Sketchbook: Whole Lotta Rosy

I read The Name of the Rose again recently, which prompted me to look out the film on YouTube. I liked a lot of it - particularly the convincingly squalid medieval atmosphere, and it was a very pleasant surprise to see F. Murray Abraham booming and sweeping in and out of rooms as dread inquisitor Bernardo Gui - but a lot of it was pants, particularly the daft ending. And it was the wrong kind of labyrinth entirely. It might as well have had a dragon in it.

The cast were a singularly grotesque lot, with the chiseled exception of Sean Connery. This made them very interesting to draw, apart from Christian Slater as novice Adso of Melk, who has a single default expression of open-mouthed confusion/bewilderment throughout the film. Also, he had an American accent, as did his older-self voiceover narrator, which I found irrationally irritating because by the time Columbus left port for the first time Adso would have been about 180 years old.

It Rhymes With 'Form.'

Let me tell you about... The Worm.

 

 

 

Bongg.

Mr Dillet is startled out of a very pleasant slumber by a bell tolling One.

Smile.

The Kuchisake-Onna; what she is and how to deal with her. 

She's an example of Japanese folkloric spirits and monsters called yokai, and she's interesting (apart from being an appealingly deranged story) because she was an example of a piece of folklore being invented in contemporary times. She seems to have appeared first of all in elementary schools in the Nagasaki Prefecture in the 1970s, and caused a genuine panic that spread through Japan.

In some versions she is mutilated by a jealous and violent husband, but this is the first version I heard.