Halloween II – Album Artwork 2020

Curator: Well, this is certainly a chilling piece. What are your first impressions of Robert Sammelin’s album artwork for "Halloween II," created in 2020 using mixed media and graphic art techniques? Editor: Overwhelming dread, to be honest. It’s the color palette combined with that shattered, almost crumbling facade. It looks like fear itself is cracking. Makes you want to reach for something comforting, and that’s *before* even hearing the music. Curator: I'd agree that Sammelin's composition certainly taps into a primal sense of unease. If we examine the use of color, we see the juxtaposition of the bloody reds and the icy blues. This could represent the dichotomy between the visceral violence and the cold, detached nature of evil so often portrayed in the horror genre. Editor: Precisely! And those figures lurking within Michael Myers' fractured mask, it's like layers of trauma. They aren’t just victims; they are the ghosts of his making. Did Sammelin intend for his face to look so much like cracked cement? Because for me, that texture symbolizes how the sins from the past ossify, until we are held in its firm grasp like mausoleums. Curator: Absolutely, I see it that way as well. Myers’ mask itself is already an incredibly loaded symbol in our contemporary visual culture. By showing the figures embedded and, almost trapped inside the mask, the artist could be expressing the suffocating impact that violence and trauma has on the collective psyche. Each figure also feels like a cultural shorthand for particular tropes in horror, perhaps to suggest all of this violence, or trauma is somehow mutually intertwined. Editor: That totally tracks! It's less a literal illustration and more a visual excavation of horror's foundation itself, what endures through the ages. Seeing those faces so vividly does leave me wondering… did the artist spend days, weeks immersed in it? It can’t have been easy… Curator: It does carry quite an emotional heft. Thinking about all of this violence that Sammelin invites us to look at, I also can’t help but recall the various interpretations that have grown up around the myth of Halloween. I think Sammelin, consciously or not, captures how cultural fears become cyclical… Editor: Yes… he makes sure they get repackaged and revisited. Gives new meaning to a frightening tradition. It resonates precisely because it shows us our fractured selves.