Witch's Brew

I don’t know when you grew up. I’ve done my best not to and will keep trying for as long as I don’t so take this for what it is worth, I grew up in the Golden Years of Monsters.

Universal had fallen on hard times so they released all of the vault films from the original Age of Monsters as Shock Theater. Every local station in the country had a low-paid, serf working the midnight show as a ghoul or vampire or zombie and kids everywhere were getting the beejeezus scared out of them. It was fun.

There is only one Dracula, Bela Lugosi. No don’t argue about it, this is an immutable fact. Chris Lee was okay, but don’t even begin with Twilight.

Boris Karloff, elegant, gentle, urbane, intelligent and that voice, you will live forever and while I am at it, Academy Award people, the 1931 Frankenstein was THE GREATEST MIME performance in the history of film and you should get off your ass and give Boris the honorary Academy Award he deserves!

From the sublime to the ridiculous, Hammer films, blood in rich, red Technicolor and the very best Van Hesling of all time, Peter Cushing and oh those Hammer honeys, Hazel Court of the red, red lips and the heaving bosoms. (No one in my opinion has heaved a bosom better before or since.) A generation of boys grew hale and hearty dreaming of being as stalwart as Peter Cushing and…well; you can guess what they were dreaming about Hazel Court.

And why am I boring you with tales of Hammer Horrors and Bela’s blood drinking?
It’s October and only a week away from Halloween and where in this community crawling with artists is the Halloween Phantasmagorical Art show.

Creating from myth is a time honored artistic conceit and the miseries of the damned have flowed across the canvas since men first trembled under some impassioned sermon of a tormented monk. The Picture of Dorian Gray has art as its plot device and what of the Phantom of the Opera, is there any art greater than the opera? (Yeah I know, but you have to admit they pay big bucks to hear ear-splitting sopranos screech in Italian.) Art and horror have walked hand in hand for many years.

But I don’t want to do a full scale portrait of Quasimodo. And you don’t have to; surely there are other images which haunt your nightmares, why not drag them kicking and screaming out into the light of day? Esmeralda might make a pretty picture or what about all of those doomed Ushers? Like animals, King Kong or Godzilla and why has poor ole neglected Gorgo not gotten as much press as Godzilla? He must feel like Christina Aguilera swamped in a sea of Kim Kardashian.

George Lucas took us to a galaxy far, far away where there are wonders untold, and thank you George you showed us all of them. So why not you? Where are your galaxies and new cosmos? Does Robbie the Robot live there? Maybe there’s an alluring Number Six?

If you’ve forgotten how it was to ride the Zeta Beam or fight Ming the Magnificent for the charms of Dale Arden, struggle through the jungle with Tarzan or Jungle Jim, listen to the Bromo Seltzer talking train that takes you to the squeaking door to the Inner Sanctum, have you never ventured into The Outer Limits or wandered through The Night Gallery, (Sneaky art reference), then its time you took a walk on the wild side, come over to the Dark Side and find what waits just beyond the waking world.