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. Every time I arrived home, there were more black and white sketches all over the place. So, we’re posting all 25 horror sketches!
★To see all of the Horror Ink Sketches, click here.
Headless Fascination
“Our dread and fascination with the headless does seem to have become much more explicit. Outside the small niche of splatter horror, severed heads were usually just suggested in the past, as in the ominous box that John Turturro’s character carries with him at the end of the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, or in the notorious box that is delivered to Brad Pitt’s detective at the end of the serial killer film Se7en– a film once considered to have pushed the very boundaries of acceptable representation. In the second series of Fargo, released in 2015, both of these boxes are recalled with the postal delivery of a head: this time, the box is opened.
There is also a long tradition going back to the Greeks of ‘brazen heads’ (mechanical heads, automata or robots) that had oracular powers, speaking unspeakable truths. At the end of this tradition lies the robot Ash in Alien. The crew only discovers that Ash is a robot after they’ve knocked his head off. When they plug the head back in to the power, he speaks only to give them their death sentence: they are all expendable. In Dennis Potter’s last TV work Cold Lazarus (1996), set in the 24th Century, a cryogenically frozen head is reanimated, and again speaks unpalatable truths. In The Walking Dead, however, the Governor sits staring at a row of fish tanks holding ranks of zombie heads kept ‘alive’ in his office, their brains undamaged, and yet they have nothing to say.” [click here to read more]
Flaming Head by Miguel Guerra
