Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Lockwood & Co. showrunner Joe Cornish clearly enjoyed working on his new series, giving it a very distinctive look:

We went back to Victorian spirit photography. There was an exhibition years ago in London called The Perfect Medium which was a massive showcase of late 19th century Victorian spirit photography. I have the catalogue at home, of these extraordinary pictures of women vomiting ectoplasm and double exposures and dead relatives appearing behind people’s shoulders. They’re all photographic anomalies that we understand now but back then they thought they were discovering a real new science. So we used that for reference, we used Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête – Beauty and the Beast; we wanted to make ethereal beautiful, simple ghosts really.

The idea is they’re all made out of ectoplasm, they’re all made out of smoke, but that rule means you can have different densities of smoke, different colours of smoke, different levels of turbulence. You can have a thin suggestive wisp or a fully formed detailed human or you can have what looks like a big tyre fire of angry volcanic smoke. I was excited by that idea because it give you lots of permutations but it also gives you a set of rules to work with, a unity of design.

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