Horror Artist Karl Persson
Karl Persson uses a glossy realism to depict horrific themes and evoke the un-plumbable depths of pain, madness, and misery.
Tags: babies, biological/organic/alien, biomechanical, blood, colorful, dark, expressive, implied horror, madness, medical-themed, realism, surreal horror, visceral
Film Review: The Reflecting Skin
1990′s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, and quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of brilliant. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I loved it. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” quality/aesthetic, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.
Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and desolate, isolated, gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot very impressively and gorgeously), The Reflecting Skin is, sort of, about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow who lives nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unimaginable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and owning a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him not to understand these strange, horrific, traumatic events around him.
The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, and unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played pretty much to perfection by Lindsay Duncan. She should be an iconic figure, in my opinion.
This movie is fascinating, and even if you end up not liking it, you should definitely see it. The cinematography alone is worth it.
The entirety of the film (from the Japanese DVD) is up on YouTube.
Tags: 1950s, abuse, bizarre, children, cryptic, dark, film reviews, fragility, hauntingly beautiful, innocence, innocence/menace, macabre, metaphors, puritanical, religion, sexuality, strange beauty, surreal, surreal horror, trailers, vampires, visceral, witchy
Fuyuko Matsui
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, edo-period japan, exposed anatomy, ghosts, macabre, surreal horror
Nicole Absher
Nicole Absher is a very, very talented young artist who produces beautiful, stark, and highly detailed drawings that are dark and provocative, lush with torment made almost palpable by her gorgeous strokes, nightmarish visions mirroring self-image and the eerie lucidity of pain.
Tags: dark, hauntingly beautiful, nicole absher, realism, surreal horror
Digital Horror: The Stunningly Beautiful Art of Karina Marandjian
Tags: bloodmilk, emotive, fleshy, hooks, karina marandjian, moths, nails, photomanipulation, pierced, red and white, self-portraits, surreal horror, torture, trauma
“Immune”: Floria Sigismondi
Floria Sigismondi is an Italian-Canadian photographer, director, and filmmaker who breaks the boundaries between mainstream and alternative visual culture. She has worked with many high-profile artists on their music videos, including Björk, The Cure, Marilyn Manson, and The White Stripes. Her personal projects and commercial work both amaze me with their preternatural beauty and color.
Floria’s vivid, hallucinatory images are morbid, beautiful, and hyper[sur]real. Her works take place in a strange, artificial, and gorgeously colorful world of her own – film stills from her videos could be taken for photo-art and vice versa.
Tags: floria sigismondi, medical-themed, music videos, otherworldly photography, religious imagery, saturated color, self-portraits, surreal horror, virgin mary
Short Film: “Embrio”
Embrio is an experimental short film made entirely by Jean-Sébastien Monzani (story, direction, film, & music), with amazing acting by Stéphanie Schneider.
What draws me to Embrio is its quality of implicit horror, conveyed through the actor’s subtle, ever-changing expressions (she really is the heart of the movie) and the eerie, intense, atmospheric soundtrack. Sans a conventional narrative, Embrio explores the compulsions, fixations, obsessions, and psychological reactions of a young woman, and, though very well-composed, it also has a rawness, depicting naked sensations and emotions with all the vagueness and ambiguity of good psychological horror – all within a clean, bright, well-lit, nearly sterile environment. It draws us deeply, physically, into the experience of the woman, and gets under our skin.
Tags: experimental, psychological horror, short films, surreal horror
Two Trailers
A seductive trailer for Vaticinio that draws you in with lullaby softness, seemingly gravity-defying dance, and a horror edge. I thought it was a trailer for a movie initially, but it’s actually for a theatrical performance that took place last month in Cordoba, Argentina.
This is the teaser trailer for a short film, The Continuing and Lamentable Saga of the Suicide Brothers, which creates a quirky, enchanting, ethereal, and retro-tastic world with an interesting mix of live action and CGI. Available on iTunes. I also love Keira Knightley’s otherworldly appearance as the fairy near the end.
Tags: dance, homage to silent film, modern fairy tales, otherworldly, retro, short films, surreal horror, theater, trailers
Reddened Mouths, White Masks, Hungry Fingers
These are ever-so-creepy installation artworks by Israeli sculptor Ronit Baranga
(via Acidolatte):
Tags: conceptual, installation art, masks, sculptures, surreal horror, teacups
Pedro Pires’ “Danse Macabre”
This is the trailer for a short film, Danse Macabre, directed by Pedro Pires and released last year, which I’d love to see sometime.
Tags: short films, surreal horror
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