{horror} – Page 147 – { feuilleton }

At the Mountains of Madness

Going through stacks of old artwork today turned up a photocopy of a drawing I did in 1990, my sole attempt to illustrate HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. By the time I did this I was pretty exhausted by Lovecraft’s world and was already at work on the first phase of the Lord Horror comics for Savoy which explains why this is a bit half-hearted, the architecture owing more to Piranesi than anything particularly alien. I forget why I did this now, I think it was at someone’s request, and I’ve also no idea where the original drawing is. The sprawling organic cityscape/landscape I created last year for the Maison d’Ailleurs exhibition is probably closer to the kind of thing this story requires.

At the Mountains of Madness was rejected by Lovecraft’s usual publisher, Weird Tales, for not being enough of a horror story. This is true, the novella is more of a fictional travelogue, especially in its later half where a million-year-old alien city is discovered in the heart of Antarctica. Science fiction magazine Astounding took it instead where it made the cover of the February 1936 issue, the climactic shoggoth attack being painted by Howard V Brown. Poor old Lovecraft had nearly all his most famous stories published in Weird Tales, and helped give the magazine its lasting reputation, yet he was never given a cover feature during his lifetime. Astounding gave him the honour again in June of the same year for another novella, The Shadow Out of Time, also illustrated by Howard Brown.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lovecraftian horror at Maison d’Ailleurs

William Heath Robinson’s illustrated Poe

Another gem from the Internet Archive collection of scans from North American libraries. This edition of the poems of Edgar Allan Poe from 1900 was illustrated by William Heath Robinson (1872–1944), an artist whose later drawings of quirky inventions have completely overshadowed his earlier books, as well as the work of his equally talented older brother, Charles. I’m probably in the minority in preferring Heath Robinson’s book illustration to his later works, and this edition of Poe is a superb example of his mastery of line and space. It can’t compete with Harry Clarke’s Poe, of course, but then neither can anything else. WHR wasn’t really suited to the darker side of literature but he acquits himself here far better than Arthur Rackham did when he attempted his own Poe collection in 1935.

• Bud Plant’s W Heath Robinson page
• W. Heath Robinson’s fairy tale illustrations

The Conqueror Worm.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive

Witness my hand and official seal

Anxious purchasers of the lavish Lovecraft art book from Centipede Press may like to know that the European signing sheets have arrived here safely ready to be scrawled upon by yours truly. I was surprised to find that these are big pages which means this book is going to be a real monster in all senses of the word, and certainly worth every dollar of its considerable cost. And I was pleased to find myself listed on the same sheet as the great Ian Miller, an artist I had the pleasure of meeting some years ago and whose Lovecraft covers for the Panther Horror series in the Seventies went some way to inspiring my own efforts a few years later.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there’s still a lot more sheets to sign…

La folie Lovecraft

La folie Lovecraft
| The Maison d’Ailleurs exhibition profiled in Libération.

Images by Robert Altman

It’s taken a while but the DVD format has slowly followed the CD with the reissue of obscure works that have been out of circulation for far too long. Robert Altman’s blandly-titled Images has been on my “When The Hell Will I See That Again?” list for about 25 years, having been shown a couple of times on TV in the UK before vanishing into the cinematic ether. It’s been out on DVD (Region 1 only) for a few years now but it’s taken me this long to see it again. In a way the film’s elusiveness suits a drama concerned with hallucinations.

Altman made Images in 1972 between two films that received far more attention and acclaim, the eccentric Western, McCabe and Mrs Miller and his Raymond Chandler update, The Long Goodbye. Images seems to have been poorly-received at the time although Susannah York deservedly won a best actress award at Cannes. Today it comes across as a minor exercise in mastery of the medium equivalent to Francis Coppola’s deft delivery of The Conversation between Godfathers 1 and 2. And, like The Conversation, it’s only “minor” because of the scale of Altman’s other achievements. For many directors this would be a career peak.

Images is a kind of Altmanesque riposte to Roman Polanki’s Repulsion. Both films concern women having trouble with the men in their lives which may or may not be the cause of a mental breakdown which becomes progressively worse throughout the film. Polanski’s take on this far is more overt, with Catherine Deneuve already withdrawn from the world at the outset. Susannah York’s character, Cathryn, is a children’s writer who seems at first to be relatively stable until her life is increasingly intruded upon by the ghost of a former (dead) lover and other hallucinations from her past. This is played out in and around a cottage in a spectacular part of Ireland where she’s staying with her husband. Most of Altman’s films go for laughs even when the subject matter is inherently serious. Images, along with a handful of his other works, has no leavening humour at all and, like Repulsion, crosses into all-out horror at times. Unfortunately this makes it difficult to discuss without spoiling the film’s many surprises.

Seeing this again was essentially like seeing it for the first time, not least because it’s a widescreen film that I only ever saw on TV in an inferior pan-and-scan version. The photography was by Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the great cinematographers of the 1970s and Altman’s favourite cameraman at that time. The production design is filled with mirrors, glass and wind-chimes, all of which complement Cathryn’s brittle mental state and which continually catch her in their reflections. The music by a pre-bombast John Williams is very good and is superbly augmented by Stomu Yamash’ta whose percussion ensemble is credited with the unnerving “sounds” which contribute so much to the atmosphere. Susannah York’s performance is excellent and serves as a reminder of what a great actress she was, frequently making the most of difficult roles in films such as The Killing of Sister George, The Maids or The Shout.

The screenplay for Images was all Altman’s work apart from Cathryn’s voiceovers where she reads (or writes in her head) parts of her novel. These were extracts from a real fantasy book for children, In Search of Unicorns, written by the actress, one of two she wrote in the 1970s. Those extracts add to the verisimilitude as well as being sufficiently naive and otherworldly to contrast with the very adult events being shown on the screen.

So I can finally tick this one off the list although I now have an urge to see Altman’s curious and not altogether successful science fiction film, Quintet. No. 1 on the “When The Hell Will I See That Again?” list remains Deep End from 1971, the first British film by Jerzy Skolimowski who later made The Shout. According to a recent Sight & Sound feature the film is caught in some legal limbo so I could still be in for a long wait.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Robert Altman, 1925–2006