You may have read Richard’s post on René Laloux and Roland Topor’s surrealist animated short,The Snails—a weird little precursor to their most famous collaboration, Fantastic Planet. Like the aliens in Fantastic Planet, the snails are monstrously large, invoking both science fiction and horror—check out The Snails at the end of the post.

Topor’s 1960 book of illustrations Les Masochistes however, is a much more personable tongue-in-cheek kind of psychological intensity. Here are seemingly mundane human beings, engaging in what (at a brief glance) could be a mundane activity, but the sparse drawings show some really cringe-inducing acts of masochism. You smile, then you shudder, then you remember that Torpor wrote the novel, The Tenant, which was later adapted into the final installment of Polanski’s Apartment Series. It all makes sense in the larger Topor canon of discomfort.

They’re like B. Kliban meets Sacher-Masoch, no?
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Via Beautiful Decay