What's Groovy

Zombo's Closet brings photographer Joshua Hoffine to my attention via a groovy interview. Hoffine's work is very cool and right up my alley, mostly capturing vivid snapshots of childhood fears, sometimes using fairy tale imagery. I suppose I should warn that the children in his photos are not always fully clothed, but they are covered, and the point, as I see it, is to heighten the sense of horror in contexts of vulnerability within the home (i.e. changing into pajamas at bedtime . . . but what's that in the closet?). Check it out here! Truly excellent stuff (though I see it got some rough criticism over at Metafilter). I love pretty much everything about the picture above--the Hansel & Gretel theme is the most obvious aspect, but you also have the red dress (recalling you-know-who), and the skulls around the cottage remind me of those around Baba Yaga's uncanny hut, as depicted, for example, in Ivan Bilibin's illustration below from the tale of Vasilisa the Beautiful:


Arbogast has an outstanding analysis of the pre-credits sequence of Kiss of the Vampire. I myself have mentioned before my love of that sequence.

Speaking of vampires, Taliesin reviews Varney in quite a bit of depth and detail.

Happy birthday to Jan--and while I'm at it, happy belated Walpurgis Night, too!

Blogue Macabre suggests an interesting scheme of criteria for evaluating horror death scenes. I think, though, that rather than going through a whole movie and running every death scene through this wringer, it might work best when used more selectively, for example to pinpoint where a key scene really shines or falls short of its potential.


Horrors of it All has an awesome werewolf vs. werewolf pre-code comic story on tap--if you liked this mod chick laying some karate on a werewolf, check out this one werewolf doing a judo flip on another!

I'm very sad. I missed my friends from Eurotrash Paradise on their Seattle get-together (this is the same crew I hung out with at last year's Horrorfind). While you're at Neil Vokes's site, be sure to check out this pulpy commission, based on this 1936 Spicy Mystery Stories illustration.

Last but not least, Valter of Documents reminded me recently of his great post on Michelet's classic La Sorciere--which he'd updated with mention of a 1973 anime based on the book! Here's the trailer:



The whole movie is available in 13 parts on youtube, starting here. I've watched it all now, and I have to say, it has some striking, unsettling, sometimes downright troubling images and scenes, but it's all so psychedelically hyper-stylized and kaleidoscopic that it actually becomes desensitizing and even downright boring in places. I guess it doesn't help that I can't understand the Japanese, and no English subtitles are provided. It did help, however, that I've read the original book, and without that, I'd have been totally adrift in the flood of arty-weird imagery.

Whew! And that's it for this installment. Stay groovy!