The ID Monster From Forbidden Planet, 1956

"Ask a film fan for a list of the truly intelligent, well-made science fiction films of the 1950s, and you'll most likely get a fairly short list. Topping that list, however, will probably be MGM's classic, Forbidden Planet. Based, at least in part, on William Shakespeare's 1610 play, The Tempest, Forbidden Planet tells the story of a rescue mission sent to the planet Altair IV to find any trace of the missing Bellerophon expedition. What they find is Dr. Edward Morbius and his now-grown daughter Altaira, along with a terrifying invisible monster that seems set on destroying the rescue crew just as it did the Bellerophon party. To bring the invisible Monster from the Id to life, MGM made a deal with Disney studios to borrow one of their chief animators, Joshua Meador, and a crew of artists, marking the very first occasion that Disney had loaned their talent to another studio. Meador and his team developed a radical new method of animation to create the Id Monster, seen only against the discharge from an electrical fence and the crew's blaster fire. Rather than rely on traditional cell animation, in which each frame is painted on a clear acetate sheet, Meador had each frame drawn in graphite on animator's paper. Then, each of these frames was shot using high contrast film, from which a negative image was extracted and composited over the positive image. The result was a weird, roiling creature, the perfect representation of all man's basest desires. Offered here is one of the original animation drawings used in the filming of the movie, a stunning portrait of the Id Monster." - quote and image source.







Here's a screenshot from the film showing how the creature appeared in the movie...


Below is a conceptual drawing for a supposed remake of Forbidden Planet I found on flickr.


The following 3 photographs are from a detailed sculpture of the Id monster created by Tony McVey. This version takes the id monster away from the meatball with legs and fangs look into a more anatomically correct, if that's even possible, abomination. You can view the page these works were found at the Menagerie Productions website.






























































And a few more sculpted interpretations of the Id beast I found on google.

Pulp Magazine Illustrations











































Scratchboard drawings by an unknown artist for an unknown fantasy tale.

Horror From Beyond!!!






















I'm figuring out a future week long post dedicated to monster movie posters which will hopefully be ready in a few weeks. There's going to be around 100 and I'm going to link to trailers of each movie wherever possible. Until then enjoy one of my favorites, Yog, Monster From Space.

Dracula And A Monkey



















I did some photoshop tweaks to these two images, removing text and other clutter. They would make awesome tshirt designs. Sometime in the next year I want to make Monster Brains logo tshirts to sell on this blog and I might come back to this image for that. The Monster Brains logo in red would look really good on a shirt with this image at the center. The image is from a Theater window card advertising the stage version of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula," shown on November 5, 1928 at Ford's Theatre in Baltimore, MD. The wear of almost a century against the flat black resembles stars in outer space upon closer inspection, giving the Dracula head a weird cosmic terror vibe. I've been really inspired by this painting and I'm considering doing a series of paintings in a similar style. Monster heads against flat black backgrounds.

The bottom picture should be obvious to any horror movie fan, Bela Lugosi with a unibrow next to a primate... Murders in the Rue Morgue. You give Bela Lugosi control of a blood thirsty ape and nothing good is going to come from that.






















And last, a similar beast...

Galaxy Of Terror (1981) Movie Poster





















"As a lone spaceship proceeds on its long voyage across space, the crew are surprised to encounter a strange pyramid form. Surprise turns to horror as one by one, they discover that their darkest nightmares are all starting to become real."

This b horror sci fi flick is probably best known for the following awesome bit of James Cameron trivia found at imdb.

"Unit director James Cameron got maggots to wriggle on a severed arm by passing an electric current through it, impressing a couple of producers and earning him his next job. And so a career was born."

That's right, electrified maggots on a severed arm are responsible for Titanic..

Enjoy this scene where Sid Haig is murdered by his own amputated arm with a glass throwing star.

And you might think less of Freddy Krueger when you see him scream like a little girl at the end of this trailer.

William Holbrook Beard - It Rains It Shines, The Devil Whipping His Wife, 19th C.





















