Boo.

I guess one Halloween post wasn't enough. I was going to leave it at that, but then I decided to tear down the wallpaper in here and reveal the original stonework underneath, for that nice dungeon atmosphere...and I spotted and had to share with you RavensBlight, which is something of a one-stop-browse for Halloween. This multimedia horror entertainment site has a little of everything from the mind of creator Ray O'Bannon: a large art gallery with satisfyingly campy collections of paintings, drawings, photos, and objects, a sizeable arcade of horror-themed games, a toyshop of stylish downloadable paper models for board games, figures, dioramas, masks, and more, plus a fiction library and a collection of original music.
Via exclamation mark.

I suggest it just in case you felt you didn't have anything Halloweeny enough to do tonight. Too old for trick-or-treating, no parties, work at night and sleep during the day, leaving your evening too cramped to fit in any festive activities, and didn't get event tickets far enough in advance anyway? I hear you.

I might try to rouse myself early this afternoon, though, and go see The Hunchback of Notre Dame at Trinity Church. I would have preferred to catch Nosferatu at St. John the Divine for the Halloween Extravaganza last weekend, but I found out about it too late to get tickets, and each showing would have made me either dangerously late for work or miserably short on sleep. There's always next year.

Halloween offerings

Once again, a colorful assortment of dark, frightful, and ghoulish things in celebration of the most fun holiday of the year. Once again presented in the eleventh hour. At least this year I got it put together before Halloween was over.

Enjoy!

Exhibits

I know we just went a couple of months ago, but how can I resist the chance to take you back for another visit to Surtateum, the Museum of Supernatural History? It's the perfect time to tour two of the museum's permanent collections: The Department of Witchcraft and Invocations and The Department of Demonology. Though still under construction, there are some interesting things to be found here: check out the collection of witches' grimoires in the Witchcraft exhibit, and read about the curse of the mummy and the gruesome artifact known as a "hand of glory" in the Demonology exhibit.





I would also like to guide you to a few selected galleries of artist Mark Ryden; I think his series Blood: Miniature Paintings of Sorrow and Fear is just perfect for the occasion. Also don't miss the Blood Drawings, and if there's time, we might even stay to take in The Meat Show.




What's Halloween without some skeletons? Michael Paulus imagines the skeletal systems of beloved cartoon characters.




Games

Exmortis 2 is the eminently worthy sequel to the excellent Exmortis. In that game, a human avatar known as the Hand unleashed a plague of evil spirits on the earth, where they began to wreak total destruction. This game deals with the apocalyptic aftermath, as you must try to stop the incursion and send them back where they came from. Visuals, sound, effects, storyline, gameplay -- everything about this game is top-notch.
As an added bonus, there is a very nice, complete walkthrough/storyline recap, written by game creator Ben Leffler, at lazylaces.




Under "My projects", "Flash games" you'll find links Bat Company's series of horror games: Ghost Story, Factory of Fear, and Atrocitys. These are your classic lights-down, sound-up, jump-out-and-go-ahhhhh! haunted house games, each a bit longer, more interactive, and more technically sophisticated than the last. One of the nice features of these games is the background scenes, featuring original locations photographed by the game creators.




DeadEnd's Hotel is a very slick, professionally-produced game with a familiar room-escaper plot: having somehow lost your memory, you awaken locked in a strange hotel room, and must find a way out. It's in French only, but you can click the link that says "Little Translation" on the main page for help with the game's main puzzle clue, and the rest you should be able mostly to figure out. I have yet to see how it ends, being unable to survive a tricky arcade sequence near (what I assume is) the end of the game.
Walkthrough at trusty Nordinho.




Haunted House Massacre is a short, linear haunted house game. Decent atmosphere, despite some production shortcuts, and a nice use of 3-d models for the characters.




Hellgate Escape is a short horror game, grim despite the somewhat cartoonish graphics. It's timed, so you have to be quick as you find your way out of Hellgate, or grisly death will ensue.
Here is the lazylaces walkthrough.




Part I of From Heaven to Hell is a promising start to what will eventually be a much longer game. Aside from the traditional "explore-the-house" features, this game also includes equipped objects and a combat system. The story: a boy who lost his mother to mysterious causes is beginning to have strange nightmares. Then there are some monsters in the house...
There's a cursory walkthrough at the Gamershood Forums thread.




Nightmare Escape is a blood-spattered room-escaper in a familiar format. The riddles are a bit tricky.
Jay is Games has a walkthrough in the comments if you need it.




Cinema

Now showing at Google Video: Tim Burton's early classic Vincent, about a dark-souled seven-year-old who wants to be like Vincent Price. Don't tell me you haven't seen it yet.
In fact, I may as well show it here, at the Blue Tea Theater of the Obscure, and save you the trip.
EDIT: Switched to English version. Oops.




Grey Matter, a rather creepy Halloween tale from the The Other Side by Mata, whose other animations include the series Little Goth Girl. You can also view Halloween specials from past years, among others.




You may enjoy as a companion piece Jan Svankmajer's wonderful Claymation film Darkness, Light, Darkness, about a curious genesis.




Animation studio Childrin R Skary has many new animations since I linked to them last, whenever that was. They have a series of dark, gothic gems. You could try my favorite, El Despertar, about a flamenco-dancing zombie-charmer, or see something for the season, the Halloween-themed short Candy. But of course you're going to watch them all.




