Here’s a list of 10 horror directors who also are known for their drawings and paintings.
This month Insight Editions will release two containers of delicious eye candy in the form of “The Art of Krampus” and the “Guillermo del Toro Deluxe Hardcover Sketchbook.” What do both of them have in common? They both celebrate very visual directors (del Toro, Michael Dougherty) who are known as accomplished artists in their own right. In both books you can see copious sketches by them (and in the del Toro book make some of your own as well), which brought to mind some other filmmakers within the genre that have a similarly artistic kinship.
Click here to purchase a copy of the Krampus book, and click here to get your hands on a copy of the del Toro sketchbook!
Also, be sure to take a look below the gallery for a sneak peak at the gorgeous contents of both editions!
Below from Guillermo del Toro’s personal sketchbook for Pan’s Labyrinth…
Two pages from the Krampus art book…
10 Horror Directors Who Draw and Paint
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Guillermo del Toro
One of horror's great contemporary statesmen has a borderline religious devotion to art and design in both its classical forms (gothic novelists, sculptors, symbolist painters) and more pulpy pop variety (comic books, video games, toys). Having begun his career as an ace make-up man under legendary Dick Smith, del Toro eventually left Mexico for the brighter shores of Los Angeles, where he continued to use his beautifully ornate sketchbooks to develop visual ideas for films like Mimic and Pan's Labyrinth that are often translated quite faithfully from page to screen.
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Ridley Scott
Although Alien (and its prequel Prometheus) remains the only real mark Scott has made on the genre, the 1979 film and the Xenomorph creature itself have made such a massive impact on horror that its impossible to gauge the scope of its influence. A classically trained graduate of London's Royal College of Art, Sir Ridley always storyboards his movies himself with tiny, fussily detailed sketches nicknamed "Ridley-grams" that resemble comic book panels. In fact, these drawings so impressed 20th Century Fox that as soon as he turned in his Alien boards the studio immediately doubled the budget.
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Clive Barker
Arguably the most gifted and prolific painter/illustrator on this list, the English splatterpunk horror author and director of Hellraiser has had a whole third career as a fine artist. His surreal, often disturbing portraits resemble the likes of Pinhead or the menagerie of fantastical creatures seen in his cult monster pic Nightbreed. He's also illustrated his own books, including the popular YA novel "The Thief of Always." In the mid-2000s he even embarked (no pun intended) on a series of "paint-ins" where he would create complex canvases and even body art in front of a live audience.
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Michael Dougherty
John Landis, a big fan of Dougherty's debut feature Trick r' Treat, has compared him to Tim Burton and the comparison is apt. Both have a cartooning background and seem to be obsessed with the darker sides of Halloween and Christmas. Now that Krampus has opened well we can only hope that Dougherty can carve out a similar career trajectory as Burton. As it was, he pitched Legendary and Universal on his Krampus script by attaching some drawings to his script, which worked as a selling tool.
"It definitely helps. I'm big on the idea of not just delivering a script when you want to get a project going but also having a few pieces of concept art to go with it to really communicate what it is you're trying to make," Dougherty told us back in September.
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Tim Burton
A Cal Arts-trained animator, Burton is one of the few filmmakers out there who actually makes a concerted effort to translate the hand-drafted look of his doodles onto the screen, which is part of what makes him a signature director. He was deeply inspired by 60's horror mavens like Roger Corman, Mario Bava and the Hammer pictures (most evident in Sleepy Hollow), but even in his early Disney animation days his drawings always had an ersatz Edward Gorey quality to them. While his watercolors or pen & inks are a little unrefined they still reveal the depth of his imagination, and what winds up on the paper is usually not far off from what appears onscreen. And, of course, there is always a scarecrow… even in Planet of the Frickin' Apes!
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James Cameron
Although we now think of him as the undisputed king of the world as far as mainstream Hollywood goes, people forget that Cameron's first three films were genre through and through (Piranha 2: The Spawning, The Terminator and Aliens) and that he also cut his teeth at Roger Corman's New World Pictures as a matte painter and effects man on dreck like Galaxy of Terror. Finally, let us not forget that Cameron is an AMAZING draftsman, and just seeing his original painting for The Terminator brings back the feeling of primal terror it unleashed in the 1984 original and not the PG-13 boredom of more recent sequels.
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David Lynch
Much like his film work, the art of David Lynch has a menacing, almost otherworldly quality to it that has a palpably disorienting effect on the viewer. Although many would argue his movies like Blue Velvet and Lost Highway aren't traditional horror flicks there's no question that the sense of dread they evoke is palpable, as is their shocking violence. Since his student days in the '60s at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Lynch has continued to paint and exhibit his work in the decades since. He also published the experimental comic strip "The Angriest Dog in the World" from 1983 to 1992, which featured a tadpole-like dog growling at different existential musings.
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Mario Bava
The grand master of Italian horror (Black Sunday, Bay of Blood) and godfather of the Giallo genre may have been known as Italy's answer to Hitchcock but he originally aspired to be a painter. When he found making a living at that difficult, he joined his cinematographer dad Eugenio in the family business. Fortunately, his artist's eye gave him a unique sense of color and design, as well as being able to utilize his skills as a matte painter to make his shoestring budgets look epic on the screen. The image seen here is a funny sketch by Bava of actress Daria Nicolodi parodying all the tortures she goes through in the filmmaker's final film Shock.
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Corin Hardy
The youngest entry on our list is a newbie to the filmmaking realm, having just released his auspicious debut feature The Hallow, although he cut his teeth on commercials and music videos that incorporate a great deal of animation. When we talked to him for that movie he allowed us to take pictures of his gorgeous pen-and-ink sketchbook, which featured renderings of The Hallow's evil fairies as well as his concepts for a remake of The Crow, which should it see the light of day will be quite different and far more mythological than the Alex Proyas version.
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James Whale
How do we know that James Whale was a skilled painter? Because Bill Condon made a whole movie about him drawing a half-naked Brendan Fraser called Gods and Monsters, that's how! The Old Hollywood director of such Universal monster classics as Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man found his film career sidelined by the early '40s. Although financially well off, the filmmaker became bored and eventually rediscovered his love of painting, building a studio for himself.
