Creepy Characters in (the Library) Popular Culture

The 118x69 inch large format alcove display poster.

In late September I asked one of the Library display team members if they had any ideas what the next display would feature after the Banned Books display came down. "No idea," she said, clearly not on her radar yet. The day before, I'd had a vision for a display, so I pitched it to her: "How about: 'Creepy Characters in Literature' or 'Fiction' or 'Popular Culture.'" I had initially thought to call it "Creepy Characters in the Library" but then thought better of it, not wanting the inference to suggest any of our patrons. That would undoubtedly be too tempting for some. By extension, I also wanted to steer away from the potential of slandering the character of real people by keeping the focus on fictional characters.


The librarian liked it, so we pitched "Creepy Characters in Popular Culture" to the rest of the team, and it was unanimously approved. With that green light, the librarian sent out an email to ask others for their creepy people suggestions, and what came back was a copious list of some of popular culture's most creepy characters of all time. Now, I have to say that for me, the term "creepy" has more to do with an observation of a person's looks and/or behaviour that results in an unsettling sense that the person appears to be capable of doing something scary, horrible, horrific, detestable, or grotesque--but has yet to actually do it. Fear hasn't actually occurred, but the concept of it has "crept in" to one's consciousness. The actual definition includes all of those secondary reactions, however, so you'll find that whereas some of the people on our list are indeed creepy, others may actually be downright frightening. And since not everyone has the same level of tolerance, you can imagine there would be a little "bleed-over" between creepy and scary (no pun intended). There are a couple on the list that I don't think look creepy, but I may not know their story well enough to rule them out (Heathcliff and Lady MacBeth, for example). A couple have a humorous quality about them, but admittedly, they also have a certain creepiness about them as well (Burger King and the GEICO money stack come to mind).


So once we had a list, I gathered photos of the entries and developed a layout to show a good portion of them. If I didn't find a very good photo of an individual, they'd have to be left off. I didn't want any low resolution pixelated images to ruin the look. For some of the lesser-quality images, I could use them for the smallest size photo locations, and for the best resolution and sized images, use those in the most prominent positions. 


I also suggested that we engage the opinions of others by making the display interactive--asking viewers to write down who their most creepy character was and place that suggestion into a jack-o'-lantern. Once all suggestions were collected, we could post the result somewhere...on a blog, on our Facebook page, or both. The librarians liked that idea, so they took on that aspect of the display. A Facebook page was set up asking for patrons to pick from a selection of five offered. Results will come later! 


The 118x69 inch large format poster was printed out in two 118x36 inch strips from the in-house Hewlett-Packard DesignJet 800, trimmed, and spliced together using double-sided clear tape, then T-pinned to the display wall. A few additional halloween decorations were added: faux spider webs, spiders, bats, rats, a styrofoam tombstone and the jack-o'-lantern to place additional suggestions in...all to strengthen the connection of the poster with the Halloween holiday.


That just leaves one question...who is YOUR creepy character in popular culture?