An atmospheric portrait of a baleful Bride, by California cartoonist Bob Lizarraga.
Lizarraga boasts impressive credits as a character and prop designer for animation and CGI studios. His personal work as an illustrator and a sure-handed caricaturist reveal a Monster Kid’s enduring love for classic horror.
Bob Lizarraga portfolios here and here, and more art on Bob’s blog.
The Bride of Frankenstein as pin-up girl is a favorite subject for cartoonists and tattoo artists, but few illustrators are as accomplished as Aly Fell of Manchester, UK, whose sumptuous art is of a tradition that tracks back directly to the classic glamour artists like Gil Elvgren and Alberto Vargas.
Fell’s smart and sexy subjects are beautifully composed and awash in rich colors and witty details, as evidenced in his Bride portrait, entitled Charge! (2007). This Bride wears purple lipstick, green silk stockings and keeps a wrench on her dressing table. Hairspray by the crateful explains the hairstyle. Note the autographed snapshot of her beau and the stashed Abby Normal brain.
Aly (Alastair) Fell work is displayed for your guaranteed appreciation on his website and blog.
La Novia — the fiancée — as femme fatale, by Spanish artist Alfonso Azpiri.
One of the masters of European erotic fantasy comics, Azpiri favors classic horror, sword and sorcery and space opera served up adult-style, with bold nudity and sexual situations. In a vastly different register, his kids-oriented character Mot, a time traveling monster, was adapted to television as an animated series.
Alfonso Azpiri’s website.
With thanks to Emilio Lobato.
British artist Tom Bagshaw describes the beautiful women he paints as “strong, intriguing characters, with an air of mystery to them.” This certainly applies to his starlit Bride who wears her stitches like delicate jewelry.
Bagshaw’s digital art serves a who’s who of editorial, advertising and fashion clients. His work can be appreciated on his website and blog. The ethereal Bride, titled Frankie, was created for Halloween. It is available as a limited edition giclee print.
New Jersey’s Mike Bell offers up an outlandish pop surrealist rendition, The Birth of the Bride. In another piece, The Bride is at once tough and sophisticated, wearing Old School tats, sipping a cocktail.
Bell’s lowbrow art celebrates monsters, pinup queens, robots and Jersey shore memorabilia, with the Karloffian Monster and Lanchester Bride as favorite subjects.
Check out his website and you’ll see Frankie decked out in fez and monocle, leopard-print smoking jackets, channeling Frank Sinatra and Johnny Cash, or clinking martinis with his inamorata.
You’ll also see Lugosi’s Dracula flicking a Zippo with continental flair, and other indelible pop culture icons, from Marilyn Monroe to Astro Boy, decorating skateboards and matchbooks.
We'll revisit Mike Bell's universe in the near future, 'cause it's loaded with Frankenstein goodness.
The reaction to The Art of The Bride series has been terrific. Visitor traffic is way up over the Holidays, usually a very quiet time, and comments have been extremely positive here, on Facebook and even through email. So let’s keep going, all the way to New Year’s Day, shall we?
I’ll be posting my Year’s End recap first thing in January, and there’s lots of new stuff I’m eager share with you, but this week, again, we’ll feature artwork inspired by the fabulous Bride of Frankenstein. Here are seven more artists and seven more visions of The Bride, as we wrap up her 75th Anniversary Year in style.
Enjoy, and here’s to a great New Year!
Art cropped from the Bride of Frankenstein poster by Martin Hansin.
Here’s a holiday-appropriate nativity scene, monster magi in attendance. A second piece shows The Bride with a cherubic child. Two fabulous illustrations by Isabel Samaras.
In Isabel Samaras’ beautiful and witty art, pop culture characters meet the Old Masters. Goldilocks and the Gilligan gang channel Ingres. Batman, Robin and Catwoman evoke Rubens. Zira of the Planet of the Apes appears as a modern Madonna with chimpanzee child. Elvis, a pill-popping martyr, is borne away by angels. Universal Monsters — and Universal’s Munsters — are rendered as biblical iconography.
Samaras shows a distinct favoritism for Frankenstein’s Monster and his fabulous Bride. Among numerous interpretations, The Monster appears Saint-like, and The Bride rises from the sea on a Botticelli half-shell. Together, they are seen clinching in erotic fervor.
