Mr Bryan Wynia lives in Los Angeles, CA and is working as a Senior Character Artist at Sony Santa Monica. His latest Lovecraft inspired creation is amazing.
“Here are some samples from my CG Workshop course. In the workshop I cover my process for creating creature concepts based on a description from H.P. Lovecraft.” For more info on the workshop you can go to the artist blog at Bryan Wynia’s Blog
Guest Blogger, Chrispy, today! Thanks to host, Larry Roberts, for giving me a moment to ‘talk’ to you, and thank YOU for reading.
The pleasure of doing a daily blog on Mr. Lovecraft are the wonderful friends you get to meet. Sometimes it is only fleeting for a few days, others for a lifetime. In any event, on 10 November 2010, a man from a small village in India contacted me and said I could share precious pages that were handed down, “these books belong to my forefather, he was a perfect occultist and ayurveda practitioner. … spells are inside the books.” While this gentleman thought the spells might be of black magic, I tend to believe they were for good, and if any darkness to them existed, it was to destroy disease and help his people.
They are absolutely gorgeous, and while I will never hold them, or smell their paper, or caress their textures, they still are “spell binding”. In his ancestors’ honor, I share them with a new audience here at Miskatonic Books.
Many times horror comes from the shock of the unknown. What we can’t control and what we can’t understand terrifies us. Once we understand a situation, fear subsides and we become rational and begin to analyze and cope with the situation as best we can. Horror stories help us with this. Poe’s stories about the fear of being buried alive was a real and present phobia of his era. It is not quite clear if he was poking fun at the phobia or if he was simply using it as a plot device, or both.
(Image from 1822 newspaper advertisement)
A shock happened in 1822 in New Jersey. A “cryptozoological” creature appeared from out of nowhere, and in a true “Captain Kirk” manner, the first humans to see it shot it. It was likely already half-dead, but it was then snagged and sliced to pieces and put on exhibit. 1822 was a more primitive time – although we need to take care not to throw stones as we have our “primitive” moments in the post-modern era – yet scientists and students of the sea quickly determined it was a basking shark.
(From a contemporary magazine report)
Howard Lovecraft has taken a beating over his overt racism, yet mostly he is allowed a pass when he portrayed fish and vermin as monsters. His aversion to fish smells, and his loathing of rats, squid, and anything else that he felt was unwholesome turned into all sorts of monstrous gods of madness. Today we recognize each of these prototypes as unique entities in a vast system of ecological biodiversity essential for the survival of our planet. OK, we don’t want THEM to EAT US, but it is imperative that we leave most of these creatures alone to survive and prosper in as close to harmony as we can.
The horrific basking shark of 1822 is now treated with respect and dignity in the video below. It is no longer a horror, but a wonder. Education and knowledge is powerful. Respectful and well written horror stories can bring us to a better understanding of those things we fear.
Classic Bradbury Holding a Cat
Ray Bradbury is not just a writer, he is our national treasure. While he started out joking around with Forest J Ackerman in Los Angeles, and embraced that new scientifiction craze in the 1930′s and 1940′s, everyone immediately knew that bundle of energy could never be contained in a “genre”. Yes, in the late 1940′s he got pegged as “that Martian guy”, but oh, he has been so much more.
He’s written poems, nostalgia, humor, horror, futuristic fantasy, but it’s all rooted in our real world, and always done with a warm heart.
If you are a collector of both Bradbury and Roy Squires, this is one you can’t miss. There were only 400 of these lovingly made by Roy for a poem Ray did for him back in 1974. There seems to be no evidence this has appeared elsewhere. And this is copy NUMBER 21 !!
For more details click on the image of the item below.
As the fictional horror of the 2010′s continues to center on “mystery genre novel” and in the mainstream as “mash-ups”, non-fiction horror has presented breakout possibilities. This gives hope that a new style of horror may be about to emerge, and not just zombies and vampires.
Karen Palmer (Inside West Africa’s Witch Camps) has written what is said to be an expose of the poverty-crushed women of west Africa. Abused by all possible opportunities, they have little money,and forced into a pecking order worse than a prison. Abandoned by all, even the gods they worship, they turn to paranormal and bizarre opportunities to survive and gain some semblance of dignity and respect for themselves and their children.
The remote witch camps of northern Ghana have perhaps 3,000 individuals and are but one of many ghettos of impoverishment and hopelessness that the world has turned their collective backs upon.
Karen entered into this as an objective reporter, but the intensity of the situation forced her to continually evaluate her position on reality and whether paranormal or other phenomenon were really happening. This is a well known psychological process, and even the most hardened and prepared individuals are susceptible to peer-pressure and cultural aberration of their perceptions. She discusses this in her book.
Is the horror Karen’s near-loss of her skeptical Western perceptions? The impoverished entrapment of women in Ghana? The acts of cannibalism and witchcraft? The many acts of dehumanizing abuse? The international political realities that marginalize large classes of humans into ghettos?
Before we castigate Karen and the individuals in Ghana, we should look in the mirror and examine our excesses that may have caused equal horrors.
