HORROR WITH ITS SLEEVES ROLLED UP

Brad McDevitt Stock Art – Horror Collection 3 is grubby, lurid and agreeably ill-behaved.

There are zombies and demons, naturally, but also a weretiger, a punk naga, a reanimated hand, a startling quantity of eyeball and some artwork drawn from the seamier, more exploitative end of horror. This is material for books that want monsters to look monstrous, violence to leave a mark and the weird stuff to remain properly weird.

The download contains 25 image files covering 17 distinct subjects. Most are TIFFs, with eight PNG files among the set. Several illustrations come in colour, black-and-white or greyscale alternatives, giving you useful options for different interiors rather than pretending each variation is an entirely new piece.

Use them in horror adventures, bestiaries, modern occult games, urban fantasy, splatter, pulp, dark science fiction or any project presently haunted by empty spaces marked ARTWORK REQUIRED.

THE CONTENTS, WITHOUT CREATIVE ACCOUNTING

The supplied files are:

• Gruesome Zombie

• Macabre Demon

• Fashion Mutant

• Slasher

• Exploitation Slime Attack

• Weretiger

• Demon – black and white

• Demon – colour

• Demon – greyscale

• Reanimated Hand

• Reanimated Hand – greyscale

• Scary Little Girl

• Crow and Eyeball

• Crow and Eyeball – black and white

• Crow and Eyeball – greyscale

• Hentai Horror

• Punk Naga

• Modern Horror Mask

• Modern Horror Mask – black and white

• Modern Horror Mask – greyscale

• Urban Predators

• Fu Manchu

• Fu Manchu – greyscale

• Axe to Grind

• Frankenstein’s Monster

That is 25 files, not 25 unrelated illustrations. The distinction matters, particularly when everybody involved can count.

THE DEAD AND THEIR DETACHED COMPONENTS

The Gruesome Zombie, Frankenstein’s Monster and Reanimated Hand cover three dependable branches of unnatural life: the walking corpse, the assembled corpse and the inconvenient bit of corpse operating independently.

The zombie can carry a bestiary entry, introduce an outbreak or occupy the foreground while its friends mass behind the barricade. It is specific enough to deliver the expected rot and violence, but broad enough to fit modern horror, fantasy, science fiction or an especially unsuccessful medical drama.

Frankenstein’s Monster needs little introduction. Use the piece for gothic horror, mad science, artificial life, stitched revenants or any creature whose maker has developed a sudden interest in avoiding responsibility.

The Reanimated Hand comes in standard and greyscale versions. It could be a crawling nuisance, an undead familiar, a severed clue, the surviving portion of a larger monster or the first indication that dismemberment has not solved the problem.

A hand is also cheap to feed and fits under doors. These are qualities insufficiently appreciated by necromancers.

DEMONIC VARIETY

The Macabre Demon is joined by another Demon supplied in black-and-white, colour and greyscale forms.

That gives you one separate demonic illustration and three treatments of another. Between them, they can cover summoned creatures, infernal antagonists, occult transformations, alien horrors mistaken for devils or whatever your setting keeps at the unpleasant end of the cosmology.

The variants matter in practical terms. Colour may suit a cover, handout or digital edition; black-and-white can sit naturally in a traditional RPG interior; greyscale offers a middle ground when full colour is unnecessary or unaffordable.

No additional theology is imposed. They can serve Hell, an invented pantheon, a cosmic intelligence or a suburban magician who has badly overestimated the protections offered by a chalk circle.

MUTANTS, HYBRIDS AND THINGS WITH COMPLICATED ANCESTRY

The Fashion Mutant, Weretiger and Punk Naga give the collection a strong urban-fantasy and body-horror streak.

Fashion Mutant is a marvellous title because it leaves plenty of room for interpretation. The figure might belong to a decadent future, a mutant subculture, a supernatural nightclub or an experiment whose creators were more concerned with presentation than ethics.

The Weretiger offers an alternative to the seemingly compulsory werewolf. It can be a cursed human, hereditary shapeshifter, occult assassin or predator attached to a particular place, family or tradition. Drop it into a familiar lycanthrope plot and half the assumptions the players brought with them become useless.

The Punk Naga combines mythic anatomy with modern attitude. It could inhabit an occult underworld, front a band, run a gang, guard a shrine or serve as a player character in a setting where monsters have stopped hiding and started forming subcultures.

These pieces are particularly handy for games in which the supernatural has adapted to the present rather than remaining trapped in an antique shop.

THE LURID CORNER

Exploitation Slime Attack and Hentai Horror are the collection’s least restrained pieces.

They suit adult horror, sleaze, erotic grotesquerie, transgressive ’zines and projects deliberately drawing upon exploitation cinema, underground comics or the more indecent reaches of pulp illustration. They need not be apologised for or politely hidden behind euphemism. Use them where their excess belongs.

The Slime Attack could illustrate engulfment, mutation, an alien organism, an escaped laboratory creation or the point where a monster encounter acquires distinctly adult overtones.

Hentai Horror is similarly suited to projects where sex, monstrosity and bodily transformation are part of the material rather than something coyly omitted between paragraphs.

Both images can also function as reminders that horror has never been a uniformly respectable genre. It has always contained grubby magazines, lurid posters, forbidden paperbacks and artwork calculated to upset whichever moral custodian was nearest.

Respectability is optional. Effective illustration is not.

PEOPLE WITH WEAPONS AND POOR IMPULSE CONTROL

The Slasher and Axe to Grind belong to the human—or at least approximately human—side of horror.

