Gird your loins, prepare your neck to be punctured and your mind to be remote controlled for this week’s spooky, creepy infusion. Expect to go into weird overdrive because it’s Samhuinn/ All Hallow’s Eve/ Halloween. The brief period when the veil between the realms of past present and future thins out and creatures half-formed and barely imagined interact in new and unexpected ways.
Witch’s village: Fantasy music ambience
Enter into an enchanted and slightly spooky ambient soundscape for All Hallow’s Eve in this prelude of what’s to come…
Walls have ears.
Doors have eyes.
Trees have voices.
Beasts tell lies.
Beware the rain.
Beware the snow.
Beware the man
You think you know.
Catherine Fisher
Freaky ghost koala makes an appearance at the Melbourne Fringe
Bat familiars for pagan priestesses by Nona Limmen
Dutch photographer Nona Limmen uses the medium of analogue photography to capture the nebulous borderland world of the macabre and mysterious.
This mysterious land, woven of dreams and memories, is inhabited by powerful women, liminal creatures wielding arcane forces so great they sometimes fracture their very being. Some of Limmen’s women are eldritch pagan priestesses conversing in whispered chants with the forests, mountains, and all the creatures under their aegis. They are fluent in the language of the wind and the ground beneath their feet speaks to their very bones.
Haute Macabre
Originally tweeted by soli (@solisolsoli) on January 24, 2022.
When you strut in your new cape and everyone’s head swivels in your direction
I can’t get over her sashaying tail, and jaunty cape…what a flirtatious little blob.
Originally tweeted by Lana Del Gay (@McClellandShane) on October 1, 2022.
Viagra Boys: Creepy Crawlers
Viagra Boys are absolutely hilarious and entertaining in how they satirise everything dark and weird in our world, it’s like poetry. There is LOADs packed in here in terms of wacky conspiracy theories and it would be completely funny if it wasn’t slightly terrifying in that some people actually believe this stuff.
Here they take the rambling theories of QANON and bring them into the gritty, rock infused light of day. The lead singer has a really powerful stage presence and for me is a cross between Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age and Nick Cave.
It’s the kind of music that burns into your retina and pituitary gland and it’s not entirely a comfortable or easy experience…but it’s really something!
Boris Johnson as the Creature from the Black Lagoon
He does that dopey, lumbering, fish-lipped look really well doesn’t he. Thank god he is now a blundering and embarrassing footnote in history.
Could crows assemble IKEA flat pack furniture?
OK so this isn’t spooky or even creepy at all..I just thought it was cute. According to this research, if some food is at stake, crows can work out how to put together IKEA flat packs. They are incredible, beautiful and intelligent aren’t they!
We already know crows are clever enough to construct tools from memory and can be trained to pick up trash. However, a new study shows that they’re more skilled than scientists previously imagined.
These resourceful birds, it turns out, can also innovate, making compound tools out of parts, a skill previously only demonstrated in a few captive great apes and in humans. “Their compound tool construction constitutes a new example of their ability to generate solutions to novel challenges, and corroborates that their abilities are highly flexible and subject to individual variation,” according to an international research team writing in the journal Scientific Reports.
Quartz
Danny De Vito as Jaws
A solid 10/10 for terrifying…what do you think? Via Weird Alle on Twitter and Reddit.
Originally tweeted by Weird Dall-E Mini Generations (@weirddalle) on September 27, 2022.
Desmond Doom: Surf Goth EP
I didn’t know that Surf Goth was a thing but now I do and I’m glad that I have discovered this. It’s like a cruisy DIIV album filled with summery goodness has been eaten for lunch by Robert Smith from The Cure and Siouxsie Sioux from Siouxie and the Banshees producing this masterwork. It sounds like if you wore a pitch black wet suit and took your dark surfboard out into the waves to intentionally swim with sharks.
This spooky, atmospheric painting by Émile Antoine Verpilleux captures the energy of Halloween for me
‘Winter Sunset’ by Émile Antoine Verpilleux, colour print from woodblocks, printed in 1928 is steeped in the right mood for the turning inwards of the year, the weather and the animals tucked away for the darkness to pervade the land.
Originally tweeted by Henry Rothwell (@HenryRothwell) on September 25, 2022.
Now when dying grasses veil
– Annie Finch (Samhain)
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil
that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Originally tweeted by irishspiritmag (@irishspiritmag) on September 26, 2022.
