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10:33am July 30, 2013
petermorwood: mattbellamymuseofspace: duod: Many classic horror icons and other disturbing creatures share common characteristics. Pale skin, dark, sunken eyes, elongated faces, sharp teeth, and the like. These images inspire horror and revulsion in many, and with good reason. The characteristics shared by these faces are imprinted in the human mind. Many things frighten humans instinctively. The fear is natural, and does not need to be reinforced in order to terrify. The fears are species-wide, stemming from dark times in the past when lightning could mean the burning of your tree home, predators could be hiding in the dark, heights could make poor footing lethal, and a spider or snake bite could mean certain death. The question you have to ask yourself is this: What happened, deep in the hidden eras before history began, that could effect the entire human race so evenly as to give the entire species a deep, instinctual, and lasting fear of pale beings with dark, sunken eyes, razor sharp teeth, and elongated faces? To be honest that last question frightened me more that the picture. Timor mortis. It’s the fear of being dead, of death itself, and by extension, what was currently the cause of lots of it. I’m thinking cholera, plague, all the rest, sometimes so virulent that “a victim could have breakfast with their family and supper with their ancestors.“ Consider the pallid complexion, sunken eyes, more prominent teeth (this last a result of slackened facial muscles which let the mouth hang open - remember the bandage Marley wears in ”A Christmas Carol”? It’s there to hold his mouth shut until rigor sets in.) This muscle slackness also caused elongated faces. All these feature on more-or-less-fresh corpses, and making new deliveries to a mass grave like a plague pit would give plenty of exposure to the sight of considerably-less-fresh ones. Accidental or deliberate, those grey streaks on the original post make-up is very reminiscent of post-mortem marbling as decomposition becomes visible through the skin. “Sharp” teeth rather than the more accurate “apparently-protruding" teeth is an imaginative embellishment (h. sapiens is an imaginative species, especially when it comes to scaring ourselves witless). IMO the “dark" sunken eyes - pupil and iris all black, often as the first stage of transformation or a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t suggestion of otherness - is a modern twist. Bryan Froud’s illustrations in “Faeries” (1978) are the first example of this creepy all-black eye that I can think of, but it’s been popularised by any number of movies and TV shows Earlier spooky eyes tended to have animal descriptions, usually cat, wolf or just ‘predatory beast", though in one memorable instance (“Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood”, an 1845 penny-dreadful serial that beat ”Dracula“ to print by a full 50 years) the vampire’s eyes are “like polished tin…” The author (James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Preskett Prest, nobody’s quite sure) was just writing a scary image, but the modern impression is of supernatural mirror shades, worn for the same reason as any Scary Shiny Glasses: so you can’t see in. Wherever “in" might be. The rest of the description is as expected: pale face, projecting teeth, gaunt hands with long nails… In other words, a corpse. Yeah the corpse thing was my first thought too. And it did used to be feared that corpses could somehow come back to life.

petermorwood:

mattbellamymuseofspace:

duod:

Many classic horror icons and other disturbing creatures share common characteristics. Pale skin, dark, sunken eyes, elongated faces, sharp teeth, and the like. These images inspire horror and revulsion in many, and with good reason. The characteristics shared by these faces are imprinted in the human mind.

Many things frighten humans instinctively. The fear is natural, and does not need to be reinforced in order to terrify. The fears are species-wide, stemming from dark times in the past when lightning could mean the burning of your tree home, predators could be hiding in the dark, heights could make poor footing lethal, and a spider or snake bite could mean certain death.

The question you have to ask yourself is this:

What happened, deep in the hidden eras before history began, that could effect the entire human race so evenly as to give the entire species a deep, instinctual, and lasting fear of pale beings with dark, sunken eyes, razor sharp teeth, and elongated faces?

To be honest that last question frightened me more that the picture.

Timor mortis. It’s the fear of being dead, of death itself, and by extension, what was currently the cause of lots of it. I’m thinking cholera, plague, all the rest, sometimes so virulent that “a victim could have breakfast with their family and supper with their ancestors.“

Consider the pallid complexion, sunken eyes, more prominent teeth (this last a result of slackened facial muscles which let the mouth hang open - remember the bandage Marley wears in ”A Christmas Carol”? It’s there to hold his mouth shut until rigor sets in.) This muscle slackness also caused elongated faces.

All these feature on more-or-less-fresh corpses, and making new deliveries to a mass grave like a plague pit would give plenty of exposure to the sight of considerably-less-fresh ones. Accidental or deliberate, those grey streaks on the original post make-up is very reminiscent of post-mortem marbling as decomposition becomes visible through the skin.

“Sharp” teeth rather than the more accurate “apparently-protruding" teeth is an imaginative embellishment (h. sapiens is an imaginative species, especially when it comes to scaring ourselves witless).

IMO the “dark" sunken eyes - pupil and iris all black, often as the first stage of transformation or a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t suggestion of otherness - is a modern twist. Bryan Froud’s illustrations in “Faeries” (1978) are the first example of this creepy all-black eye that I can think of, but it’s been popularised by any number of movies and TV shows

Earlier spooky eyes tended to have animal descriptions, usually cat, wolf or just ‘predatory beast", though in one memorable instance (“Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood”, an 1845 penny-dreadful serial that beat ”Dracula“ to print by a full 50 years) the vampire’s eyes are “like polished tin…”

The author (James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Preskett Prest, nobody’s quite sure) was just writing a scary image, but the modern impression is of supernatural mirror shades, worn for the same reason as any Scary Shiny Glasses: so you can’t see in. Wherever “in" might be. The rest of the description is as expected: pale face, projecting teeth, gaunt hands with long nails…

In other words, a corpse.

Yeah the corpse thing was my first thought too. And it did used to be feared that corpses could somehow come back to life.

Notes:
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    That sorta looks like the creepy version of Yolandi from Die Antwoord…..
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