At the end of his short story The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe describes a blood-red moon shining through a fissure that jags across the facade of an ancestral mansion – just before the whole thing collapses. As a little boy growing up in Newry, Northern Ireland, Marc Hagan-Guirey obsessed over Poe’s story, imagining a “lonely and imposing house that even the architect felt despair in creating. There’s also mention of eye-like windows. I imagined them sitting like a tiny cluster of arachnid eyes, poised and waiting.”
Today he is realising those windows with the use of a scalpel and paper at his kitchen table. Not any old paper, but Fabriano 5 200gsm. Hagan-Guirey is giving me a tutorial in the venerable Japanese art of kirigami. It isn’t supposed to be a competitive sport, but looking across as he scores, cuts and folds, I can’t help but feel inadequate.
Kirigami (from the Japanese “kiru”, to cut, and “kami”, paper) is like origami but with blades – you cut and fold a single piece of paper to construct your creations. It requires the manual skills of a brain surgeon, the 3D architectural vision of a Frank Lloyd Wright and fingers like Alfred Brendel’s. Mine are like unsliced chorizo. As we work, I worry I’m going to slip and fill that half-moon shape with my blood. Which would, at least, be fitting.
Many of Hagan-Guirey’s works are culled from his favourite horror movies. TV presenter Jonathan Ross owns his realisation of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining, and actor Reece Shearsmith bought his Dakota Building from Rosemary’s Baby. Other collectors of his work include Chris Addison, Jane Goldman and JJ Abrams, who was so impressed with his papery Star Wars scenes that he bought one.
The 34-year-old, who styles himself Paper Dandy, has now produced a book of 20 designs for readers to make themselves, its designs inspired by horror movies and stories including Dracula, Frankenstein, the Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
He claims his love of horror movies came in part because his older brother, while babysitting him, would let him stay up to watch them. A formative moment came on 31 October 1992, when he saw Ghostwatch, a BBC Halloween mockumentary ostensibly broadcast from a haunted suburban house. “I thought it was real, because Sarah Greene was presenting and I trusted her. I was sitting on the steps gibbering afterwards.”
My favourite of the works in his new book depicts a silhouetted man swinging from a gibbet. Its title is Gallows Hill. “That’s inspired by a place of that name in my home town,” he says. “Prisoners would walk from the jail through a tunnel to Gallows Hill. As a kid, I could still get into that tunnel. I remember the relief at coming out of it into the light – and then realising how very different the condemned would feel when they emerged to see the gallows in front of them.
Unlike me, Marc has been making models for a long time. He was a solitary child, whose mother would often give him action figures such as He Man and ThunderCats. “I always wondered why they weren’t in boxes, and it turned out it was because the boxes were fire damaged after explosions in department stores.” He set to work building fortresses for his superheroes: “When mum would come home with the shopping, I was always taking the egg boxes and unwinding toilet rolls for the cardboard.”
We fold and slash on a self-healing mat that protects the table and prolongs the life of our blades. It is soothing, meticulous work that fits into the current vogue for all things mindful – as we craft, our phones ring and ping unanswered. “One thing you’re doing wrong,” says Marc gently (I love that “one thing”), “is you’re trying to cut out too much. Don’t cut out the whole moon, just little sections at a time.”
Guirey-Hagan was head of studio for a Soho ad agency in London before his reinvention as a paper artist. In 2010, his then partner, the illusionist Derren Brown, managed to wangle a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House in Los Angeles. “That’s the exterior to Deckard’s apartment in Blade Runner and it was also used in House on Haunted Hill [the 1959 Vincent Price movie]. I really wanted to commemorate that, and that’s when I came across kirigami. It’s usually used for architectural designs, but I wanted to use it to capture the fragility of the building, and the delicacy of the paper seemed perfect for that.”
He’d always loved the Addams Family movies, so he freeze-framed them to get the interiors right – and even got the floor plans from the movies’ art director so he could make his kirigami designs more accurate. In 2012, his work had its first show at Gallery One and a Half in east London. Last year, he did a kirigami Soho scene depicting all kinds of rudery for an auction in aid of the Terrence Higgins Trust. “It sold for £19,000 – I couldn’t believe it.”
Why, I ask him, were so many Hollywood haunted houses – think the ones in Psycho, Beetlejuice, The Munsters and The Addams Family – American replicas of the French Second Empire style of architecture? “Simple. After the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression, lots of these beautiful homes were abandoned,” he says. “They became symbols of depression and despair – and then they became haunted.”
But what, you’ll be wondering, happened to my kirigami Fall of the House of Usher? Reader, I can’t pretend I finished it. Instead, I took over Marc’s and folded, pinched and levered it (using a cocktail stick instead of my clumsy bodgers) to produce the finished article. I can’t pass it off as my own work because Marc signed it.
“If I see this on eBay, I’ll be cross,” he tells me mock-sternly as I fold it into my bag. Wouldn’t dream of it. It now sits on the mantlepiece, backgrounded by blood-red walls. This Halloween I shall watch the 1960 Roger Corman version – with Vincent Price – in tribute.
• Paper Dandy’s Horrorgami: 20 Gruesome Scenes to Cut and Fold by Marc Hagan-Guirey is published by Laurence King at £12.95. Buy it for £10.36 at bookshop.theguardian.com.
• This story was amended on 28 October 2015. The subhead was changed to correct the spelling of Marc Hagan-Guirey’s name.
