Yeah yeah, I know what you’re all think­ing. “Oh no, just what we need – one more col­lec­tion of lame “fun” fonts cel­e­brat­ing some crass over-​commercialized hol­i­day”. And, actu­ally, I agree with you. Hal­loween fonts? Christ­mas fonts? Hanukkah fonts? Easter fonts? I cringe every time they get thrown our way at yet another fes­tive occa­sion. Why? Because those inane com­pi­la­tions never seem to rise above the anec­do­tal nor the juve­nile. Because you can be sure to have a couple of com­plete duds amongst them. Because they lower our per­cep­tion of the artis­tic value of type by offer­ing silly fonts at a ridicu­lously low price. Basi­cally they are con­de­scend­ing; an insult to our artis­tic taste and our intelligence.

Plus I have this dubi­ous rela­tion­ship with Hal­loween itself, at least in the Low Coun­tries. The tra­di­tion never existed here in the first place, and it was imported only recently by com­merce. Actively look­ing to fill up every single down­time between the other hol­i­days, shops are trying every­thing to keep us con­sum­ing all year long. This new Hal­loween thing is super­flu­ous as well: our local cel­e­bra­tions have all the bases cov­ered. Dress­ing up? We have car­naval in Feb­ru­ary. Candy for the chil­dren? Sin­terk­laas brings it every 6th of Decem­ber. Going from door to door at night? Chil­dren do that to col­lect pocket change on Jan­u­ary 6 for Drie Koningen.

Still I do write for an inter­na­tional blog so I won­dered if I could do some­thing with the con­cept of fear in typog­ra­phy. I’m con­vinced that cer­tain type designs – and in par­tic­u­lar dis­play type – can convey a spe­cific feel­ing, a cer­tain atmos­phere, as most type­faces have their own dis­cern­able voice. While some shout it out, others do it a little more cun­ningly. Of course a lot depends on con­text, but still… So this Hal­loween I started com­pil­ing a list of “scary” fonts. Some­how I became so engrossed by my research that it took far longer than I expected to write and doc­u­ment this post. I still hope it is of some use to some­one. And I always say – better 51 weeks early than one week late!

By the way, this is not the defin­i­tive list by far, and a very sub­jec­tive one to boot. Please feel free to offer sug­ges­tions so we can add to it and flesh it out. This should be fun.
I reckon I expose myself to pos­si­ble ridicule from seri­ous type design­ers and users, but I felt that – after the Queen Raquela misunderstanding/debacle – I didn’t have any cred­i­bil­ity to lose any­more. And frankly, do I look like I even remotely care? ;)

Dog Bark­ing © Pat
On a basic ani­mal­is­tic level we’re scared of any­thing that could bite us or shred our skin, flay­ing the living flesh from our bones and feast­ing on our entrails. So any shape that reminds us of preda­tors – be it real ani­mals or imag­i­nary crea­tures like vam­pires or were­wolves – is poten­tially scary. No, I don’t mean MON.ster. The type­faces below all have fea­tures that hint at claws, fangs and other sharp and lethal attributes.

Orig­i­nally devel­oped as a logo for Impe­r­ial Record­ings, a Dutch techno/trance record label, FF Impe­r­ial was ulti­mately rejected for being too “goth”. Donald Beek­man gave the two vari­ants rather sin­is­ter names. Spike has almost vampire-​like pointed stems, and the rounded ver­sion gives the char­ac­ters of Bone a bone-​like quality.

Richard Lipton devel­oped designs by Los Ange­les graphic designer Margo Chase, rec­og­nized world­wide for her skill with custom typog­ra­phy and iden­tity devel­op­ment, into dig­i­tal type­faces. Talon spells it out quite lit­er­ally. Its char­ac­ters ref­er­ence the sharp claws of birds of prey.

Shogun is based on a few almost ori­en­tal char­ac­ters from a strik­ing con­tem­po­rary logo­type by Chase. The sharp­ness remains, but as the char­ac­ters are broader they look more like hatch­ets or cleavers.

And Ecru is based on four unique cap­i­tals E, C, R and U. It is com­posed of sharp spikes that look ready to impale you.

I don’t know inhow­far Adam Roe’s Per­co­la­tor was inspired by Miles Newlyn’s sem­i­nal Demo­c­ra­t­ica which pre­ceded it by two years, but the sharp finials add a level of danger to Roe’s interpretation.

