Stickers can be crafty little expressions of identity, not unlike pins or patches on a well-worn denim jacket. They’re little markers that hint at a person’s tastes, interests, or obsessions. Maybe you’re at work and you glance at a desk to see a professional notebook with a Metallica sticker on it, signaling the presence of a metal head in your immediate vicinity. Perhaps you’re stuck in traffic and the car in front of yours has a red, white, and blue Punisher skull sticker on its back window, immediately telling you to change lanes and maybe get behind a car with KISS sticker on it just to be safe.
The point is, stickers are a great way to offer people a peek into your personality. It’s something that illustrator Andy Price seems keenly aware of with his own horror stickers, collected in the aptly named The Extreme Horror Sticker Book. Upwards of 500 stickers are contained in the book, and they come in all shapes, sizes, terrors, body parts, and cursed objects you can imagine. The variety on display is sure to satisfy fans of horror from all corners, with some clever references to classic movies and iconic monsters that really elevate the designs.
Published by Simon & Schuster via their Adams Media imprint, the book is a treasure trove for horror enthusiasts that features 7-to-8 stickers per page, with some designs getting duplicates here and there. The majority of them are entirely different from one another. It’s an impressive feat that allowed Price to run the gamut of the horror genre.
The stickers are not strictly separated by theme or by class of monster, but there is a loose sense of interconnectivity between them where classic monsters like werewolves and vampires are located close enough to each other for some correspondence while stylized words like “Horror,” “Nightmare,” and “Poison” stay within reach as well.
Where Price really showcases his talents and his love for the genre are in his homage stickers. These ones take recognizable silhouettes or thinly veiled approximations of horror locations and objects that can immediately stand out to fans so that they can place them in the movies they belong to.
One that stands out is an image of a giant skull with a wide-open yellowish eye peaking from hiding behind a mountain range. It evokes the title of the Wes Craven 1977 classic The Hills Have Eyes. Another one is the silhouette of a tall man in blue coveralls holding a bloody knife while drenched in shadows, a clear reference to John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978). Not but a few pages ahead is a kid dressed like a witch with a Jack-o’lantern mask on that looks like it was taken straight out of Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982). Look closely enough and you’ll even find the demonic pig from The Amityville Horror (1979) staring out a window.
The fun is in seeking out each reference and each homage and then deciding which one you want to put on your water bottle, laptop, or cellphone. But Price isn’t only interested in the hardcore horror fan. There’s enough creepy dolls, bats, and devils to satisfy even the most casual fan. And then there’s the original creations, the creatures that are so wonderfully weird and unsettling that they could easily spawn their own movie franchises. One of them is a skull with batwings that’s attached to a mess of tentacles, which gives off a Cthulhian vibe for those in the know. Others are zombies with wounds that would give Tom Savini a run for his money.
Andy Price has put together a wonderful celebration of fear with The Extreme Horror Sticker Book. It’s a bit of a departure from his My Little Pony comic book work, but it falls perfectly in line with his previous horror-themed books, The Unofficial Horror Movie Coloring Book among them. The illustrations are so inventive and varied that it often feels like you’re holding an actual art book with removable sticky images. More importantly, each piece is sure to help people convey their love of horror at first glance. Be it funny, gory, or creepy, you’ll find something within the 500-plus stickers that’ll speak both to you and for you.
