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Classic horror films get the vintage comic book treatment by Spanish artist Nache Ramos


‘Long live the new flesh!’ A digital design based on David Cronenberg’s 1983 film ‘Videodrome.’
 
Outside of the fact that he is a talented artist with a deep love of classic 60s, 70s, and 80s horror, unfortunately, I do not know, nor was I able to dig much up on self-professed “comic enthusiast, music freak, horror lover, and videogame collector” Nache Ramos. But here’s what I do know. Ramos is based in Alcoli (or Alcoy), Spain where he has been a graphic designer and illustrator for over a decade. His art has been used to decorate snowboards made by Wi-Me Snowboards, and for Australian snowboard company Catalyst. In 2018, he won a Guns ‘N’ Roses contest which asked fans of the band (via Twitter), to create artwork based on their 1987 album Appetite for Destruction. Other than well-deserved accolades for his submission, I’m not sure what Ramos got as a prize, but I suppose gaining exposure to G’N'R’s 6+million Twitter followers is very much a good thing. This was also the same year Ramos moved from using traditional artistic mediums to creating his work digitally. This brings me to Nache’s nostalgic interpretations which infuse the look of old-school comic books with Ramos’ love of science fiction and horror films he grew up with.

Like any horror fan worth their VHS collection, Ramos digs the films of director John Carpenter and has created several digitally designed homages to Carpenter’s films in vintage comic book style. Others include David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (pictured at the top of this post), Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Richard Donner’s bone-chilling 1976 film, The Omen. If this all sounds good to you (and it should), Ramos also accepts commissions via his Instagram. You can also pick up very reasonably-priced prints of Ramos’ super-cool fictional movie posters on his Red Bubble page. I myself picked up Nache’s take on Videodrome. Scroll on to see more of Ramos’ fantastic faux-vintage comics.
 

 

 

 

 
Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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04.23.2021
10:31 am
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A History of Violence: The gory artwork of Vince Locke


Vince Locke’s artwork for the 2017 Cannibal Corpse album ‘Red Before Black.’ The concept for the image was to capture the victim’s perspective as they are about to die.
 
If you’re a fan of Buffalo, New York death metal band Cannibal Corpse, then you know the artwork of Vince Locke. Kerrang! magazine has called Locke “a man who reinvented the meaning of the word “disgusting.” If the title of this post rings a bell, it should, as one of the many comic book ventures Locke has worked on—including Neil Gaiman’s epic The Sandman—the graphic novel A History of Violence (1997) written by John Wagner. The novel would later be adapted into David Cronenberg’s 2005 film of the same name. Locke’s work in A History of Violence earned him a Haxtur Award (Spain) for Best Long Comic Strip.

Locke’s masterful work with both Cannibal Corpse and with the ultra-violent zombie comic Deadworld is pretty legendary within the interwoven worlds of heavy metal and comic books. The impact of Deadworld was so seismic at the time that, according to Locke, it was in the early stages of development before The Walking Dead turned the world of zombies on its necrotizing ear. A huge fan of the classic horror filmography he cites his favorite Hammer film as the ultra-creepy Masque of Red Death starring Vincent Price. This checks out, as Locke liberally uses the color red in his paintings because there is so much BLOOD. His long collaboration with Cannibal Corpse was initiated by Cannibal Corpse vocalist Chris Barnes, who called Locke up telling him he had a job he “might be interested in.” In 1990, Locke would create the artwork for CC’s record Eaten Back to Life and thus began a goretasticly beautiful relationship which would go on to inspire other artwork within the death metal arena. However, trying to out-gross Locke (long considered an “honorary” member of CC) and his artfully repulsive work is next to impossible. Trust me. In his teens, Locke had some formal art instruction, later studying art for two years in college before he dropped out to pursue comic book illustration. His work with Cannibal Corpse, as noted by Kerrang!, has been censored and even banned around the world.

In 2009 Locke combined Cannibal Corpse and his love of illustration into the graphic novel. Evisceration Plague named after CC’s eleventh record from 2009. The individual stories in the book are based on the songs on Evisceration Plague like “Evidence in the Furnace,” “Shatter their Bones,” something I hope never becomes a thing, “Scalding Hail.” Here’s more from CC’s bassist Alex Webster on how Locke was able to bring the band’s lyrics to “life”:

“Vince Locke has done an incredible job turning our lyrics into blood-soaked and vicious illustrations for the Evisceration Plague comic book. He really has captured visually what we were trying to convey lyrically. His artwork has brought our macabre songs to life in truly explicit fashion…fans of graphic horror will not be disappointed.”

