Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts

Monday, September 6, 2021

10 Bizarre Hand-painted Horror Movie Posters

 Copyright 2021 by Gary L. Pullman

 

 Artist Heavy J.( Source: Deadly Prey)

In the 1980s, Ghanaian entrepreneurs seized upon their country's recent importation of VCRs to show movies to members of neighborhood video clubs. Local artists who went by their first names or pseudonyms, including Leonardo, Heavy J, Farkira, Salvation, and Magasco, to name only a few, likewise benefited from these new enterprises, since club owners commissioned them to create original posters to advertise the films.

Using flour sacks for their canvasses, the painters offered their own garish interpretations of their subjects. Often combining violence and gore with bizarre interpretations of both Ghanaian movies and foreign films, including Hollywood blockbusters, the artists' work generated excitement about the movies, and the video clubs became huge hits.

Simple in design and execution, the outrageous hand-painted Ghana posters look nothing like the slick, mass-produced lobby cards seen in traditional movie theaters. Instead, the Ghana movie posters are truly one of a kind, offering those who may be unfamiliar with the nation's culture a window into the nature of Ghana's entertainment business, its local art, and the innovative nature of its entrepreneurs.

Cujo

Although Ghana posters advertise all film genres, many of the most shocking examples promote horror movies. Surprisingly, though, even movies that are designed to horrify are not always imagined as horrific by the Ghanaian artists who paint them, usually with little or no knowledge of the plots of the movies the posters are supposed to promote.

For Cujo, Lewis Teague's 1983 cinematic adaptation of Stephen King's 1981 novel of the same name, which pits a rabid St. Bernard against an isolated family, the theatrical release poster shows an isolated house under a dark, threatening sky; the neglected white picket fence in front of the distant residence bears, in dripping, blood-red paint, the warning, “Now there's a new name for terror: Cujo.”

 

Source: CNN

By contrast, the Ghanaian poster shows an adult female figure standing behind a male child. The sky is blue. An oversize dog, more closely resembling a Basset hound than a St. Bernard, lies across the bottom of the poster, the very picture of harmless calm—except for the blood slathering the canine's muzzle. Despite the blood, which appears almost an afterthought, the poster conveys more a sense of serenity and domestic bliss than it does an aura of dread and danger.

The reason for the differences in the theatrical release poster and its hand-painted counterpart is suggested by a question raised by writer Peter Shadbolt: “How would you design a movie poster for a Hollywood blockbuster you’d never seen, filled with characters you knew nothing about and actors you’d never heard of?” The Ghanaian Cujo poster is one answer to this question.

Fright Night

Such adjectives as “simple,” “unsophisticated,” “cartoonish,” “gaudy,” and “lurid” are often used to describe the strikingly original artwork displayed in Ghanaian movie posters. They were not intended to be masterpieces. Instead, they were commissioned with but one purpose. The artists paid to paint the posters were given much the same instruction as Frank Armah, who “began painting posters for Ghanaian movie theaters in the mid-1980s”; the goal of his posters was simple: “Sell as many tickets as possible.” The way to accomplish this objective was also simple: exaggerate. “If the movie was gory, the poster should be gorier (skulls, blood, skulls dripping blood). If it was sexy, make the poster sexier (breasts, lots of them, ideally at least watermelon-sized).

During the 1980s and 1990s, the posters sold the movies. Today, they are sold to collectors for as much as $2000 each and grace the walls of American and European art galleries. In addition, the “cult following” of the artists' fans keep the painters busy creating copies of the original posters for sale to eager customers.

The fact that the posters so little depict the contents of the films they promote is the reason that they are in such demand as collectibles, art dealer Ernie Wolfe believes. “These posters appeal to people because [they] invite this really incredible dialogue—a comparison between what you know of a film and how the painter imagined it. And they’re also just really good art.”

The Ghanaian poster for Fright Night (1985), directed by Tom Holland, is a good example of this poster-movie disconnect. The theatrical release poster shows a group of ghastly apparitions hovering over a house. Inside, framed by the residence's only illuminated window, the silhouette of a standing man is visible. Apparently, the resident is oblivious to the presence of the maniacal spirits raging above his house. The darkness of the night sky, illuminated only by stars and a full moon, the darkness of the man's silhouette, and the darkness of the shadowy lawn in front of the isolated house reinforce the poster's caption: “There are some good reasons to be afraid of the dark.”

Source: The Atlantic

One Ghanaian version shows neither apparitions, house, occupant, night sky, nor dark lawn. Instead, it depicts a winged serpent in a blue business suit, complete with bloodstained necktie. The creature's pair of scaly human hands, one red, the other orange, reach toward a blonde; the tip of its tongue, between her lips, drools blood. The claws of the scaly orange hand reach inside the woman's mouth. Her brow, face, and neck are lacerated and bleeding, and the flesh of her upper right arm is torn. A young man's head rests against her side. The movie's title appears above the man's head. There is no darkness—at least no literal darkness—of which to be afraid, and the woman looks more exhausted than horrified, despite her wounds.

Rituals

During the 1980s, the video clubs showed mostly imported movies (horror and splatter movies from the U. S., kung fu pictures from Hong Kong, cannibal films from Italy and France, and Bollywood comedy productions from India), but, beginning in the next decade, especially in Nigeria, the clubs included both Ghanaian and Nigerian films, with the establishment of the Ghallywood and Nollywood film industries.

This more local fare sometimes reflected historical conflicts between Christianity and local religions in which, often, the former displaced the latter. These movies had a proselytizing mission. To convert their audiences from “the natural religions,” the films depicted the spirits of the local religions as “evil forces,” such as demons, or “pagan” forces, such as those of voodoo, which were overcome by God or a Christian priest. Often, the churches themselves financed these films.

