The Mark Of The Vampire

I'm three years into treatment for lymphoma (chemo, radiation and the rest), and I'm just emerging now from a particularly nasty few months of heavy chemo and a stem cell transplant. My strength is just starting to return, and it feels great. All this shit has kept me from writing as much as I'd like to recently, and I'm hoping to start posting more frequently again until my next round of treatment begins.

I want to show off a gory bit of medical tech that I had to wear around for a couple of days recently. It's called a Vas Cath, or central venous catheter. It's a "port" that is stitched into the neck and connected to an access tube that runs directly into the Jugular Vein, on down through the Superior Vena Cava and into the heart. In spite of the fact that it sucked having it in, a perverse part of my sci-fi horror lovin' mind couldn't help but appreciate it's similarity to some cool biomechanical imagery in some of my favourite flicks:

unfortunate Max Renn's Videodrome-tumour induced episode of a gun assimilating itself into his "old flesh" via a series of gorily tunneling conduits...


... and even more so, the disgusting Harkonnen "heart plugs" from Lynch's Dune.


Finally, much to my amusement, after having the device removed, my doctor described the hole left in my neck as "the mark of the Vampire". Groovy.

Biomechanoid

I stumbled on this little gem at Pink Tentacle yesterday and was suitably blown away. It would appear that in 1984/85 H.R. Giger quietly recycled some of his iconic production artwork for Alejandro Jodorowsky's unrealised Dune adaptation. Not for use in another movie, but a Japanese ad campaign for Pioneer's ZONE home entertainment system.

This brief glimpse of Giger's dark vision for planet Arrakis makes me lament the death of this project more than ever. The combination of Giger's nightmarish design and Jodorowsky's unconventional and surreal approach would surely have resulted in a cult SF film quite unlike anything we've ever seen.

As everyone knows, shortly after the collapse of Dune, Jodorowsky's core creative team of Dan O'Bannon, Giger, Chris Foss and Moebius all went on to contribute their talents to Alien; thus making O'Bannon's bastard child of Dark Star and Dune the closest we'll ever get to seeing What Could Have Been.

Of course this is all ancient history and common knowledge, but seeing these TV and print ads makes me wish anew that Giger's brilliance was further utilised at the height of his ability. I could watch an entire film - devoid of any actors, dialogue or story - of nothing but Giger's art, brought to life by '80s practical FX: sets, miniatures, models, animatronics, puppetry and matte paintings. A sort of biomechanical perversion of Koyaanisqatsi.