While this kind of artwork might not be for everyone, it is important to bring up the fact that Locke’s work with Cannibal Corpse changed the trajectory of the genre as it relates to how bands use imagery to further connect to their audience. And without a doubt, Locke’s work connected with fans across the world and then some. And though I shouldn’t need to say so, the images you’re about to see are like watching a Lucio Fulci film on PCP. Speaking of the great Italian master of gore, in 2018, Locke was enlisted by the incredible Eibion Press to illustrate a graphic novel adaptation of Fulci’s 1981 film House by the Cemetery. Like the other Fulci titles in Eibon’s catalog, it’s bloody fantastic. Lastly, in April of 2021 Cannibal Corpse will release their fifteenth album, Violence Unimagined with Locke’s artwork gracing the cover. If you haven’t eaten recently, are not easily offended, and feel as though “you’ve seen it all,” click here to see Locke’s latest cannibalistic conjuring for Cannibal Corpse.

If you’re in the Long Beach, California area, you may make an appointment with The Dark Art Emporium to see an exhibit featuring work by Vince Locke, Ryan Bartlett, and Brian Mercer which opens on March 13th.
 

Artwork by Locke for the cover of Deadworld #1 (1986).
 

The original artwork for the cover of Deadworld #7 (1988).
 

Deadworld #9.
 

Deadworld #10.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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03.12.2021
06:42 am
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David Cronenberg on Andy Warhol
09.20.2018
05:49 am
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The soundtrack CD from the Art Gallery of Ontario show
 
In between A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg curated a Warhol retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario. ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964, a selection of work from Warhol’s first years at the Factory, also appeared at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, but the AGO show was special in at least two respects.

Only the Toronto iteration of the show presented Warhol’s death and celebrity paintings alongside his early films. For instance, Cronenberg set Silver Disaster #6, Warhol’s silkscreened image of two electric chairs, in the middle of a triptych, looping the movies Kiss and Blow Job on either side. The director also recorded a soundtrack for the exhibition which he narrated himself, splicing in contributions from Dennis Hopper, Amy Taubin, James Rosenquist, and Mary-Lou Green. In a masterstroke, Cronenberg included Elvis’ recording of the title song from Flaming Star on the soundtrack; as he pointed out at the time, the Don Siegel movie that was the source for Warhol’s Elvis I and II is “about racism, and everyone dies in it, including Elvis.”

Recall that the brilliant explosion characteristic of a supernova is the moment of a star’s death. With its Ballardian preoccupations, the show might as well have been called Death Drive. Fittingly, the Guardian marked the fifth anniversary of 9/11 by running an interview with Cronenberg about his contribution to ANDY WARHOL/SUPERNOVA.
 

David Cronenberg at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 2006 (via Seems Artless)
 
The show also provided an occasion for Cronenberg to reflect on the New York underground scene that inspired him as a young filmmaker. He told a wonderful story about Stan Brakhage’s first encounter with Warhol’s movies during a Q&A at the museum:

Stan Brakhage, who was a very hardcore—I think he just died recently, didn’t he—just very hardcore art-art-art-film maker, with work in Super 8 and 16 mm and ultimately in video, but very, very obscure, difficult, you know, not very well known except in his own circle. Andy really knew everything that was going on in New York. He knew the underground, he knew the music, and he produced the Velvet Underground’s first album, I mean, he was into everything. He knew what was going on with underground filmmakers at [Jonas Mekas’] Co-op, and at one point, once he had made a few films, Jonas Mekas told Stan Brakhage he must see this work of Andy Warhol’s.

So he watched about 16 hours of Andy’s stuff, and he came out, and he said, “This is trash! This is ridiculous, this is ludicrous, it’s nothing. I mean, it’s absolutely nothing, it’s bullshit.”

And then Mekas said, “Did you watch it at 24 frames a second?”

And he said, “Yeah.”

He said, “Stan, I want you to go back and watch it at 16 frames.” Which, of course, makes it longer. “Because if you’ve only seen it at 24, you haven’t really seen it.”

