An Eerie Orchard

So after yesterday's sidetracked post, I am back into Halloween mode tonight with an Halloween themed post. This picture was taken from the book Dracula's Castle, which was the basis for the Dracula Game of my childhood. It is not a very good picture I'm afraid. But it is an interesting, if simple, image. I am obsessed by something August Villiers de l'Isle-Adam said about how to create terror, to show "not the devil but his work". This is what this drawing does. In the gamebook it is the setting of an comic-epic encounter and combat to the death between Jonathan Harker (the player-character-reader) and a... vampire apple. A Granny Smith, which are supposed to be the worst ones. But I digress...

This image is I think more spooky and scarier than many of the ones of monsters and vampires in the book (I will upload some of them). Because it shows the place where evil dwells: an old, abandoned orchard, with a menacing axe and old fruit trees, with ripe fruits still abandoned on the branches. Halloween is associated with harvest and gluttony. This orchard is of course associated with it, but it also has a sinister aspect: the fruits are corrupted and the place looks menacing. It is in a way a Garden of Eden after the Fall. Again, the work of the devil... And there is the apple (the vampire apple?). Apples are associated with supernatural in numerous ways, I will not list them here. here it is hanging there, already bitten... We often think of abandoned castles, old mansions, cemetaries, haunted houses as setting for horror stories. I think an orchard would do just as well.