Freak people out with these DARK SHADOWS Valentine cards

The idea here was to mash-up those old Frankenstein Valentine Stickers using images from Dark Shadows. Because of the show's love for classic horror tropes, the captions used on the Valentine's Day stickers didn't need any re-writing. The end result, though, is making my skin crawl a little. That's a sign that something went very right or very wrong. You can decide for yourself which direction it took.

I don't know if the disturbing product is a result of the source material, an accidental lack of chemistry between the original stickers and Dark Shadows, or my own fragile state of mind.

If you're interested in freaking people out, I've shared high-resolution versions of these cards on the Blood Drive Tumblr feed. These are print ready, but I take no responsibility for any restraining orders that might result from deploying them IRL.

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A tale of two Dark Shadows posters

One of the highlights of my year was being asked to design the poster for Dark Shadows: Behind the Screams, one of the events at the annual Sleepy Hollow International Film Festival. I wasn't abel to attend the event, which sucked ... but I'm deeply honored to have been asked to participate and hope to make the pilgrimage next year.

The poster you saw wasn't my first idea, though. At the time I'd been riffing on the great James Bama's 1966 promotional painting for Star Trek, which you can see here. I was having fun with that kind of macho-adventure collage, even applying it to Gregory Walcott's character in Plan 9 from Outer Space, promoting his buffoonish character to a level of heroism he doesn't really deserve. I mention all of this just to illustrate where my head was when the offer arrived from the kind people at Sleepy Hollow.

Here's how the first poster looked, seconds before I scrapped it.



There were two significant problems with this version. Sleepy Hollow's Dark Shadows: Behind the Screams featured a visual retrospective of the classic Dark Shadows television series, a Q&A with cast member Kathryn Leigh Scott, as well as a screening of 1970's House of Dark Shadows" Scott appears in both versions of the poster, but there remained a significant problem with the first draft. House of Dark Shadows was shot in Sleepy Hollow and nearby Tarrytown, which needed to feature predominantly in the marketing. I considered a version of this poster with the Lyndhurst Estate (the mansion that served as Collinwood in "House") in place of Seaview Terrace (Collinwood from the television series) but the overall concept of this poster was so inextricably tied to the second year of the series that it no longer made sense. Below is my second effort, and the poster that was ultimately used in the marketing. I'm very happy with how both of them turned out.

Prints of both posters are available from HereticTees Studios HERE.

It's a parody, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

It's possible some of you saw the "TapedLive" image and didn't get the reference. (I got into one argument with a reader on Facebook about whether or not "TapedLive" was spelled correctly.) It's also likely some of you got the reference, but didn't know there was more to it than a parody of a 1987 punk album. So here's a primer: Evilive was an impossibly short (13 minutes!) live album released by the Misfits in 1987.  (The album was actually an expanded version of an EP released by the band five years earlier.) The second release featured cover art, most likely created by the band's frontman Glenn Danzig, that was a riff on the 1957 Roger Corman movie The Undead.

I love the Misfits. I love Dark Shadows. I ... um, respect Roger Corman. So this felt like a natural fit. You can see a reverse evolution of the concept below. If you like it, head on over to my Redbubble store and browse my other works. Warning: There be monsters on the other side! LINK.

Creative Vandalism: Suspiria ephemera

Joan Bennett made only two theatrical films in the 1970s. Both of them -- 1970s House of Dark Shadows and 1977's Suspiria -- were horror movies, a genre she had previously avoided like the plague. Both moves have been remade in recent years (Tim Burton's 2012 Dark Shadows and Luca Guadagnino's 2018 Suspiria) to delightfully devisive results. And both remakes improbably featured Chloë Grace Moretz, a bit of trivia that will likely give rise to a tumor if you dwell too long upon it.

Above is a screenshot of a Facebook comment about my Inappropriate Gold Key movie adaptions post from earlier in the week. I created cover art from some 1970s comicbook adaptions of movies you absolutely don't want your kids to see, which prompted the response about Harry Potter. It kind of blew my mind and inspired me to create a movie poster for Guadagnino's Suspiria that targeted the Hogwarts crowd.



