Illustrations for Exquisite Terror - Hannibal and Precious

Pencil
May 2014

I have a very dear friend who writes about horror movies, and one of the outlets through which he distributes these writings is a rather neat publication called Exquisite Terror, an academic exploration of aspects of horror film. Having heard that editor Naila was looking for more illustrators, James put my name forward and Naila got in touch to ask if I'd be interested in doing illustrations for a piece on The Silence of the Lambs.

My emailed reply contained more capital letters and exclamation marks than is usually seemly in a first-contact communication, but it couldn't be helped. I have been fascinated by that film since I was perhaps eleven years old (though I wasn't allowed to see it until much later), have seen it dozens of times and know it inside out. I know all the quotes and all the parodies. The merged personalities of Clarice Starling and Jodie Foster loomed large in my pre-adolescent psyche as one major heroine; Lecter, with his manners and his Katharine Hepburn voice and his ostensible invulnerability, as a perfect villain. My reply, therefore was a great big YES, yes, most definitely yes, I would indeed be interested in doing illustrations for a piece on The Silence of the Lambs, thank you very much for asking.

Naila requested one of Hannibal Lecter's face, citing it as "delightfully creepy", and one other image. I had hoped to provide more, actually, but a third piece I began fell victim to a poor choice I made quite near the start and couldn't be salvaged in the execution - the rest, typically, fell victim to a lack of time. I toyed with the idea of doing the famous "Nice-chianti-FF-FF-FF-FF" face for the Hannibal picture, but when I browsed stills of it I realised that it sort of lacks tension. The brilliance of that moment is the startling suddenness of what he does; the image of him actually doing it has already bypassed that moment and wasn't as effective. I browsed some more and settled on the big close up of his face as he drinks in Starling's story about the lambs - much creepier, and featuring quite hypnotic eyes that allowed me to let the edges ofthe picture fade into the background a little to try and get the focus on his gaze.

For the other image, I toyed with a few ideas - including, a little shamefully, a kind of wry still life collage of Lecter's own drawing of Clarice next to a glass of chianti and a plate of fava-beans-and-you-know-what. Yes, I know - it would have been bad; I moved on. I always relished the moment when the head-in-a-jar of Benjamin Raspail is unveiled, but it was genuinely difficult to find a good image of it from which to work and I gave it up as not to be. Likewise the skin suit itself was hard to frame well, and like the snarling Lecter, it lacked tension because it's somewhat less than the sum of its parts (forgive the allusion) - not a Maguffin exactly, but certainly not as representive of the horror involved as it should be considering its creation is the motivation for all that killing. No skin suit.

There were good images of Starling herself and I very much wanted to include her, but the image I settled on was the one I made a mess of and there wasn't sufficient time to correct it. Had there been the possibility of a colour reproduction I would have loved to create a green-tinted monochrome of Starling groping terrified in the dark from the night-vision-goggle-framed point of view of Buffalo Bill... but grayscale only on this occasion, so that wouldn't have worked. Thinking of black and white and its restrictions led me to the perfect shot - Catherine Martin's low angle POV, looking up out of the pit at the odious little Precious gazing down at her. That was the one I wanted.

Little else to tell really. Pencils varying from 2B to 6B - a lot of time (but never enough) spent trying to get back into the mindset, remembering less is more; remembering you're not drawing everything that's there but an impression of what's there; remembering you're drawing light and shadow, not lines. Once I'm 'into' a drawing, I remember how much I love it and once it's done I see all the mistakes I made in it. It doesn't feel like other mistakes feel - there's no fear or regret with them because that picture can only ever be what it is; instead you feel calm and even-minded, because you know next time it will be better.

Or maybe that's all just the psychological effect of hours spent gazing deep into the eyes of Hannibal Lecter - who knows.