Being the hardcore guy that he was, he went back, and he sat there for, you know, 20 hours, came out, he said: “He’s a genius.” True story.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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09.20.2018
05:49 am
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‘Long Live the New Flesh’: Documentary profile of David Cronenberg
03.19.2018
10:35 am
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If you’re reading this website, you’re probably aware of the movies of David Cronenberg. Almost certainly the greatest filmmaker Toronto ever produced, Cronenberg established his reputation in the 1970s and early 1980s with a series of ecstatically cerebral and creepy sci-fi/horror movies that led to the coinage of a new adjective, “Cronenbergian,” which was understood to mean something to do with uncontrollable manifestations of human flesh. Cronenberg was one of the few filmmakers with the balls to tackle the works of J.G. Ballard and William S. Burroughs, although if Steven Spielberg ever decides to adapt Junky, he’ll join the club as well. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Cronenberg’s great crossover hit came in the summer of 1986 when he released his remake of the 1958 movie The Fly, starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. On the occasion of the UK release, which happened in February of 1987, an intriguing 50-minute TV documentary about Cronenberg was shown on British TV.

Long Live the New Flesh was directed by Laurens C. Postma, whose main directorial credit had been a 1984 program about The Prisoner. In the years to follow Postma would also direct documentaries about Derek Jarman and the Christian rock band Stryper.
 

 
The documentary shows admirable discipline in restricting the informational flow to a series of interviews with Cronenberg, Martin Scorsese, Stephen King, and movie critic Robin Wood, as well as miscellaneous clips from Cronenberg’s movies. At no point is an actor interviewed about anything. Wood has some criticisms of Cronenberg’s approach to horror, and Postma shows Cronenberg’s response to Wood as well.

Cronenberg had adapted Stephen King’s The Dead Zone a few years earlier, which explains his presence here. Scorsese and Cronenberg had become buddies a few years earlier, after Scorsese overcame his intuited dread at meeting his Canadian colleague, as he explained in an issue of Fangoria from 1983:
 

I’ve also had a chance to strike up a friendship with David, whom I would never have cast to play himself. I expected somebody who looked like a combination of Arthur Bremmer and Dwight Frye as Renfield in Dracula this is a go meet at driver, slobbering for juicy flies. The man who showed up in my apartment in New York looked like a gynecologist from Beverly Hills.

 
Commenting on Scorsese’s presumptions, Cronenberg later told David Breskin in Inner Views,
 

This is the guy who made Taxi Driver and he’s afraid to meet me! This is a guy who knows from the inside out that there’s a complex relationship between someone who makes films and his films. But he still was taking the films at face value and equating me with them, and the craziness he saw in the films, and the disturbing things he saw in the films, he felt would be the essence of me as a person.

 
After the jump, watch the program, plus a special treat…....
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.19.2018
10:35 am
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Illustrations of films by Dario Argento, David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott & more from Cinefantastique


The cover of Cinefantastique magazine featuring an image of Asia Argento, a bunch of blood and a razor blade with a job to do. The image is based on her father’s 1996 film ‘The Stendhal Syndrome.’ Illustration by David Voigt.
 
Originally the long-running film magazine Cinefantastique was just a little fanzine that was compiled with the help of a mimeograph machine in 1967. A few years later it became a highly regarded proper magazine known for its use of lustrous photos and exhaustive critical analysis of films by a team of writers that included the founder of Video Watchdog Tim Lucas along with future Stephen King collaborator, writer, and director Mick Garris. The vision of Cinefantastique publisher and editor Frederick S. Clarke was to ensure that the magazine was a category killer when it came to its approach in the treatment of cinema, taking the art of scrutinizing a film to a new level by providing expansive articles that expertly dissected every aspect of a movie instead of churning out fluff pieces like their competitors.

Another aspect that set Cinefantastique apart was the indulgent use of color photography in its layouts and covers. In addition to the use eye-popping photos, the magazine often featured creative illustrations on the cover done by various artists such as Roger Stine, sci-fi illustrator Barclay Shaw, John Carl Schoenherr (who created the iconic cover illustration for the dust jacket art of Dune), and Andrew Probert who is best known for his colorful contributions to the 1985 film Back to the Future and 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Some of the magazine’s more memorable illustrations were done by Stine and his cover for Cinefantastique that featured a surreal image of Sissy Spacek dripping in blood in 1977 (Volume six, Number one) won the artist critical acclaim. Cinefantastique still maintains an online presence as well as offering access to their extensive back-catalog of interviews and retrospectives. Physical copies of the magazine are also pretty easy to come by. Some of the images that follow are slightly NSFW.
 