Other themes include human sacrifice; cannibalism; and evil deeds involving children as victims, “perpetrators,” and witches. One of the posters promoting Rituals, a Nollywood movie (director unknown) that includes references to human sacrifice, is typical of the sensationalism of the Ghanaian horror movie posters. The poster depicts a semi-nude man, bandoleers crossed over his chest, setting a large bowl containing a bloody, decapitated man's head on a table occupied by six human skulls and a human bone. No caption provides any hints as to the situation; the sole clue that viewers receive is that which is supplied by the film's title: the head, skulls, and bone, are involved in “rituals” of some sort. Only a reference, external to the poster itself, relates these rituals to human sacrifices.

Jurassic Park

 


While Ghanaian movie posters do not always depict the actual contents of the films they promote, this discrepancy is not considered a flaw among art collectors and experts. “They're not just film posters,” says Karun Thakar, the curator of the African Gaze exhibition in London, England. The exhibition showcased over a hundred posters that, along roads and in markets and other “public spaces,” advertised screenings of Bollywood, Nollywood, Ghallywood, and Hollywood films by “mobile video clubs.”

Like others of their kind, these Ghanaian movie posters were “gruesome and gaudy,” and they usually did not have much to do with the actual plots of the movies they promoted. They also zeroed in on films' minor elements rather than key features of the movies if such elements were provocative. For example, the poster promoting Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) focused on the prostitute with three breasts who appears in only one short scene of the film.

Even when the posters deigned to feature the movie's protagonist, the main character was often illustrated as performing an action that is unrelated to the movie's plot, and the scene frequently differs drastically from the images in the film itself. The Ghanaian poster for Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) is a good example. The poster “features a freakish dinosaur,” resembling a hybrid Tyrannosaurus Rex-brontosaurus—“gobbling up a man and a person playing golf, indicating that the artists painting these posters might not have seen the films.”

Mandy

Brian Chankin, the proprietor of a video rental store in Chicago, Illinois, is a fan of Ghanaian movie posters. He not only collects and sells them, but he has also commissioned quite a few original paintings by noted Ghanaian movie poster painters. Chankin tours the United States, showing his collections from the mobile art gallery he operates. In addition, he partners with Ghana artists who make “huge tattoo flash paintings in the same style as the movie posters.”

Although the movie posters themselves seldom reflect what the films they advertise show, that's not an issue for fans, nor are the posters' occasional “misspellings and plot inconsistencies.” What counts, for admirers and collectors, is the posters' “eye-catching” qualities. 

Proceeds from the sales of the shop's prints of original art and a book, Deadly Prey, featuring photographs of the “earliest commission paintings” and essays by Chankin, commission agent Robert Kofi, and Terry Zwigoff, director of Ghost World, Bad Santa, and other horror films, support “artists in Ghana.”

In the Ghanaian poster for Panos Cosmatos's Mandy (2018), the man with the amputated right arm, the slashed left arm holding a decapitated head, and the slashed left leg who flees a chainsaw-wielding killer and a man with a knife does not look exactly like Nicholas Cage. However, the poster otherwise succeeds in conveying at least the essence of the horror movie it promotes.

The film concerns a couple, Red Miller and Mandy Bloom, who are living alone in a forest when they are attacked by a cult of hippies and demonic bikers. The sadistic attacks motivate Red to strike back, and his vengeance is predictably terrible, violent, and bloody. Red's wounds, cult member Marlene's decapitated head, Brother Klopek and his chainsaw, and Klopek's accomplice and his knife, like the sliced head and the woman with the gaping hole in the center of her abdomen, suggest the orgy of violence that the movie presents, and, although the action is compacted in the collection of images, as if they occur simultaneously, rather than successively, the poster is mostly true to the picture's plot, a relative rarity among Ghanaian movie posters.

Night of the Demons 3

The studios in which Ghanaian artists worked were simple by the standards of the countries in which the films were produced that were shown by the video clubs, as were the facilities the entrepreneurs used to exhibit the imported pictures. A 2005 photograph of a Ghanaian artist known as Leonardo shows the painter seated in a plastic chair, cans of paints and other supplies on a shelf behind him or stacked against the wall below the shelf, in crates, a galvanized steel tub, and plastic trash bags. Wearing only overalls and flip-flops, he sweats in the heat of the day inside concrete walls decorated with words in red, blue, and green paint. His tools—a hammer, brushes, cans, and large rectangular cuts of cotton for use as his canvases—are visible among the other stored items.


In another photograph, one of Leonardo's colleagues, Heavy J., stands beside his poster for Jim Kaufman's Night of the Demons 3 (1997). In his vision of the movie, a male lamia, or snake man, is wound around a kneeling woman who frantically tries to remove the monster's coils. The creature holds its arms up, as if it is about to claw an attacker. The poster is displayed at the front of one of the video club's theaters, advising audiences that the movie is scheduled to be shown at “6:30 PM.” The single bench shown in the photograph suggests the nature of the theater's seating, which is confirmed by other photographs apparently typical of the arrangements of seats.

In another photograph, a showing of a movie is seen in progress in Tema, Ghana. An audience of nine are present. Two stand, their hands raised overhead; the others sit, one or two to a bench, several with their hands raised as well, and all watch the television set on a high shelf inside a cabinet. Although plenty of seats remain along the six half-empty benches visible in the photograph, those in attendance seem to be enjoying the picture.

The Guardian

Source: Ernie Wolfe Gallery

The Ernie Wolfe Gallery is an online exhibition hall on which “Golden Age Hand-Painted Movie Posters from Ghana” are on perpetual display. The collections show a variety of film genres, including horror, which seems as popular with Ghanaian audiences as it is with other moviegoers across the globe. Since the artists typically painted the posters of the movies to be presented before the films were actually shown to video clubs’ audiences, their art is almost always strikingly different than the actual movies the posters supposedly represent, offering viewers fresh perspectives on the films themselves. Although often lurid, the art is also highly imaginative.

