NITRODJINN

NITRODJINN

"The nocturnal creature of desolate areas known as the Nitrodjinn is a rare and strange being. Each creature is invariably associated with an atomic energy source such as a reactor or large battery, from which it appears to draw its 'life force.' Each being manipulates the local weather conditions to produce a thick fog for a 100-meter radius around the atomic power source."

"In ultraviolet light or when seen without the surrounding fog, this being appears to have a vaguely humanoid torso with four arms and a featureless head. The lower half of the body is a long serpentine form stretching along the ground all the way back to the power source."

Roger Moore, Dragon Magazine #75

I love monsters with no faces. It's just completely alien and unsettling. The earliest example of something like this I can find in folklore is the yōkai called noppera-bō that appears exactly like a human just with no face. 

A noppera-bō by Asai Ryōi from Otogi Boko

In literature we have E.F. Benson's faceless ghost from his story The Step: "The moonlight shone on his face, and that face was just a slab of smooth yellowish flesh extending from ear to ear, empty as the oval of an egg without eyes or nose or mouth." Lovecraft himself dabbled with faceless monsters in the Commonplace Book: "21-A very ancient colossus in a very ancient desert. Face gone—no man hath seen it."

But it's the more contemporary film & internet depictions that really stick with me. The first of these is the 1958 American film Curse Of the Faceless Man. It's basically a mummy knockoff but with one of the corpses from Pompeii as the stand-in. The way those work is that the bodies were covered in ash for centuries, the flesh rots away leaving a human-shaped cavity (the bones are all that remain) in the hardened ash. This is filled with plaster and extracted. Creating a vague human outline. The producers of the movie thought this is just what the ash did to the bodies...hence the monster. 

The two that left the greatest impression on me were Dick Smith's unused makedup for Ghost Story (it was featured in an issue of Fangoria and haunted me) and the Chatterer design from Hellraiser. Even these aren't truly faceless (they both have mouths and Chatterer has eye sockets).

But of course the most iconic, truly faceless monster of our time is the creepy pasta turned YouTube star turned film start turned internet meme....Slender Man. I first dropped into Slender Man lore (aka diagnosed with slender sickness) with the YouTube series Marble Hornets. The micro budget series expanded the lore at a glacial pace but kept things realistic and haunting enough to keep me hooked. Similar series and films followed but that all seemed to fizzle out after the infamous murders.