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.

Cities of the dead

Immortelle.net is a nicely done site that offers virtual tours of the grand, beautiful cemeteries of New Orleans. I can't imagine what state they must be in now, but they are preserved here forever. You can browse a series of images for each cemetery, or view one of the four virtual 3d panoramas. I've posted this link before, but it's worth repeating.




You can also take a virtual tour of Paris's famed Père Lachaise cemetery. There is a panoramic walkthrough, as well as a map with famous graves marked out, where you can view individual images. The one below is the grave of Chopin.




Then there's my real reason for posting. After Life: The Four Seasons of Streatham Cemetery, a lush multimedia composition by photographer Jonathan Clark. Over the course of a year, he photographed a number of already striking, brilliantly composed scenes of one cemetery. Then, he grouped them into four series by season, and added atmospheric background music, sound effects, and and one or two digital elements to create eerie light effects, motion, or ambient weather. Snow drifts softly down, birds fly by, grasses wave in the wind. The effect is stunning.

More abandoned places

My browsing lately has turned up a number of interesting sites dedicated to lost, forgotten, deterioriating, and abandoned places that are well worth exploring.

Ohio Trespassers is one of the coolest sites. A couple of intrepid explorers have made it their mission to trespass onto all the unusual and out-of-the-way sites they can find, and collect photo evidence. Abandoned factories, graveyards, barns, castles, hospitals, tunnels, and insane asylums all yield up their secrets.





Immortelle.net offers histories and visual tours -- including virtual 360 panoramic views -- of New Orleans' fascinating cemeteries, which resemble the French-style cities of the dead.




Forgotten NY is an enormous site exploring hundreds of forgotten nooks and crannies of New York City in words and pictures. Not just abandoned and old places, but also unusual ones. Categories include old signs and advertisements, subways and trains, cemeteries, cobblestones, street scenes, trolleys, and more. This site is just massive.




All of this reminded me of Ghost Town, that story of the woman Elena who documented her trip through the desolate lands of the Chernobyl area. It turns out that her story is exaggerated if not entirely fabricated -- apparently she did not daringly forge into forbidden territory alone on a motorcycle as she claims, but went on a guided excursion in a car with her husband -- but however true the frame narrative, the pictures themselves are still (mostly) real (a few of them might be staged), and very evocative. (More info: this thread explains why it's not true. Here is the website for the private tour she went on.)




My earlier post, "Abandoned places," can be found here.