Source:  Ernie Wolfe Gallery

The poster for William Friedkin's The Guardian (1990), features a personified tree that attacks adults and children alike. One victim hangs from a branch. Another struggles to free himself from the mouth in the tree's trunk. A third, armed with a chainsaw, the blade of which is smeared with blood from one of the tree's uncanny roots, is entangled in a looped branch, from which the party's fourth victim, while lying on the ground, wound in the coils of another branch, seeks to free him. The poster suggests that the movie is about an animated and malevolent forest. In reality, although a somewhat similar scene occurs in the film, the picture is about a nanny whom a young couple hire to care for their newborn baby—a nanny who is also a goddess intent upon protecting her domain.

Braindead

Besides the fact that Ghanaian artists often did not know, in any detail, if at all, what a movie actually showed, they were also handicapped by the facts that they did not have access to the foreign studios' posters for the movies or to reproductions of the original posters, since Ghana's “military rulers restricted the import of printing presses.”

To get prospective audiences into the buildings and tents in which the video clubs' cinematic offerings would be shown, local artists were instructed to pull out all the stops. They did so, starting with the dimensions of the paintings. Like the style of the art itself, the “canvases” the artists cut from flour sacks were larger than life, measuring “40 to 50 inches in width, and 55 to 70 inches in height.”

The artists were so successful in selling the movies that, “by the 1990s, the height of the movie club business, several dozen artists were employed to produce the posters.” By the 2000s, the demand for video clubs began to disappear, since “home viewing became more widespread and printing became more practical than commissioning original artworks.”

 

During the heyday of Ghanaian movie poster production, however, some truly fantastic, if bizarre, works were created, including artist Salvation’s poster for Braindead (1992), directed by Peter Jackson, which suggests the bloodbath that ensues when a woman who dies, after having been bitten by a Sumatran monkey, returns to life to feed on both animals and people, including her former friends and neighbors.

Source: Deadly Prey

Salvation's poster features a Lon Chaney look-alike with fangs and a missing eye, a pale ghoul spewing green bile, a beast that resembles a cross between a dog and a monkey, and a gang of vampires in pursuit of a brawny man wielding a sword. With no reference to the movie's plot in the artist's picture, potential viewers would likely have plenty of questions about the scene Salvation depicts, which is just what the video club owners would have wanted in commissioning the work.

Species

How might Roger Donaldson's Species (1995) be interpreted by an artist who had not seen the film? Thanks to the survival of the Ghanaian movie poster for this movie, we do not have to wonder.

 

Source: Wikiart

Although there is no evidence that the poster's painter knew of Rene Magritte's surreal paintings, the poster for Species resembles Magritte's oil painting The Harvest (1943). Just as Magritte paints the figure of his reclining female nude in several colors, with arms of different hues, a head of a tint that matches no other part of the figure's body, and legs of mismatched shades, the body of the Ghanaian artist's blonde-haired female alien is various shades of blue, green, and peach.

The painting's surreal quality is also evident in the inclusion of the naked man who crawls on his knees, eating one rat as he wraps his impossibly long, slender tongue around a second rodent. Although the poster's art has virtually nothing to do with the plot of the film it promotes, the warning presented by its caption, “Men cannot resist her; mankind cannot survive her,” is probably true enough.

Cannibal Terror

A largely panned French contribution to the fare the video clubs showed was the 1981 film Cannibal Terror directed by Alain Deruelle. The plot is simple. After their kidnapping goes awry, two inept kidnappers, Mario and Roberto, hole up in a friend's house in the jungle. In the process, Mario rapes the friend's wife. (With friends like these, who needs enemies, right?) Afterward, the criminals encounter a tribe of hungry cannibals.

The plot doesn't seem to have given the artist much with which to work, but the painter made the most of what he had, showing one of the criminals lying on the ground, on his back, as three members of the tribe, seated beneath the tree, dig in. One munches on the victim's calf; another devours his left forearm; and the third chows down on a length of intestines that he pulls from the gaping cavity carved into the dead man's abdomen. It's a bloody feast, and the rapist's vital fluid dribbles down his severed limbs, his slit-open belly, the stump of his amputated left leg, and the chests of those who make a meal of him. Despite the movie’s meager plot, the film rewards its audiences with plenty of blood and gore, according to the poster, at least.

 

Ghanaian movie poster artists (left to right):Salvation, Heavy J, Mr, Nana Agyq, Fakira, and Stoger

Source: Nerdist

Unfortunately, the artists who created these lurid masterpieces of tasteless, often violent and gory art, were probably underpaid, since their work took them as many as three days, “depending on the subject matter and what the artist could find out about the movie.” To expedite the painting process, artists relied on such “well-worn tropes [as] snake women, skeletons, zombies, witchcraft, and even the occasional giant fish” and sometimes mixed images from one movie with those of another film.

 



Monday, June 29, 2020

Long-Legged Fly by William Butler Yeats : Analysis and Commentary

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman




That civilization may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand upon his head.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.


That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practice a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.


That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding resides
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

Commentary


 The first line of this poem alerts us that something of monumental importanceno less than the survival of civilization—is at risk. For this reason, the speaker of the poem asks that precautions be taken against potential distractions. The dog should be silenced, and the pony should be tied to a “distant post.” The next lines introduce the subject of this first stanza. None other than Caesar himself is plotting his next battle. He is in his tent, “where the maps are spread,” but his gaze is “fixed upon nothing.” The “nothing” that he focuses on could be the destruction that will result from the battle to come, the very battle that he is, even now, planning. However, this immediate destruction will have the paradoxical effect of ensuring civilization’s survival, as the opening line contends. To this end, Caesar’s mind, the speaker says, “moves upon the silence” “like a long-legged fly upon the stream,” with quickness and certainty, a fluid movement of consciousness.

