On Saturday morning, August 24, 2013, several of Lovecraftian fandom's most respected artists gathered for a panel at NecronomiCon-Providence to discuss how they effectively portray aspects of horror in illustration and film. The panel consisted of illustrators Robert Knox, Bob Eggleton, Allen Koszowski, and Jason Eckhardt, and filmmakers Stuart Gordon, Andrew Leman, and Sean Branney. The first part of the conversation was transcribed from existing audio, while the conversation that follows was captured by a method of shorthand.
Knox: "We can all agree that there are many different ways to
depict the indescribable. My approach leans towards absurdity and surrealism.
Eyewitness accounts in Lovecraft’s fiction barely describe the horrors seen, which lets your imagination run wild. Most depictions of Cthulhu are based
on the statue Lovecraft described in detail, with batlike wings and cephapod
head. My take is that the statue is religious art- for the cult is a religion,
as blasphemous as it is- and religious art is only an interpretation, it can’t
be God. Just as we see in Michaelangelo’s paintings of God and know that can’t be Him, the statue can’t be Cthulhu. Remember what George Burns said in the
movie Oh, God! 'If I showed you my real form, you couldn’t handle it.'"
Leman: "Michaelangelo’s depiction of God is flattering to
humans. If the eidolon in “The Call of Cthulhu” is religious art, does it
flatter us or Cthulhu?"
Eckhardt: "The representation is an effort to make Cthulhu
understandable. You need something to focus on while you’re sacrificing humans
in the swamps!"
Gordon: "Lovecraft found everything disturbing, which lends
itself to weird sex scenes, fish, and a sense of otherness."
Eggleton: "I don’t set out to disturb; I draw monsters just
as I liked to as a kid… and sometimes it disturbs people."
Knox: "We’re jaded as artists and are probably tough to
disturb. But surefire elements are things people don’t like: creepy and slimy
things all over them, like bugs, slugs and worms."
Leman: "People like penguins because they’re anthropomorphic,
but this familiarity can also make things weird- something’s that familiar but
not quite right…"
Eckhardt: "Like fish people- what’s stranger than them? I’ve
seen people with the touch of the Innsmouth look... But as for strangeness,
there’s Machen’s idea of taking Heaven by storm, that fish talking and stones
singing would drive you mad."
Knox: "Growing up in New England, you know there’s certain
towns you don’t go to, and you never admit knowing someone from there, from the
town one does not mention in polite company. That idea found in Lovecraft is
quintessentially New England. But in depicting horror in art, is there a such
thing as going too far?"
Gordon: "
No!"
Eckhardt: "Well, if it’s too absurd, you risk the danger of it
becoming ludicrous."
Branney: "As artists, we want to create a suspension of
disbelief, so it’s got to be a believable absurdity."
Leman: "We just did The Color Out of Space, and in that
story- with it’s otherworldly color- you run up against the limits of human
perception- you can’t depict a color that can’t be perceived."
Knox: "What is the single most important factor of portraying the
unnameable?"
Leman: "Leaving something up to the human imagination."
Eggleton: "That can be hard, because as an artist I want to
be in your face with the monster!"
Koszowski: (To Eggleton) "Lumley told me that you made him, your covers
made those books of his."
Gordon: "In movies, the thing left to the imagination is most
disturbing. For instance, in the movie Seven, they show you pieces to the
puzzle when portraying ‘lust,’ not the whole picture. You’re left to construct
the scene yourself and it becomes more terrible than it ever could’ve been on
the screen."
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| Norman Rockwell's "Murder in Mississippi" |
Branney: "There’s a balance between the implicit and the
explicit, and between the two is the sweet spot. The blank spots will linger in
your imagination as your mind chews on it for a long time."
Eckhardt: "The use of shadows can be particularly effective.
In the Norman Rockwell Museum, there’s an enormous canvas of three workers in
headlights and the shadows of the men that murdered them. The violence is
suggested, and it’s all the more powerful and terrifying."
Knox: "In my own work, I want to capture a sense of
absurdity. If the viewer can’t ask, 'what the hell is this?' it’s a failure.
Trying to depict the incomprehensible isn’t easy; I’ve spent my career on that.
For my painting 'The King in Yellow,' I originally wanted it all yellow, but I
had to darken it to become disturbing. What about the ways sight and sound are
used in film?"
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| "The King in Yellow" by Robert Knox |
Gordon: "Sound effects very much get your imagination going.
Have you seen the film Seconds by John Frankenheimer? The scene where they
drill into a guy’s head is all sound effects; as you can imagine it, your head
becomes the one being drilled! The film becomes dreamlike as the guy’s mind is
destroyed."