I could easily have filled this last week’s worth of daily posts just with Samaras’ Frankenstein paintings, every single one of them a perfect little masterpiece in its own right. I’ll be revisiting Samaras, here, in the coming weeks and months. There’s so much to admire.
Simply said: Among Frankenstein artists, Isabel Samaras is the Queen of them all.
An art book, On Tender Hooks, and a Postcard book.
Isabel Samaras’ website and blog.
An interview with Samaras via Fangoria.
A bold Bride faces forward in this gorgeous illustration by Don Ivan Punchatz. A closeup shows Punchatz’ beautiful rendering, with a curious but very effective purple outline to the character. The blowup also reveals that the Bride was manually cut out and pasted onto the background.
The Bride, along with her famous beau, and fellow Universal Monsters The Mummy, Dracula and The Wolf Man, was part of a 1991 “Monster Match” promotion for Pepsi.
I must admit my unbounded admiration for Don Ivan Punchatz (1936-2009), truly one of the great American illustrators of the later half of the Twentieth century. His elegant and powerful art appeared in a surprisingly wide variety of venues. He created beautifully enigmatic covers for science fiction paperbacks, notably Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. He appeared in Playboy and Time, equally at ease with formal portraits or delightfully eerie metaphorical illustrations. His work would pop up in National Geographic with meticulous renderings of animals, as well as National Lampoon, showing stumblebum president Gerald Ford hitting himself in the forehead with an ice cream cone.
For all the amazing artwork he produced, Punchatz is perhaps most remembered as the creator of the iconic logo and box art for id Software’s Doom.
Punchatz was celebrated by his peers as the first artist to break away from New York where illustrators had traditionally settled so as to stay close to the publishing industry. Punchatz moved to Dallas where his career continued to flourish, going on to create a successful regional studio. Having studied under artist and teacher Burne Hogarth, Punchatz, in turn, mentored young artists, Gary Panter among them.
Now, question... When do we get a comprehensive book of Don Ivan Punchatz’ art?
Punchatz bio on Spectrum, and his New York Times obituary.
Here’s a supremely elegant Bride sporting delicate scrollwork tattoos. She’s a doll-maker, brought to life to create life in turn, making button-eyed monsters.
This sumptuous digital painting was created by Asunción Macián Ruiz, aka Medusa the Dollmaker, of Valencia, Spain. The artist dedicated the painting to “the divine Elsa Lanchester” and meant it as “a brief and tender tribute to all these movies that scared us and we grew up with, fathers and mothers of all actual terror films.”
The art was used to great effect as the poster for the first Festival Gótico y de Terror de Málaga held in March 2010.
Asunción Macián keeps a website, a blog, and a deviantART page.
Read an interview with the artist on Something We Like.
This striking, big-eyed Bride is a one-of-a-kind art doll by Texas-based artist Sarah Young.
The 20-inch tall Bride is sculpted in paper clay over an armature. Her beehive is mohair, her wedding gown is vintage fabric and she carries a bouquet of dried flowers.
Sarah Young’s website and Etsy page.
Photos of the Bride doll in progress.
A beach off an industrial wasteland. Night falls, lightning strikes at sea, and it’s surf’s up for a tattooed Frankie while his teenage Bride (note the ring), catching moonbeams, reads a cheap mag by the light of firebugs in a jar.
California-based artist Damian Fulton’s credits include stints in advertising, serving as Head of Creative Development for Marvel Comics, and directing TV commercials for high-end clients. As a painter, Fulton explores the imaginary Pacific Coast zone where sun and surf, pop culture and the cars and sprawl of Los Angeles meet.
The Frankenstein Monster pops up here and there in Fulton’s work adorning skateboards or riding his Frankenstein Flivver, but this oil painting, called The Bathers, is uniquely and spectacularly original.
Damian Fulton’s website and deviantART page.
In his introduction to The Art of Alex Gross (2007), writer Bruce Sterling described the artist’s Pop Surrealist paintings as “… a powerful body of contemporary artwork whose themes include globalization, commerce, great beauty, dark mayhem, and the remorseless passage of time.”
