Higham, George (Animator,Special Effects Artist)
Dread Central Staff
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One way to meet George Higham is to die violently in Manhattan.
I’ll get back to that.
Another method is to find a common interest in puppetry, contact him by e-mail and visit him in his Brooklyn studio. Finding this preferable to what I would imagine to be a rather one-sided conversation in the NYC Morgue, I had the pleasure of meeting with George late this summer in his studio.
Discussions about horror/fantasy art and entertainment naturally focus around the “big” names – King, Barker, Romero, Cronenberg and Carpenter. However, there are other creators out there, diligently producing in the shadows of the limelight. Although not a household name, even in the smallish fan community of horror, monsters and the macabre, George Higham has been creating creatures, literature and horrific images and films most of his life.
Sitting in his basement studio in Brooklyn, amidst two-headed skeletal chimps, ghoulish statuary, mummified fetuses and an articulated Edgar Allan Poe puppet, George discussed his early influences, his work and the ups and downs of being an independent artist. In the course of the interview I found that he has some valuable insights and advice on being an artist and working in the special effects field.
Chris Fehring: Do you consider yourself a puppeteer?
George Higham: I wouldn’t not classify myself as that. Whatever the project calls for to get the vision across is the technique I would use. I’m doing a lot of puppet images for the Wormwood Tarot (photographic) series I’m doing right now, but even as a sculptor and photographer, I remember my roots in film. I’ve been shooting tons of video -both documentary and “beauty shots” of the finished pieces.
CF: How old were you when you started?
GH: Basically I’ve been actively making things since I was 12. It was always monsters, zombies – something ghostly or otherworldly. I’ve always enjoyed puppets in films, especially from a special effects point of view. It seemed like a natural way to bring a lot of my sculptures to life.
CF: Was Harryhausen an influence on you growing up?
GH: Not so much. Harryhausen I’ve always enjoyed, as well as other stop motion films like King Kong and the classics, but a bigger influence was an obscure little thing I saw in Coney Island when I was in my single digits. It was a ride in a fake rocket ship. The point of view was going through a strange alien world and it had all these little creatures that were stop motion and I loved that. And the memory of that stuck with me.
Then I started becoming exposed to more obscure stuff like Ladislaw Starewicz, a Russian filmmaker who emigrated to France during the Revolution and he had some really bizarre puppet films that he did. And the work of (Jan) Svankmajer, a Czech animator who did a lot of work in the 70’s and 80’s. The main difference between their work and Harryhausen is that they are creating a whole bizarre world with characters that populate it. The whole thing is kind of a twisted perspective. It’s not meant to interact with the reality of live people like the Harryhausen stuff. I think I like the more abstract story – and creating a strange viewing experience – better than that. Where you fill in the blanks yourself.
CF: You used to do special effects work in film?
GH: I worked on Street Trash, Plutonium Baby, and Spookies. I worked Off-Off-Broadway on Shock Theater. On TV I worked on the “Monsters” TV show. I once worked with Grandpa Munster on a cable station. I built a graveyard set and acted with him in one of my zombie costumes. I also worked for the Commander USA show. I also worked a film called Vampire’s Embrace. That was a deferred-payment gig that I got burned on. It’s that type of thing that made it difficult to sustain that type of work here in NYC for one thing, where a lot of effects work is done in California. It was hard to get work that would pay enough to support. So wanting to stay in New York was a factor. But that’s how I learned – being part of a crew, heading up a couple of effects crews. Soul Tangler gave me a lot of freedom in what I wanted to create as did Vampires Embrace. The other stuff was basically being part of those crews.
We moved on to discuss his short, stop motion puppet film Annabel Lee which is an adaptation of Poe’s moody poem of a wicked, envious universe that tragically comes between a man (played by the “Poe-Puppet”) and his true love.
CF: Let’s talk a little about Annabel Lee.. Did you have a lifelong interest in Poe or was in just something that fit your style?
GH: Kind of both. I’ve always liked Poe and I have always liked Annabel Lee. On a very simple level I’ve liked the rhymes. I like the beauty of the story. It’s a love story but it has these very horrific, horrendous things going on in it. It leaves itself open to interpretation. And I did the best I possibly could, I felt, to remain faithful to the spirit of what he wrote. Something that if I could communicate with him I would want him to see and be happy with, but still have my own visual spin on it. The main goal was to create a puppet that someone would care about. This is what I really wanted to do through the course of the whole film and I utilized horrific effects to achieve that goal.
CF: Do you feel successful with that?
GH: I can say I’m happy with the film – that I did my very best. Going back I would do some things differently but not enough to keep me up at night worrying about it. It didn’t all work, there were some shots that were a little shaky, but I was working with a six-foot ceiling and no more than an eight-foot space.
CF: Is Annabel Lee going to be distributed on DVD?
GH: It’s due to come out in 2005 by Synapse. It’s a slow process, that’s what I am experiencing now. I’ve made this film and I would like it to be out there yesterday.
CF: Some scenes are in a music video I understand.
GH: Yes, from Cradle of Filth, a heavy metal band from England.
CF: What is the subject of the Wormwood Tarot?
GH: Actually the Wormwood Tarot is developed from a series of short stories I was writing called A Ghastly Shade of Green. This refers to both the color of decay and the color of absinthe. Two very strong elements through all the fiction I was writing.
Last October I took a week off from the morgue and built a 20-foot back alley set at my place in the mountains. It’s got very expressionistic angles. I’ve been building and shooting full-scale sculptures there. It’s all very nightmarish, and quite Victorian, laced with plague and absinthe. I’m creating the whole series of a traditional Tarot deck – the major arcana, which are 22 images, and the minor, which are an additional 56. I originally thought I would just do the major arcana, which I was doing up until mid-July. Then I realized that if I really wanted to get a publisher and get this out there I would need all 78 images.