 
In the next stanza, the poem moves from Caesar to Helen of Troy, she of the face that launched a thousand ships. Helen’s mother is Leda, the Spartan queen who was raped by Zeus in the guise of a swan. As a result of their union, Helen was born and, upon her abduction, the Trojan War was waged: “A sudden shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead.” The line in “Long-Legged Fly,” “That the topless towers be burnt,” recalls the line “The broken wall, the burning roof and tower” from “Leda and the Swan.” This is the same event that Leda, in “Leda and the Swan,” was allowed, perhaps, to see. Now, Helen is beginning to develop her charms. (Here, we see her practicing a dance, whereby, we may suppose, she will develop grace.) Her development will require an uninterrupted silence, just as quiet was needed for Caesar to plot his strategies. That’s why we are asked to “Move most gently if move” we “must/ In this lonely place.”
 

 The third stanza concerns the artist Michelangelo at work on the Sistine Chapel. It may seem amusing that the speaker suggests that the importance of this work will be to ignite lust in young women. “Girls at puberty,” upon viewing the nude men in the artist’s painting will have their first thoughts of men as menthat is, their first sexual thoughts concerning men“the first Adam in their thought.” However, we should remember that civilization’s continuance is predicated as muchor moreupon such thoughts and their attendant actions as it is on the winning of wars. For the sake of the artistor perhaps for art’s sakethe speaker, once again, calls for the elimination of all distractions, including not only children but also the Pope himself, who might quarrel with Michelangelo’s use of nudes in his painting:

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope's chapel,
Keep those children out.


The chapel is as quiet as a mouse, so to speak, as the great artist works, his mind, like that of both Caesar’s and Helen’s, moving “upon the silence” “like a long-legged fly upon the stream.” 
 
 
A great general, a great beauty, and a great artist
three famous persons of celebrated accomplishment, each in a different area of lifeshare the same genius, for the mind of each “like a long-legged fly upon the stream/ . . . moves upon silence.” In each case, the genius requires nothing more than silence to perform, since the movement upon that silence is a movement of the mind, which is subjective and unique rather than objective and general. The poem suggests that the rest of us also have a part to play in the accomplishments of such genius. What is more, our part may be neither as small nor as insignificant as it might first seem. It is the ordinary person who is called upon to “quiet the dog,” to “tether the pony,” to “move most gently,” to “shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,” and to “keep those children out” so that the great men and women of genius can exercise their genius. In short, it is we, ordinary men and women, who are called upon to maintain order and to sustain civilization so that, within the peace and quiet afforded by such orderly life, genius can develop and create.

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Eros by Ralph Waldo Emerson: Analysis and Commentary

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 
The sense of the world is short,
Long and various the report,—
To love and be beloved;
Men and gods have not outlearned it,
And how oft soe'er they've turned it,
'Tis not to be improved.

Eros” is a love poem of sorts or, one might say, a meditation on love itself, since Eros is the Greek god of sexual, or erotic, love. The first two lines of the poem present a problem, as it were; the remaining lines provide the solution to that problem.

The problem is that life is short, and it’s meaning is uncertain. “The sense of the world”its perception, the smell and the taste and the feeling and the sound and the sight of the worldis short,” the speaker laments, lasting, in most cases, far less than a century. In addition to the brevity of life, the meaning of existence is unclear, although the interpretation of its possible significance is as “long and various” as art, philosophy, and religion can make it.


To the problem of the shortness and uncertainty of life, the speaker offers a solution: “To love and be beloved,” he declares, is an adventure that has defied the learning of both 'men and gods,'” and represents something that, no matter how much it is studied, analyzed, or considered, is “not to be improved.”

The love of which the speaker speaks, as the title of the poem indicates, is physical, or sexual, loveerotic love. It is fitting that the remedy that the speaker suggestssensual loveis physical, just as the organs by which life itself is perceived are physical. Human beings know the world through their eyes, noses, skin, ears, and tongues. Likewise, through their bodies—or, more specifically, through their sexual organsthey may experience somethinglovethat is not only meaningful in itself but that has both physical and spiritual dimensions, thereby transcending the merely material world that is, in itself, all too short and uncertain. The same body that perceives a short and uncertain life in the material world within which it exists can, in becoming the vehicle for sex and love, give life a meaning that, derived from physical organs, is, nevertheless, spiritual in its essence, thereby providing a means of transcending the merely material, or animal, basis of existence and experience.



Friday, April 3, 2020

Shhh: The Making of Monsters (and Short Horror Films)

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman


The equivalent of flash fiction (or, in some cases, short stories), short films have simple, linear plots; minimal characters, and a single conflict. However, the use of symbolism and metaphor can enrich the possible interpretations of many of these exercises in independent filmmaking.

Shhh (2012) stars Sean Michael Kyer as asthmatic, stuttering Guillermo, a young boy beset by a monster, and Ilze Burger, as his teenage sister Helleana. Guillermo draws pictures of monsters, earning Helleana's scorn.

She regards her younger brother as a “freak” and goes out of her way to be snide, insulting Guillermo about his drawings, his apparent incontinence, his stuttering, and whatever else crosses her mind. Lately, he's been cutting off his own hair, a lock or two at a time, and concealing the results under a knit cap.

Although the children share the same wash room, only Guillermo sees the monster. Of hideous appearance, the monster is creepy, but its behavior is rather lame, as the conduct of monsters goes: the goblin-like creature with an extensible, tubular proboscis, eats hair, which explains why Guillermo has been cutting off his own tresses.

Once he faces the monster, feeding it hair from his sister's hairbrush, it disappears, and Guillermo is able to set aside his inhaler, leaving it, with his sister's brush, in the wash room. In bed, he holds his finger to his lips and says “shhh!”

