Murnau Tapestries
Description: This image was a weird ride. It started off as a color version of my earlier "splash page" piece, evolved into using those imges as a cover and then took a right turn into Doctor Doom territory. It was fun to use the more salacious elements of Blacula's marketing to make something garish ... but William Marshall deserves better. Marshall (and, by proxy, Prince Mamuwalde) had real gravitas, so I began to wonder what kind of stories about "Blacula" we might get with the world as a canvas. I also didn't want to lose sight of the fact that Mamuwalde had become a villain. So, this is what we get.
Description: My favorite scene in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens is the creepy shadow on the wall as Count Orlok ascends the staircase toward his final victim; it is one of the most iconic images in film and perfectly captures the ambiance of classic horror. In tribute to the simplicity of this still, I kept the artwork as minimal as possible. To contrast the near-black brushwork of the silhouette, I created a graphic background with my signature gradient banding in greyscale. Then I fit everything into an oval with a grainy vignette to sort of fuse vintage and modern into one look and tie it all together.
Description: The Nosferatu design is inspired by F.W. Murnau's German Expressionist classic Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror starring Max Shrek as the terrifying vampire Count Orlok. Released in 1922, the film was a thinly veiled adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula and was the subject of a successful lawsuit by the Stoker estate. Only a few prints survived yet still Nosferatu came to be widely regarded as a masterpiece. Werner Herzog remade the film in 1979 starring Klaus Kinski.