I’ve been faithful to the traditional Tarot archetypes and symbolism, but have altered specifics to fit into the Wormwood World. An example would be the four suits that I designed: Absinthe (replacing the suit of Cups which is a water symbol;) Flames, which is fire; Nails, which is my Earth symbol; and Shadows, which is my Air symbol. For example the Ten of Nails is a puppet corpse with ten large nails driven into him.
CF: You’re now doing much of your photography in stereo?
GH: The original focus was to do a photographic series of these images. Stereo photography is something I started experimenting with four months ago. I started having so much fun and success with it that now basically everything I’m doing I’m documenting in stereo photography. It requires a viewer to interact. The concept is that the left eye and the right eye see things a little bit differently. Basically I have to mimic that with a camera in creating two different exposures. One that would be the left eye and one that would be the right. The thing that appeals to me most with 3-D is that it pulls you into another world. This is something I always try to create. This goes back to the puppets and why I prefer off-kilter all-immersive worlds in stop-motion as opposed to the King Kong approach.
It’s a world within its own. Something different from what the viewer experiences so that they can be part of that world for a short period of time, such as a thrill ride, or a spookhouse. Something to pull them into a different environment. Stereo Photography is like a Viewmaster when you were a kid. You look into it and the rest of the world is gone. You’re just seeing a small tunnel and a bright-lit world and ultra-dimensional slides of something weird. I find it suits my work very well and I’m very excited about the stereo work I’m doing. I just have to find a physically viable way to share it with people.
CF: These are ideas that you come up with, some thought, some vision and then you create it. You don’t look for someone to buy it ahead of time?
GH: That’s the way I prefer to do it. Of course now I have to go out and find a publisher that would be interested in doing a Tarot deck or book, as well as trying to get an art show out of it incorporating the finished photographs and sculptures.
CF: Any thoughts on doing Lovecraft? It seems perfect.
GH: I would love to. Actually what I had envisioned next is an animated project – another Poe film but based upon a bunch of different Poe elements, stripped down to create a hyperkinetic and horrific short experience. That’s what I wanted to do next. I’ve done a ton of designs for the film, different takes on his Masque of the Red Death and elements from all his stories. But The Wormwood Tarot pulled me away from that for a bit…
Lovecraft? Absolutely. Clark Ashton Smith. A lot of writers out there. I love old fantastic literature. I love strange literature, particularly from the Victorian Period. They all inspire me when I read them. I see them all in visual terms. I’m far more in tune with older literature than new. Favorites are many, but Gustav Meyrink stands out as does Alfred Kubin. Modern writers? Robert Weinberg and Thomas Ligotti – pure genius, each of them!
CF: Any particular Lovecraft story?
GH: I’ve always been partial toward what is known as his lesser tales as opposed to the larger Chuthulu Mythos. The Hound always struck me -about grave robbers and a demonic beast.
George’s day job is working as a Radiographer for the NYC Morgue. Essentially bodies are brought in and George documents them with X-rays as part of the autopsy process.
CF: Any influences from the NYC Morgue?
GH: Influences? Yes, I’d say the different textures and colors. The general images themselves, probably not. I’ve had so much of this throughout my life that all this macabre imagery is already ingrained and part of my thought process. It’s not like going there [to the Morgue] is inspiring in the creative way. It was inspiring in a physical way in that suddenly that became a day job and I had to work that much harder in the artistic part of my life because the time for it shrunk and I had to utilize the time for my art so much better, as opposed to just floundering around for years looking for the next special effects job. Since I started at the morgue my productivity has increased tenfold. Even though the time is less, the drive is so much more.
CF: That’s a neat point to bring up. The feeling I get from people, especially young people going into the arts, is that they feel they cannot have a day job. Thoughts?
GH: The opposite I think. Before I started at the morgue I considered a lot of different options – straight jobs as well as creative. I felt that a creative job that wasn’t within my control would be too diluting to my energies. I felt I would be better off with a straight job – even though it’s a twisted straight job – that I would be able to devote that much more of my mental energies to creativity.
CF: What kind of things would you say to someone who is 20 years old and getting into “the field”?
GH: Be realistic about money. This has worked well for me. To not, as an artist, have a chip on the shoulder and to think that the world owes you financial support in your artwork. To not always complain about government cutbacks and funding for artwork.
That if the art is coming from the heart there’s going to be a way to do it and a way to show it. For me to succeed in this I realize I have to devote the energy to get what I have done out there. I find that difficult. It’s my weak part. I’ve found the business part difficult but it’s very necessary to survive. I have thousands of photographs, hundreds of them I feel would make a good art book. I have to work on making that happen as opposed to devoting all my energy into creating hundreds of more photographs.
CF: Any concerns about your own creations coming to life? Would this be a good thing? A bad thing?
GH: Oh, a good thing. It would be a lot easier than my moving them in tiny increments per photographic exposure to create the mere illusion of life….
If you would like to see Annabell Lee before the 2005 DVD release, George will be having a screening in NYC along with Mad Monster Party. It starts at 5PM on Sunday, Oct 31 at Anthology Film Archives on 2nd ave. @ 2nd St. You can also visit George’s website to see some more images of his work.
In this regard if you are a publisher or have any contacts that may be interested in George’s work, he would love to hear from you. Please contact him through his website, which will be getting a major overhaul in the coming weeks so keep your eyes on it.
Categorized:Interviews News