At the end of the picture, half of a drawing that Helleana had torn in half, which shows the monster in attack mode, has been taped to a picture of Helleana who looks terrified as the attacking monster approaches her. In the original drawing, the monster had been attacking Guillermo. By facing down the monster and leaving his sister's hairbrush in the wash room after promising the monster that he could provide more hair for it to eat, Guillermo seems to have substituted Helleana for himself as the monster's prey.


The filmmakers offer several clues concerning the true nature of the monster that confronts Guillermo, most of which relate to the boy's behavior. However, the movie begins with a series of dark drawings, by Guillermo, many of which are devoted to the monster.

The first two pictures depict subjects Guillermo and his relationship with his family:
  • He lies supine on the floor, apparently content, sketching Saturn, the sun, and a star. As this picture is displayed, the narrator informs the audience, “This is the tale of an extraordinary child . . . ”
  • The next picture shows Dad, Helleana, and Guillermo. Dad tips a bottle to his lips, and Helleana strikes Guillermo repeatedly on the head with a round object. Dad and Helleana look slightly monstrous, while Guillermo looks miserable. The narrator's commentary continues: “ . . . raised in such a way that you would have thought he never smiled . . .”
Several of the next drawings concern the monster:
  • Guillermo tells Helleana about a monster in the bathroom. The narrator states, “. . . for every night he fought a lurking fear.”
  • As he stands before the toilet, a monster parts the shower curtain, lunging toward the boy. The narrator, something of a poet, it appears, adds, “His passage to the bathroom, [sic] locked away a creature would appear.
  • Guillermo loses control of his bladder, a sight that Helleana finds hilarious; she laughs as she points to him, standing in a puddle of his own urine.
  • He dared not even wonder [at] the horrors that await,” the narrator advises the audience. The monster leans over Guillermo, its mouth gaping. “The children who defied his terms, he could only imagine their fate.”
The next two drawings focus on Guillermo himself:
  • Guillermo holds a hand to his forehead. “And what you wonder were the terms asked of our dear boy.”
  • As Guillermo takes a pair of scissors to his head, the narrator answers his own question: “Clumps of hair from off his head, the creature could enjoy.”
The final picture is text: “Shhh . . .” as the movie begins.


During the movie's action, we learn these facts about Guillermo:
  • He is neglected (left alone) much of the time.
  • He is artistic and imaginative.
  • He cuts his hair to feed the monster.
  • His sister is emotionally and abusive toward him.
  • He stutters.
  • He is incontinent.
  • He is asthmatic and relies on an inhaler.
  • He finds the monster both frightening and disgusting.
  • Earlier, when he called to his father to rescue him from Helleana, she put her finger to her lips and commanded, “Shhh!” At the end of the movie, he does the same thing.
To understand the monster, we must understand what Guillermo's behaviors represent.

Consulting psychological theory, we discover that pulling (or, we assume, cutting) and trichophagia, or the compulsive eating of hair (we are also assuming that the monster represents a psychological condition of some sort; as such, it is an inner state, a dimension of the self) is a way of relieving stress, anxiety and loneliness.
 
Although stuttering can have physiological and genetic causes, it can also be caused by “stress in the family,” “problems communicating with others,” and “low self-esteem.”

Urinary incontinence can also be caused by physiological issues, but emotional stress that impairs the fight-or-flight response precipitated by the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine can also cause urinary incontinence.

Although asthma is a physical condition, “research has also shown that the body’s response to stress triggers the immune system and causes the release of certain hormones,” thereby leading “to inflammation within the airways of the lungs, triggering an asthma attack.” His ability to discard his inhaler after overcoming the monster seems to underscore the idea that his asthma attacks are attributable to the severe stress he experiences on a regular basis.

It appears that the alcohol and general unavailability of his father and his sisters' emotional and physical abuse of him accounts, in large measure, for Guillermo's heightened stress. These traumas, which affect a young child, are obviously severe, giving rise not to one expression but to a number of severe symptoms: trichophagia, stuttering, urinary incontinence, and asthma. Possibly, he also has low-self esteem as a result of being neglected and abused.

There seems to be another cause of Guillermo's heightened stress. In none of the pictures he draws does his mother appear. She is neither seen nor heard in the movie, and no one speaks of or otherwise refers to her. The disappearance of the mother, possibly as a result of her demise, could explain not only Guillermo's stress but also the alcoholism of his father and the abusive behavior of his sister. Each in his or her own destructive manner, the surviving family members appear to be attempting, largely unsuccessfully, to cope with the grief and loss of the adult female member of the family.


 The monster appears, then, to be a personification of the stress, low self-esteem, loneliness, and fear that Guillermo experiences as a result of his father's emotional abandonment of him, his father's alcoholism, his sister's emotional and physical abuse of him, and, quite possibly, his mother's “abandonment” of him through her death and the grief he feels for her passing and his loss of her, the presumed nurturer of the family.

The narrator tells the audience that Guillermo is “extraordinary.” What makes him so, the film suggests, is his artistic ability. The dark drawings he creates objectify his fears, allowing him to put into pictures what he may not be able to put into words. He can picture himself contented; he can picture his father's alcoholism and his sister's violence and cruelty; he can picture his helplessness, his humiliation, and his fear.


He can also picture an adversary, the monstrous form upon whom he projects the harsh treatment of his father and his sister; they, as much as his own low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief, are the monster he sees in the bathroom, or the wash room, the place to which he goes to divest himself of waste and dirt, to relive himself and to cleanse himself.

