Olivier de Sagazan
Tags: blood, bodily art, body art, body painting, creepy, dark, distorted bodies, eerie, emotive, evisceration, expressive, flour-white flesh, grotesque, hyperreal, insanity, macabre, psychological horror, realism, red, red and white, surreal, textured, tortured bodies, unnaturally colored flesh, visceral, wound
Asylum: The Video Game
Asylum is an upcoming survival horror computer game from Senscape that will be released sometime in 2011 (so it can’t be too long now, unless the release is pushed back to 2012).
Almost nothing is known about the story except this: you explore the sprawling, intricate, nearly opulent-looking Hanwell Mental Institute, and the horrors that the inmates underwent. The main character is an ex-patient who has returned to the asylum “to understand why he is suffering from bizarre hallucinations.”
There’s a lot of focus on the actual exploration of the building – as creator Agustín Cordes claims, “Each single room matters and even the bathrooms are brimming with details,” and “The overall consensus is that exploring the Hanwell building feels eerily realistic and is filled with ‘touchably crisp textures.’” About the premise, “I will only say this: Asylum is supposed to feel surreal, like there’s something horribly wrong going on inside Hanwell as soon as you set foot inside the place. Don’t try to make any sense out of it, at least not until you’re halfway into the game.”
More words from the creator:
An aspect that has become very apparent during our testing is that Asylum, unlike most first-person adventures, is really fluid. There are virtually no loading times, control is quick and smooth, navigation is easy, you have an amazing deal of freedom of movement — all in all, everything feels just right. At times it feels like a first-person shooter actually, which is pretty cool if you ask me — after all, adventures should test your creativity and intuition, not your patience with the controls. In this regard I believe that we have definitely achieved our goal because Asylum feels, in one word, “modern.”I love anything to do with old insane asylums, especially in the context of horror, and if the teaser (showing the decayed and sinister corridors of the institute, and cells in which inmates are suffering in horrific, bloody ways) is anything to go by, this should be interesting and imagination-piquing.
A gameplay trailer was released last month, which is quite amazing.
Tags: decaying architecture, horror video games, insane asylum aesthetic, psychological horror, surreal, survival horror video games, trailers
Una Burke’s META.MORPH
Úna Burke’s beautiful A/W 2011 collection of armor/medical-inspired sculptural fashion, META.MORPH, is complemented by stunning wet-plate collodion photography from Andreas Waldschütz and Stefan Sappert. Witness below:
Further delight yourself by viewing this video, inspired by “the cinepoems of Man Ray and jarring aspects of psychological horror”:
via Haute Macabre
Tags: alien beauty, architectural fashion, avant-garde, black and white, conceptual fashion, corsets, fashion films, fashion photography, fashiontech, haute couture, high fashion, man ray, medical braces, medical-themed, military/warrior chic, prosthetic, psychological horror, short films, trauma, una burke, vintage, wet-plate photography
Another trailer for Alice: Madness Returns
Here is a trailer, featuring gameplay, for Alice: Madness Returns, which was released earlier this month (making it the fifth and final trailer).
Alice: Madness Returns is released in the U.S. on June 14, and in Europe on June 16, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
I’m so looking forward to this!
Tags: alice in wonderland, american mcgee, colorful, cute n creepy little creatures, dark fairy tales, dreamscapes, gloomy color schemes, hauntingly beautiful, horror video games, innocence/menace, insane asylum aesthetic, insanity, madness, neo-victorian, psychological horror, surreal, trailers, victorian
Tim Walker’s “Dreaming of Another World”
Dreaming of Another World
+ Photographed by Tim Walker
for the March 2011 issue of Vogue Italia{via Haute Macabre – see the complete editorial there}
Tags: avant-garde goth, baroque, fashion editorial, hauntingly beautiful, high fashion, historically inspired, mystical, psychological horror
Trailers for “Alice: Madness Returns”
Several months ago I posted the short teaser trailer for Alice: Madness Returns, the upcoming sequel to American McGee’s Alice which will be released on June 14th of this year. Here are three more trailers which give an enticing taste of the game:
Tags: alice in wonderland, colorful, dark fairy tales, dreamscapes, hauntingly beautiful, horror video games, innocence/menace, insane asylum aesthetic, insanity, madness, neo-victorian, psychological horror, surreal, trailers
Short Film: “Embrio”
Embrio is an experimental short film made entirely by Jean-Sébastien Monzani (story, direction, film, & music), with amazing acting by Stéphanie Schneider.
What draws me to Embrio is its quality of implicit horror, conveyed through the actor’s subtle, ever-changing expressions (she really is the heart of the movie) and the eerie, intense, atmospheric soundtrack. Sans a conventional narrative, Embrio explores the compulsions, fixations, obsessions, and psychological reactions of a young woman, and, though very well-composed, it also has a rawness, depicting naked sensations and emotions with all the vagueness and ambiguity of good psychological horror – all within a clean, bright, well-lit, nearly sterile environment. It draws us deeply, physically, into the experience of the woman, and gets under our skin.
Tags: experimental, psychological horror, short films, surreal horror
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