Blogs

I've recently added a new "Gothic, Fantastic, Macabre" category to the blogroll, which would be a good place to start if you're looking for some blogs with a suitable Halloweeny mood. There's La Main Gauche, for one, the wonderfully dark and fantastic blog that convinced me I needed this category in the first place (French-language, but the links are so good you'll get plenty out of it even without the text); Fantastic Animation, which is so in both senses of the word; Monster Brains, a beguiling parade of beasts, creeps, and creatures of all descriptions; and of course there's dear old Maktaaq, who's always going on about zombies, ghosts, horror movies, Transylvania, mad scientists, hampsters, and the like.

Last week was Death Week at the Athanasius Kircher Society, and you know what that means -- a delightful procession of some of the most outlandish, morbid, and fascinating things having to do with death and the deceased, like Victorian Post-Mortem Photography or the Body Baker, a Thai artist who sculpts frightfully realistic body parts out of bread.




For more haunts, see last year's Halloween post, Five haunted houses for more horror games, or explore some virtual cemeteries in Cities of the dead.

Painting the odd

There's a huge gallery of the surreal and storybook artwork of husband-and-wife team Andrej and Olga Dugin at Storyopolis, which is itself an amazing site with images from loads of wonderful illustrators. Comprised mostly of illustrations for books, the work of the Dugins includes a few surrealist paintings as well as pencil sketches, ink drawings, and watercolors, from medieval and heraldic figures to still lifes, border designs and emblems, maps, and characters from the Arabian Nights. This, incidentally, is why I think all books should have pictures. I just love their work.





Hermann Serient is an Austrian painter whose vibrant, almost garish scenes depict towns filled with colorful, whimsical, and at times menacing characters. His artwork is little like a lurid dream where everything seems bright and strange, and on the point of spinning out of control.




Painted Woman is the art of Kim Richardson. Garbed in masks, feathers, fur, horns, lobster shells, and especially the recurrent nautilus shells, the vulnerable figures in these "intuitive paintings", with dual faces, dismembered limbs, and doorways into the body, display the costumes and symbolic trappings of the unconscious.
Via Cipango.




Jay Long's works incorporate typewriter text, anthropomorphic animals, clowns and painted dolls, industral towns, trees, and everyday objects in simple, whimsical compositions. His sizeable gallery incorporates oil paintings, shadow boxes, silhouette paintings, giclee prints, and mixed media works, all of them delightful. I particularly enjoy his series of human- and animal-formed objects.




Armen Gevorkian is an Armenian painter whose lifeless, statue-like figures inhabit a cold, gray world of dark light, hard edges, and sharp points. His paintings are still and strange, eerie, and wonderful. There are a few more works along with a short essay at this gallery.





Remedios Varo was a Spanish surrealist whose rich paintings are laden with symbolism and magic. This site brings together a number of galleries displaying her work, as well as bios, articles, bibliographies, and other resources.




Reminiscent of the best of Dali and Magritte, the work of Siegfried Zademack is wonderful, strange, disturbing, dreamlike surrealism at its best. Veiled figures, odd machines, half-formed objects, statues, weights, rowboats, and mysterious women populate these fragmentary cities and empty landscapes with their endless horizons.
Via All About Nothing.





I love Tiffany Bozic's spare, stylized forms and muted palette. For some reason, her website now only points to a gallery site containing a handful of her recent works which, while quite nice, are a bit different from her older surreal tableaux of animal and plant forms. I hope her complete portfolio will be available again soon.




Susan Jamison's works are variations on a theme: a botanical body, black-veined head and pink-flowered body, accompanied by birds, insects, and flowers. According to the artist's statement, the paintings "incorporate naturalistic imagery with feminine cultural symbols and everyday objects to explore archetypes from myths, dreams, and fairy tales.... The first format, a portrait, is a classical Renaissance presentation. Medical illustrations of the head are appropriated and modified into archetypal portraits of women that appear in a dream state. They interact both passively and purposefully with plants and animals in ways that become metaphors for intimate life experience. The second kind of composition...is a proportionally neutral square. These images are designed, edited, and cropped in a way that is clean and contemporary, and yet share a sensibility with Audubon illustration, as well as traditional Asian art."




Arnau Alemany's paintings and lithographs portray solitary fragments of urban spaces isolated in empty landscapes, clustered as if into a single organism, combined with alien arctitecural forms, or suddenly and inexplicably overtaken by nature, suggesting not living buildings and cities so much as abandoned relics from another time.

Timepieces of distinction

Digital timepieces:

Available in digital and analog formats, standard and military time, with and without seconds, in your choice of colors and image sets, The Human Clock is a delightful little timepiece featuring a range of user-submitted photos of people, animals, objects, and numbers indicating the time for every minute of the day. I just love this 9:56 grandma, for instance.




Here's another human clock, this one with acrobatic human figures forming the digits.
Via Le Web...et le reste.




Then there are the Bar Code Clock and Money is Time Clock. The artist's site features a lot of bar code art in addition to the nifty clock.




Clockblock 1.0, an animated clock made out of building blocks. Watch as second-by-second the blocks are stacked, then toppled. Also available as a screensaver.




Analog timepieces:

The Cable Clock, which uses cable physics for that realistic noodly wobble. Screensaver, too.




An attractive Roman numeral clock. Nothing fancy, just a large flash app.




Ditto with this minimalist clock.




Lots of clocks you can add to your webpage at Clocklink. These are just a handful of the analog -- they have a lot of digital designs, too, including a bar code clock, and they've been steadily adding more.




Calendars:

"Cosmos", "Line" and "Umi/Aki", from a series of calendars by designer John Maeda, who has also made a lot of other nifty flash artworks and gadgets. Created "for purely aesthetic reasons" with "no intent to advance the state of the art in digital time management," these calendars "were in fact, designed for you to waste time instead of save time."




I do hope I've helped you waste at least a little time here today.