Not exactly claws or fangs, but fright­en­ing spikes adorn JesusLovesY­ouAll. This is one of the remixes Luc(as) de Groot made of The­Sans, the sans vari­ant of his break­through type super­fam­ily Thesis.

Sunset on Irish Grave © Brian Lary
The west­ern cul­ture has always had an uneasy rela­tion­ship with the dead, unlike many other cul­tures. This is prob­a­bly why ceme­ter­ies spook us. Tombs, mau­soleums and necrop­olises turn into eerie har­bin­gers of doom at night. We imag­ine them being haunted by the souls of the departed, venge­ful ghosts that tor­ment us and drag us down to the nether­world. The fonts in this sec­tion remind us of the carved let­ter­ing and other typ­i­cal shapes on head­stones, with some imma­te­r­ial char­ac­ters thrown in the mix.

Jonathan Barn­brook works in the twi­light zone between art and graphic design. Not con­tent with merely design­ing type­faces, he con­stantly researches con­text and seman­tics. Some of his alpha­bet designs are strongly influ­enced by gothic archi­tec­ture and let­ters carved in stone. These type­faces seem to have struck a nerve with graphic design­ers and art direc­tors, because they often appear on items related to horror movies and games, goth and metal albums and book covers, even on the DVD cover for Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, The Scari­est Of Them All.

Exocet is based on study and redraw­ing of early Greek and Roman stone carved let­ter­forms which have been rein­ter­preted to give a very con­tem­po­rary feel.

Mason Serif is based on draw­ings made in Barnbrook’s sketch­books over a number of years with added inspi­ra­tion from 19th cen­tury Russ­ian let­ter­forms, Greek archi­tec­ture and Renais­sance bibles. Every char­ac­ter comes in at least two vari­ant shapes; and those are all avail­able as cap­i­tals, reg­u­lar small caps and super­script small caps. It even has gothic arches for A’s and crosses for T’s.

Echo­ing much of the “Eng­lish” let­ter­ing that first inspired Barn­brook to start draw­ing type­faces, Priori Serif takes from many of the let­ter­ing exper­i­ments in the 20th cen­tury. Lately I saw it used in the intro­duc­tory text for Hell­boy II: The Golden Army.
The report of John Barnbrook’s pre­sen­ta­tion Type Is Image at Typo Berlin 2008 on Unzipped.

The ethe­real letter forms of Char­ter D by Patrick Adamove seem to lack any sub­stance, ecto­plas­mic enti­ties drift­ing away on the slight­est chilly breeze.

Peter Kowaleszyn’s Pol­ter­geist and Static are quite aptly named. Their char­ac­ter shapes become imma­te­r­ial, like ghost-​like forms barely dis­cernible in the static on a tele­vi­sion screen.

Skull & Cross­bones © Ben­jamin Ear­wicker
As we are obsessed with youth and vital­ity grow­ing old and the prospect of dying fright­ens most of us. Just the thought of our decay­ing body becom­ing depen­dent, grow­ing sick or being afflicted by demen­tia is unbear­able. Even worse is the con­cept of the dead being revived, grotesque sim­u­lacra com­posed of rot­ting flesh and seep­ing innards with an uncon­trol­lable urge to crack open your skull and slob­ber up your brain. The fonts in the list below are in a cer­tain state of decomposition.

Thanks to the grunge boom in the nineties there are count­less degraded type­faces out there, so I won’t list them all. Yet there are a couple worth men­tion­ing. The Let­Ter­Ror col­lec­tion FF Instant Types dates the begin­ning of this move­ment and became insanely suc­cess­ful – just like most of the Erik van Blok­land/Just van Rossum pro­duc­tions. Many find the degra­da­tion found in FF Con­fi­den­tial and FF Stamp gives them an air of creepi­ness, as they are com­monly used for thriller and horror designs.

As 2Rebels was founded during the grunge boom it car­ries a quite few worn type­faces. Yet I have moved most of them to the next cat­e­gory as they dis­play a level of rest­less­ness which reminds me of para­noia and insan­ity. One that really looks aged is Bad Deni by foundry owner Denis Dulude, as does K.O. Dirty.

