Night Land

For ages and ages, I've been planning to do an adaptation of William Hope Hodgson's epic novel "The Night Land." There's nothing like it before or since in pop culture. It's teeming with weird monsters and it's copyright free -perfect for my purposes. Also, it's mostly about just a single character wandering like a knight errant through a wild wasteland, just waiting to be Photoshopped together using various strange textures. So, why haven't I gotten around to adapting it? Well, mostly it's about boiling down 584 pages of verbose narrative and archaic prose to something that could be told in around 20 minutes. But there is actually a solution for that because there's a shorter version of the novel, which I'll get back to shortly.

Let's talk briefly about the background of the book. It was the last work written by hunky Victorian fantasy author Hodgson, who had been a sailor in his early years and was one of the first bodybuilders in the UK, but the first of his books that were published. Hodgson would go on to join WW1 and eventually be blown to smithereens by an artillery shell at Ypres, cutting a career of completely original horror fantasy tales tragically short.

Above is my edition of The Night Land, published in the 1970s by Ballantine books in their Adult Fantasy series (edited by Lin Carter). They split it up in two volumes, as you can see. To protect copyrights in the US, Hodgson boiled down his 200 000+ word epic to a shortened 20 000-word novelette, published in the USA as The Dream of X, thus establishing, kind of, his novel as having a copyright status and protecting it against pirate publishers. However, the risk of someone stealing and publishing the enormous The Night Land was slim indeed, but there you have it. I actually read The Dream of X in a Swedish translation before I could get my hands on The Night Land. 

In short, the premise of The Night Land is that the story is set on Earth millions of years in the future. The sun has died but the desolate landscape is partially illuminated with fire and lava from the ground and from mysterious lights sometimes appearing. The remnants of humanity are huddled together in a gigantic pyramid called The Last Redoubt. Around this fortress is the Night Land shrouded in perpetual darkness, but teeming with monstrous lifeforms. Some are huge as mountains and loom threateningly along the horizon. Others are man-sized and quite human-like. A blue flame of mystical earth currents surrounds the pyramid and keeps the nightmarish vermin at bay. Futuristic knights each armed with a "diskos", a sort of spear ending with an electrically charged razor-sharp rotating disc, guard the refuge. 

However, one such man receives a telepathic distress call from a Lesser Redoubt, that nobody in the great pyramid has heard of. Our hero sets out alone to rescue the inhabitants of The Lesser Redoubt, since their earth current is failing, and travels across the bizarre world of the Night Land, encountering mysteries and fighting monsters.

The Dream of X tells the same story but pretty much snips out almost all of the travel bits. There's also a bizarre framing story set in the 1600s concerning a narrator who dreams the whole tale but is convinced it is a true vision of the future. This narrative device is enthusiastically presented at the beginning, even providing a romance for the narrator, but it's all soon forgotten when we leap millions of years ahead in the story.

For a few years, I've been contributing illustrations to Graeme Philips' excellent fanzine Cyäegha, but he's also published other collections pertaining to the "Lovecraft Circle" of writers, as well as peripheral authors. Included in the collection Forbidden Dreams is The Carpathian Codex, written by Cardinal Cox. It's a collection of poems inspired by the writings of Lovecraft and others. Among these poems is Night Land, a text summarizing the set-up for the plot and concept of Hodgson's The Night Land. I figured that would be a fun way of tackling the world of the Night Land and doing a very compact meditation on the subject rather than tackling that big project just yet. I got permission from Cox to adapt his poem, and off I went.

If you've followed my YouTube videos the past few years you know that my preferred filmmaking style is to use still images, adapt them in Photoshop, and use those as backgrounds/foregrounds. For the Night Land landscape, I used images of lava fields from Iceland. Digital effects like animated smoke, fire, and lightning were pulled from various open-source CGI clips.