Cover by Roger Stine, 1982.
 

1981.
 

The infamous “Carrie” cover by Roger Stine, 1977.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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05.24.2017
11:58 am
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Valentine’s Day cards inspired by the master of horror, David Cronenberg
02.13.2017
02:35 pm
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There’s a website out there claiming that in 1992 some company printed a set of 21 Valentine’s Day cards, each with a picture and come-hither motto riffing off the mostly grisly works of David Cronenberg. Whoever runs the site was cleaning out the storage space of a “distant relative” in North Hollywood, and came across several deadstock sets of the Cronenberg Valentine’s product, alongside similar Valentine items promoting “CareBears, Michael Jordan, and Jurassic Park.”

I ain’t buying the idea for a few reasons—not a single hit comes up for the set on eBay, which strikes me as a prerequisite to believing a story like this. The name of the company, Ephemerol, is a reference to a drug in Scanners that’s way too cute to be real, in my opinion.
 

 
Meanwhile, the picture of the set looks like it could have been made by anyone possessing a decent color printer, and the cards themselves seem decidedly post-Internet in nature. Having said all this, it would be cool and hilarious if something as dark as this had ever made it to the Spencer’s Gifts in your mall in the George Herbert Walker Bush years, but I’m betting ‘twas never thus.

Still, the cards are quite amusing. You can use the site to send your sweetie a Cronenberg Valentine’s Day card, virtual email style. Rigorously hewing to the 1992 premise, you won’t find eXistenZ or Eastern Promises here—the only movies available date from 1992 or before—Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers, Videodrome, The Fly, and Scanners are the main ones used.
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…...

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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02.13.2017
02:35 pm
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Body Horror: David Cronenberg’s mad doctors… dissected
07.22.2016
09:56 am
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Oliver Reed as Dr. Hal Raglan in The Brood (1979)
 
David Cronenberg really directed some doozies between about 1975 and 1990…. actually he never stopped making remarkable movies, but that first big chunk of material represents most of what we think about when we throw out the word “Cronenbergian.” The prosaic yet unsettling visions he presented in Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, and Dead Ringers are the most thorough expression of the “body horror” genre and have no true equal in the canon of world cinema.

Until I watched L. C. Durham’s intriguing, er, dissection of Cronenberg’s repeated inclusion of unreliable medicos in this period, it had never occurred to me that the pattern was that strong. Get a load of this murderer’s row of medical professionals: Dr. Antoine Rouge, Dr. Emil Hobbes, Dr. Dan Keloid, Dr. Hal Raglan, Dr. Paul Ruth, Dr. Sam Weizak, Drs. Beverly and Elliot Mantle. It’s a lovely bunch, no? We can only wonder why Cronenberg had quite so much to say about doctors.

Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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07.22.2016
09:56 am
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Concept art for David Cronenberg’s ‘Total Recall’ that never was
06.14.2016
02:38 pm
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I’ve heard some great stories about the David Cronenberg movies that almost were. Indeed, I once heard Cronenberg himself tell the tale of taking a phone call from the office of George Lucas, who wanted to feel the Toronto-born director out on the subject of directing Return of the Jedi. Cronenberg sniffed that he didn’t really direct material written by other people, and that was the end of that. (The conversation is all the more ironic if you consider that since that moment, Cronenberg has directed material originated by William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and Don DeLillo, among others. Maybe he just didn’t think of Lucas as a writer on that level?)

Cronenberg also turned down a chance to direct Top Gun, finding it too jingoistic (plus, as a Canadian, Cronenberg doubly wasn’t into it).

What I didn’t know until recently is that Cronenberg was the first director to be considered to direct Total Recall, which was eventually directed (rather well) by Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, previously responsible for Robocop.

Interestingly, Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon had tried to develop Philp K. Dick’s story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” as a script in the 1970s before concluding that the special effects would be too costly—their next project would become Alien, the commercial success of which kick-started the orignal PKD project again. 

Cronenberg worked on pre-production for the PKD project for about a year, a process that generated the fascinating concept art seen below. His choice for the lead role was to have been William Hurt, a far cry from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s, er, likely less thoughtful approach to the movie. After Cronenberg’s labors, the producers told him that they admired his treatment but were hoping for something a little bit closer to “Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars,” so Cronenberg returned to a project that would have a tone that interested him much more, that being a remake of the 1958 sci-fi classic The Fly.

