Art: "The Shining," 2007
Polish designer Leszek Zebrowski created this piece in 2007 in honor of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's "The Shining." Shelley Duvall never looked so nightmarish.
Ryan Baker //
Polish designer Leszek Zebrowski created this piece in 2007 in honor of Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's "The Shining." Shelley Duvall never looked so nightmarish.
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.
Toronto-based Phantom City Creative provides a range of services to their genre film clients; ranging from DVD packaging design to poster key art, their clientele is exclusively genre films and related events like the Toronto International Film Festival.
Some of their choicest pieces, though, are posters for classic genre films - like this one for George Romero's classic "Night of the Living Dead." You can actually purchase limited edition prints of this and other design work at their website.
If ever there were a movie for our time, that movie is "Hobo with a Shotgun" starring Rutger Hauer. Set to debut at the Sundance Film Festival later this month, already cinephiles, skeezers, burn-outs and scumbags are profusely salivating in anticipation of this blood-drenched, gore-caked, garbage-stenched cavalcade of urban decay and slum lawlessness.
Spawned from a sleazy trailer tailor-made for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's 2007 ode-to-exploitation double-feature "Grindhouse," this is the second such fake trailer to be converted into a full-length feature film, preceeded only by Rodriguez's own "Machete." Check out the awesome trailer for "Hobo with a Shotgun," but be warned - there's plenty of blood and cursing: Also, the poster's designer, artist Tom Hodge, discusses "Hobo with a Shotgun" on his blog, The Dude Designs, and you can also plumb the crime-infested depths of the film's official site.If we're lucky, maybe the next project to emerge from the slime of "Grindhouse" will be a full-length feature adaptation of Edgar Wright's send-up of British horror films, "Don't!"