While you’re waiting for the little freaks to creep up your driveway tonight, you might enjoy viewing the work of Demizu Posuka (ポ～ン（出水ぽすか)), one of the most distinctive and prolific artists at Pixiv. Demizu reminds me of a more macabre Arthur Rackham, but he has his own peculiar style.
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The internet is forever? Only if it’s something you’d rather were forgotten. I recently looked for my favorite Chick tract, but the places it used to be are gone. I did eventually find it, and here it is: Jack Chick meets H.P. Lovecraft.
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Severian has some thoughts on literary and cinematic horror:
Horror often works via inversion. Just as Lucy Westenra ends up being an inverted version of the classic Victorian matriarch — she only kills children — the Count himself is unnaturally pale. But other than that… he’s Gandhi, basically, using our own laws and over-exaggerated sense of fair play against us. Gandhi actually was in London in the early 1890s — as a lawyer, no less (called to the bar in 1891). By the time Dracula was published in 1897, Gandhi was a well-known nuisance in South Africa… and, of course, the Boer War would break out just two years later. (To say nothing of Gandhi’s extremely sketchy personal habits, vis-a-vis young girls. Oh, and he’s a vegetarian, ostentatiously so. Horror works with inversions, eh?).
Of course, nobody in academia could ever make that argument and live to tell about it….
More culture:
Sarah Tillard on Henry Fuseli and the “The Nightmare.”
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If you want some spooky music, I have suggestions here and here. Eve Tushnet has more here and here. For movies, I’m the last person to ask; perhaps Young Frankenstein in memory of Teri Garr. For books, pretty much anything by Tim Powers would be appropriate. For anime, Mononoke if you want something artsy, Hozuki no Reitetsu if you want something funny, Natsume Yuujin-cho if you want something warm and fuzzy and just a wee bit creepy.
A few more pictures from ポ～ン:
