Édouard Chimot, Le visage humain, 1921
via Adventures in the Print Trade

Of a sudden . . . in the midst of the silence . . . the iron lid of the coffin burst open with a crash, and the corpse of the dead girl sat up. Even more frightful was she now than the first time. Frightfully her teeth rattled, convulsively her lips twitched, wildly she screamed incantations. A whirlwind swept through the church; the icons fell on their faces; the smashed panes flew out the windows. The doors were torn from their hinges, and an innumerable horde of horrors swept into the holly church. The whole place was filled with a terrible sound of the scratching of claws and the swishing of wings. In a flock, they swooped and wheeled, searching everywhere to find the philosopher.

--Nikolai Gogol: Viy (Epigraph to Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson)

Here's the scene (no longer on youtube) from the '67 movie Viy, which I was lucky enough to see on a huge screen a few years ago.

I created this post just to use the above image by Chimot. Check out the rest of Neil Philip's beautiful "Dicing with Death" post at his Adventures in the Print Trade. Neil includes some other Chimot images, and explains: "They were made for an edition of the harrowing vision of existential nothingness that is the novel L’Enfer (Hell), by Henri Barbusse."

Sept. 19 update, Neil added in the comments section:

You might like to know the exact text to which Chimot was responding in creating this etching. It is: "Un grand sujet de sculpture: l'être adoré qu'on a perdu, soulevant la dalle du tombeau et vous montrant sa figure. Ce visage humain est à la fois infiniment désirable et teerrifiant."