Polish artist Tomasz Alen Kopera’s living and breathing trees
Tomasz Alen Kopera (b. 1976) in Kożuchów, Poland has a degree in Construction Engineering from the University of Technology in Wrocław. He paints with oil on canvas and is inspired by human nature, the mysteries of the universe and the human psyche. He is celebrated for his acute attention to detail and mastery of colour. He has lived in Northern Ireland since 2005.
Tomasz Alen Kopera’s website
Originally tweeted by helen warlow (@HWarlow) on September 21, 2022.
The Curse Of The Mummy’s Tomb 1964 – Hammer Horror Films
The perfect Halloween film. I don’t like horror films normally but I don’t mind these older ones as they are not so gory and more kitsch.
Ukrainian artist Boris Groh’s dark apocalyptic visions
Young Ukrainian artist Boris Groh was the famous artist who immortalised the soldier sticking up his finger at the Russian warship, this piece of art has appeared on countless posters, social media posts and on postage stamps in Ukraine which immediately sold out.
Although for years before this, Boris Groh was creating creepy necromancer art featuring giant skeletons creeping through destroyed urban cityscapes, a strange portent of what was to come. He draws mainly using Photoshop but also in ink and oils on canvas. About his skeleton art he has this to say about it:
I’m not in a hurry to create a story for them, because I like it when the viewer himself comes up with his own story. I do not want to limit the viewer to one story.
Boris Groh interviewed for Displate
~ “Listen to them, the children of the Night. What music they make.”
Bram Stoker
The Hidden Gods by Eugene Chekhov
Originally tweeted by 𝙴𝚞𝚐𝚎𝚗𝚎 𝙲𝚑𝚎𝚔𝚑𝚘𝚟 (@ChekhovEugene) on September 1, 2022.
You are the result of the love of thousands
Samhuin is a time to honour and respect our ancestors and I found this Frida Kahlo painting and quote which fits perfectly with that.
“Suddenly, all my ancestors are behind me. ‘Be still!’ they say. ‘Watch and Listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.'”
Linda Hogan, ‘Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.
Correll B does Led Zeppelin
Correll B dances and sings and gets a lot of encouragement to keep going, (for better or worse) on Twitter. It’s strangely interesting and also horrifying.
Originally tweeted by CORRELL B (@CORRELLB2) on July 17, 2022.
“What seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my own heart.”
-Haruki Murakami
A “sea monster” standing cup made in Northern Italy in the mid-16th Century using a nautilus shell engraved in China with dragons and mounted in silver. The base is said to be the direct cast of an eagle’s claw.
Originally tweeted by Anthropology Review (@Anthro_Review) on February 23, 2022.
Willem Dafoe does a better job as Pretty Woman than Julia Roberts
All of the gyrating, posing and being cute/sexy is improved with Willem Dafoe’s face on it…don’t you agree?! No???? hahaha
Au Revoir Jerome
A beautiful and eerie short film from France. Jerome who passes through the veil attempts to find his beloved Maryline in a surreal wonderland.
Probe to the unknown
I would love to read beyond the covers of this vintage paranormal magazine. Produced in California during the psychadelic era of the 60’s and 70’s it featured tall and tremendous stories of strange phenomena. That girl looks like she is ready to take on the other side.
Originally tweeted by Greg Newkirk 🌚 (@nuekerk) on September 2, 2022.
Radio Moscow – Brain Cycles
Last bit of music is an epic psychedelic rock album.
Abandoned poppets looking for a home this Samhain
It is shocking and sad how many poppets are left abandoned on the doorsteps of churches, in school lockers or even in skips. They are for life and not just Samhain so please if you see one around, please give them a kiss and take them home to care for them.
Via Feral Fibres and Hookland Doll Emporium
Originally tweeted by The Hookland Doll Emporium – Ashcourt (@HooklandE) on November 12, 2021.
Ballybogs: Cheeky Irish peat fae
Irish peat fae, Ballybogs are strange looking creatures with disproportioned bodies. They appear to have been dipped in mud & prefer to keep to themselves in their mud holes. They are known to prank unsuspecting human travelers & lead them astray from the path. #MythologyMonday
Originally tweeted by irishspiritmag (@irishspiritmag) on October 3, 2022.
I had so much fun with this one, there were literally so many items I needed to include, so I included them all! I hope you enjoyed this mega monstrous edition and if you didn’t pee your pants just a tiny bit, well then I didn’t do my job properly. Have a spooky time today and don’t go flirting with the undead, at least not too much that they pull you into the underworld.
Content Catnip 