The Great Redoubt pyramid was made from a single stock CG image found at Depositphotos.com duplicated many times and arranged as two sides of the pyramid. I wanted a tile-like texture, inferring that the pyramid is a patchwork of generations worth of repairs. The small pinpoints of light were added in Photoshop with the drawing tool.

The skies were made from more stock images of CG clouds, animated with distortion tools in After Effects, and also with altered colors.

The monsters of the original novel are too numerous to give a due appearance in a short video, but I picked a couple of favorites. "The Yellow Thing" is a four-armed humanoid creature the hero encounters and fights at one point when he's lit a campfire. "The Humped Men" are a race of squat creatures that seem to be very populous, so I figured I'd better include one of those too. I included a scene where a Yellow Thing tries to catch a Humped Man.

As I usually do I sculpted the head and torso as a single piece in medium grade Monster Clay, adding a couple of plastic pearls for the eyes.

I made the puppet's armature slightly disproportionate and irregular. I wanted to imply that the Yellow Thing is some kind of mutant abomination, not something that evolved with a symmetrical body.

For the arms and legs, I used exclusively cotton dipped in latex and thin polyurethane soaked in latex to shape very sinewy muscles.

The rest of the body was padded with thin polyurethane foam to achieve a knotted, but softer muscle look.

I cast patches of latex skin from a variety of old plaster skin texture molds, again to try and achieve a varied, deformed look to the body.

The head only has a single aluminum wire loop for the mouth. I retained the pearls from the sculpture as eyes. The skin was painted in a dirty yellow using tinted latex and touched up with numerous passes of airbrush colors. The teeth were tissue paper dipped in latex.

I decided the Humped Man would be symmetrical, but anatomically different from humans in many ways. It sort of came out looking a bit like a hairless Ewok.

Very simple padding on this puppet. I wanted a softer, chubbier look to the body.

For some reason, most of the photos taken with my phone turned out blurry, but hopefully, you can see some details. Like the Yellow Thing, the Humped Man only has articulation in the jaw regarding the face. Both these puppets make very quick appearances and weren't required to do much. The Humped Man was only painted with tinted latex.

I'll talk a bit about my plans for making a longer Night Land adaptation at the end of this post, and if that comes to fruition I'll re-design these monsters and make puppets with more articulation.

I also built a puppet that doesn't have a direct analog in the book. I just wanted to include a creepy monster with humanoid features, and this is what I came up with. I wanted the critter's eyes to be grown shut and the neck to have a tumorous texture.

Basically, this creature has the look of a human spider or insect, so the legs were made to be long and spindly. Cotton dipped in latex was used to shape muscles and tendons.

The latex head was attached to a long neck made from a single aluminum wire wrapped in soft yarn. I used a paper ball dipped in latex to prop up the back of the head. The snaking tongue is just a very thin aluminum wire wrapped in sewing yarn and painted with tinted latex. A couple of nails joined together with thermoplastic make up the center of the body.

The bulk of the body was shaped with two pieces of dense foam plucked from a package I got a while ago. Whenever I get useful package material it goes into the handy-to-have-some-day box.

The finished puppet was dry brushed with tinted latex, with mottled effects being applied using a toothbrush and acrylic airbrush paints. The wispy hair is simply a tuft of crepé hair (sheep's wool) glued on with a few drops of liquid latex.

A prominent monster character in The Night Land is The Silent Ones, so I felt I had to include those. They are a group of hooded beings who emerge from The House of Silence and travel on the few roads still remaining. It's very bad luck to encounter a silent one. It's never really revealed who or what they are, but the reader gets the feeling that they are among the top power players in the Night Land. For my Silent Ones I found a stock image of four hooded capes. I cut them out in Photoshop and added a few other changes before importing the images into After Effects and keyframe animated them to glide over the crusty ground. I added a CG animation of a wiggling squirmy shape in a layer under each cape, so you can just see something nasty peeking out under the cloth.

