I was flipping through one of my many art books the other day (some call it “research”, others call it “laziness”), and an interesting thought started popping into my head.
I had seen these images before.
Now, to be fair, I’m sure I’ve flipped through the book before. I do define laziness, after all. What I mean is actually less direct, and has more to do with the content that I was seeing, more than the actual piece of art.
Here’s one of the pieces, cover art by Frank Paul for Famous Fantastic Mysteries Magazine:
A nice piece of classic fantasy art, by a master artist, most definitely. But I was linking it to this, something a bit more recent:
This one, as many of you have guessed, is a depiction of the Kraken, from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
What is it about certain images, certain ideas, that challenge us so much? These visions that seem to pop up in each generation, with their own little twists of course, but still much the same.
Each image is shown through different techniques, details, and angles. Modern CGI graphics obviously show far more detail, at a level of photography for modern audiences, versus the simple lines and colors of mid-20th century illustration.
But think about these images too:
The monkey, seemingly being captured by tentacles, is from Japan, mid-19th century. In the other photo, tentacles wrap around a Mycenaean goblet from 1200 B.C.
Yes. We’ve been weirded out by tentacles for quite a long time.
I don’t think it’s necessarily just the tentacles, though. I think that the tentacles represent two ideas that have survived those millennia, and continue to survive to this day. The ideas compliment one another well: that we can’t see everything, and whatever is out there is just waiting to take us away.
Tentacles are a great example of that. In Paul’s image above, in Pirates of the Caribbean, and especially for the poor monkey, these strange appendages have come out of the unknown ocean. We can’t see where they are coming from, we don’t know what beast they might be attached to, and we just know for certain they are nothing but our doom.
Not only that, but they aren’t just here by coincidence. They are here for us, to take us with them by force, or to steal our loved ones. Not just strange or weird, but malevolent creatures from a world unlike our own.
It’s a place where art, stories, and film can take us away, to provoke our fight or flight systems. We, and our ancestors, have taken a bit of nature that seems alien to us and pushed it into the very fabric of our nightmares.
We can confront our fears, and turn them into fascinations. Like anything in fantasy or horror, the tentacles just represent something of ourselves. The vision has lasted thousands of years because, ancient or modern, we all have that fear of what we love being taken away from us.
We take this natural creature, make it a million times larger, and fight the good fight in our fictions. We’ve taken an oddity, and made it a challenge to who we are. Do we win? Do we lose?
That’s up to this generation’s creators, for now. But I’m still hoping the monkey made it.
Russell Dickerson has been a published illustrator, author, and general malcontent since at least 1999. His work has been included in the prestigious Spectrum annual, and he has created art for many publishers and authors. He resides online at www.darkstormcreative.com.