My son really liked the depth on the skull, but his actual vote for this week’s Sketch of the Week was this one of Mr. Hori from the film Noroi: The Curse, noting “the expression … is incredible”:
I personally was unhappy with how I elongated the face; Mr. Hori’s face is fundamentally round, but my hand kept wanting to regularize him against Munch’s “Scream,” I guess 🤷♀️.
I do feel like I get at least close to the extremity of Mr. Hori’s terror in that scene. (The actor, Satoru Jitsunashi, is pretty amazing in that role; he totally makes the movie for me.) Here’s the reference image (more or less; I was working from several stills I grabbed from the movie, because his whole face wasn’t ever in frame at once):
A lot of my favorite horror films are SNL digital shorts. I’ve been mulling this over for years now (in fact, I just spent the last hour writing about this from a craft perspective, a screed that I mercifully deleted rather than sending).
I think it all comes down to this: horror in film basically relies on four tools:
Jump scares are easiest, mounting dread takes the most time, and squick is often the best way to cash in or make a name for yourself. But it’s always the uncanniness I’m after in horror, that experience Freud described as abruptly seeing the “familiar and old-established” as strange and alien, thus giving the sense of revealing a deeper truth “which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”
It’s the horrific uncanniness I love in these comedy skits. In part, this arises from what’s implied about the universe that the characters live in, all the stuff that’s outside the frame (e.g., Jason’s refrigerator, the pizza beast, the old woman across the street, that high school).
But I think the key element—the thing that pushes this beyond “the familiar and old-established made strange and alien” and into the territory of “that which ought to have remained hidden being dragged up into the light” is the fact that the world we actually really livein—where I’m sitting and typing and you’re sitting and reading and we’re both watching these little 3-minute-gems—is also outside the frame.
The awful thing the characters in the movie are about to experience? It’s already happening here. Hell, it’s us. And we’re laughing.
“Unedited Footage of a Bear” —> the unskipable Claridryl ad —> the uncanny Claridryl reality that may or may not be part of the unskipable Clarifryl ad
I’m callously taking advantage of the Reason for the Season to plug some of my free-to-read/hear horror stories:
This Place Is Best Shunned
“This Place Is Best Shunned“—Allie and Rooster are heading down to Asheville for Rooster’s new gig, a cushy stint as artist-in-residence at UNC. Rooster is more of a con artist than maker of art, but Allie doesn’t mind, because he’s good-looking, charming, and values what she is: a girl with a keen eye for abandoned places and a knack for getting into them. But when they stumble upon an old backcountry church—the perfect backdrop for Rooster’s latest project—they discover that some “abandoned” places have a knack for keeping themselves occupied.…
Whatever Comes After Calcutta
“Whatever Comes After Calcutta”—It was late in the day when Lyle Morimoto saw the hanged woman and almost crashed his Prius somewhere between Calcutta, Ohio, and whatever the hell came after Calcutta. For hours he’d been sipping warm Gatorade and cruising the crumbling two-lane blacktop that sliced up the scrubby farmland of southern Ohio. He understood that he was not thinking clearly, but that seemed OK, since it also meant not thinking about his ear, or his wife, or Detective Jason Good, or the gun in the pocket of his suit jacket.…
The Slender Men
There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House
If you simply must purchase something, you might just as well purchase this (especially if you liked any of the above, because it’s all that and moooooore):
There Was a Crooked Man, He Flipped a Crooked House—”Downtrodden architect Glenn Washington and his none-too-bright sidekick Lennie help a crooked real estate baron flip houses in downtrodden Detroit. A house comes up that is too good to gut for parts. Too good to be true. Waaaay too good. Thing is, nothing leads where it should — go through the front door, step out the door on the back porch. Best library ever. And why are the cops nosing around? Non-Euclidian architectural petty-crime adventure, and all that implies.”—Adrian Simmons, Black Gate magazine
“The Slender Men” audiobook (fun horror fiction dedicated to all those adjunct professors out there)
“Whatever Comes After Calcutta” audiobook (this one wigs me out a little because when I wrote it I was exaggerating about “red” America, and now it sorta reads as almost documentary)
I’m not making this book up, and it wasn’t a joke. I cannot stress this enough. It was a real children’s book real people bought without irony, intending to use it to help them teach their children about the realities of Satanic Ritual Abuse.