I wanted to focus on the actual Night Land landscape, following the text of Cox's poem, so the people of the pyramid are only glimpsed briefly. There is a version of an old Italian "peplum" or sword & sandal movie called The Giant of Metropolis, which is in the public domain. I used still shots from the movie where people are dressed in various retro-futuristic costumes, cutting out the people and adding them in layers in After Effects. The raging thunderstorm outside the pyramid is CG stock footage and the inside pyramid "set" is a modified stock image from Depositphotos. I made it a keyframed tracking shot, having the various elements in layers move a bit as the "camera" tracked in.

There is a bunch of so-called watchers in the Night Land; huge mountain-like monsters that move so slowly that the observers of the phenomena need millennia and generations to track any movement at all. One thing is certain, though -they're all moving towards the Last Redoubt. I use two old puppets to portray a couple of the watchers, each with its own characteristics. I took two photos of the puppets and 2D animated them. My idea was to show the monsters finally bearing down on the pyramid, making -for them- very quick movements.

Even the brave knights of the pyramid were still images. Again, I found useful material on Depositphotos and created the spinning diskos using a Photoshopped image of a glowing wheel with lots of spokes, animated to rotate very fast.

And that's about it for my Night Land video. I did the narration myself and used music by YouTube composer Sir Cubworth, who offers a collection of his work among the free YouTube resources.

Will I do another version? Yes, that is the plan. I want to basically do The Dream of X, but with more monster encounters, so it'll be a mix of the two versions of the story. When I'll be able to do it is up in the air for the time being. 

Imps

The subject for this little film had been on my mind for many years, namely to use a woodcut describing "imps", witches' familiars, as a template for stop-motion puppets.

I am, of course, thinking about the famous woodcut featuring witchfinder general Matthew Hopkins and two of his victims-to-be. The presumed witches are parading a pretty impressive lineup of servitor demons in various animal shapes, some more bizarre than others. The names of these imps were pretty cool too.

Lets' start with Sacke & Sugar, which is actually just the one creature. In the woodcut, it's apparently a black rabbit of some kind. I went with a zombie rabbit kind of thing instead. This little monster has an exposed skull, which I sculpted in medium grade Monster Clay. The skull and the jaw are separate.

Both parts of the skull were replicated in Rhino casting plastic from two DragonSkin FX silicone molds (after cleaning out the clay).

The aluminum wire skeleton has a pair of t-nuts in its feet, with bits of harder wire lashed to the aluminum wires using yarn, creating the "bones" of the skeleton. An aluminum wire also goes into the jaw.

Since most of the puppet would be covered by fake fur I didn't have to spend too much time on shaping the foam padding into exact muscle replicas. General shapes were quite adequate. A latex cast of a mummified-looking chest sculpted for another puppet was re-used. To create bits of shredded, dried tissue I simply rolled up thin skins of tinted latex sponged out over a plastic tray, the so-called "chunks-o-flesh" method. The insides of the ears were simply made by carving negative shapes into clay with the end of a paintbrush and then adding tinted latex into those shapes. The eyes are German-made taxidermist's glass eyes (don't know what animal they're supposed to be used for.

The fur I used was also used for the puppets in Empire of the Robot Monsters and is a short-haired synthetic fur attached to a slightly elastic fabric, which means that it will stretch slightly when animating the puppet.

Greedigutt isn't pictured in the woodcut but Imagined it as a dwarfish Hieronymus Bosh kind of creature. The head and feet were sculpted in clay, and then cast in latex from a dental plaster mold.

This little fellow was built in one day, having a very simple body padded with foam. The tail was built up over an aluminum wire using soft yarn.

Patches of latex cast in old skin texture molds covered the puppet. It was given a base paint of reddish-brown using tinted latex applied thinly with a sponge.

 A lighter coat of tinted latex was then dry brushed on. White latex pigments helped create a pale skin tone. The white eyes were just painted on, but the lower lip could be animated via an aluminum wire.

