Capturing Arsenic and Old Lace, in One Macabre Image

Eric felt the sketches were on the right track, although he wondered if there was other imagery that might work better than the skull and crossbones. (“On a bottle it clearly means ‘poison,’ but in the abstract the first thing I’m getting is ‘pirates,’” he wrote.) He also recognized the Kapralik voice in my layouts but wasn’t getting enough of the Gorey side. So I “gothed it up” on the second pass. I changed the secondary color from orange to purple. The orange, intended as a reference to the film’s Halloween setting, was coming off a bit too sunny. Purple, on the other hand—a Victorian-era color of mourning—seemed a moody complement to the emerging Gorey trappings. First, I reworked the skull-and-crossbones concept, proceeding to do a version with gravestones and bats. While sketching this concept, the visual similarities between a headstone and a bottle dawned on me. Something clicked. I scratched out some lines on a Post-it: a poison bottle flanked by two gravestones, along with the cast of characters. I liked it. It was more than an illustration of a scene. It had some metaphorical heft. I worked it up.

We had a solid cover direction. Time to find a title treatment. The typography up until this point was, for the most part, placeholder—there for flavor as the primary elements were developed. Eric and I agreed that the type on the second round was feeling a tad overworked. Perhaps something Old Hollywood would be in order?

Knowing what type could work meant seeing it in context. I commenced “building a set”—hanging a backdrop, creating the scenery and playing with lighting, albeit in Photoshop, rather than in a photographer’s studio, as Kapralik would have done. I’d yet to consider costumes, so I worked with the figures in mannequin form. Kapralik liked to embellish his set pieces with doll-size versions of real-world objects, and I looked to do the same by giving each character a plot-specific prop to handle. I left Jonathan’s hands free because, well, he’s a strangler and he might need them. The bats are vintage Halloween tchotchkes.

In the meantime, I was pulling type samples for the title treatment and credits that would appear on the cover. I considered a variety of possibilities, from straight-up 1940s-style to poison-label type to something with a hint of Victoriana—as long as it had qualities reminiscent of hand-lettered movie posters. I set up multiple treatments and tried them out in situ. There were a few strong contenders but one standout, whose distinctive sinewy letterforms harmonized ideally with the surrounding drawn elements, almost as if it all came from the same hand. It’s the one we ended up using.

The final pieces were the figures, which were hand-drawn in pen and ink. At first, I drew the crosshatching in contour to suggest dimension, but I soon discovered that so much line work skewed the balance of the piece too heavily toward the Gorey side of the equation. What would Kapralik have done? Perhaps use cutouts of Gorey-esque hatching, just as he used cut-up pieces of fabric? I inked up a handful of hatched swatches and applied them to the drawings. The result was much more graphic and appealing.

It all came together looking as I’d hoped. The nods to both Kapralik and Gorey are present, yet one doesn’t seem to overwhelm the other. There’s still plenty of room for the image to be its own thing. I like to think we found that sweet spot.