Hello and welcome to today’s Track of Words guest post where I’m delighted to welcome the brilliant David Annandale to discuss some of the ways in which visual media and horror fiction are influenced by, and in turn influence each other. David will be familiar to a lot of readers as the author of all manner of dark fantasy and science fiction for both Black Library and Aconyte Books, and whether he’s writing all-out horror or not everything he writes has that dark DNA at its core. With two new books already announced for 2022 from Aconyte Books – Reign of the Devourer, a Doctor Doom novel as part of the Marvel: Untold range, and In the Coils of the Labyrinth for Arkham Horror – I can’t think of a better time to hear David’s thoughts on this topic!
Without further ado then, over to David…
The relationship between horror literature and visual media is a long-standing one, and very familiar, at least when one considers the influence of the former on the latter. Frankenstein, Dracula and Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, to take core examples, were all adapted for the stage, and then to film, with the Shelley and Stevenson books first appearing on screen in the first decade of the 20th Century. Horror literature, then, has been central to the development and formation of the horror film, to the point that, though the horror film has been with us since 1896, the first films actually to be called “horror movies” were the Universal adaptations of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931.
But what about the other way around? What about the influence of the visual medium (film or otherwise) on horror literature? The fact is that most of us have grown up surrounded by visual media, and that has shaped our imaginations. We certainly see the direct influence of film on books in the form of novelizations, but also in things like references, allusions and other nods to visual sources.
A still from Bride of Frankenstein – click to enlarge
In my own work, for example, I pay homage in The Dominion of Bones to the undead Knights Templar of Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972), model Doctor Doom’s laboratory in The Harrowing of Doom on the one from Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and, among many other horror film references in the forthcoming Reign of the Devourer, link the character of Dr. Orloff to her namesakes in Dark Eyes of London (1939) and The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962). As for In the Coils of the Labyrinth, Dario Argento’s Inferno (1980) is a presiding presence over its composition in more ways than one (but I’ll remain silent about how for now).
Still from Bride of Frankenstein – click to enlarge
Still from Inferno – click to enlarge
But film is not the only visual medium, of course. Everything I do for Black Library obviously owes its existence to the tabletop game. The gloriously over-the-top imagery of the models not only inspires the stories, but gives them a certain license too. (And by extension, I think some of what I say below applies to works inspired by other tabletop games as well.)
Look at that beautiful cover art, by John Coulthart!
To explain what I mean by that, I want to jump back to the movies again for a moment. Though the horror film, by its nature, operates under a looser, more dream-like logic, by and large, than other genres (and I do use the word “genre” with some caution), there is an even greater emphasis on the dream-like in the horror films of continental Europe than their Anglo-American cousins. Compare, for instance, Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932). Though only a year apart, the films might as well be from different worlds. Dracula could almost be a waking attempt to transcribe a dream, whereas Vampyr is a transmission from within the dream.
The House of Night and Chain – David’s first Warhammer Horror novel
Speaking for myself, the nature of Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar, as games of resplendent pageantry and narrative flexibility, shapes the fiction in their image. Once we admit the likes of miles-long Gothic cathedrals as spacecraft, then we are closer to the European version of horror, and there is an exhilarating kind of creative possibility at the narrative level, one where readers and authors have already agreed to the contours of a certain kind of shared dream, and the nightmarish imagery of these worlds invites horror in all its manifestations, even if we’re not talking Warhammer Horror explicitly. And when we are, then it truly is a wonderful horror sandbox in which to play.
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David Annandale is a lecturer at a Canadian university on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games. He is the author of many novels in the New York Times-bestselling Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universe, and a co-host of the Hugo Award-nominated podcast Skiffy and Fanty.
You can find David on Twitter or on his website.
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Thanks so much to David for taking the time to contribute this excellent guest post! If you haven’t already checked out David’s work, especially his more overt horror writing, then hopefully this will have given you the incentive to check it out. I would particularly recommend The House of Night and Chain (Warhammer Horror), Curse of Honor (Legend of the Five Rings) and The Harrowing of Doom (Marvel: Untold)!
See also: all the other David Annandale-related reviews and interviews on Track of Words.
David’s next novel due for publication is Reign of the Devourer, due out from Aconyte Books as an ebook and US paperback in January 2022 and a UK paperback in March 2022.
Check out the links below to pre-order* Reign of the Devourer!
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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