Another quickly built puppet (though not in one day) was Jarmara, the caterpillar dog. Actually, in the woodcut, he most resembles a creepy version of Dougal from The Magic Roundabout. It doesn't look like he's got any legs, so I decided that he probably walked like a caterpillar. The only thing I sculpted in clay was his head.

A latex cast of the head, reinforced with a cotton/latex mix, was attached to the aluminum wire skeleton. Aluminum wires were also used for the ears, which were covered with more latex and cotton. More padding with that soft yarn.

Jarmara's head and feet were dabbed with tinted latex and his buggy eyes were another pair of German taxidermy work. Strips of soft foam helped to further pad out the body.

Finally, fake fur from an old had was used to cover up the body. The aluminum wire torso could be contracted and extended to ape the movement of a kind of caterpillar.

The idea for Pyewacket (another imp not shown in the woodcut) was inspired by dancers and contortionists who can bend their hips and legs over their shoulders. It's a fairly impractical way of walking, but it sure looks strange. Another simple aluminum wire armature provided the skeleton. The dark grey blob at the bottom is a bit of dense foam from a camping seat cushion, filling up the chest area, without adding any real weight. 

The head was sculpted in Monster Clay..

..While the rest of the body was built up using foam shapes of various densities.

Patches of latex cast in texture molds then covered the foam.

The finished Pyewacket was painted with tinted latex, and detailed with acrylic airbrush paints spattered onto the puppet using a toothbrush. Fake fur from an old jacket collar was glued on here and there using the very strong and transparent Telesis silicone glue.

The best-remembered critter from this woodcut is doubtless Vinegar Tom, the strange cow-whippet-thing. The head was another Monster Clay sculpture, using plastic pearls for the eyes.

The horns were cast in latex from an old plaster mold. Small aluminum wires help move the ears and the jaw. The tie-downs I use are usually M4 t-nuts, but for this puppet, I used M3 to make the feet really small.

For Vinegar Tom, I did a pretty intricate foam muscle build-up. I based this on both cow and dog muscle diagrams.

The pearl eyes were used so I could move them around, BUT looking at the woodcut I realized the eyes were simply too small. I simply glued a pair of bigger glass taxidermy eyes over the original pearl eyes, and built up eye sockets around the eyes using cotton dipped in latex. A finely detailed latex skin was added over the foam padding.

More fake fur was used to add a short mane to Tom's neck. Teeth were made from cotton and latex, as were the toes. This puppet was painted with PAX paint (Prosaide glue + acrylic paint) using a sponge, with acrylic airbrush paints adding a bit of subtle detailing.

Grizzle, our last little critter, was basically a scary pig standing on his hind legs. He only appears for a short bit at the end, so I decided to make him something recognizable. There are examples of demonic pigs in religion, folklore, and pop culture, so it seemed a suitable choice. I sculpted and cast both head and torso in latex from a dental plaster mold.

Again, a very simple aluminum wire armature did the job. It's still strong enough and versatile enough to allow the puppet to be used for more projects.

The latex skin was partially padded with thin bits of polyurethane foam. Aluminum wires go into the ears and the jaw. Also, reflective pearls were glued into the eye sockets.

The foam muscle padding was quite detailed, though most of the focus would be on the latex torso, which was attached to the padded body using liquid latex as a bonding material.

Reddish tinted latex was applied as a base paint, with a purple-greyish latex paint dry brushed over that, with strands of fake for added as bristles to the neck, and cotton/latex tusks stuck into the mouth. Saliva and snot were created with Glossy Accents scrapbooking plastic.

That's all about the imps, but what about their mistress. Well, I don't know who she is, because she's just a bunch of stock footage clips from Videoblocks.com, but I'm glad I found her. 

All of the film was treated with a couple of filters in After Effects to make the image a bit fuzzy and dream-like. Libby Grant delivered another excellent narration (our previous collaboration was Baba Yaga's Hut). Almost all of the backgrounds were found on Depositphotos.com, where I have a monthly subscription.