With his curious Bride of Frankenstein portrait, artist Alex Gross breaks with his usually intricate, large-scale paintings steeped in irony and typically loaded with unsettling images and deep, often obscure cultural references.
Gross’ Bride is part of a delightful series that repurposes vintage photographs, painting directly over the cards and transforming the subjects into pop culture characters. Gross turns forgotten Victorians into colorful comic book heroes such as Batman and Wonder Woman, and famous movie monsters the likes of Godzilla and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. See the collection here.
Marie Meier’s Bride sips pink champagne and wields a cigarette holder with decadent aplomb. She keeps a brain in a bell jar and poses against intricately spooky wallpaper. The image is scratched and weathered like an old postcard, yet as vivid as a stained glass window.
In another painting, The Bride appears as mysterious and formal as a Byzantine icon.
Marie Meier’s subjects include musicians like Lux Interior; pinup queens, strippers and burlesque artistes; Bettie Page and Amanda Palmer, all wrapped in flowers and tentacles, flaming hearts, and candy colored Dia de los Muertos skeletons. Meier calls her outside art style “goth’n roll”.
Meier keeps an eye-popping website and several art blogs, all accessible through this one.
The classic Bride, as played by Elsa Lanchester, comes to electric life in a luminous painting by Daniel Horne.
Horne is a multi-talented artist. As a painter, he has created some 400 book covers, he has illustrated children’s books, role-playing and card games, and his art graced the cover of the annual anthology of fantasy art, Spectrum. As a sculptor, Horne creates astonishing, one of a kind art dolls and unique monster masks.
Horne is a fan of classic movie monsters and, along the way, he has illustrated or sculpted all the great characters in the field, not the least of which is Frankenstein’s Monster in all its film versions, and related movie characters such as Colin Clive’s Frankenstein, Ernest Thesiger’s Pretorius and the Bride herself in glorious three dimensions.
Horne’s Bride painting is currently serving as the cover for the ever-excellent Monsters from the Vault magazine. It is also available as a very affordable print directly from the artist.
This modern Bride is alive, but she’s obsessed about her health. Artist MichaelO (Michael Oswald) calls this piece Hypochondria.
The patchwork girl is a digital creation, based on a photograph, built up and painted on a computer, mostly with Photoshop. The artist describes his work as “photo-manipulation on steroids”, but don’t let the digital wizardry fool you. PCs and Photoshop are tools, like brushes and oil paints, and MichaelO’s superlative art is the work of a top-notch draughtsman and an accomplished artist.
MichaelO’s website and deviantART page.
Model is NikxStock.
The Bride strikes a Janet Jackson pose in this wonderful illustration by Jared Moraitis.
Purposefully referencing the iconic Rolling Stone cover by photographer Patrick Demarchelier, the image was commissioned by Ben Scrivens of Fright Rags for use on a limited edition t-shirt — no longer available — in a special fund-raising case (details here) during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, this past October. The piece is called We Belong Alive!.
Artist Moraitis has posted his sketches and color tests for the illustration here, along with one variant featuring the owner — Guess Who! — of those well-placed hands.
THE ART OF THE BRIDE SERIES
Her entire film career runs barely twelve minutes of screen time, yet The Bride is one of the best-known and most celebrated characters in film history. In this, her 75th anniversary year, The Bride continues to engage and inspire new generations of artists.
Starting here and now, and straight on to Christmas morning, I’ll be posting a new Bride of Frankenstein illustration every day. Ten artists, ten interpretations, ten unique visions of The Bride!
Happy Holidays!
David Cairns is hosting The Late Films Blogathon all this week on his superlative film blog Shadowplay.
David writes, “The idea is that late in many filmmakers’ careers, when they’re no longer in fashion, they often produce work which is underrated at the time: it’s compared negatively to their Golden Age work, and to the hip hits of the moment, and then consigned to the dustpile. But with nearly every great filmmaker, whatever the problems of the late films (often produced on low budgets, sometimes literally shot in the filmmaker’s back garden), they nevertheless encapsulate the mature reflections of great artists, and are worth appraising with an open mind.”
