{horror} – Page 132 – { feuilleton }

New work: Two forms of darkness

Darkness: half-title page.

I’m still behind with site updates but here are two recent design jobs come to cast a shadow over the summer. Darkness is another fiction anthology from Tachyon, edited by Ellen Datlow and subtitled Two Decades of Modern Horror. Ann Monn’s cover design has a snake writhing through shadow so I carried the serpentine motif into the interior design. The book runs to 478 pages and, as the title implies, features lots of big names including Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King.

Darkness: title spread.

Dark Matter, on the other hand, is a double-CD compilation of singles from Bristol’s Multiverse label which is released this month. If you need a descriptor then many of the tracks here would be classed as dubstep, and a few are doomy enough to serve as soundtracks for urban horror. Skream is one of the featured artists, and his Trapped In A Dark Bubble on Tectonic’s Plates 2 collection (which I designed last year) has a great sinister ambience.

The design is very minimal with silver ink on a matt black digipak. The label requested graphics that mixed esoteric symbols with references to modern physics or astronomy without any of the allusions being too specific as to their origin or meaning. For the fonts I used the Fell types which take the design back to grimoires and old manuscripts.

The specimens of Alex CF

Artist Alex CF makes beautifully detailed—and very authentic—cases for cryptozoological specimens. I think I’d seen examples of these before but not the Lovecraft exhibits like this collection which presents samples and studies retrieved from the Mountains of Madness. Among other Lovecraftiana there’s also a case devoted to artefacts from R’lyeh. These would have been ideal additions to the Lovecraft show at Observatory which (as a reminder) opens this Friday.

Via ~Wunderkammer~. (I think. If it wasn’t, it should be…)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• At the Mountains of Madness
• Walmor Corrêa’s Memento Mori
• The art of Ron Pippin
• Custom creatures
• Cryptozoology
• The Museum of Fantastic Specimens

The Thorns of Love by Antoni Maiovvi

The Thorns of Love CD cover.

One of the consequences of having been so productive of late is having less time to update my web pages. The CD design section is now a year out of date so I’ll be trying to amend the situation as time allows.

The Thorns of Love by Antoni Maiovvi was released last month and is another of my designs for the Caravan label. The attention-grabbing photos are by Liz Eve whose work adorned earlier designs for 2562 and Pinch. It’s great to work with quality images like these, and Liz’s gory pictures are an ideal match for Maiovvi’s music, a series of lengthy compositions in a style which might be described as Giorgio Moroder scoring a Dario Argento horror movie. This is a fantastic album and the CD’s fourth track, Class Dagger, is one of the best new electronic pieces I’ve heard this year.

The Thorns of Love vinyl sleeve.

The Thorns of Love was released on double-12″ vinyl as well as CD so I’ve also posted the vinyl art, something I need to go back and do for previous designs. Vinyl isn’t dead by any means, and it’s a pleasure to work for the larger format.

• Antoni Maiovvi interviewed at Electrofreaks

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dead on the Dancefloor

Odes and Sonnets by Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith’s weird fiction is reprinted more often and more widely than his poetry so it’s convenient for those curious about his verse that the Internet Archive has two volumes of early work. Odes and Sonnets is from 1918 and features embellishments by illustrator Florence Lundborg whose grape-devouring peacocks nod towards the fin de siècle spirit Smith was trying to capture in his poems. The Star-Treader, and Other Poems is Smith’s first book from 1912, published when he was just 19, and is heavily indebted to the Decadents. That Decadent influence carried over into the stories he wrote for Weird Tales and augments their unique flavour and over-heated atmosphere, an atmosphere which raised his work above the often mediocre level of his contemporaries. On page 58 of The Star-Treader can be found The Eldritch Dark, the poem from which the leading Smith website takes its name.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Clark Ashton Smith book covers

House of Harrington

Curtis Harrington.

House of Harrington is a short documentary from 2008 about the late filmmaker Curtis Harrington which has just been posted to YouTube by its makers, and by a curious coincidence this appearance occurs in the week of Dennis Hopper’s death. Harrington gave Hopper the lead in his debut feature Night Tide (1961) at a time when the actor was ostracised in Hollywood after a falling out with director Henry Hathaway. Hopper’s diligent performance in Harrington’s film, a low budget horror, is a long way from the histrionics one usually finds in works of this sort and is a good reason to seek it out.

Marjorie Cameron in The Wormwood Star.

Also in Night Tide in a wordless role is the enigmatic occult artist Marjorie Cameron who drifts around looking spooky and mysterious. Cameron had earlier appeared with Harrington in Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954), he as Cesaré the Somnambulist from Caligari, she as Aleister Crowley’s Scarlet Woman. That encounter led to Harrington making her the subject of one of his experimental shorts, The Wormwood Star in 1956. I’ve wanted to see this film for years, if only to sate a persistent curiosity, and House of Harrington contains a few tantalising glimpses. With luck it may turn up on YouTube (or even DVD) in the future.

Lastly, Automat Pictures, the makers of House of Harrington, also have a lengthy filmed lecture in their channel, Queer for Fear, which “explores gay and lesbian subtext in the horror film, and examines the intertwining of queer history and monster movies.”

• House of Harrington: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Curtis Harrington, 1926–2007
• The art of Cameron, 1922–1995
• Kenneth Anger on DVD…finally