For something that was rattled off in about half an hour, I was mostly happy with it. But it also made me realize something: I've created a LOT of Suspria-related weirdness over the years. Nobody's really taken much notice in them, but they make me happy. So here's a collection (and it's not even everything!) of the Suspria ephemera that's sprung from my diseased imagination.

Inappropriate Gold Key movie adaptions

First off, House of Dark Shadows is not a movie for kids. There were probably a lot of legal reasons Gold Key never folded a comic book adaption of the film into their ongoing Dark Shadows series, but face it ... that movie was one faked suicide away from getting slammed with an R rating.

But hey! I don't recognize the authority of the Motion Picture Association of America or the Comics Code, so I can do whatever I want. So I mocked up a cover of what Gold Key's adaption for House of Dark Shadows might have looked like. From there, the idea evolved into increasingly darker directions ... my instinct was to arrange these covers in order of inappropriateness, but that was more difficult than it looks. So here they are. Click on them to see larger images.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker gets down and dirty

It's been a few minutes since we last updated the website. Personal obligations have temporarily taken most of us away from Collinsport for a spell, but we'll be firing on all cylinders again soon. In the meantime, enjoy some creative vandalsim concerning Gold Key comics and the misadventures of an intrepid reporter whose name you probably know. No, they aren't real ... but they ought to be.

The Silver Age of Dark Shadows fandom

Believe it or not, this isn't a photograph ... it's a composite image made up of more than two dozen individual elements assembled to give the impression of a three-dimensional image. Believe me, it would have been so much faster to just stack some VHS tapes and take a photo ... but that would have defeated the purpose here, which was to create something.

This image was inspired by a piece I made a while back for The Last Drive-In, the new show with  Joe Bob Briggs that currently wrapped its first season on Shudder. You can see that piece here, but it was a similar concept: to create a stack of VHS tapes depicting all of the movies shown on the show's first season.

I wanted to pay tribute to the Silver Age of Dark Shadows fandom, back when the quickest way to interact with the show was through home video releases. It was always a delight to walk into Suncoast in those days and see entire shelves full of Dark Shadows VHS tapes. I hope the love for those days shines through in this piece, though there might also be a troubling subtext about fandom's nostalgic obsession with consumerism. But that's a topic for another time.

You can find Analog Shadows at my Redbubble store here. And feel free to look around the rest of my silly store here.

Horror movies as books as movies

If you're a hardcore movie fan, odds are you spend an inordinate amout of time bitching about the cover art for home video releases. If you track the quality from the golden age of VHS to today's Blu-ray releases, you'll notice that arc isn't going upward. It's goddamn depressing. Amazon recently stepped in a pile of their own poo recently with an abominable thumbnail for their Suspiria remake ... but if you think it's weird that a company would foul their own next in such an exorbitant manner, let me introduce you to cover art for pretty much every Star Wars home video release since 1995.

It's not that 21st century media marketing is necessarily bad. The people creating these things are as talented and passionate as ever. But the folks controlling the purse strings have sucked all of the joy from commercial art. If you're lucky, a successful movie might get a nifty steelbook edition a decade after its theatrical release ... until then you're usually on your own. There's a subculture devoted to custom DVD and Blu-ray artwork to account for the sins of corporate culture (and because fans often feel an invalid sense of ownership over properties they love) and some of this art is terrific . Some of it ... not so much. But it's usually more fun to browse these galleries than it is to browse the home video aisles of your local Target.

Last week I had one of my stupid ideas, which are frequently the most fun ideas. As a child, some of my only access to horror movies were magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland and Fangoria, as well as movie "novelizations" that were omnipresent during late late 1970s' and early '80s. One of the first novels I ever read was Alan Dean Foster's adaptation of Alien. Peter Benchley's Jaws was almost the first, but that book had a tendancy to disappear. I later learned that my mother had taken to hiding the book to keep her 7-year-old from reading the explicit sex scenes in the novel. By the time I turned 9 she'd given up, opting to tear out the offending pages.

Yes, I know that Jaws is not a novelization, but there was such a give-and-take between Hollywood and publishing in those days that many books and movies are permanently linked in my imagination. I tend to think of Friday the 13th Part 3 as being the first in the series that I saw, but that's not true ... I read the novelization at age 11 because nobody would take me to see a slasher movie.

