A mercenary hitman is ordered a kill on a dwarf, and much to his chagrin, realizes never to underestimate a small man. Stylish, dark and twisted, there is a thread of macabre humour which runs through his work, Washing Day being the perfect epitome of that. A Ku Klux Klan member chews off his own fingers which lynched a group of black men, and an odd young man receives a new sight at a terrible price. While a morose man attempts numerous failed suicides only to die in a freak accident, a man is brutally punished for being an enlightened soul. It is in this vein of distorted reality that his work runs, one of the best other example being Greetings from Hellville, a chilling collection of horror shorts. As she sees each movie, little by little, her innocence is stripped away as she is made to witness the horrific accidents of humanity, though the worst is saved for the last…

Inside the tent are boxes with screens containing a title on the box and a film, costing only a dime, just right for the girl’s limited pocket money. Ott seems to have been deeply influenced by Expressionist silent cinema, and not just because of the lack of dialogues- there is a haunting, brooding quality to his work, and reality often distorts into radical horror to evoke emotions.Ĭinema Panopticum for instance, one of his better known works, is the story of a young girl who finds herself in a carnival and unwittingly wanders into a tent with a banner bearing the eponymous name. As the artist has graduated onto a more public stage, his work seems to have only gotten more nuanced. In an interview, he once mentioned having had “black thoughts” since he was a boy, and drawing ghouls and monsters since a tender age. Appropriately so, since the images speak of a bleak, surreal and often confounding world. Ott’s artistic renditions are enveloped in a world of blacks, whites and greys- there is absolutely no scope for colour. Difficult to pin down (literally so- even the Wikipedia entry on Ott is in Swiss, and sparse at that), Ott seems to be an artist as intriguing as his characters. Secondly, the art itself is rendered through the unique technique of scratch cards- he painstakingly uses knives on black coloured scratch boards to reveal white lines beneath, which then manifest into intricate, and more often than not, horrific images. For one, he employs neither dialogue nor captions in his works, preferring to let his art do all the talking, and the rare words have a strict utilitarian purpose. The term “graphic novelist” is really a misnomer and rather a limitation when it comes to describing Swiss horror artist Thomas Ott.

Cinema panopticum thomas ott