The char­ac­ters of both FF Muti­lated and FF InnerCity from the FF Dirty­Faces col­lec­tion have been eroded by the elements.

My gen­er­a­tion grew up during the Cold War with the pos­si­bil­ity of a nuclear holo­caust hov­er­ing over our heads. Nowa­days it’s ter­ror­ism – be it fun­da­men­tal­ism or government-​sponsored – that forces many to live in con­stant fear. The fol­low­ing type­faces look like they were blasted to bits, burned to a crisp or melted down.

Just van Rossum’s FF Advert – a human­ist take on W.A. Dwig­gins’ Metro – is one of those noto­ri­ously under-​appreciated Font­Fonts. The five weights of the FF Advert Rough vari­ant of can be over­layed to form out­lined type. Yet most inter­est­ing things happen when you slightly shift and/or rotate the stacked weights.

Accord­ing to designer John Critch­ley, FF Bull is an authen­tic repro­duc­tion of old John Bull rubber stamp type sets, inked to vary­ing degrees to pro­duce six dis­tinc­tive “weights”. Just like FF Advert Rough these are fully inter­change­able and can be com­bined or over­laid to pro­vide even more vari­a­tions. The look of the Under­Inked, Semi­Inked, Out­line and Double weights make it fit into the Dis­as­ters cat­e­goy, not in Death & Decay.

Agreed, Ado­les­cence looks like Neville Brody’s clas­sic FF Blur with a little FF Auto­trace flavour, but by adding unex­pected vari­a­tions in weight and size Adam Roe added a feel­ing of uneasi­ness which makes it fit in this list.

The FF Dirty­Faces col­lec­tion also includes some designs that seem to have been afflicted by dis­as­ter. Both FF Motive and FF Nine­SixNil­Nil look as if they’re caught in an explosion.

And Jay David’s Dang has bits and pieces flying off too.

There never was a more con­vinc­ing typo­graphic metaphor for nuclear melt­down than Tobias Frere-​Jones’ Fuse excur­sion FB Reactor.

Beneath the sur­face © Dave Sackville
But per­haps what fright­ens us the most are para­noia and mad­ness, lurk­ing just beneath the sur­face in a famil­iar and seem­ingly normal person. Imag­ine the veil of sanity unex­pect­edly being lifted, reveal­ing a psy­chopath who attacks with­out warn­ing. The post­man bru­tally enter­ing your home, tying you up and start­ing to tor­ture you with pliers, drill and power-​saw. Your own dear grand­mother sud­denly turn­ing around, blood­shot eyes wide open, foam at the mouth and bran­dish­ing a big carv­ing knife. This feel­ing is per­haps the most dif­fi­cult to convey in typog­ra­phy, but I think the exam­ples below come mighty close.

As I men­tioned above, many of the worn type­faces in the 2Rebels col­lec­tion have a frac­tured, unhinged look. This is why I prefer to file Carbon, DV9, and Han­buhrs in the Para­noia category.

And both FF Dirty­Fax and FF Angst almost lit­er­ally por­tray the dam­aged psyche too.

By dupli­cat­ing the char­ac­ter shapes, shift­ing them hor­i­zon­tally and using the cross-​section of each set of char­ac­ters Jan Tomás cre­ated Alpha­bat. The end result looks fren­zied and restless.

Just as fren­zied and rest­less is Motion by Frank Heine which emu­lates the com­pul­sive obses­sive scrib­bles of a psychopath.

Matt Heximer’s Bitchin Camero is in the same vein but with more vari­a­tion in the lines that com­pose the letters.

If I were asked to pick one really scary face, I guess Grassy would be the one. Do you know the scenes in those fifties thrillers, where the female lead finally snaps under the psy­cho­log­i­cal tor­ture and dashes out in the night, run­ning through the moon­lit wil­lows? This creepy cre­ation by Inka Strot­mann per­fectly cap­tures that atmosphere.

Header image: Hal­loween Pump­kin ©2008 Crys­tal Woro­niukHeader type: FF Muti­lated, FF Impe­r­ial Bone, FF Sanuk BoldAll sam­ples (except FF Advert Rough) set with the stan­dard font pre­viewer on FontShop.com.All sample text are titles of The Simp­sons Tree­house of Horror episodes