The Slasher can carry the obvious role in a masked-killer scenario, but it could also represent an executioner, vigilante, cult enforcer or recurring figure whose identity matters more than its statistics.

Axe to Grind has an excellent double meaning built into the filename. The wielder might be a murderer, survivor, woodsman, monster hunter or someone settling a grievance with unusual literalism.

These images are useful because human threats change the temperature of a book. A demon may require research, ritual and specialised weapons. A person with an axe can be understood immediately and may already know where the characters live.

Sometimes the mundane explanation is worse.

THE SCARY LITTLE GIRL

Horror understands that children make adults lower their guard. It has been exploiting this tactical error for generations.

The Scary Little Girl might be a ghost, psychic, possessed child, unnatural copy, dangerous innocent or merely the one person in the story who can see what is actually happening.

She can stand at the end of a corridor, appear in an old photograph or calmly explain something no child should know. She might need rescuing. She might be bait. She might have arranged the entire sequence of events because the grown-ups continued refusing to listen.

The picture can support a complete adventure by itself. Give her a name, decide what she wants and work out why every adult in authority has misunderstood the situation.

Then let the players misunderstand it differently.

A CROW, AN EYEBALL AND THREE WAYS TO PRINT THEM

Crow and Eyeball is supplied in colour, black-and-white and greyscale forms.

It works as a striking symbolic image for surveillance, prophecy, death, witchcraft, unnatural sight or a particularly unpleasant familiar. It might be a chapter opener, cult emblem, magical effect, monster illustration or recurring motif threaded through a book.

The image does not need an elaborate explanation to earn space. Sometimes an arresting piece of horror art is doing its job simply by making the reader stop and look.

The three treatments make it easy to reuse across different products or place it wherever the surrounding layout demands a particular tonal weight.

MASKS, IDENTITIES AND WHATEVER IS UNDERNEATH

The Modern Horror Mask also comes in three treatments: standard, black and white, and greyscale.

Masks are useful horror images because they conceal, transform and announce at the same time. This one could belong to a killer, gang, performer, cult, protest movement or supernatural identity adopted by several different people.

It can serve as a character portrait, faction symbol or visual clue. Put the mask at one crime scene, repeat it later and allow the players to construct a conspiracy whether you had one prepared or not.

That is not laziness. It is responsive campaign design.

The mask need not even be worn. It could be found in a locker, sealed inside an evidence bag or hanging in a room where nobody admits to owning it.

URBAN PREDATORS

The file titled Urban Predators offers a ready-made piece for city horror.

The title is broad enough to cover criminals, monsters, hunters or people who have become difficult to distinguish from any of the above. Use it for street-level supernatural games, gang horror, modern fantasy, night-time pursuit or a chapter about what moves through the city after ordinary people have gone home.

Urban horror benefits from figures who look embedded in their environment. Monsters in a city need territory, contacts, places to feed and some means of dealing with CCTV. A predator that survives modern life has already learned more adaptability than the average player character.

FU MANCHU

Two versions are supplied under the filename Fu Manchu: standard and greyscale.

The title draws upon an old pulp-villain archetype and may suit retro crime, period melodrama, sinister masterminds, occult conspirators or a knowingly lurid pastiche of penny dreadfuls and serial adventures.

You are not bound to the filename. The figure can be renamed and used as any scholar, cult leader, criminal patron or ominous gentleman required by the project.

Stock art works best when you treat filenames as labels, not commandments.

PUTTING THE COLLECTION TO WORK

There is enough here to illustrate a compact horror adventure without every page looking as though it belongs to a different book.

A possible sequence suggests itself:

A severed hand is recovered after a slime attack. The surviving witness insists the attacker was human before it began changing. Research turns up an old photograph containing the Scary Little Girl and a masked figure. A crow has been left at each scene, its eye surgically altered. The trail leads through an urban supernatural community to a demon passing itself off as a fashionable mutant. Meanwhile, somebody with an axe is removing witnesses.

That is merely one arrangement. The collection is deliberately mixed. You can strip it for individual monsters, reserve the variants for layout needs or scatter the images across several smaller releases.

Stock art earns its keep by solving ordinary publishing problems. It fills a bestiary, breaks up walls of text, gives an NPC a face and allows limited commission money to be spent on the handful of illustrations that genuinely must be unique.

Twenty-five ready-made files will not finish the book for you.

They will make finishing it considerably less expensive.

THE TECHNICAL TALLY

The collection contains:

• 25 image files

• 17 distinct subjects

• 17 TIFF files

• 8 PNG files

Alternate versions are supplied for:

• Demon: black and white, colour and greyscale

• Reanimated Hand: standard and greyscale

• Crow and Eyeball: standard, black and white and greyscale

• Modern Horror Mask: standard, black and white and greyscale

• Fu Manchu: standard and greyscale

The other twelve subjects are supplied as single illustrations.

Some pieces also appear in other Brad McDevitt collections where they straddle more than one genre.

LICENCE

The artwork is supplied for personal and professional projects under the attached licence.

Read the licence before publishing. Check what it requires regarding credit, alteration and redistribution, rather than discovering after release that your understanding of the terms was based upon optimism and a hurried glance at the filename.

More monsters, characters and ill-advised discoveries can be found in the wider Brad McDevitt Stock Art range and the other horror stock-art collections.

The demon is ready.

The hand is mobile.

The little girl knows your name.

At least the layout is coming together.