His artistic ability allows him to project an enemy, to imagine an adversary. Having accomplished this feat, he can now devise a way to attack and conquer his foe and all that it stands for, all that it represents. By overcoming the monster, he rids himself of his low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. By gaining confidence in himself, he overcomes his sister's power over him and he does not need his father's love and protection. In vanquishing the monster, he becomes a hero. He does not need his inhaler. He does not need his scissors. He can enjoy, but he does not need, the refuge of his room.

He overcomes the part of the monster that is Helleana by imagining her as the monster's victim. In restoring the drawing she'd ripped in half, he replaced his own image with an image of her as the monster's prey. Henceforth, she is the one who must feel low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief. He is no longer the scapegoat that she had made him. Without him in this role, she herself must bear the weight of her own problems, without him as her whipping boy.

Instead of picturing himself as the monster's prey, he escapes this fate by imagining his sister in the role of the monster's victim. She who was his tormentor becomes the tormented, the tortured victim of the monster that she helped to create. His father, meanwhile, is the victim of the monster he embraces, the bottle of whiskey that suppresses the low self-esteem, stress, fear, disgust, humiliation, loneliness, and grief that he feels, even as he feeds it not the hair of his head, but the essence of his soul.


Friedrich Nietzsche warns, “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” This cautionary declaration also seems to inform the short film.

In the final analysis, there is more than a bit of the monster in Guillermo, too, for he is willing to sacrifice his own sister to the monster, even going so far as to deliberately leave her hairbrush in the bathroom before telling her just where to go to find it. Then, as he lies in bed and she, presumably having gone to get her brush, begins to scream, he holds a finger to his lips and says “shhh.” There is an emotional abyss as deep, apparently, as that of a sociopath, for he seems to feel no qualms about having sent his sister to the same fate as that which had been his own.

Whether his father and his sister helped to make him the monster he has become, the fact remains that he himself has had a part in the making of the monster, for he has contributed to its creation, both by his own actions and through the exercise of his imagination.

Shhh is not without flaws (what is?). The verse in which the narrator speaks is amateurish, at best, and it's often an unnecessary distraction. The drawings, although well executed, are a bit too didactic. The psychology, although suggested, rather than overtly stated, is alternately implausible and too broad. The horror is tepid.

Nevertheless, the short film, overall, is intriguing and offers a lot to discern, analyze, and appreciate.

Saturday, December 14, 2019

Scenes of Buddhist Hell

Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman

Warning! Do not read this article unless you have a strong stomach!


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Stark, horrific, and grotesque, the sets of statues are warnings to the faithful. In no uncertain terms, the sculptures show the fates of those whose bad karma caused them to be born in a place of long-term, but not eternal, torment in a layers of Naraka, the Buddhists' hell.


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In one set of sculptures, skeletal figures are marched, chained together in single file, their bloody arms, spines, buttocks, and legs exhibiting holes that have been punched into them, toward a gigantic bowl-shaped pan atop skulls. A fire under the pan indicates its purpose: to cook the unfortunates who climb into the pan, unfurling long tongues as they dance in the burning vessel or lie with their arms folded over the pan's rim. Dark-skinned guards, armed with spears and sticks, guard the damned. One of guards lifts a cursed male figure over his head, ready to toss him into the pan with the others who share his doom.


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Naraka is somewhat similar to the hell of Chinese mythology, upon which Naraka itself is based. Although the numbers of the layers, or courts, of the labyrinthine underworld differ among sources, some stating that there are three or four courts, others that there are ten, still another that there are eighteen, and yet others that there are thousands, the chief source for Naraka claims that there are Eight Cold Narakas and Eight Hot Narakas. Each has its unique form of punishment, several of which are depicted by the statues.


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Some of the punishments of the Cold Narakas include suffering from blisters, experiencing splitting skin, and having the body itself crack open and expose the victims' internal organs, which also crack apart.


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Among the torments of the Hot Narakas are being attacked with iron claws and fiery weapons, being showered with molten metal, being sliced into pieces, and having to walk and lie on the heated ground. Guards cut bodies into pieces with fiery saws and axes. The damned are crushed by rocks, burned alive, eaten by wild animals, impaled upon fiery spears, pierced by a trident, and roasted alive.

Each punishment, in both the Cold Narakas and the Hot Narakas, lasts from hundreds of millions to sextillions (1021) of years, and each lifetime in a Naraka lasts eight times longer than the previous one.


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Some of the statues depict the suffering that the damned encounter in Diyu, the Chinese hell (or hells); others seem to portray the plight of the condemned in the Narakas. Among the former punishments are suggested by the names of a concept of Diyu as comprising eighteen hells: Hell of the Hanging Bars, Hell of the Pit of Fire, Hell of Tongue Ripping, Hell of Skinning, Hell of Grinding, Hell of Pounding, Hell of Dismemberment by Vehicles, Hell of Ice, Hell of Disembowelment, Hell of Oil Cauldrons, Hell of the Mountain of Knives, among them.


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Some scenes involving the statues do not seem to match the descriptions in Buddhist scriptures concerning the nature of the Narakas, in which case the sculptures may, instead, represent various other hells in the Chinese Diyu. With thousands of hells, each group of statues likely represents one of the many places of Chinese, if not specifically Buddhist, torment.


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The sculptors are not timid in displaying the flesh of the damned, and there is even some grim humor in the displays of some of the figure's torments, especially when the punishments apparently are for the commission of taboo sexual acts or harboring forbidden appetites of the flesh. Phalli, for example, are sometimes of gargantuan size, as if the organs, as symbols of prurient desire, weigh down those who bear them. One male figure appears unable to stand erect, because the enormous size and weight of his phallus causes him to stoop at all times. Another male figure also stoops, carrying his flaccid organ over his shoulder as he shuffles along, past a female figure whose bloody vulva is being consumed by a dog while another male figure, whose thoughts have too much been occupied by sexual fantasies, perhaps, looks on, as it were, his phallus having replaced his neck and head.


