The Best Prop Ever Made: Red Dragon's Journal

Recently I watched the movie Red Dragon, and we can forget about every single aspect of this movie right now aside from the one thing I was in complete awe of: the journal.

After the movie's intro, we're treated to one of those beautiful '00s opening credit sequences, and this one is laid over extensive shots of the one prop that they truly went crazy for: Red Dragon's own gorgeous, scribbly journal. There are so many pages, it's so thick, and it's just so nicely arranged. I am taking huge inspiration from the neatly arranged newspaper cuttings, sinister medical woodcuts, and perfectly scrawled thoughts in pen. This guy would've have been a Tumblr darling in 2008, most certainly. And for that, I'm more inclined to support his crimes.

I love the way clippings are overlaid on some of these pages - many have a picture in the centre of this huge page, surrounded on all sides by handwriting, and I like that layout a lot, how it conveys a singular focus and feels somehow more chaotic and intense than it might if the image was placed at the top, or top-left, of the page. It just feels more serious, more prominent to the eye. I love that.

There's a neatness to the arrangements of these pages, but still you can feel the frenetic, hurried energy of them. The way the handwriting fills up every tiny space, to the edge and in some cases over the top of the pasted in clippings, perfectly communicates a certain feverishness. There's a great sense of layout that is ultimately just the base for the unchecked ink ramblings of the guy. It's such a great object.

Again, the neatness, and the consideration of layout is clear when you look at each page here, but there are lots of little rough details that bring it back to feeling super real, and like a genuine document of thought - like the torn edges of this headline:

I would love to flip my greasy little fingers through the actual prop. In any case, it's a fantastic bit of inspiration for my journals. I might start collecting more newspapers.