Hell House: The Art of Esao Andrews
Esao Andrews combines a colorful palette with a Gothic sensibility. Some of his paintings are twists on traditional portraits from earlier epochs akin to the work of Nicola Samorì. Wildly dilapidated and foreboding houses are a recurring motif, and, reminiscent of Shirley Jackson‘s psychological horror stories, depict the inner, psychical falling apart, decay, distortion, and warping. Fairy tales and folklore, including Pinocchio and Thumbelina, loom in the forefront with menacing or perverted appeal. In some works, his vibrant style illustrates the bizarre, the obscene, and aberrations, contrasting atrocious or monstrous things such as a giant, bloated black spider with a symbol of sweetness, purity, and elevation such as a child or an angel. Some of his illustrations are cartoonish, charmingly retro, with a dark, whimsical sense of humor, while others are realistically rendered and Dali-esque, while yet others are macabre and lovelorn, bloody tale-telling depictions.
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, dark, illustrations, innocence/menace, macabre, modern fairy tales, monsteresque, neo-victorian, pop surrealism, portraits, realism, religious imagery, spiders, surreal, symbolism, victorian
Jeremy Enecio
>>Jeremy Enecio<<
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, alien beauty, animals, creature, hauntingly beautiful, illustrations, mythology, realism, sexuality, surreal
Film Review: The Reflecting Skin
1990′s The Reflecting Skin, directed by Philip Ridley, is a weird movie and rather obscure. It’s very interesting, and quiet, bizarre, grotesque, over-the-top, and terribly beautiful, all at once. Visually, it’s amazing. The cinematography is gorgeous, very unforgettable. It has such atmosphere… Eerie, chilling, ominous, cryptic, ascetic yet lush. Admittedly some of the acting is just god-awful (especially the child actors!), but the movie overall is kind of brilliant. Destined to be thought terrible and intolerable by many, I loved it. It is quite possibly the movie that most embodies an “American Gothic” quality/aesthetic, a haunting sense of desolation and hopelessness, mirrored by the land, and a hypocritical, unforgiving puritanism.
Taking place in rural America in the 1950s (whose landscape of yellow wheat fields and desolate, isolated, gray wood frame houses standing in the midst of them is shot very impressively and gorgeously), The Reflecting Skin is, sort of, about child abuse, innocence, imagination, death, mortality, and love. The main character is a young boy named Seth Dove who creates an elaborate fantasy around a mysterious, otherworldly-seeming English widow who lives nearby, believing her to be a vampire who is preying on his loved ones. I suppose it’s partly about the unimaginable innocence of youth… Instead of registering and owning a sense of evil in the world, Seth displaces it onto this mysterious figure, a source of external, supernatural evil, thus allowing him not to understand these strange, horrific, traumatic events around him.
The “vampire,” pale, regal, and obsessive, is such a strange, lovely, macabre, spectral, enigmatic character, with the most absolutely haunting speeches, remote yet intense, vehement, and unnerving meditations on aging and love. Icily menacing yet alluring, preternaturally quiet with sudden outbursts of piercing, violent, grotesque, deeply primal, forlorn emotion, mercurial as a madwoman, she was played pretty much to perfection by Lindsay Duncan. She should be an iconic figure, in my opinion.
This movie is fascinating, and even if you end up not liking it, you should definitely see it. The cinematography alone is worth it.
The entirety of the film (from the Japanese DVD) is up on YouTube.
Tags: 1950s, abuse, bizarre, children, cryptic, dark, film reviews, fragility, hauntingly beautiful, innocence, innocence/menace, macabre, metaphors, puritanical, religion, sexuality, strange beauty, surreal, surreal horror, trailers, vampires, visceral, witchy
Akino Kondoh
{Akino Kondoh‘s sketches and drawings for her short animations}
Beautiful.
Tags: black and white, bugs, children, creepy, innocence, intricate line drawings, ladybug, nostalgia, red, surreal, sweet/melancholy, trauma, twins/doppelgangers/doubles
“Clump” by iamamiwhoami
A mysterious, beautiful, frenetic, and vaguely sad music video from iamamiwhoami.Tags: electronic music, experimental music, hauntingly beautiful, iamamiwhoami, jonna lee, meadow, music videos, mystical, nature, surreal
Marcela Bolívar’s Ash Series
{Ash}>>Marcela Bolívar<<
Tags: emotive, foliage, hauntingly beautiful, hazy, marcela bolivar, modern fairy tales, nature, otherworldly photography, photomanipulation, silver, surreal
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
Lost Fish’s Alice
These beautiful images are from the book Alice, à travers le miroir, a French edition of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There illustrated by Lost Fish (see my previous post on her).
Tags: (twists on) traditional art, alice in wonderland, children, cute little girls, dollflesh, fragility, historically inspired, illustrations, innocence/menace, lolita-esque, lost fish, neo-victorian, pop surrealism, porcelain, precious, queens, red and white, surreal, sweet/melancholy
Alternate Trailer for “Melancholia”
Following the first trailer I posted earlier, this is a second trailer for Lars von Trier’s upcoming movie Melancholia. I am so excited for this! It promises to be so, so big, and visually stunning.
Melancholia will be released in New York and LA on Nov. 11, and in other cities across the US starting Nov. 18, but it will be available On Demand on Oct. 7, so you can watch it at home a month before its theatrical release. I feel like this is something that should be seen in the theater, but I will probably be too tempted to resist; and of course it’s great for those who don’t live in one of the cities where it will be playing.
Tags: hauntingly beautiful, lars von trier, sci-fi, surreal, trailers
Diego Indraccolo + Pok U Chan
These images are from Schön! Magazine, photographed by Diego Indraccolo and illustrated by Pok U Chan.
Tags: art nudes, avant-garde, black and white, dark ethereal, fashion editorial, ghostly, illustrations, inky, otherworldly photography, surreal, transparency/layering
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