Ryan Baker //
That's Michael and Jermaine Jackson on back-up vocals for Rockwell's 1984 single. Rockwell himself was the estranged son of Motown CEO Berry Gordy Jr., but managed to get back into his father's good graces with this song, one of the biggest hits of 1984.
For the third year in a row, the apparel design community Threadless has held their "Threadless Loves Horror" competition asking designers to submit their horror-inspired tee-shirt designs for prizes and the chance to be produced and featured as products on Threadless.
With just a little over 800 entries, not all are good - in fact, there are quite a few dogs - but there's the occasional brilliance that makes combing through the entries worthwhile.
The 1957 and 1958 theatrical releases of "Curse of Frankenstein" and "Horror of Dracula," respectively, saw Britain's Hammer Films become legendary; by returning to the sources of cultural horror that propelled Universal Pictures to eminence during the Great Depression, Hammer found great financial success in the U.S., so much so Universal, who had previously threatened voluminous lawsuits should Hammer's interpretations tread too closely to their own, offered up the remake rights to their library of creepers.
Unsurprisingly, Hammer took full advantage, their own adaptations of "The Mummy," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," "The Wolfman" and "The Phantom of the Opera" following soon thereafter - 1959,1960, 1961 and 1962, to be precise. Like Universal before them, Hammer likewise turned the Frankenstein and Dracula films into franchises, spawning 14 sequels between them, as well as four additional (but unrelated) "Mummy" sequels.
Gradually, Hammer diversified their genre offerings outside of the traditional but familiar literary characters; 1964's "The Gorgon" is just such an example, based on a script by director John Gilling that drew inspiration from the mythology of ancient Greece. Gilling would also be responsible for writing and director several other notable original Hammer films including "Plague of the Zombies" and "The Reptile" (both from 1966, shot back-to-back with the same sets and locations in England's rural Cornwall).Interestingly, however, "The Gorgon" was not the sole creation of Gilling nor even Hammer. After two underperforming films, Hammer solicited input from audiences, asking moviegoers to submit ideas for upcoming Hammer films they'd like to see; one entry touched upon the combination of Greek myth and Hammer's usual Gothic setting and Hammer began to develop the idea into a full-fledged script, first called "Supernatural" and finally taking up the title "The Gorgon."
The film concerns itself with a quaint German village set upon by one of the mythic Gorgons, the half-serpent, half-women monsters kin to Medusa, whose gaze can turn any living thing to solid stone. Hammer's two leading men, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, star alongside "scream queen" Barbara Shelley and Prudence Hyman, formerly an extra on Hammer's "The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll" from 1964, wearing a snake-hair headress as the titular creature. Each of the headress' latex rubber snakes could move independently thanks to cables running through each one.
It's a shame when visually interesting movie posters feel like the stuff of alternate universes.
Truthfully, you'd often be hard pressed to find dull poster art outside of the U.S.; there's something uniquely frustrating about the formulaic, all-too-familiar patterns of overbearing brand name actors accompanied by their floating, disembodied heads, reminders that film entertainment - like virtually all else within this consumerist society of ours - is as much a commodity, shaped by the concensus terrorism of audience testing, as any consumer packaged good choking the the shelves of big box retailers.
The domestic art used was pretty pedestrian, especially in comparison to the above.
Australian singer-songwriter Goyte's collaboration track with New Zealand's Kimbra, off Gotye's 2011 album "Making Mirrors."