My contribution to The Late Films Blogathon is a repost, tweaked a bit, of my article on Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, the last of Hammer Films’ remarkable Frankenstein series. The film also marked the end of director Terence Fisher’s career and the impending demise of the studio itself. Here is...
Twilight of the Goths: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell
Released in May of 1974, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell reflected the end of an era. It was the last of the Hammer Films’ Frankenstein series as well as Terence Fisher’s final directorial effort and, ultimately, it was one of a handful of films that effectively closed out the history of the studio and its gothic horror heritage.
As the Seventies dawned, the market for Hammer’s classy, low budget horrors was shrinking fast. Double bills were being phased out, the small neighborhood cinemas and the second run houses were vanishing from the landscape. The company tried desperately to hang on to its share of the market, but ambitious co-productions deals with Japan’s Toho, Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers and America’s AIP fell apart.
Most damaging to Hammer’s fortunes, sensibilities were changing, too. The Gothics that had made Hammer the most copied horror studio in the world were going out of style. In 1968, a wildly popular independent American film, Night of the Living Dead, yanked horror films out of the Victorian parlors and back into the Twentieth Century, making Hammer’s civilized chills feel suddenly very quaint. The major Hollywood studios entered the horror field with big-budget titles like Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973) and The Omen (1976). Hammer introduced nudity, the famed, deep-cleavaged Hammer Heroines dropping their bustiers altogether, but still, even with extra helpings of Kensington Gore, a new generation of horror film fans looked upon Hammer’s Victorian settings as old hat.
Despite the best efforts of studio head Michael Carreras, the partnerships and distribution deals that Hammer had always relied upon were disappearing in a sea change of mergers and realignments. Financing was drying up and distribution became problematic. Hammer’s Dracula series, the studio’s most lucrative franchise, ground to a halt with The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Shot in late ’72, the film wasn’t released in England until January 1974 and it would be another four long years before it finally limped onto North American screens.
Likewise, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell wrapped in October 1972, yet it would take a year and a half before it came out in England, to poor box office. It would eventually make it to North America in the Fall of ’74, on a double bill with Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter — a bold but failed attempt at creating a new franchise — sneaking into second rate cinemas for a quick week’s run with no publicity save a newspaper ad. It was an ignominious end to the Hammer Frankenstein series, though the film itself, a true valedictory piece, is quite remarkable. Despite its shrunken budget, it has all the trappings of the classic Hammers, with detailed period sets beautifully lit and photographed, and a sterling cast, every player excellent, headed by the formidable Peter Cushing.
Older now, emaciated, his hands burned and useless, Cushing’s Baron is still at it, hiding under one of his barely disguised names. This time he’s “Dr. Victor”, the resident medical man in an asylum for the criminally insane. Harvesting parts from the inmate population, as he did with the patients of a charity hospital in The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958), he is helped in his secret experiments by the mute Sarah (Madeline Smith), a willing but unskilled assistant, beloved by the inmates who see her as an angel come among them. Things go into high gear with the highly coincidental but very timely arrival of Simon Helder (Shane Briant), a young surgeon sentenced to the madhouse for his unholy experiments inspired, as it happens, by the writings of Baron Frankenstein.
Frankenstein’s living canvas is Herr Schneider (David Prowse), a colossal, shaggy brute incarcerated for violence, namely a propensity for attacking people with broken glass. The gorilla-like creature is given new eyes, the delicate hands of a sculptor (a brief appearance by Bernard Lee), and the brain of a genius, but the sum of the parts don’t add up and the violent nature of the beastly Schneider re-asserts itself.
In an unexpected and sobering twist, perhaps hinted at by the very surroundings of the tale, Baron Frankenstein’s solution to his miserably failed experiment is to propose the mating of the mountainous monstrosity with the helpless, innocent Sarah. The creature would be “Reborn… A new version of his true self,” says the Baron to his incredulous assistant. We’d always known the Baron to be a cold, cruel man, but this shocking development betrays a fleeting grasp of sanity. “I think you’re mad,” says Helder. “Possibly,” Frankenstein laughs, “I must admit I’ve never felt so elated in my life!”