If a powerful and thought provoking issue such as this can hit mainstream non-fiction, can we not hope that fictional horror will rise to the occasion and equally embrace the human condition?
S. T. Joshi talks about the Lovecraft film festival in Seattle and many of his upcoming projects…including those with yours truly here at Arcane Wisdom.
A single gene in a caterpillar virus sends its victims running for the treetops, where they die and their bodies liquefy, sending an ooze of virus particles on their brothers and sisters below.
This species of baculovirus infects only gypsy moth caterpillars, essentially turning them into zombies. It stops the caterpillars from molting and sends them up into the tree leaves during the day (a behavior they normally save for the cover of darkness), where they die among the leaves as they wait to molt.
“They die there, and then they melt within hours after they die, and they are dripping virus down onto the leaves below,” said study researcher Kelli Hoover, of Pennsylvania State University. “We knew before that this behavior benefits the virus, but we didn’t know how it was causing the behavior.”
You can read the whole article here Live Science
Game creator RED WASP DESIGN has created ‘Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land’ video game for iPhones. non-Apple users: there are plans to port the title to Android phones and the PC.
This game will have soldiers and investigators facing off against and ancient enemy that is “using the carnage of the great war to build an undead army amidst the battlefields of Europe.”
Here is a video of what the Lovecraft enthusiast game player has in store.
John Wyndham (1903-1969) was type-cast as a science fiction novelist. While his high fantasy novels struck a somewhat science fiction note, it was clearly not scientifiction’s rayguns, BEM’s, and Babes.
He wrote in the mid-1930′s under the name John Beynon and hit with a notable book called The Secret People, a sort of derivative novel about an underground and marginalized civilization. It fell historically in line with H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as others. As usually happens with authors of this type, his fantasy blended easily together between popular genres of mystery, detective, scientifiction, with a touch of horror.
World War II interrupted his output as he became a minor minister (Information) and a soldier in the signal corps. To all eyes, his day was done as a writer.
The 15 year gap must have built up to a crescendo within his psyche as his next book was a score that shook the genre and our culture. Producing a true 20th century classic, The Day of the Triffids (or Revolt of the Triffids) Wyndham again built on tangents derived from H. G. Wells (i.e. The Kingdom of the Blind, War of the Worlds, Day of the Comet) but to masterful effect.
A man who had an accident fortuitously was protected from rays that blinded every other member of the human race. They were immediate victims of a mobile plant species that enslaved humans for nefarious purposes. Obviously much of this played out as metaphor for the early Cold War as terrible news of many and varied atrocities trickled out of what had happened in obscure corners during WWII.
On the surface one might think this a silly premise – Brian Aldiss was a notable critic – as walking plants with whip-like appendages seized people. The real horror was what the remaining humanity did to each other. Exposing civilization as a thin veneer over barbarism most cruel, Wyndham poked a hole in the propaganda that the allies had proposed while winning the War. The Allies were supposed to be destroying the axis of evil for liberty, freedom, and oter wonderful things. In fact the post-War West was only vaguely different in their imperialism than The Soviets, or the recently destroyed Nazis. It was only colors in shades of black.
The hero of the story constantly is stunned to see one horror after another in this apocalyptic nightmare, and which was worse? An alien spore, a capitalist militia, or a barbarian rapist? Each was equally dehumanizing.
The book itself (1951) appears quaint to us today in yellow with black stick images. And, of course, Hollywood later had its turn at making a movie of it. The frustrating thing is that authors get typecast as one thing or another. Was Mary Shelley really a horror novelist, or was Frankenstein early science fiction? One could argue that The Day of the Triffids plays out better as a horror novel, but as horror sold poorly in the 1950′s, it was marketed as science fiction. It is still hyped as Sci-Fi, even though in today’s market it is one of the lowest selling of genre. Perhaps it was neither, or both? Certainly Simon Clark, a notable purveyor of horror, did a loving tribute and an authorized sequel Night of the Triffids (2001) to mixed reviews.
In any event, Wyndham left a long legacy of wonderful fantasy fiction and frequently sent horrific shudders through his readers imaginations.
A terrible horror B-movie?
No, it’s real “science”.
1 September 2011. Dateline Tokyo. A new chemical reagent makes the brain see-through, allowing fluorescent tags to light up neurons and blood vessels deep inside. This enables 3-D images of entire structures, without having to cut anything away or divide anything into smaller sections.
(Above are Mouse Embyos that exhibit the invisibilty technique.)
With every scientific step comes good and evil. Growing more food is good for starving people, but destroying genetic diversity is bad. Building drones saves soldiers lives, but escalates the ease of going to war. Treating cancer is good, but do we have to do it with debilitating toxic chemicals that scour the blood vessels, lock up our intestines, make us bald, rot our teeth, and irradiate our skin into ooozing sores?
Horror stories let us express our disgust with pushing technique while belittling our humanity and individualism. Is this new invisible enzyme another of those issues? Is it really a good idea? Hmm, maybe we should re-read that classic story …
