Ed Harrington And Ikea: Instructions for Creating Sci-Fi Monsters

Ed Harrington And Ikea: Instructions for Creating Sci-Fi Monsters

“I love monsters, I love creatures, I love beings, I love aliens. That’s more supernatural and more the stuff of fairy tales. Fairy tales are as ancient as we are. I love those stories. I think they’re really interesting because they always have more than simply the fright aspect. There’s something deeply psychological.”

– Denis O’Hare

We are absolutely fascinated with Sci-Fi monsters, and have been since we first climbed down from the trees and started walking with tremendous beasts, like sabertooth tigers, sabertooth bears, and possibly sabertooth bunny rabbits.

They represent things that we fear: the unknown, the uncontrollable, the unstoppable; even our own wild nature.

Personally, I think one of our modern monsters has to be the minimalistic and deceptively easy instruction manual (or leaflet) that comes with IKEA furniture. The most frightening thing about it? It is real!

IKEA began business in 1943, when Ingvar Kamprad founded it as a predominantly mail order business. Within five years, in 1948, the company began selling what it is famous for today; not Swedish meat balls, but furniture.

Ten years after beginning to sell furniture, IKEA opened their first store in Almhult, in the Swedish province of Smaland, followed by stores in Norway in 1963, and Denmark in 1969. The store’s massive expansion began in the 70’s, as IKEA began opening branches outside of the Scandinavian peninsula.

By the end of the decade, people in Singapore, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, and Canada would be able to buy their furniture from the design-oriented Swedish company, and the chain just kept growing.

The 80’s saw Kamprad’s empire grow to include stores in France, Spain, Belgium, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Italy.

All and all, IKEA currently operates 267 stores in 25 countries, which means, on average, more than 10 stores per country. Another fun fact: Germany is their biggest market, boasting a massive 44 stores, which translates to almost a quarter of all IKEA stores around the world.

One of IKEA’s most iconic, let’s say, emblems is (still not the Swedish meat balls) the instruction manual you get when buying anything from an office chair to a collapsible box.

Like I said earlier, it is really minimalistic, and all joking a side, one of the smartest decisions in design history, as it gave up on the classical wordy format (who ever actually read an instruction manual?), letting the images do the instructing.

Illustrator, cartoonist, graphic designer, and composite bowman Ed Harrington had this funny random idea of mixing the uber-friendly leaflet with some of the most famous and scariest has had to offer. The results are minimalistic jewels of maximal hilarity.

1. Alien

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Alien is the monster horror film with a psychological twist. The movie put every masculine power-fantasy trope on its head, and threw it in the trash like a bad first draft. In fact, the movie is discussed and so influential that there are works out there analysing its psycho-social and psycho-sexual implications and messages.

Of course, Harrington’s approach is a fair bit more light-hearted, using IKEA’s “you” avatar to illustrate how one goes about making his own deadly, acid-blooded xenomorph, using all the things provided in the pack… except the screwy thing that no one ever uses.

2. Vorhees

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If you just take into account cultural osmosis, Jason Vorhees is the invulnerable serial killer from the Friday the 13th series, who goes around killing teenagers who express their attraction for one another in the way that nature intended. But Vorhees was, in fact, just a hallucination of the first movie’s protagonist Alice. I will not give any spoilers as to who the real killer is (you can thank me in the comment section).

The artist’s illustration reference’s Jason’s origin story, him being a little boy who drowned in Crystal Lake, the lake that gives the name of the camp where the original movie’s action is set, as well as his inclination for slaughtering horny teenagers.

3. Cenobite

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The Cenobites are the antagonists of Clive Barker’s horror novella The Hellbound Heart, and the franchise it gave birth to, called Hellraiser. They are beings from another dimension, who’s sole purpose is performing weird, sadistic experiments, and giving gore enthusiasts a reason to swoon.

There are four Cenobites, each with their own characteristic mutilations and style, but here, Ed chose to illustrate the most iconic one, namely Pinhead. To obtain the Pinhead Cenobite, all you need to do is play around with the Lament Configuration, and then add surgical scaring and nails, all with the tools provided. Use of the screwy thing is, of course, optional.

4. Edvard

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Personally, I do not agree with putting Edward Scissorhands on this list of monsters, as he is most definitely not a monster. His actions are far from malevolent, and the true antagonists of the movie are the close-minded inhabitants of the quaint cul-de-sac into which he is, perhaps a bit unwittingly, propelled.

I do think, however, that Harrington gave justice to poor Edward by adding the heart into the necessary pieces required to make him.

5. Brundlefly

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A remake of the original 1958 film with the same name, and loosely based on George Langelaan’s short story of the same name, The Fly is the timeless tale of science going too far (or boy meets girl, depending on which trope you prefer).

Cronenberg always offers up terrific monsters, and the fly from the eponymous movie is no different (though I do prefer the thing from, you guessed it, The Thing).

I do not think Harrington quite does justice to the mangled abomination that is Jeff Goldblum in this movie, but you can get a fairly good idea about what you are going to get if you dive head-first into an experimental teleportation device.

6. Human Centipede

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The most recent monster on this list is the human centipede, once again from a movie with the same name.

Once again, the monster here is not, in fact, the creature, but its maker (so here we have the Frankenstein trope). Having seen the movie, it is in my opinion that there is definite wasted potential here, so much so that Harrington’s illustration is about as scary as the movie itself. What is, perhaps, more scary is that, somehow, the director managed to convince the actors to play around with their noses in each other’s butts while filming.

That wraps up our presentation of Ed Harrington’s IKEA inspired Sci-Fi monster manuals. We hope you enjoyed our presentation as much as we did, and that you will be kind enough to leave us your thoughts in the comment section below.

3 Comments on “Ed Harrington And Ikea: Instructions for Creating Sci-Fi Monsters

  1. Hey Max,

    I’m glad you like them. It’s fascinating how creative can people be :D Stay tuned, we’ll come up with more posts like this one. Have a great day!

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