Purportedly, Cronenberg’s take on the material would have been lot closer to Dick’s original story than the Verhoeven movie.

The artworks here were created by Ron Miller and his wife Judith Miller, who was responsible for the 3-D models, as well as production designer Pierluigi Basile.
 

 

 
Much more after the jump…....
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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06.14.2016
02:38 pm
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‘Scanners’ head-explosion ‘magic-motion’ lenticular postcards!
05.03.2016
09:39 am
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File under “esoteric gifts to give someone to let them know they’ve blown your mind”:

These are cool. The company Forever Midnight is offering up these killer “magic motion” lenticular post-cards of the infamous “head explosion” scene from David Cronenberg’s 1981 sci-fi horror masterpiece, Scanners.

I’m a sucker for lenticular shit. I have a Jesus portrait with eyes that follow me around my room, keeping me sin-free. It works most of the time. But these Scanners cards are among the the best uses I’ve ever seen of the novelty effect, sometime called “wiggle pictures,” since the process was developed in the 1940s.

The “head explosion” scene from Scanners is one of the great practical make-up effects of all time. The effect was achieved by creating a latex replica of the actor’s head, using a life cast. The head was fitted over a plaster base and the insides were filled with fake blood and various bits of dog food and rabbit livers and other things laying around the effects studio. The head was then actually blasted from behind by a 12-gauge shotgun held by special effects supervisor Gary Zeller. The end result is one of the biggest “oh shit” moments in cinema history.
 

 
You’ll have to make the jump to see more head explody…

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Posted by Christopher Bickel
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05.03.2016
09:39 am
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Long live the New Flesh: The making of David Cronenberg’s ‘Videodrome’
04.29.2016
09:09 am
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Videodrome, which came out in 1982, probably freaked me out as much as any movie ever has, when I caught it on cable TV a year or two after its release at the age of 13. In fact, I turned it off halfway through—it was just too much—but I ventured back a week later and watched the whole thing in morbid fascination.

It was the last of the films David Cronenberg made in his concentrated early “body horror” period, that stretch when he was establishing himself as an absolute master of intellectual schlock. Not that he ever abandoned that terrain at all—Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, and Crash were still to come—but his next project was a comparatively commercial Stephen King adaptation, The Dead Zone, and it wasn’t too long before he’s adapting David Henry Hwang plays and making movies about Jung.

After the thrilling, entropic run of serious mindfucks between 1975 and 1982, consisting of Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome—leaving out the racecar drama Fast Company to make a tidier chronology—there was a period in which Cronenberg’s actual personality and his public persona were quite out of sync.
 

Just a normal day in the Cronenberg universe…..
 
In real life, Cronenberg was a thoughtful, mild-mannered dork, but he was perceived as an insane freak, since cinephiles hadn’t had much access to seeing Cronenberg himself yet. The 1980s would bring The Fly and Dead Ringers, which would cement Cronenberg’s reputation as a filmmaker with a rare power to unsettle.

Today we think of him as this genial old guy who makes striking but somewhat conventional dramas like Eastern Promises or Maps to the Stars, but there was a time when even Martin Scorsese, a filmmaker quite accustomed to a bit of the ol’ ultraviolence, was actually frightened to meet his Canadian colleague!

In an interview that appeared in David Breskin’s wonderful collection Inner Views, Cronenberg commented:
 

I’m aware there are apparent contradictions, like the well-known Marty Scorsese thing: after I met him, he said in an interview that he had been terrified to meet me, though he had wanted to meet me. This is the guy who made Taxi Driver and he’s afraid to meet me! This is a guy who knows from the inside out that there’s a complex relationship between someone who makes films and his films. But he still was taking the films at face value and equating me with them, and the craziness he saw in the films, and the disturbing things he saw in the films, he felt would be the essence of me as a person. And so he was amazed to meet a guy who, as he later said, “looked like a Beverly Hills gynecologist.” And I was not anything like he thought I was going to be.

 
So that’s the context in which James Woods says, in Mick Garris’ look at the making of Videodrome, that Cronenberg’s was “one of the strangest minds I’ve ever encountered.” The fact is, Cronenberg’s sensibility has been tremendously normalized over the last generation, and it takes a mental effort to recall a time when Cronenberg was fucking dangerous and ultra weird.

