Three LA Shows Offer Visions of Horror and Fantasy
Three exhibitions currently on view in Los Angeles explore horror, dark fantasy, and the occult, which is perfect timing for this Halloween season.
LOS ANGELES — Forget your sexy nurse or jokey meme costumes this Halloween season. Three exhibitions currently on view in Los Angeles present complementary visions of horror, dark fantasy, and the occult more in keeping with the holiday’s origins. More than simply offering up gross-out chills (though there are plenty of those), together they reveal something of our collective history of fear, escapism, and otherness that runs through pop culture and cinema to high art.
Storefront gallery Lethal Amounts presents a survey of Halloween masks from the 1960s to present day. Take one step inside the downtown LA space and you’re hit with the smell of latex, recalling childhood visits to the costume shop. The masks on view range from ghoulish. mass-produced models available to the general public, to hyper-realistic, high-end, fantastical one-of-a-kind show pieces. Two similar series produced by Distortions Unlimited show advances in mask-making from the late 70’s to today.
Also on view are a few pieces featured in films, including Michael Myers’s iconic mask from the Halloween series. The blank, ghostly face was actually a cheap Captain Kirk mask that the crew painted white. In the gallery’s back room hang the original Ex-Presidents masks worn in Point Break. Life-like busts of transgressive punk rocker G. G. Allin and serial killer John Wayne Gacy, in his “Pogo the Clown” make-up, provide a glimpse of “real life monsters” as gallery owner Danny Fuentes put it.
The unfortunately-titled Trap House at Think Tank Gallery also has a few film pieces, including molds used for prosthetics worn by Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, and Sigourney Weaver, but also expands the fantasy and horror-themed concept to include paintings, bizarre taxidermy, and sculptures from some of Hollywood’s most talented effects artists. Most impressive are the contemporary takes on the classics, like Carl Lyon’s metallic busts of Lynchian characters, and Ian von Cromer’s Trumpian twist on John Carpenter’s They Live! (1988).
Alongside the visual art, Think Tank has also arranged an escape room based around a rather convoluted plot involving a deranged musician, human trafficking, and organ harvesting. Narrative issues not-withstanding, there are some compelling elements, such as puzzles that activate artworks outside the escape room. Some of the kinks were still being worked out during the press preview, however during a recent visit, they seem to have tightened up the experience.
The blockbuster of these three exhibitions, however, is Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The sprawling show assembles 600 horror artifacts, artworks, ephemera, and cinematic models from the collection of the visionary filmmaker. Despite the overwhelming volume of material, it is still a fraction of what is contained in his residence known as Bleak House. This maze of objects and images is like a tour inside the mind of the director of Pan’s Labrynth and Hellboy, where 19th century prints, Hollywood monsters, Disney, low-brow comics, Victorian elegance, and Mexican wrestling all collide. Featured artists include Blake, Ensor, Ray Harryhausen, Goya, Posada, R. Crumb, and Mike Hill to name a few. As he said at the press preview, the exhibition challenges the notion that “horror and beauty are opposites.”
Born in Guadalajara, del Toro’s vision is firmly rooted in his Mexicanness, and it comes across in the way he reframes American horror tropes with a Mexican Catholic sensibility. “[As a child], I didn’t fit in with the saints, I fit in with the monsters,” he recalled. In Pacific Rim, his version of Japanese Kaiju films, he noted how his monsters were influences by alebrijes, mythical Mexican beasts, some of which are on view in the show.
At Home With Monsters not only looks at del Toro’s numerous and varied sources of inspiration, but also at the ways in which we manifest our real-life fears in supernatural ghosts and ghouls. With a nod to current political, social and economic disruption, del Toro said, “The real monsters are in finely tailored suits. There is nothing scarier than people who are profoundly ignorant and profoundly certain.”
The Art of the Halloween Mask is on view at Lethal Amounts (1226 West 7th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles) through November 15.
Trap House is on view at Think Tank Gallery (939 Maple Ave., Downtown, Los Angeles) through November 5.
Guillermo del Toro: At Home with Monsters is on view at LACMA ((5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles) through November 27.