Branney: "We did 'The Call of Cthulhu' as both a silent film
and a radio adaptation, which makes for an interesting contrast. Image is
powerful and sound is powerful, but when they’re divorced from each other, the
audience needs to imagine what’s missing."
Leman: "Even the city’s name in that story is meant to be
unpronounceable!"
Knox: "My thought should’ve been that every character
pronounces the city and monster differently."
Gordon: "From Beyond had been rejected due to a brain being
sucked through eye sockets, but it was the sound that provoked that response,
because you don’t actually see it happen. We had to take it out to get an R
rating, then we got to put it back in for the bluray release. The most famous
and effective use of sound and image is Psycho- you never see the knife and
body at the same time- you make the connection by sound, which was actually
made by stabbing a melon… and the blood was chocolate syrup. I believe Psycho
was intentionally filmed in black and white to leave more to the imagination."
Branney: "In our The Whisperer in Darkness, we used a chicken leg being ripped apart every time Akeley moved- you can hear the skin and
tendons pop. Organic sounds, like breaking melons and tearing meat, seem to
push buttons."
Leman: "Also part of sound is the film’s soundtrack, which is
absolutely indispensible- music has the ability to appeal directly to the
emotion, bypassing the rational part of the brain."
Gordon: "Going back to Psycho, Bernard Hermann’s score could
even make peanut butter and jelly scary! I can’t imagine the bathroom scene
without the soundtrack."
Branney: "You can only accomplish so much with visuals; the
emotional life of any movie is being laid down by the music, particularly in
our genre."
Gordon: "Do you artists listen to music while painting?"
Koszowski: "I listen to soundtracks."
Eckhardt: "I do, but the music doesn’t necessarily have to
coincide with the feeling of the work."
Knox: "Lately I’ve been listening to Red Sox games while
drawing. As for music, it could be punk one day, a soundtrack the next. But
silence doesn’t work at all."
Koszowski: "I do my drawings dot by dot, and without music, I
couldn’t do it."
Knox: "This idea of an unnnameable horror- it could be an
inanimate object. Lovecraft gives us non-Euclidean geometry- geometry that
follows no logical patterned rows of blocks; however accurately drawn, they
cannot or should not exist. I get a sense of this distortion in Medieval
paintings. M.C. Escher is a great example, too, but most of us would go, “I
can’t do that!” Lee Brown Coye had the habit of including tied bundles of
sticks in his paintings. When he’d made a trip to upstate New York, he saw
these bundles of sticks thrust in the ground and wondered who’d put them there
and for what purpose… He found them disturbing and so he put them in his
paintings."
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| "The Picture of Dorian Gray" |
Leman: "They implied some motivation he couldn’t comprehend,
which made it frightening."
Knox: "What about inspiration? Who are your favorite artists?"
Koszowski: "Virgil Finlay."
Knox: "For me, it’s Hans Bok, Coye, E.C. Comics, and
Surrealism."
Gordon: "Do you know Ivan Albright, who painted 'The Picture
of Dorian Gray?' Everything is moldering, decomposing, including inanimate
objects. Another favorite of his was 'That Which I Should Have Done I did Not
Do.'"
Eggleton: "Arnold Bocklin’s 'The Isle of the Dead' is a disquieting
and disturbing painting of a dark figure that brings souls to the island. Bocklin painted
several versions and even the daylight version is creepy. There’s one in the
Met in New York City. He was a major influence on my work. Also, Tom Wright’s paintings in
Night Gallery are a favorite."
 |
| Arnold Bocklin's "The Isle of the Dead," third version, 1883 |
Knox: "Those paintings remind me of Roger Corman’s Poe films."
Leman: "Hieronymus Bosch and his hideous creatures, half
human, half fish. My first exposure to Lovecraft was through those Michael
Whelan paperbacks with their black and white and red color scheme."
Branney: "I’m a fan of Berni Wrightson’s pen and ink work.
His use of light and shadow evokes different time periods, which we try to do
in film, too."
Eckhardt: "I’m more a traditionalist, liking Howard Pyle. With his
demand for accuracy, you know how that pirate’s coat felt just by looking at
his painting. Are you familiar with Barry Moser? He did a staggering rendition of
Frankenstein."
Knox: "Wrightson’s style owes a great debt to Graham Ingles.
We see artists hundreds of years ago doing works of horror; how did they get
away with it?"
Branney: "They were seen as cautionary works- they depicted
what would happen to you if you don’t go to church!"
Gordon: "Eh, they seemed to show you’d have more fun in Hell
than in Heaven!"