"The author of this provocative nineteenth-century painting, William Holbrook Beard, was born into a family of portrait, animal, landscape, and genre painters in the small town of Painesville, Ohio, near Cleveland. He is best known for his satiric genre scenes featuring animals as stand-ins for human beings behaving badly. He frequently used bears as protagonists. The present work is less anecdotal, and more hauntingly compelling than many of his satirical works. In the upper scene, an innocent child has happened upon a peculiar wooden grate on the ground in a clearing of a misty field. Noises from below the strange construction attracted the child's attention and led him to kneel down and listen. In the lower, underground scene, which is rendered in an entirely different palette of earth tones and fiery furnace reds, Beard has painted a scene of a devil flogging his wife. Reminiscent of the work of Salvator Rosa, the subject is doubtless related to a literary source, but has a painterly rather than illustrational quality." - quote and image source.

The Discovery of Adam, 1891

"Best known for genre scenes of animals satirizing human behavior, William Holbrook Beard painted his first known monkey painting only two years after the publication of Charles Darwin's controversial Origin of the Species, 1859. Beard believed that animals possessed souls and could express human emotions and feelings, yet according to Robert M. Peck, "Beard refused to believe in man's descent from more primitive primates." (Peck, 1994, p.699) No other work in Beard's extensive oeuvre so clearly and humorously illustrates the artist's opinion of Darwin's theory than the present work, Discovery of Adam, 1891. Here, a group of well dressed monkeys appear confounded at the discovery that their ancestor, Adam, is in fact a turtle. Beard further conveys his message by inscribing "200,000 B.C. Adam" on the tortoise's shell. Beard possibly refers to Darwin's theory of evolution, the survival of the fittest, by depicting two prehistoric pterodactyls fighting in the left background." - quote and image source.

More work by the artist can be found listed at Artcyclopedia.
The Monkey Fur art blog has a post with a selection of Beard's animal related paintings.

Mehmed Siyah Qalem,15th Century Turkestan

Demons dismember a horse


Dancing demons

Three demons absorb closed cases, this work isn't credited towards Qalem but appears nearly identical to the other paintings so I'm guessing that it's by the same artist.

A few more related works can be seen at Visipix.

To see more works by Qalem, visit this gallery.

Among the Gibjigs





















These 3 illustrations and page of text are from a weird children's fantasy book from 1881 written by Sydney Hodges and illustrated by Horace Petherick. The entire book can be found at the Google library along with a downloadable pdf file (with art) of the book. These are the kind of books you hope to stumble upon when digging through old bookstores or libraries. Filled with some truly weird and disturbing imagery, such as the human headed lizards sneaking out of the bushes above, this book and the similar "Among The Woblins" posted below are well worth checking out.








Among The Woblins...





















Written by Sydney Hodges and illustrated by Horace Petherick, released in 1883. This children's fantasy tale concerns surreal scenes of giant ogres and birds, beaked figures resembling characters out of Max Ernst's Une Semaine De Bonte and other fantastic imagery. Online pages can be found at the George A. Smathers Libraries. To download a complete pdf of the book including all illustrations visit the google library here. I've included some of my favorite illustrations from the book below. I only skimmed through both books but they appear to take place in the same fantasy world with the scene of the army of monsters appearing near the end of both books.

Pulp Covers From aaa_aad_add_ddd





















Here's a handful of some crazy pulp magazine/book covers posted over at the new blog dedicated to sci fi movie posters and book covers, aaa_aad_add_ddd. You know a blog is going to be good when its title looks like a self destruct sequence for a killer robot!

And I have a huge pile of pulp related covers that I plan on posting across a weeklong period sometime in the next month.

Illustration From Pilgrim's Progress





















The painting above can be found in this illustrated book of the Pilgrim's Progress from 1890. Look here to see previous mention of artwork associated with this Christian tale.

Monsters Of The Sea, 1890





















Here's an odd collection of illustrations depicting various sea beasts from a book released in 1890 and written by John Gibson. I think I've posted a few of these before but here appears to be the original source of the drawings.
A few more illustrations along with the entire text of the book can be found on this page.