Images created using law enforcement composite sketch software and descriptions of literary characters, sourced from books and readers. The project ran weekly from 2012 to 2015 with occasional updates and additions after. Brian J Davis is a filmmaker and digital artist living in Brooklyn. His work has been collected in Against Expression: An anthology of conceptual writing (Northwestern University Press) and Always Apprentices: The Believer Presents 22 Conversations Between Writers as well as The Guardian, Utne, People Magazine, and The Believer. He's the co-creator, with Emily Schultz, of the AMC-Shudder series The Blondes.
brianjosephdavis.com
The latest video from Heroic Collective Productions is live on Vevo today! It’s for the new single “Earthbound” by Los Angeles based doom pop band Death Hags. A visitor to the planet lands in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and makes their way the center of the universe, which, if you don’t know, is in Flushing Queens. A riff on The Man Who Fell to Earth, this was a very fun shoot over a couple of very hot days. Thanks to the cast and crew and to Lola of Death Hags for creating such a perfect track of space dust!
Director: Brian J Davis | Producer: Emily Schultz | Assistant Director: Tobias Carroll | Cast: Lola G, Alex Podulke, James Greer
The Monster, Frankenstein, MaryWollstonecraftShelley
As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved, contrary to my first intention, to make the being of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and proportionably large. After having formed this determination and having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials, I began…How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing… but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
It’s the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein. Here’s a repost of the composite of the Monster from 2013, which I accidentally made look like a Black Flag-era Henry Rollins.
Lula was looking up at the back of Sailor’s head, admiring his curly chestnut hair. “Honey?” she said. “I sure am glad that prison haircut is on its way to growin’ out. Gives me somethin’ to grab hold of while we’re makin’ love.”
“You remind me of my daddy, you know?” said Lula. “Mama told me he liked skinny women whose breasts were just a bit too big for their bodies. He had a long nose, too, like yours. Did I ever tell you how he died?”
Lula sat up and fixed a pillow behind her back. Her long black hair…fanned out behind her on the powder blue pillowcase like a raven’s wings. Her large grey eyes fascinated Sailor. When he was on the road gang he had thought about Lula’s eyes, swum in them as if they were great cool, grey lakes with small violet islands in the middle. They kept him sane.
“Five years ago?” Lula said. “When I was fifteen?”
“Sometimes I feel just like one of Dracula’s wives. You know, those skinny women in see-through robes with long hair and fingernails who follow the Count around and do what he says.”
We’re happy to announce that The Blondes, the novel by our own Emily Schultz about a form of rabies that affects only blonde women, will be developed by AMC’s new streaming network Shudder. Emily and I will be working on the pilot. The Hollywood Reporter has the full story on Shudder’s development slate, including a show from Patty Jenkins! More soon but for now enjoy the book trailer we shot last year for The Blondes.
His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease.
Bloody Disgusting did a cool roundup of the horror-themed Composites. Read it here.
He was an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn’t have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a gun…“You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!“… When he smiled he showed a row of strong white teeth…Hunching his shoulders slightly…The Misfit’s eyes were red-rimmed and pale and defenseless-looking.
Great news at Deadline today. Director John McNaughton is reteaming with Michael Rooker for an adaptation of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Rooker starred in McNaughton’s debut, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, a film that terrified the living hell out of me in the ‘90s. Will Rooker capture the patrician “George Bush” vibe of the above composite? Either way, it will be an interesting take.
Shadow looked at the man in the seat next to him…He grinned a huge grin with no warmth in it at all…His hair was a reddish gray; his beard, little more than stubble, was grayish red. A craggy, square face with pale gray eyes…The man’s craggy smile did not change…There was something strange about his eyes, Shadow thought. One of them was a darker gray than the other…humorless grin…Wednesday’s glass eye… He was almost Shadow’s height, and Shadow was a big man. (Suggested by jrodgersartand apeculiarcontradictorything)
Updated image: Author Neil Gaiman graciously suggested several changes to the composite: 20 years older; craggier; a squarer face and permanent smile. I updated everything but the last item—expression being rather muted in the program.
Starz released the full trailer for their adaptation of American Gods this week. No gray with their Mr. Wednesday, but you can never go wrong with casting Ian McShane.
Regan MacNeil, The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty Her pretty eleven-year-old was asleep…sad, large green eyes grieving in a waiflike face…She looked at her daughter, at the turned-up nose and freckled face…Her daughter’s features were contorting into a malevolent mask: lips pulling tautly into opposite directions…Chris blinked at the mad-staring, grinning face, at the cracked, parched lips and foxlike eyes. She screamed until she fainted…Karras saw the scratch marks on her face; the cuts on her lips where apparently she’d bitten them. …her cracked and swollen lips…Karras shifted his gaze to the tangled, thickly matted hair.
