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.
Reynold Brown was a successful illustrator whose images appeared in magazines like "Popular Science," "Argosy" and many others in between lush paintings for paperback book covers. It was as a teacher at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena Brown met an art director at Universal Pictures and began an entirely new career.
Brown created stunning, colorful artwork for a slew of films, many of which were genre entries like 1960's "The Time Machine," 1957's "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," 1955's "Tarantula," "Ben-Hur," "The Alamo," "Spartacus," "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" and many, many more."The Undead" itself is entirely forgettable, churned out in just six days by professional cheapskate Roger Corman and shot almost entirely in a converted supermarket. Tellingly, Corman and the studio for which he did much of his directorial work, American International Pictures, had the practice of creating lurid posters first, floating it by a gaggle of overexcited teens at the local mall and deciding to fund it or kill it based on their reactions.
You should browse the beautiful gallery of Reynold Brown's work over at the what is inarguably the best blog in the whole entire world, Monster Brains, a superbly curated repository of monster artwork from all sorts of artists across all sorts of mediums. It is described as "a never-ending celebration of monsters" by site overlord Aaron Alfrey, whose superhuman ability to locate and post high-quality images of everything from VHS box art and pulp comics of every generation to gorgeous publicity stills from 1931's "Frankenstein" to bizarre Russian coloring books is surely the by-product of immense doses of radiation.
