A Tribute to Pyramid Head

Just got back from watching Silent Hill Revelation, and I would like to take a moment to pay tribute to my favourite monster of all time...Pyramid Head. Could he be any hotter??

Props to the talented Roberto Campanella, a professional ballet dancer and choreographer, who portrays Pyramid Head in both of the Silent Hill movies and does an incredible job of bringing the sexy terrifying creature to life.
Here is a rilly rilly interesting video of the choreography for all the silent hill 
monsters. 

Here's to you Pyramid Head, Man/Monster of my dreams!!

Sexytime

Come to the Haunt

Beloved pack of freaks.

The dangers of creating monsters for a living....

 This year I've been lucky enough to land a job doing special fx make-up for the Kube 93 Haunt down in Georgetown. It's been great fun, creating horrifying monsters, unfortunate mental patients who have suffered terrible accidents, surgeons who have gone round the bend and transforming beautiful people into malformed freaks of nature. 

The actual haunt is too scary for yours truly to even walk through alone....even without any actors in it! This veritable House of Horrors includes all manner of creepy characters to scare the life out of you! 

I highly recommend this place for a good scare this Halloween...come on down and see my handiwork,  we are located in the Georgetown Morgue, which for those of you who don't know, is a real morgue from the 1920s that now houses our lovely haunt, and doubles as a metal concert venue, with a rather disturbing history...

  The current building has undergone major renovations since it was first called Kolling Mortuary Services of Seattle in 1928. At that time the three-story facility was used to process and prepare the deceased for funerals. In 1939, Charles and Henry Broughton bought the mortuary and the name changed to Broughton Brothers Funeral Services. By 1943, they had built a crematorium that prepared about 100 bodies a day. Along with the crematory, two 110-foot smoke stacks were also added to the extended facilities.

 Charles and his wife lived in the brick home connected to the mortuary. During the Broughton Brothers’ ownership, a series of horrific events occurred. Supposedly, in 1947, jazz trumpeter John “Figgy” Dorsey’s body was reported missing from the embalming table at the Broughton Brothers Mortuary. The dead man was found the next morning on Mrs. Dorsey’s front lawn at her home in Ballard — dismembered. She sent the body parts back to Broughton Brothers so they could piece him back together for his funeral, but the explanation as to who committed this horrific act, and why, is still unknown. Figgy Dorsey was also a shady figure. There were two jazz musicians named Dorsey, a Jimmy and a Tommy, but no Figgy.

But the story gets stranger. A tragic incident occurred April 29, 1965, involving one of the Broughton brothers, Charles. A “strong, rolling earthquake rocked the Pacific Northwest at 8:29” in the morning, according to The Seattle Times. At the time, University of Washington seismologists gave the earthquake a magnitude of eight or nine on the Mercalli Scale of 12. While most businesses only had minimal damage, one of the towers of the mortuary caved and destroyed the west wing of the building, killing Charles.

While death is natural at a mortuary, it seemed to haunt the Broughton Brothers Funeral Services. There are no live witnesses or any captured suspects to tell of the events of Oct. 25, 1968. On that night, all nine employees of the morgue were having a business meeting when maybe two or three, probably armed, men came in and bound every Broughton Brothers’ employee, according to the Historic Morgue Society (Strangely enough, the main page of that site is currently defunct). The employees were supposedly forced in the crematorium and all burned alive.

Even now, this gruesome crime is still unsolved and seems to be dead and buried, so much so that there is no record of it. However, there were rumors that the Broughton brothers knew where all the bodies were buried — you could say, in more ways than one — and were involved in a bit of dirty business. But nothing was proven or charged. The aged brick walls of the home, mossy dilapidated roof and windows covered up by wooden panes are the only hints of the morgue’s shady past. Supposedly, Charles’ wife continued to live there after his death until she committed suicide in 1979.

So come on down, don't be shy. Here are the hours and dates we are open.  We are open for the rest of the month. Happy Halloween, more pics to come soon! ^_^ 

 

Silent Hill, Downpour: The stuff of Nightmares or Fantasy?

As you may know, the latest Silent Hill game Downpour was released just last night, and it certainly did not disappoint! Straight from the twisted, macabre mind of Konami, every scene is really dripping in atmosphere, shrouded in mist and fraught with tension! The game-makers really paid close attention to detail and sound. 

Just in the first couple hours of gameplay there were some surprises that had us screaming with fear. There is a lot of mystery and weird, disturbing side stories; The combat is pretty gory and satisfying. True to Silent Hill style, the game is very dark and often you only have the meager light from a zippo for help.
By the end of five straight hours of gameplay we were rocking ourselves in the  fetal position, weeping softly and bashing  in the skulls of anything that twitched within our field of vision.

There are ever-present creepy old radios and tvs chiming in with unsettling, ironic music right when things are getting really tense. There are also clues all over so keep an eye open.

The main character is an escaped convict on the run; the female characters leave something to be desired as with most video-games, but overall I highly recommend checking this out...the graphics and attention to creepy are better than ever and the monsters are....shiver...well we won't talk about them. 

Lets just say this is the type of game that stays with you in the daylight hours, making you constantly scan the area for weapons and look over your shoulder for creepy crawlies...be sure and check it out, and keep your wits about you!!

Pick-axe, the weapon of choice

Just turn around right now...

Edward Gorey

Critic Edmund Wilson described Edward Gorey's work as ''poisonous and poetic." He drew an early 20th century world --from the Edwardian era through the Roaring Twenties -- primarily black-and-white and strangely surrealistic. 