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Oddly, the Asian figures are bright white; the only parts of their bodies to be represented in color are those of their sex organs: one male's is reddish brown; the others' members are dark brown. The female figure's vulva is red with the blood flowing from her half-devoured organs. The absence of colors except in regard to their sexual parts is intended, perhaps, to make their colorful, offending organs stand out all the more, by way of contrast.


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Images of mutilation, impalement, distension, anatomical displacement (eyes in elbows and replacing nipples, a fanged mouth or a complete face in an abdomen), grinding, devouring, decapitation, hacking, disembowelment, tongue ripping, spearing, knifing, pressing, roasting, physical transformation, hooking, and dismemberment make it clear that Buddhism is not simply the mellow, intellectual, contemplative discipline that it is often portrayed as being and is often understood, especially by Westerners, to be. These statues testify to the fact that there is also a darker, brutal, sadomasochistic, and decidedly more sinister side to Buddhist tradition, doctrines, and beliefs.
 


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Paranormal vs. Supernatural: What’s the Diff?

Copyright 2009 by Gary L. Pullman

Sometimes, in demonstrating how to brainstorm about an essay topic, selecting horror movies, I ask students to name the titles of as many such movies as spring to mind (seldom a difficult feat for them, as the genre remains quite popular among young adults). Then, I ask them to identify the monster, or threat--the antagonist, to use the proper terminology--that appears in each of the films they have named. Again, this is usually a quick and easy task. Finally, I ask them to group the films’ adversaries into one of three possible categories: natural, paranormal, or supernatural. This is where the fun begins.

It’s a simple enough matter, usually, to identify the threats which fall under the “natural” label, especially after I supply my students with the scientific definition of “nature”: everything that exists as either matter or energy (which are, of course, the same thing, in different forms--in other words, the universe itself. The supernatural is anything which falls outside, or is beyond, the universe: God, angels, demons, and the like, if they exist. Mad scientists, mutant cannibals (and just plain cannibals), serial killers, and such are examples of natural threats. So far, so simple.

What about borderline creatures, though? Are vampires, werewolves, and zombies, for example, natural or supernatural? And what about Freddy Krueger? In fact, what does the word “paranormal” mean, anyway? If the universe is nature and anything outside or beyond the universe is supernatural, where does the paranormal fit into the scheme of things?

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word “paranormal,” formed of the prefix “para,” meaning alongside, and “normal,” meaning “conforming to common standards, usual,” was coined in 1920. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “paranormal” to mean “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” In other words, the paranormal is not supernatural--it is not outside or beyond the universe; it is natural, but, at the present, at least, inexplicable, which is to say that science cannot yet explain its nature. The same dictionary offers, as examples of paranormal phenomena, telepathy and “a medium’s paranormal powers.”

Wikipedia offers a few other examples of such phenomena or of paranormal sciences, including the percentages of the American population which, according to a Gallup poll, believes in each phenomenon, shown here in parentheses: psychic or spiritual healing (54), extrasensory perception (ESP) (50), ghosts (42), demons (41), extraterrestrials (33), clairvoyance and prophecy (32), communication with the dead (28), astrology (28), witchcraft (26), reincarnation (25), and channeling (15); 36 percent believe in telepathy.

As can be seen from this list, which includes demons, ghosts, and witches along with psychics and extraterrestrials, there is a confusion as to which phenomena and which individuals belong to the paranormal and which belong to the supernatural categories. This confusion, I believe, results from the scientism of our age, which makes it fashionable for people who fancy themselves intelligent and educated to dismiss whatever cannot be explained scientifically or, if such phenomena cannot be entirely rejected, to classify them as as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena. That way, the existence of a supernatural realm need not be admitted or even entertained. Scientists tend to be materialists, believing that the real consists only of the twofold unity of matter and energy, not dualists who believe that there is both the material (matter and energy) and the spiritual, or supernatural. If so, everything that was once regarded as having been supernatural will be regarded (if it cannot be dismissed) as paranormal and, maybe, if and when it is explained by science, as natural. Indeed, Sigmund Freud sought to explain even God as but a natural--and in Freud’s opinion, an obsolete--phenomenon.

Meanwhile, among skeptics, there is an ongoing campaign to eliminate the paranormal by explaining them as products of ignorance, misunderstanding, or deceit. Ridicule is also a tactic that skeptics sometimes employ in this campaign. For example, The Skeptics’ Dictionary contends that the perception of some “events” as being of a paranormal nature may be attributed to “ignorance or magical thinking.” The dictionary is equally suspicious of each individual phenomenon or “paranormal science” as well. Concerning psychics’ alleged ability to discern future events, for example, The Skeptic’s Dictionary quotes Jay Leno (“How come you never see a headline like 'Psychic Wins Lottery'?”), following with a number of similar observations:

Psychics don't rely on psychics to warn them of impending disasters. Psychics don't predict their own deaths or diseases. They go to the dentist like the rest of us. They're as surprised and disturbed as the rest of us when they have to call a plumber or an electrician to fix some defect at home. Their planes are delayed without their being able to anticipate the delays. If they want to know something about Abraham Lincoln, they go to the library; they don't try to talk to Abe's spirit. In short, psychics live by the known laws of nature except when they are playing the psychic game with people.
In An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural, James Randi, a magician who exercises a skeptical attitude toward all things alleged to be paranormal or supernatural, takes issue with the notion of such phenomena as well, often employing the same arguments and rhetorical strategies as The Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In short, the difference between the paranormal and the supernatural lies in whether one is a materialist, believing in only the existence of matter and energy, or a dualist, believing in the existence of both matter and energy and spirit. If one maintains a belief in the reality of the spiritual, he or she will classify such entities as angels, demons, ghosts, gods, vampires, and other threats of a spiritual nature as supernatural, rather than paranormal, phenomena. He or she may also include witches (because, although they are human, they are empowered by the devil, who is himself a supernatural entity) and other natural threats that are energized, so to speak, by a power that transcends nature and is, as such, outside or beyond the universe. Otherwise, one is likely to reject the supernatural as a category altogether, identifying every inexplicable phenomenon as paranormal, whether it is dark matter or a teenage werewolf. Indeed, some scientists dedicate at least part of their time to debunking allegedly paranormal phenomena, explaining what natural conditions or processes may explain them, as the author of The Serpent and the Rainbow explains the creation of zombies by voodoo priests.

