io9: fetish

Shadow People Haunt the Darkest Corners of Your Dreams

Lauren Davis — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:08:45 PDT

Juha Arvid Helminen unnerves with his Shadow People, a dreamily creepy series of black-on-black photos that evokes The Invisible Man and Silent Hill's Pyramid Head monsters. His black-wrapped subjects are amassing an army to march through your nightmares.

Juha Arvid Helminen [DeviantArt via Coilhouse]

"Your Whole Body Will Be Different Now"

Annalee Newitz — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:49:42 PDT

I love it when some random B-movie from the 1950s delivers a scene of such inventive perviness that it could only have been created in a sexually-repressive culture. Such is the case with this outrageous (and yet work-safe) scene from 1959 flick The Head, where mad Dr. Ood has grafted the head of a hunchback nun onto the body of a stripper (using Serum Z of course). After the operation, the nun-headed stripper approaches Dr. Ood with new desires . . . for things like cigarettes and porn.

This is a genuinely standout B movie, with great over-the-top performances, a noir-ish plot, and surreal mad scientist sets from Hermann "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" Warm. Plus I haven't even mentioned that the whole thing hinges on that story about the Russian scientist who kept a dog's head alive with some kind of crazy machine. They have that machine in this flick — only with a HUMAN HEAD! But really, The Head hits it out of the park for all its blatantly fetishistic moments: C'mon, a nun in a collar who suddenly has a hot body and crazy stripper sex urges? Somebody back in 1959 had a nice little wank to that one, I'll guarantee. [The Head via IMDB]

Cthulhu In Love: The Fetish Art Of Richard Kadrey [NSFW]

Charlie Jane Anders — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:10:00 PDT

We've been huge fans of Richard Kadrey's writing ever since we read his seminal cyberpunk novel Metrophage, and we've been lucky enough to hear him read several times from his stories of the bizarre sex lives of mutant assassins. So we were thrilled when we found out he also creates gorgeous, disturbing fetish art under the name Kaos Beauty Klinik. His breathtaking work — including women with actual tentacles and gorgeous women who are masked and mysterious — reminds us of the freakish beauty of Joel Peter Witkin's art. Click through for a (NSFW) gallery.

Says Kadrey:

Science fiction and the human body are inextricably linked through velocity. Both forms (the flesh and the word) are hurtling toward a future that is probably a hundred times weirder and more unexpected than anything we're yammering about today. I embrace with the future by throwing words at it. I obsess about speeding bodies by documenting and modifying them, trying to guess the forms they'll take as they hurtle off the cliff of the future. I wonder what we'll be like and look like when we hit the bottom and start rolling to the edge of the next cliff.

[Kaos Beauty Klinik], plus [DeviantArt]

Must Read: Click

charliejane — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:21:41 PDT

Must-read graphic novels are futuristic classics that shouldn't be missed. Of course, not every must-see is perfect. That's why we've rated them 1-5 on the patented "crunchy goodness" scale.

Title: Click
Date: 1992-2002

Vitals: Claudia, a super hawt rich girl, has a device implanted that makes her sexuality remote-controllable. A creepy man uses that remote control to turn her into a raging naked slut whenever he wants.

Famous names: Milo Manara

Crunchy goodness: 2

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Manara put out three sequels, plus a naughty invisible man story and a naughty Gulliver's Island ripoff. And Click inspired a whole flotilla of depraved fetishists on the Internet.

Sights you'll never unsee: Three words: Dog in heat. Also, drugged emenas that cause women to have clairvoyant visions. Okay then.

The shit: The field of erotic science-fiction comics is not exactly overcrowded, but Manara manages to make it seem like a viable chimera. The ornateness of his art, combined with the sense of all heck breaking loose when the woman's dial is turned up, combine to make you forget quite how ooky the whole thing is.

Deadliest spoiler: Claudia gets back together with her attorney husband in Click 4. But then an incestuous brother-sister duo get their hands on a remote control and decide to use her remote-controlled sex drive to battle corporate corruption. Or something.

Milo Manara: The Official Website (maybe NSFW)