Danger lurked everywhere: in sinister furniture, monstrous urns, terrifying topiary, and architectural horrors. It was a world inhabited by the disaster-prone, the decadent, the villainous, and the blithely innocent -- all of whom (unless poverty-stricken) tended to dress well. Gorey's writing perfectly mixed the macabre with humor and clever word play to (usually) tell a cautionary tale of moral instruction and devastatingly bizarre hilarity.

Edward Gorey was born in Chicago in 1925 and claims to have taught himself to read at age 3 1/2, to have read ALICE IN WONDERLAND and DRACULA at age 5, FRANKENSTEIN at age 7, all of the works of Victor Hugo by age 8, and continued growing up reading Agatha Christie mysteries. His father was newspaperman and his parents divorced when he was 11. They later remarried when Gorey was 27. Between those two marriages, Gorey's father wed Corrina Mura, best known for singing "La Marseillaise" in the movie CASABLANCA.

After three years in the army, Gorey arrived at Harvard as a French literature major. The very tall young man was known for wearing capes and numerous rings. His set included a group of young poets studying under John Ciardi -- his roommate, the future poet Frank O'Hara, Adrienne Rich, Alison Lurie, George Plimpton, Robert Bly, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Gorey and O'Hara were campus dandies in the manner of Oscar Wilde.

Gorey eventually moved to New York in 1950 where he drew book jackets and illustrations. He also began producing his odd little books. When he could find no publisher he kept writing books anyway and self-published them in small runs. The Gotham Book Mart became the central clearing house for Gorey, presenting exhibitions of his work, selling his books and eventually collectibles. In 1961 his THE CURIOUS SOFA: A PORNOGRAPHIC WORK BY OGDRED LEARY became something of a bestseller. (Gorey's pornography, like his horror, was never explicit. It was intimated rather than shown. Unknowable devices like the "thumbfumble" became all the more wicked because they were completely cryptic.) Over the next decade he became a commercial success -- Gorey's first anthology, AMPHIGOREY came out in 1972 from G. P. Putnam's Sons followed by its (first) sequel AMPHIGOREY, TOO in 1974 -- and theatrical designer -- he won a 1978 Tony for costume design for DRACULA and was also nominated for his scenic design for the show.

In the 80s, Gorey's work received its widest circulation with the animated opening and closing credits of the PBS television program MYSTERY.

Even as major publishers published Gorey, he continued to self-publish small batches of his books, paying little attention to their sales. All-in-all, it is estimated he wrote more than 100 books and illustrated more than 60 by other authors.

Gorey, evidently as personally unique as his work, was more jovial than mordant. Bearded, sporting an earring in each lobe and rings on most of his fingers, he often wore a raccoon coat and white sneakers -- although in recent years he became rather embarrassed about wearing fur in public. He moved permanently to Cape Cod in 1986 and lived in an old house overflowing with books, collections, and cats. Over time, he became reluctant to travel -- not even to see productions or exhibits of his work. He became what locals call "a real Cape Codder" -- helping with local charities, quietly attending summer art shows where he encouraged young artists of budding talent. Gorey wrote a series of surrealistic plays and puppet performances and directed them in local community theater.

My friend Marie Robinson is a Cape Codder. She met Edward Gorey in the Lovelette Insurance Agency one day when she'd stopped by to make a car insurance payment. "He was a very tall, slender man dressed in jeans, a nondescript T-shirt, an understated leather jacket, and sneakers," she told me. "He would have blended into the woodwork, if it weren't for his large hands that were cluttered with thick silver rings of dragons and skulls and a pirate earring that set off mirthful eyes. He drove a Volvo, rather than a hearse, much to my dismay. 'You aren't the first person who has said that,' he laughed."

When she commented how much she appreciated his work, he actually blushed, lowered his eyes, murmured a quiet "thank you," and said "I love my work, and if you want to do anything well, you need to be in love with it, for its own sake. And you must go to its darkest place."

Jean Pasch -- another local who described his "Victorian cedar shingled cape house" as "perfect" -- reports he "loved to be aloof, but signed anything you put in front of him."

For me, Edward Gorey represented an elegantly macabre perspective, slightly wicked, a bit decadent, always mysterious. He played it all offstage and revealed just enough to make your own imagination sprout bat wings and sail into the gloom. I'd love to be a Gorey femme fatale, even if it meant being plucked from a grotto by a fantod. Somehow Gorey made doom seemso attractive.

He reminded us, as Henry Allen wrote in The Washington Post, "the warmth of human laughter arises not from hope and cheer but from melancholy, cruelty and ill turns of fortune, the more pointless the better...what relief he offered: Life is not as bad as you think, it's much worse. Such a giggle."

Edward Gorey has been named as one of this year's Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award recipients. The award is given "to an individual whose work has substantially influenced the dark fantasy/horror/occult genre. It honors not merely the superior achievement embodied in a single work but acknowledges superior achievement in an entire career." Harlan Ellison will present the award at the Bram Stoker Awards Banquet May 14.

Gorey created a large body of small work that's influence is still growing. In the history of literature the willingness to take the graphic novel/story (and the work in that field of writers like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore) seriously can be directly attributed to the earlier recognition of Edward Gorey.

"For some reason,'' Gorey told The Boston Globe in 1984, ''my mission in life is to make everybody as uneasy as possible. I think we should all be as uneasy as possible, because that's what the world is like.''

May you rest...uneasily, Mr. Gorey.

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Little windows

 Don Kenn is a danish illustrator who writes directs/animated TV shows for children and spends his free time drawing intricate illustrations/’monster drawings’ on sticky notes depicting a dark world full of monsters and other strange creatures, or as he puts it "a little window into a different world, made on office supplies."

I love these little drawings, they are quite reminiscent of Edward Gorey. You can view more of his work on his blog Enjoy!