John Bolton is a British artist known for his work, predominantly in the horror field, for British comics like '
Look In', '
House of Hammer' & '
Warrior', US comic publishers such as
Marvel,
DC and
Dark Horse, card games publishers
Wizards of the Coast and
White Wolf, his paintings of vampiric ladies and, perhaps most crucially to Wyrd Britain readers, for his drawings of the ghouls in the graveyard in the movie '
The Monster Club'
The film is presented as a roughly cut documentary, fronted by Marcus Brigstocke, focussed on the first gallery exhibition of Bolton's vampire paintings. Bolton - who appears in the film as an interviewee at the exhibition launch - is played by actor John O'Mahoney, and is shown as socially awkward and reticent of both the gallery show and the film eventually relenting to allowing Brigstock access to his studio located in the crypt of an old church at the centre of a suitably gothic graveyard.
Developed from his own fictionalised biography ('Drawn in Darkness') this mockumentary written and directed by
Neil Gaiman - who's worked with Bolton several times on stories such as '
The Books of Magic' & '
Halequin Valentine' - is,
in his words, "
an investigation into where artists get their ideas from". Gaiman's status as a novice film-maker works to his advantage here and the occasional clumsiness plays to both the mockumentary form and the 'unfinished' nature of the documentary and the end result is a fun, tongue in cheek tribute to Bolton and his influences that owes a debt to
H.P. Lovecraft’s '
Pickman’s Model'.
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