There’s nothing an audience loves better than watching a beautiful woman bleed. If she’s dead by the end of the story, even better. Consuming stories of women’s suffering for enjoyment is an age-old pastime that Sacramento artist Christy Savage understands down to the Lovecraftian marrow of her bones. “I was a morbid child,” admits the painter and filmmaker, and her body of work reflects that sentiment with chilling accuracy.
While Stephen King’s character-driven stories fueled her childhood nightmares, today it’s Edgar Allen Poe, the father of American Gothic, who is her most recognizable muse. Classic tales like "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt"—a sort of sequel to Poe’s famous detective story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"—burst from her canvases in haunting detail: a corpse stuffed into a chimney, the menacing descent of the razor-edged pendulum, the murky waters of the Seine, where Marie meets her tragic end. Horror-lit nerds like myself will surely be tickled blood red by Christy’s Easter egg-filled allegories, but there’s plenty of sensational pulp here for fans of lowbrow horror and subgenres like Italian giallo, cosmic horror, and the contemporary GOAT of storytelling: True crime.
“There are so many women who have been murdered brutally and then trashed,” says Christy, a “huge fan” of the true crime genre. “It's weird to make this art knowing it’s real and horrible. At the same time, that's where inspiration comes from—sometimes things are too hard to swallow.”
Christy’s Discarded series, like much of her work, subverts the well-worn horror trope of the Beautiful Victim: long blonde hair, double D boobs, unfailingly white, cast aside like trash, and sexualized even in death. Think Twin Peaks’ subversion of the trope, prom queen Laura Palmer, pulled from the water and wrapped in plastic, but still “so beautiful.” Or Rose McGowan’s sexed-up Tatum Riley in Scream, who met her undignified death precisely because her boobs were too big to fit through a doggy door. In Discarded, Christy marries this trope to our cultural obsession with true crime, unending lust for women’s pain, and the increasing ethical ambiguity of remaining a “neutral” observer.
Christy’s work appears in our July 2025 exhibition, H2O. Visit the exhibition via the button below, then scroll through to read our interview with Christy Savage.
In Today’s Q+Art Interview…
Christy Savage shares her favorite tales of terror, explains how Mario Bava’s cinematography has influenced her filmmaking, and discusses her spooky new series, Inspirational Witches.
What draws you to Edgar Allen Poe in particular? Do you have a favorite Poe story?
Christy Savage: “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” or “The Black Cat,” probably. “Marie Rogêt” was based on an actual murder that happened; they found a body in the water. It's a short story and a murder mystery, one of his early detective stories. There are moments when his stories get super brutal, like in “The Black Cat,” where the narrator goes, “Then I buried my axe in her brain.” I could see it in my mind, and thought I’d better put it on canvas.
Poe’s writing is atmospheric but can be incredibly visceral. What other writers and genres have shaped your taste and inspired your aesthetic?
CS: I'm a big fan of HP Lovecraft and classic horror. I've gotten back into modern horror lately, too. I've been reading a lot of novels and murder mysteries too. I'm a big mystery fan. I read Agatha Christie, Mickey Spillane, and the Perry Mason books. I was a huge Stephen King fan as a child, and I got away from it for a while, but I'm reading Never Flinch right now.
Are you referencing other writers in your work as directly as you do with Poe?
CS: I've done a number of Lovecraft-inspired pieces. He doesn't have a lot of women in his stories, so there's less brutality than you get with Poe. There's brutal shit, don't get me wrong, but not in the same way, happening to women, which is obviously a thing that triggers my imagination.
What about sources beyond traditional literature?
CS: Absolutely. I have a whole series, Discarded, that's inspired by true crime. Discarded by the highway, discarded by the river, discarded by a Dumpster.
I notice the victims in your work conform to a specific archetype common in horror. When it comes to your female characters, what influences your choices regarding their appearance?
CS: Sometimes I branch out, but, as a child, that whole American beauty standard with the blonde hair and the blue eyes and the big boobs was shoved down my throat so much that I internalized it. I really liked the combination of pretty, but dead.
Your work has a campy, lurid quality that seems to transcend traditional literature, evoking a more visual medium like illustrated pulp magazines or film. Given your background as a filmmaker with four horror movies to your name, what are your thoughts on the aesthetic of Italian giallo films?
CS: I'm wearing an Opera shirt right now. I'm a huge fan of those. It’s stylized and gory, right up my alley. As a cinematographer, Mario Bava is probably my biggest influence. You watch his films, or a [Dario] Argento film, and you have these brilliant, nonsensical colors. It’s like, “Where’s that red light coming from?” Who cares? It looks good.
I also love sixties, seventies drive-in movies, and monster movies, and I love Hitchcock and a lot of that standard stuff, too. And I love film noir. I love Fritz Lang's film noir movies. I'm a film geek, but mostly 20th century. That's where my focus is, but I am trying to get back into modern horror more because some fun stuff is coming out lately.
We’re in a horror film Renaissance, so say the experts. What else are you working on that you’re excited about right now?
CS: I call them Inspirational Witches. I infuse them with inspiration because I have way more inspiration and ideas than I can ever possibly get done. But I love inspiring other people to do art, too. So I put inspiration into them, and then put them out there—everybody who’s got one so far says the witches are inspiring them.
Finally, which three books would you recommend to our readers to help them better understand your work?
CS: The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film by Michael Weldon, The Encyclopedia of Horror by Richard Davis, and the 2004 TASCHEN Men’s Adventure Magazines.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. All images published with permission of Christy Savage; featured image: “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.”