Alex Garland’s 2018 film Annihilation is a macabre and brilliant piece of ecological terror, rife with beautiful set pieces of mild-horror. Artist Rory Kurtz’s 2018 poster for the film pulled all these elements together into a illustration of creepy and surreal opulence.
I thought of Kurtz’s poster as I finished reading Jeff VanderMeer’s novel the film is based on. I enjoyed the film but felt I missed a lot. I was curious how aligned Garland’s film was with the book. Would Kurtz’s film illustration fit the book as well?
Garland’s Annihilation keeps the story of the book, but with added characters and scenes created from moments mentioned in a sentence. The key difference between book and film—the film imputes the sci-fi elements with terror and horror, where the novel treats the science-fiction as poetry, a wild, feral blossoming of new dangers.
Garland stays near VanderMeer’s key moments, and the image Kurtz illustrated is one of the author’s finest creature descriptions. Here is how VanderMeer wrote the figures painted by Kurtz —
“But in what had been kitchens or living rooms or bedrooms, I also saw a few peculiar eruptions of moss and lichen rising four, five tall, misshapen, the vegetative matter forming an approximation of limbs and heads and torsos. As if there had been runoff from the material, too heavy for gravity, that had congregated at the foot of these objects. Or perhaps I imagined this effect.”
scene from Alex Garland’s Annihilation
The novel’s protagonist imagines these figures as eruptions, the moss-lava fell down as rubble at the foot of the eruption site. She was warned that the area induces hallucinations, so she doubts her own reality. Garland’s figures have tree trunks as feet and legs, as if they grew from the ground up and were not eruptions at all. This is a point of interest, why change it?, or did Garland attempt eruptions and my eyes are not seeing it?
Garland places defined roots, making it clear that these were once people that grew into the ground. They put down roots. They turned.
I have my own imagined figures now that I have read the book. It is the eruption quality I feel is lost—VanderMeer’s words give me the vision of the earth spouting, a hissing geyser of lush flora, drifting down in human form. An eruption of blossoming goop.
Kurtz’s illustration pulls from Garland’s design of the figures, but drops the terror. Kurtz painted an achingly gorgeous depiction of what I took from the book—the abundant of beauty of the natural world, the brightness felt by the protagonist where, even in danger, she is witness to the awe-inspiring magic of creation.
Annihilation poster illustrated by Rory Kurtz, released by Mondo, 2018