To be fair, Woods was in the middle of making a movie in which his character, Max Renn, develops a kind of vagina into which he can insert a videotape and basically acts out the narrative laid out in David Bowie’s “TVC15” when he crawls into the cold glass of his cathode-ray tube…..

More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.29.2016
09:09 am
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Creepy portraits based on David Cronenberg’s ‘Scanners’
04.13.2016
01:38 pm
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“I must remind you that the scanning experience is usually a painful one, sometimes resulting in nosebleeds, earaches, stomach cramps, nausea, sometimes other symptoms of a similar nature.”

Those words, from David Cronenberg’s anomic 1981 classic Scanners, are spoken by the unnamed scanner, played by Louis Del Grande, who has no idea that he is about to undergo a fate far worse than a mere earache.

In 2014 the Criterion Collection came out with a new DVD edition of Cronenberg’s twitchy, sweaty masterpiece of ESP horror. The DVD packaging featured some memorable cover art by Connor Willumsen, but casual observers may not have twigged just how many excellent and evocative artworks Willumsen concocted for the project.

Fortunately, Willumsen’s website features a Scanners section with all of the art he created for Criterion, including preliminary sketches. Here’s a sample, but go to his website to check out the full array of images.

Click on any image for a larger view.
 

 

 
More ‘Scanners’ portraits after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.13.2016
01:38 pm
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Watch David Cronenberg’s first short film ‘Transfer’ from 1966
03.21.2016
10:32 am
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1cronenbergd.jpg
 
In 1966, David Cronenberg wrote, edited, produced and directed his first film Transfer. This 16mm short told a seemingly simple story of a psychiatrist (Mort Ritts) and his patient (Rafe Mcpherson) playing out their roles against a frozen, snow-covered landscape.

Cronenberg was a 23-year-old student studying English Literature and Language when he made this film. He had originally enrolled at the University of Toronto to study science, but changed courses during his first year as he believed it would not help him become a “scientist who wrote fiction.”
 
02cronenbergtwo.jpg
 
Academia did not hold his interest long. Cronenberg quickly sought other avenues to express himself. Inspired by a classmate David Secter—who directed a feature film Winter Kept Us Warm—Cronenberg started hanging out at movie facility houses to learn about cameras, film and soak up as much as he could on the technical side of filmmaking.

He then ventured out to make his first of two short 16mm films—Transfer and From the Drain.
 
05cronenb.jpg
 
Though there is little of the bloody visceral obsessions that mark some of his later work, Transfer does hint at his interest in medicine, psychiatry and the relationship between doctor and patient which he would later develop in The Brood (1979), Scanners (1980), Dead Ringers (1988) and most obviously A Dangerous Method (2011) that examined the relationship between Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and the first female psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein. Cronenberg declared this last film had brought him full circle from the making of his first—Transfer.

 
01cronenendcard.jpg
 
Cronenberg has since said:

Transfer, my first film, was a surreal sketch for two people—a psychiatrist and his patient—at a table set for dinner in the middle of a field covered in snow. The psychiatrist has been followed by his obsessive former patient.

The only relationship the patient has had which has meant anything to him has been with the psychiatrist. The patient complains that he has invented things to amuse and occasionally worry the psychiatrist but that he has remained unappreciative of his efforts.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.21.2016
10:32 am
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Check out David Cronenberg’s 1967 anti-war comedy-horror student film, ‘From the Drain’
08.26.2015
09:41 am
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It’s difficult to imagine a David Cronenberg film without the surreal violence and body horror, but this 1967 student film is unmistakably his work, even at just 14 minutes and a meager $500 budget. The lack of exposition leaves the exact nature of the characters’ motivation and plot rather vague, but there is a distinctly anti-war vibe, and an unexpected dark humor to the intense subject and ominous setting.

Two men sit and talk in a bathtub, totally clothed—both are presumed to be veterans of an unnamed war. One man is under the impression that they’re in the “Disabled War Veterans’ Recreation Center,” but the facility is clearly a mental institution. In true Cronenbergian resolution, a vine creeps up through the tub drain and strangles one of the men, while the other watches completely unaffected. Like I said, barrel-a-laughs!
 

 
Part 2 after the jump…

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Posted by Amber Frost
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08.26.2015
09:41 am
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‘Fear on Film’: Three masters of horror—Landis, Cronenberg, Carpenter all in the same interview
04.22.2015
12:17 pm
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If you were living in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, you might remember this interview which aired on that “magnificent obsession,” the legendary Z Channel, a local cable channel that catered to film nuts until its inevitable demise in 1989. The host here is Mick Garris, a renowned expert in the horror genre.

