3%A9rim%C3%A9e [Oct 2006]

Her stupid questions …

“Her stupid questions, which once had seemed to me the happiest proof of her love; her voice, which had once been capable of exciting me physically; her touch which had ravished me, all had only one effect and influence over me now—to enervate me. She became jealous, or behaved as if she were; there was scene after scene. I realized that I should have been devastated, but all I could feel was torture. Then she would kiss my hand, beg for forgiveness, we would rest side by side, and I was consumed by boredom. I ate oranges and was annoyed by the thought that I would have to get up in the middle of the night and go home. And as I held her in my arms, I was thinking of any other woman, longing for any other woman, a prostitute for all I cared, if only I could have kissed other lips, heard other sighs…”

If Schnitzler was a master of the playboy type, he was even more famous for his depiction of the woman with whom the playboy was so often involved, das susses Madel, “the sweet girl.” She is socially inferior and sexually accessible; he can buy her company with modest gifts. Each of the parties in this relationship is subject to a characteristic illusion: the young man pretends that there may be a future for their affair; the young woman tries to pretend that she is content with its impermanence. The break, when it comes, is likely to be awkward for the young man, painful for the young woman. Far from being the femme fatale of the fin-de-siècle aesthetic imagination, she is fragile and vulnerable. –via http://media.ucsc.edu/classes/thompson/schnitzler.html [Oct 2006]

See also: Arthur Schnitzler (1862 – 1931)

In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn

In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European æsthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the “advanced intelligentsia” to minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state. –H. P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature (1924-1927) via http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Supernatural_Horror_in_Literature/Edgar_Allan_Poe [Oct 2006]