Based upon my recent reading of Tzvetan Todorov's The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to the Fantastic, I add the following addendum to this essay.

According to Todorov:

The fantastic. . . lasts only as long as a certain hesitation [in deciding] whether or not what they [the reader and the protagonist] perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. . . . If he [the reader] decides that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described, we can say that the work belongs to the another genre [than the fantastic]: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be entertained to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous (The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, 41).
Todorov further differentiates these two categories by characterizing the uncanny as “the supernatural explained” and the marvelous as “the supernatural accepted” (41-42).

Interestingly, the prejudice against even the possibility of the supernatural’s existence which is implicit in the designation of natural versus paranormal phenomena, which excludes any consideration of the supernatural, suggests that there are no marvelous phenomena; instead, there can be only the uncanny. Consequently, for those who subscribe to this view, the fantastic itself no longer exists in this scheme, for the fantastic depends, as Todorov points out, upon the tension of indecision concerning to which category an incident belongs, the natural or the supernatural. The paranormal is understood, by those who posit it, in lieu of the supernatural, as the natural as yet unexplained.

And now, back to a fate worse than death: grading students’ papers.

My Cup of Blood

Anyone who becomes an aficionado of anything tends, eventually, to develop criteria for elements or features of the person, place, or thing of whom or which he or she has become enamored. Horror fiction--admittedly not everyone’s cuppa blood--is no different (okay, maybe it’s a little different): it, too, appeals to different fans, each for reasons of his or her own. Of course, in general, book reviews, the flyleaves of novels, and movie trailers suggest what many, maybe even most, readers of a particular type of fiction enjoy, but, right here, right now, I’m talking more specifically--one might say, even more eccentrically. In other words, I’m talking what I happen to like, without assuming (assuming makes an “ass” of “u” and “me”) that you also like the same. It’s entirely possible that you will; on the other hand, it’s entirely likely that you won’t.

Anyway, this is what I happen to like in horror fiction:

Small-town settings in which I get to know the townspeople, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. For this reason alone, I’m a sucker for most of Stephen King’s novels. Most of them, from 'Salem's Lot to Under the Dome, are set in small towns that are peopled by the good, the bad, and the ugly. Part of the appeal here, granted, is the sense of community that such settings entail.

Isolated settings, such as caves, desert wastelands, islands, mountaintops, space, swamps, where characters are cut off from civilization and culture and must survive and thrive or die on their own, without assistance, by their wits and other personal resources. Many are the examples of such novels and screenplays, but Alien, The Shining, The Descent, Desperation, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, are some of the ones that come readily to mind.

Total institutions as settings. Camps, hospitals, military installations, nursing homes, prisons, resorts, spaceships, and other worlds unto themselves are examples of such settings, and Sleepaway Camp, Coma, The Green Mile, and Aliens are some of the novels or films that take place in such settings.

Anecdotal scenes--in other words, short scenes that showcase a character--usually, an unusual, even eccentric, character. Both Dean Koontz and the dynamic duo, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, excel at this, so I keep reading their series (although Koontz’s canine companions frequently--indeed, almost always--annoy, as does his relentless optimism).

Atmosphere, mood, and tone. Here, King is king, but so is Bentley Little. In the use of description to terrorize and horrify, both are masters of the craft.

A bit of erotica (okay, okay, sex--are you satisfied?), often of the unusual variety. Sex sells, and, yes, sex whets my reader’s appetite. Bentley Little is the go-to guy for this spicy ingredient, although Koontz has done a bit of seasoning with this spice, too, in such novels as Lightning and Demon Seed (and, some say, Hung).

Believable characters. Stephen King, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, and Dan Simmons are great at creating characters that stick to readers’ ribs.

Innovation. Bram Stoker demonstrates it, especially in his short story “Dracula’s Guest,” as does H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, and a host of other, mostly classical, horror novelists and short story writers. For an example, check out my post on Stoker’s story, which is a real stoker, to be sure. Stephen King shows innovation, too, in ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, It, and other novels. One might even argue that Dean Koontz’s something-for-everyone, cross-genre writing is innovative; he seems to have been one of the first, if not the first, to pen such tales.

Technique. Check out Frank Peretti’s use of maps and his allusions to the senses in Monster; my post on this very topic is worth a look, if I do say so myself, which, of course, I do. Opening chapters that accomplish a multitude of narrative purposes (not usually all at once, but successively) are attractive, too, and Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are as good as anyone, and better than many, at this art.

A connective universe--a mythos, if you will, such as both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, and, to a lesser extent, Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and even Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have created through the use of recurring settings, characters, themes, and other elements of fiction.

A lack of pretentiousness. Dean Koontz has it, as do Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, Bentley Little, and (to some extent, although he has become condescending and self-indulgent of late, Stephen King); unfortunately, both Dan Simmons and Robert McCammon have become too self-important in their later works, Simmons almost to the point of becoming unreadable. Come on, people, you’re writing about monsters--you should be humble.

Longevity. Writers who have been around for a while usually get better, Stephen King, Dan Simmons, and Robert McCammon excepted.

Pacing. Neither too fast nor too slow. Dean Koontz is good, maybe the best, here, of contemporary horror writers.


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