Helder squelches the Baron’s ludicrous plan. The Monster, on a rampage, is set upon and literally ripped apart by the assembled inmates. Censors having warned Hammer not to shoot the written scenes of the mad crowd eating chunks of Monster flesh, director Fisher shows one inmate “feeding” strips of flesh to a doll.
In the final scene, Cushing’s Baron shrugs off the loss of his tormented creation. “Best thing that could have happened to him,” he says, “He was of no use to us or himself.” With Helder and Sarah watching in sad silence, The Baron starts sweeping up the laboratory debris, babbling on, “We must get this place tidied up so we can start afresh… We will need new material, naturally. Herr Adler in 106, perhaps…”
The scene fades to an outside shot of the asylum, dark but for the light in the laboratory window, and the end titles crawl up the screen.
In a film curiously devoid of the patented Hammer Glamour gloss — no cleavage to speak of — the gore is ramped up, though it seems very tame by today’s standards. Eyeballs are frequently jiggled in front of the camera, collected in jars and spilled on the floor. There’s an extended scene, almost documentary in detail, where a brain is methodically removed from a freshly sawed skull. When it’s transplanted into the Monster’s head, Cushing dumps the old, useless brain to the floor and kicks it away. The Monster is last seen as a bloodied, disemboweled mess. Most memorably, there’s a brief moment, unfortunately cut from some copies, where Cushing’s Baron, unable to use his hands, helps his assistant re-attach a severed hand by biting down and holding a vein between his teeth.
Peter Cushing turns in a typically commanding performance as the snappish Baron, in full possession of the character, ordering people around with élan and apparently delighted with having an assistant he can teach his dark arts to. Cast as the diligent Simon Helder, Shane Briant had appeared in three other Hammer Films as well as playing Dorian Gray in a television adaptation. He would go on to a busy career as an actor and an accomplished novelist. Sarah, the mute “angel” who wafts demurely through the picture is played by Madeline Smith, a former model used to far sexier roles that included a couple of Hammer vampire films, a Carry On part and being Roger Moore’s first Bond Girl. Of special note, veteran actor John Stratton puts in a rousing performance as the dastardly, corrupt and ever-harried asylum director.
The “Neolithic” Monster is played by David Prowse, unrecognizable in an ugly full-head mask and bulbous upper body suit covered with long matted hair. It was Prowse’s third appearance as Frankenstein’s Monster. He had a tiny walk-on part in the James Bond comedic curio, Casino Royale (1967), as a Universal-style flathead Frankenstein. In 1970, he was the muscular Monster in Hammer’s Horror of Frankenstein, a smirking remake of The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and an ill-fated attempt to relaunch the franchise with a younger cast headed by Ralph Bates in the Cushing part. Prowse would play another role in a concealing head to toe costume, opposite Cushing again, in 1977, as Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977).
Director Fisher, though in ill health and insecure, made Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell a sure-handed, sober film that projects a fin-de-siècle weariness. It’s as if Fisher and Cushing understood — with Hammer in slow motion collapse — that this was their last stab at Frankenstein and they conspired to give the Baron a proper sendoff.
In the climactic scene where The Monster lies eviscerated on the flagstone floor, surrounded by the blood-spattered inmates, Cushing’s Baron steps up and orders the inmates back to their rooms…
“There’s nothing more to see,” he says. “It’s over now... All over.”
Related:
After Frankenstein: Almost 40 years on, actor Shane Briant revisits the part of Simon Helder in a short YouTube video.
The Posters of Frankenstein: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell
Who Am I? Frankenstein Created Woman
Peter Cushing
The Director: Terence Fisher
Est’d 1818, Hoxton Street Monster Supplies of East London, purveyors of essential, quality goods for Monsters of every kind, offers Brains Jam, Children’s Ears, Pickled Eyeballs and other Human Preserves, as well as Tinned Fear and Canned Unease. This is where our favorite Monster shops for the ever-indispensable Neck-Bolt Tighteners, very reasonably priced at four pounds.
The shop, truth be told, is a front for The Ministry of Stories, a center where kids aged 8 to 18 get one-on-one tuition with professional writers. Organized by We Made This, it’s an offshoot of Dave Egger’s 826 Literacy Project.
Follow the links and read about a truly remarkable project.