This post is already too long for what it's meant to be, which is an introduction to some custom DVD covers for some of my favorite horror movies ... designed to look like book covers. There are some (ahem) vintage covers in the lot, as well as a cover for the more-recent Rob Zombie film The Lords of Salem. (Yes, there was a novel based on that movie.)

You can download the covers below. If you plan to print and use them, print them at 100 percent and trim them along the crop marks. I haven't watermarked them to avoid cluttering the art, so if you share them please tell people where you found them.

Come see the other way the vampires do it

I don't love much of the artwork that has accompanied the home video releases of House of Dark Shadows over the years. Going back to the days of VHS, the movie has always been given staid, lackluster packaging that feels almost designed to be invisible. I'd be stunned if the designers creating these boring, butt-ugly packages had even seen the movie.

Ugh.

So, I decided to make my own ... back in 2016. My first idea was to use some of the grindhouse-style artwork produced for the movie's bonkers 1970 marketing blitz, but I was distracted by something shiny and never finished it. Last week I returned to the idea and started from scratch, keeping two goals in mind. First, there needed to be a sense of joy to the artwork. House of Dark Shadows is about as pure a horror movie as you're ever going to find, and that needs to be celebrated. I also didn't want to hide the movie's age. New movies are being made every day, but they're not making any more movies from 1970 ... using a bullshit Photoshop collage to give a movie a superficial facelift is gross and embarassing. I'm looking in your direction, Star Wars.

The first design is a tribute to the classic cover stories about Dark Shadows from Famous Monsters of Filmland. I used the color scheme of the magazine's feature about House of Dark Shadows, while also trying to invoke the mighty Basil Gogos. The second design is a more traditional Criterion Collection riff, one that relies heavily on Nancy Barrett (just as movie's original marketing campaign did) while reminding people that House of Dark Shadows is a goddamn brutal movie.

But what to do with this art? My first idea was a bad one, but well intentioned. I've seen enough of my work show up on t-shirts and other websites to make me cautious about sharing high-resolution files. Posting them online almost gaurantees that the images would sooner or later make their way to Redbubble. My solution? "Pay for the shipping and the cost of printing and I'll mail you the covers!" Easy, right? But the messages I received asking for prints immediately got to the point where I felt uncomfortable about the volume of financial transations involved. I also didn't want to spend the rest of the month waiting in line at the post office. Realizing I'm an anarchist at heart (and a lazy one, at that) it felt best just to release these images into the wild and let you good people take care of the rest. All I ask is that, should you print and use these covers, please send me a photo when you're done. I'd love to see people actually using these things!

You can download high-resolution images below from Imgur. There are two versions of each: one for DVD, the other for Blu-ray. If you don't already own House of Dark Shadows on home video ... well, you bring shame upon your family. But you can restore that honor by picking up a copy at Amazon HERE.

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Creating the cover art for Master of Dark Shadows

Artist Jesse Vital has shared a look at the process of creating the cover art for upcoming Master of Dark Shadows home video release. Two things leap out immediately: Lara Parker is absent from his rough sketch, and the Zuni Fetish Warrior from Trilogy of Terror is missing from a later, more complete version.

If you're just now finding out about Master of Dark Shadows, you can find out everything you need to know about the film and its many, many special features by clicking HERE. It's set for release April 16 and is available for pre-order from Amazon.

You can see Vital's art below.

Barnabas Collins makes the vampire wall of fame in Chile

Gabriela Ferrada, an artist who goes by the handle THORN, spent last summer decorating the walls Constitución with images or her favorite vampires. Located in Chillán, the capital of Chile, the neighborhood now features the likenesses of Gary Oldman as Dracula, Sharon Tate from The Fearless Vampire Killers, Kiefer Sutherland from The Lost Boys, Brad Pitt from Interview with the Vampire and, of course, Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins.

Ferrada has been doing multilayer stencil since 2010 and, if her handle and website address are any indication, she's also a horror fan. Ferrada's website address is www.thornindustries.org, the name of international conglometrate eventually inherited by Damien Thorn in The Omen series. Lucky for us she devoted a little time to documenting the creation of her murals and shared a variety of images on her social media outlets. She dedicated Barnabas Collins to her mother, because "he scares her."

You can find Thorn on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ThornIndustries/
and Twitter at https://twitter.com/kontraky