Season's reapings

Welcome to Blue Tea's Third Annual All Hallow's Eve Roundup. It took a while, but I managed to scrape a few things together. I hope you enjoy.

Art

Feeling funereal? Cemeteries, a Flickr photoset by talented photographer Burza-snieta, who has a lot of other very worthwhile galleries not appropriate to our theme today.
Via La main gauche.






Mia Mäkilä Lowbrow and Horror Art should give you plenty of dark, lurid stuff to look at as you while away the long Halloween hours. Not much else to say...go and feast.






Kris Kuksi does a lot of different kinds of work, from botanical renderings to fantastic painting to realistic portraiture, but what I'm interested in today are his stunning, outrageously detailed mixed-media sculptural works. You'll find them under the category "the grotesque" in his eclectic gallery, and they will hold you in thrall. These thumbnails don't do them justice.
Via Dark Roasted Blend.






Dark, surreal paintings by David Ho. They are technically excellent and wonderfully evocative. If I weren't posting this for Halloween, I'd pick some of the dreamier or more magical pictures, but today I'm plumbing the gallery for the grimmer, hellish, even Boschian scenes. Try especially the "Contemplation" series, which "dwells upon the spectrum of human emotions, desires and needs", or, for a modern fairy tale, the series of "Candace the Ghost".
Via The Lumper.







I haven't yet done Ray Caesar, which is a shame. His portraits of wicked, elegant, creaturized women and menacing, haunted-looking girls inhabit their own world of cold, detached, refined grotesquery.





Swan Bones Theater is the gallery of artist Kelly Louise Judd, and features a nice array of paintings as well as illustrations and dolls in a fairy-tale-inspired, pop-surrealist tradition. Gloomy forests, brooding ravens, and pale maidens in pearls and lace and wolf's-skin clothing abound.






Games

It looks like Exmortis 3 isn't ready for Halloween this season, but in the meantime you can enjoy a little slice of spooky with Ben Leffler's macabre minigame, Purgatorium. Only he could make a baby's nursery such a dreadful place. Not for the faint of heart! If you liked that and haven't already played his excellent Exmortis series, make that your next stop.





Project Pravus is a classic haunted house game, a lights-down speakers-up after-dark spookfest. You are a real estate agent investigating a house for sale at a suspiciously low price. The locations are moody sepia-toned photographs, the sounds are low and rumbly, the sights are gore and ghosts and secrets revealed. Short and dark.
Walkthrough at Jay Is Games.





Eternal Darkness is a short, goth flash game that's light on substance but scores high marks for style. You play a teen girl who goes to a nightclub, falls in with a bunch of vampires, and has to save the world. As far as gameplay goes, there are only a few decision trees to navigate, but in between you can enjoy the fully-voiced characters, punk soundtrack, slick animation, a nice credits sequence, and even some "outtakes" at the end.

I also hope you enjoy this screencap from the credits, by the way. You don't know how hard it was to get. Incidentally, if you're really bored, I discovered that you can right-click on the flash player about where I took this cap and uncheck "play" -- the action will freeze, but the people keep dancing in the background. But remember I said only if you're bored.






Devil's Triad is described by its author as a "cutesy, evil vs. evil thing", with "multiple endings, an RPG-style battle with Satan, and lots of cute characters to interact with." You can play as a vampire, witch, or ghost, and your task is to unite with the other two characters to defeat Satan. A little longer and with some more depth than the typical casual game offering, this one will take a little time to play through. Quite nicely done.





Video

The music video for Emilie Simon's "Flowers", a wonderful gothic-cute, Burtonesque animated gem.


Nightmarish Boschian imagery remixed and brought to hellish life in this comic-grotesque music video for Buckethead's "Spokes for the Wheels of Torment".


Delightfully dark and super stylish music videos by My Pet Skeleton. Click "music videos" on the menu to the left, or have a look at the 2006 Reel for a quick and tasty sample of their work.

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.