Horror Ink Sketches
As part of our horror countdown we’re posting one new ink sketch every day. All through October, Miguel was caught up in a creative frenzy and drew a ton of Horror movie inspired illustrations! It was pretty crazy. Monsters were all over the place. So, we’ll continue to post all 25 of his horror sketches!
And no horror countdown would be complete without the one and only – Dracula!
Vampires
“The traits of modern-day vampires are pretty well established. They have fangs, drink human blood, and can’t see themselves in mirrors. They can be warded off with garlic, or killed with a stake through the heart. Some, like Dracula, are aristocrats who live in castles. Today’sPopular Stories Science & Innovation Quake split a tectonic plate in two, and geologists are shaken Animals New crocodile species found hiding in plain sight.
But vampires didn’t start out so clearly defined. Scholars suspect that the modern conception of these Halloween monsters evolved from various traditional beliefs that were held throughout Europe. These beliefs centered around the fear that the dead, once buried, could still harm the living.
Often, these legends arose from a misunderstanding of how bodies decompose. As a corpse’s skin shrinks, its teeth and fingernails can appear to have grown longer. And as internal organs break down, a dark “purge fluid” can leak out of the nose and mouth. People unfamiliar with this process would interpret this fluid to be blood and suspect that the corpse had been drinking it from the living.
Vampires of Europe
Vampires of Europe Because of this, vampire scares tended to coincide with outbreaks of the plague. In 2006, archaeologists unearthed a 16th-century skull in Venice, Italy, that had been buried among plague victims with a brick in its mouth. The brick was likely a burial tactic to prevent strega—Italian vampires or witches—from leaving the grave to eat people.” [click here to read more]
Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (1931)
Lon Chaney was originally set to play the role after his success in silent classics like,“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “The Phantom of the Opera”, but he died as “Dracula” began production. Enter a mysterious 49-year-old Hungarian, who starred in a 1927 Broadway production of “Dracula”.
“What was new about the film was sound. It was the first talking picture based on Bram Stoker‘s novel, and somehow Count Dracula was more fearsome when you could hear him–not an inhuman monster, but a human one, whose painfully articulated sentences mocked the conventions of drawing room society. And here Lugosi’s accent and his stiffness in English were advantages.
Lugosi was by all accounts a strange, deliberately theatrical man, who drew attention to himself with stylized behavior. He made his foreignness an asset, and in Hollywood and New York used his sinister, self-mocking accent to advantage. After the success of “Dracula,” he often appeared in public dressed formally, with a flowing cape, as if still playing the role. In later life, addicted to drugs, he was reduced to self-parody, and a glimpse of his last years can be found in “Ed Wood” (1994), set during his last picture.” [click here to read more]
Dracula inspired by Bela Lugosi