The early 1980s were such a great moment for the horror genre, and these three men were right at the center of it all. This interview was probably conducted in early 1982—Landis had recently come out with An American Werewolf in London, and was a year away from releasing the video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” which anyone who lived through the era will tell you was not just any ordinary music video—it was a 13-minute horror movie on the zombie theme, and both song and video featured a memorable vocal bridge by Vincent Price. Carpenter, of course, had kicked off the Halloween franchise in 1978, had recently come out with The Fog, and would release The Thing in the summer of 1982. Cronenberg, whose previous two features were Scanners and The Brood, was promoting Videodrome, which would come out in 1983, the same year as The Dead Zone. And that’s not even counting something like the first Evil Dead movie, which came out in 1981, or Alien, which came out in 1979. The Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street franchises started in 1980 and 1984, respectively, and that same period saw a whole lot of Stephen King movies too, like Firestarter, Cujo, Creepshow, and Christine.

It’s a pretty interesting interview—Carpenter insists that movies don’t scare him but then admits that seeing It Came From Outer Space when he was 4 years old did scare him. Landis thinks that there’s been a change in horror movies—back in the day, the movies were fairly good but then the effect is ruined by the appearance of a shitty-looking monster; by 1981 the movies had gotten worse but the monsters actually look pretty convincing. The names Rick Baker and Roger Corman are bandied about liberally. Both Landis and Carpenter bemoan the need for entire days being spent to make a single effects-heavy shot. Cronenberg complains about censorship in Canada and points out several positive aspects of the U.S. system (this was taped before the introduction of PG-13, which precisely mirrors a suggestion made by Cornenberg). Cronenberg shows decent self-knowledge when he says, “My films tend to be very body-conscious”—an understatement, to say the least.

Above all, this is a great video if you are a big fan of brown jackets.
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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04.22.2015
12:17 pm
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Watch ‘The Italian Machine,’ David Cronenberg’s Ballardian motorcycle fetish short
03.09.2015
11:49 am
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I’ve already written an item for DM on Secret Weapons, David Cronenberg’s near-incomprehensible TV short from 1972 about a dystopian state that uses mind control drugs and a rebel biker gang that opposes it—in that movie, however, despite the stated existence of a biker gang, there were scarcely any motorcycles to be seen in it. That problem, at least, does not arise in Cronenberg’s 1976 short The Italian Machine.

It’s almost jaw-dropping how much progress Cronenberg had made between these two movies. The Italian Machine relinquishes all aspirations toward big-dick sci-fi in favor of a far more nuanced, engrossing, unfussy meditation on technology, art, decadence, and, shall we say, the pet obsessions of warring subcultures. The idea of the movie, which lasts only 23 minutes, is that a bunch of motorcycle buffs, having learned that an incredibly rare and high-quality Italian motorcycle, specifically a 1976 Ducati 900 Desmo Super Sport, has come into the possession of a local art enthusiast who intends to keep it in his living room as a sculpture, take on the moral imperative of liberating the machine from its outré confines and restoring it to its rightful purpose of kicking ass on the open road. 
 

 
What The Italian Machine, which first appared on the CBC television program Teleplay, most resembles is a really good short story; more specifically it reminds me a great deal of J. G. Ballard, which isn’t very strange considering that Cronenberg adapted Ballard’s Crash a couple of decades later. In The Italian Machine, Lionel, Fred, and Bug are three motorcycle nuts who enjoy the kind of nerdy oneupmanship that probably features on every episode of The Big Bang Theory. Upon finding out the identity of the Ducati’s purchaser, one Edgar Mouette, they concoct a plan to pose as a magazine crew of photographers doing a spread on Mouette’s interiors. That Ballardian angle resides mainly in Mouette and his cohorts, philosophical aesthetes to the max (when they’re not taking cocaine). Once Lionel and his buddies gain entry, it is the viewer’s task to decide which side is the nuttier of the two. Eventually they do get ahold of the bike, at which point their own ability to fetishize the machine unexpectedly manifests itself.

Truly, a top-notch piece of work, very in line with the many dark masterpieces Cronenberg would make in the years to come.
 

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.09.2015
11:49 am
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