My Late-80s Folk Art

I am sure that to my son (born in 2017) the idea of going to the video shop to rent movies will be as peculiar a notion as buying sheet music. For good or ill, my regular trips to Armchair Theatre in Edinburgh between the ages of say 8 and 12 moulded my aesthetic and dramatic sensibilities. Some of my earliest memories involve staring in awe at VHS and Betamax boxes like they were little religious icons, absorbing the dumb slogans and gory, titillating, action-packed images. I of course ended up watching a lot of these movies as well, mostly surreptitiously while my parents worked, slept or squabbled. As such, gunfights, monsters and body horror sunk into my subconscious.

I played alone a lot as a child, and the images and plotlines on the screen became jumbled and muddled together into the stories I told with my toys. Bits of Hellraiser, The Thing, Kindred, Mad Max, and an assortment of sci-fi trash and schlock were remixed, plagiarised, and parsed through my adolescent mind. The toys themselves ranged from big late 80s brands such as Mask, Starcom and Transformers (laterally, GI Joe), and little rubber monsters, board games, bits of perfume bottles, and whatever I could get my hands on to make “sets”. These stories could last a long time and formed sagas that spanned many sequels over the summers, whose plots spiraled into deeper absurdity.

The culmination of these stories was using felt pens to make “VHS Covers” to promote the sagas and sum up key plot points. Here I present some of my favourites, presented in broadly chronological order from about 1987 - 1992. I find them now both very silly and fascinating in equal measure. A reflection of the swirling world of pop culture imprinting itself on my mind.

Limbo

The origins of all of this began when I drew an “eyewitness” description of the school ghost in about 1987 or ‘88, when I was 10. Every school has some sort of phantom, and in Abbeyhill ours haunted the boiler room. Then, one day a daring boy called William went there to learn more and after some time, he ran out and began ranting about what he had seen to an enthralled crowd (looking back, the event had a number of characteristics of a legend trip). I turned the boy’s description of the ghost into a series of drawings which I then circulated; a winged demon-like thing with a long tail which in retrospect was reminiscent of the villain from the D&D cartoon, but different enough to get past the lawyers. (As an aside, this led to me forming a ghost-hunting “gang” with future Scottish politician Gary Dunion).

The lines between reality and fiction were porous. As I imagined more, the exploits of the school ghost merged with movies I’d watched, such as Speilberg’s masterpiece Poltergeist and the more recent, proto-Marvelesque The Monster Squad. I started building a new legend around it, and made a series of follow-up drawings that dramatised these stories as a series of VHS covers of a series called “Limbo” (sometimes “Holocaust” or “Terminus” - I was very fond of dramatic words). As you can also see from the scans, some of the scenes from the story were breathtakingly violent.

The depiction of the school ghost was reinvented as “Theroid”, an old word that means something like “bestial”, and his backstory elaborated upon to involve face-melting jewels and ancient idols. As you can see with the art gradually improving, it was a story I revisited for some years, long after I left primary school and the school ghost faded from memory.

Pacland

This one deserves special mention because of its peculiar nature. I had never played the Pacman games, only charming ripoffs like Bug Byte’s Hyperaction. However I did get the Pacman board game from a local charity shop. Having few friends to play it with, it formed the basis of a new story, something between Tron and Mad Max, in which some cops (Micro Machines) get trapped inside the labyrinth of the game, where they evade traps and battle Pac Men and other monstrosities of the cyberscape (Rubber finger puppets, Boglins).

The Red Door

“Who would have knew [sic]… that robots live in hell"? Who indeed young Jamie. This epic decalogy featured cybernetic demons versus grizzled, jaded cop Sid Law, in a series of ever-more titanic and ludicrous battles against the technological forces of evil (mostly Transformers). So exhausted did language become to describe the dramatic escalations of the sequels, that Red Door VII was itself subtitled “Armageddon II” (Part 2?). In much the same way, I suppose, as the Harry Potter, etc story arcs were split in twain on the big screen. I am not sure if the mechanoid demon idea was derived from some movie or album cover I had seen but the trope would hit the mainstream after the massive success of Doom in 1993.

Thorax: Wrath of the Bluebottle

If there a Venn diagram with The Thing, Aliens, The Blob and The Fly, this ludicrous epic would be at the centre. Set on the icy world of Pluto, a team of spacemen face-off against a grotesque shape-shifting, human-mimicking Bluebottle. As best as I can recall, the plot had something to do with radiation warping the DNA of a fly trapped in the spacecraft, and as you can see, the sequels became increasingly overblown, resulting in the destruction of whole planets. The fourth of the series sees the horror come to civilization (which was the common fan-fiction destination of both Carpenter and Cameron’s respective franchises). The fifth takes place in the Bermuda Triangle, and the seventh, subtitled “The Thoraxian Wars”, was a galaxy-spanning conflict between rival armies of shapeshifting flies.

Hellbender

This was Hellraiser by way of Die Hard, and again featured composite 80s action hero “Vic Law” and was a spiritual successor or soft reboot of “The Red Door” from a few years earlier. Perhaps indicative of puberty’s nascent stirrings, this time instead of facing off against transformers, it was BDSM demons. In slowly descending into gimmicks like time travel and outer space, it weirdly anticipated the decline of the Hellraiser franchise itself.

Re-Vamped

Long before vampires were reinvented as broody, sparkly love interests, 11 year old Jamie tried to reinvent them with a more Metal🤘 edge. The story begins in New York when two street punks assault and kill a woman at the exact spot at which some legendary vampire was killed centuries before. Her blood seeping into the soil enabled the ancient monster to resurrect, unleashing a trail of ultra-violent destruction and - once vampire hunters were invariably involved - OTT action scenes with wooden-stake gatling guns. For the antagonist, I suppose I was imagining something like the Kurgan from Highlander.

Plummeting Daggers

Detectives are called to the scene of a strange murder. In a warehouse flooded with a fog of unknown origin, a worker is killed by a dagger that had inexplicably fallen from above. As the cops investigate, any attempts to delve deeper into the structure lead to further bloody and inexplicable deaths. Heatmap readings show three bipedal robots inside the building (including a Space Crusade dreadnought and Ed-209), but they remain immobile. Who made them? Why are they here? Elsewhere, a drug called Liquid Dreams circulates on the streets, whose side effects lead people to question their own realities. How are they all connected?

Readers, I know not. This was J.J. Abrams mystery-box storytelling in which strange occurrences and fresh conundrums deepened intrigue but undermined any attempt to build towards a coherent conclusion. This was an attempt at a more grown-up story, but we lacked any skill of how to to do so.

To be continued…

I say “we” because Plummeting Daggers was the first such project in which I had a collaborator. He, likewise had created his own world populated by his own stories and characters, although they had a more superhero than scifi/horror bent, they overlapped in the action-hero antics along the lines of Die Hard. And in the coming years, we wove these worlds together, to create a single, expansive, connected universe drawn from the world of comics, with a mythology that lasted over 40 thousand years. This, though, is another story.

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