This week Looper.com featured several of the horror-themed composites in an article about film adaptations. Check it out here!
When he landed the police department hovercar on the roof of the Rosen Association Building in Seattle he found a young woman waiting for him. Black-haired and slender, wearing the new huge dust-filtering glasses…She had, on her sharply defined small face, an expression of sullen distaste. She eyed him from beneath long black lashes, probably artificial…Rachael’s proportions, he noticed once again, were odd; with her heavy mass of dark hair her head seemed large, and because of her diminutive breasts her body assumed a lank, almost childlike stance. But her great eyes, with their elaborate lashes, could only be those of a grown woman…Some female androids seemed to him pretty; he had found himself physically attracted by several.
Jesus, The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis
Narrow, deeply wrinkled forehead… His patched and repatched tunic rolled off his shoulder and revealed his body—thin… The fluff about his chin and cheeks had become a curly coal-black beard. His nose was hooked, his lips thick…It was not a beautiful face, but it had a hidden, disquieting charm. Were his eyelashes to blame? Thick and exceedingly long… Or were his eyes responsible? They were large and black, full of light, full of darkness—all intimidation and sweetness. Flickering like those of a snake, they stared at you from between the long lashes, and your head reeled. (Suggested by Gary Barwin)
Nick, determined and guilty, his mouth a tight line, getting it done…His eyes are mischievous, his lashes long.
I wondered if I’d become so nefarious come October, I’d be some frat boy’s tasteless Halloween costume: mop of blond hair, an Amazing Amy book tucked under an armpit…Looking at my smarmy grin, my hooded eyes, I thought, I would hate this guy.
“Good God, he even has a cleft chin"… “You seem totally different than before. In charge but not cocky. Even your jaw is less … dickish.”
The skill of police artists is to make the living appear dead.
— Inspector Longhi in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, available in blu-ray from Criterion.
The man was young, blond, with his long blond hair whipping in the wind from cars blasting past them. He had a red goatee and scars cut sideways across both cheeks, just under his eyes. The scars were dark red, and the young man reached into the garbage bag with the dead dog and told the crew—it wasn’t dead…In the snapshots people take, in the videos, it’s always the flying blond hair, the red goatee, the scars. It’s always the same man…The details about Oyster are his hair, it looks shattered, the way a pine tree looks struck by lightning, splintered blond and standing up in every direction…His eyes are white. It’s not the white of white flags, surrender. It’s the white of hardboiled eggs, crippled chickens in battery cages, factory farm misery and suffering and death. (Suggested by douglard)
This morning Chuck Palaniuk launched a Kickstarter to fund an indie production of his novel Lullaby. From the archives, here’s Oyster, with possibly my favorite hair on the Composites.
“Bond reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless” …As he tied his thin, double-ended, black satin tie, he paused for a moment and examined himself levelly in the mirror. His grey-blue eyes looked calmly back with a hint of ironical inquiry and the short lock of black hair which would never stay in place slowly subsided to form a thick comma above his right eyebrow. With the thin vertical scar down his right cheek the general effect was faintly piratical. Not much of Hoagy Carmichael there, thought Bond, as he filled a flat, light gunmetal box with fifty of the Morland cigarettes with the triple gold band. (Casino Royal)
Rather like Hoagy Carmichael in a way. That black hair falling down over the right eyebrow. Much the same bones. But there was something a bit cruel in the mouth, and the eyes were cold. (Moonraker)
Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad. Sawley, in fact, declared at the wedding that ‘Sercomb was mated to a bullfrog in a sou'wester’. And Smiley, unaware of this description, had waddled down the aisle in search of the kiss that would turn him into a Prince. (Call for the Dead)
From the outset of this meeting, Smiley had assumed for the main a Buddha-like inscrutability from which neither Tarr’s story nor the rare interjections of Lacon and Guillam could rouse him. He sat leaning back with his short legs bent, head forward, and plump hands linked across his generous stomach. His hooded eyes had closed behind the thick lenses…Here Guillam sensed a wave of unusual anger, imparted by a ghostly smile that crossed Smiley’s pale lips. (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)
Was a young feminist artist murdered by her husband on September 8th, 1985? After three years of trials the court declared sculptor Carl Andre not guilty of the murder of Ana Mendieta. But the trial was controversial, and the case revealed deep divisions of gender, race, and class in New York’s art scene. CompositeCast goes back to pre-gentrified New York to look at the evidence, the trial, and why this death still haunts the city. Stream or download below or subscribe at iTunes. Our next episode will look at “Satanic Panic” and the Judas Priest trial.
