I've always seen dark elves, orcs, Unseelie Court, Lovecraft's ghouls, D&D's drow and derros, and their mutual prototype in Richard Sharpe Shaver's deros, and the like as more or less the same basic creature, given different names for different contexts: bestial, frail, immortal, undead, functionally albino humanoids driven out of the sunlight, deep underground, to live in subterranean civilization of darkness where they delight in madness, evil, witchcraft, sadism, and cannibalism, especially when inflicted on surface-dwellers in the form of dangerous pranks like kidnapping children to raise up as monsters, and leaving their own changelings in the child's place, to grow up with horrible appetites and a mischievous cruelty in spite of the parents' best efforts to raise the child properly... Tolkien wasn't the first or the last to toy with the idea that orcs/goblins were simply fallen, evil, unseelie elves! And I get the impression from the old folklore on dark elves, goblins, orcs, and the like that the concept might go back to ancient folklore that understood old pagan tombs to be the entrances to an underground afterlife where the Old Ones live in a sort of eldritch fairyland afterlife parallel to this world, from which the dead "elves" might rise up to the mortal world in the form of vampires, ghouls, ghosts, and phantoms of all kinds.
Perhaps a "space orc" concept similarly borrows from and spills over into "death metal elves IN SPACE" territory, as well as space morlock territory, and vice-versa.
Someone posted a great kit-bash project they're working on, combining German helmets with gas masks and WWI French trenchcoat torsoes, with Raumjager flamethrowers, to produce some great pulp sci-fi bad-guys - seriously, check that project out!
I thought to myself, that looks like a cool project, and now I kinda want to steal the idea to make a squad of post-apocalyptic cyborg ghouls like the guy from those early '80s heavy metal album covers, apparently inspired by some old French Heavy Metal magazine illustrations:
Gas masks... trench coats... pickelhaubes... shoulder armor... bullet belts... weird assault rifles... skulls... mutations, mutilations, war, and pain... and spikes, lots and lots of spikes!
Given, perhaps, some sort of "Transylvanian" flavor, maybe that's the unique spin on those death-metal space elves/orcs we seem to be looking near?
These dark impalers were, perhaps, recruited for the Death Fields from some shadowy, far-future post-apocalyptic colony death-world at the borders of the Empires of Man, where these warriors have manned crumbling castles in high mountains and dark prieval forests, outposts in desolate wastelands and cobwebbed and damp underground bomb-shelters, where they have, through endless, apocalyptic, total warfare, been containing a mind-shattering alien threat lurking even deeper under the ground in vaults and caverns of unspeakable cosmic horror: the impalers are the only thing keeping these ancient enemies from spilling out of those lower vaults of horror onto the surface of their world, and spreading from there into the galaxy at large, where they will surely run amok until they topple the unprepared, decadent and corrupt central empires of man..... The Death Fields are like a war school for the impalers, where they will learn new ways to fight and vanquish the darkness beneath their world!
