Vintage Horror T Shirts (Ebay's Got 'Em, We Want 'Em)

Good morning!

What's the T, people? I am bleary eyed at the non fiction service desk, I will tell you what. We went over to some friends' house to play Mario Kart and talk trash last night, and while we had a whale of a time, 11:45-bedtime-me is way more irresponsible than 9:45-bedtime-me, vis-à-vis the fact that when I woke up, cartoon like, to strains of one of those classical morning songs and rays of sunlight streaming through one window, it was EIGHT THIRTY. Had I set my alarm? Who can say. Had I woken up a full hour and a half later than I usually do on a work day? Absolutely. Was I supposed to actually be at work at 8:30? Uh, yeah. I parked in the $10 a day lot (instead of my usual shuttle spot) and managed to get in the door by about 9:05, but daddurn it, that is the first time I have been significantly I think ever in my four years here at the biblioteca. Ah, well.

Speaking of pulse-racing drama, however, how about vintage horror/sci-fi t-shirts? I am loving some of these vintage graphic designs almost as much as I love the movies they represent!!

VTG 1991 ALIENS movie t-shirt, horror science fiction cult classic 1980's film

As usual, I was looking for something T-O-T-A-L-L-Y different (to the point that I'm not quite sure what it was) yesterday when I fell into a veritable wormhole of these seventies', eighties', and nineties' movie tie-in t shirts. It's interesting to me that there's an even split here between the kinds of items we're looking at-- half are in the "sold to people who love the movie" category (in the back of Rolling Stone by mail, in your local record store, etc), and another good half I think are promotional items from the movie's release. I love the idea of these new-old t-shirts being in a box somewhere in someone-who-used-to-work-for-the-movie's attic like "Oh, those?". Perfect example: Matthew's dad, who was a musician in LA in the 80's, was going through some stuff in closet storage when I noticed some t-shirts that were being used almost-as-packing for some items in a carboard box-- what where they? A promotional t-shirt from the LA premiere of Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein and another from a Boz Skaggs concert in the mid-seventies'. To someone who worked in that industry, I guess it's like "Oh, yeah! I remember that. Cool, huh? Wow, that was a long time ago", whereas to the rest of us star-struck plebians, it's like "OH MY GOD. IS THIS REAL LIFE." (he let me have both of them, because he is a good father-in-law).

Deadstock 1991 PREDATOR 80s horror movie

What might have started out as "Here, wear this shirt when you're working in the production office of this super low budget movie we're trying to put together with scotch tape and dreams" or "Hey, give these away at the movie opening, maybe we can create some buzz" turns into a rare, tangible object of movie history. Looking at these, I'm reminded of the behind the scenes featurette on the dvd of The Fog. Thing I have probably mentioned 1,000,000 x: I am a HUGE "John Carpenter in his prime" fan. HUUUUGE.  I think the handful of movies he made in the late seventies' and early eighties' have STILL set a cultural high water mark for horror movies in general (and are good enough to generally excuse his 1983-2010 output...Orson Welles didn't make Citizen Kane every time he got behind the lens, either). I could tell you about how much I love The Thing until I was actually blue in the face. My little movie loving brain was sent into overdrive listening to Carpenter and ex-wife/muse Adrienne Barbeau talk about how family-like the cast and crew of these iconic movies were. There was a lot of "Yeah, this guy was my roommate's boyfriend, and the sound guy was dating so-and-so's sister, and then we all went up to Santa Monica for Memorial Day" type stuff that I just cannot see "young Hollywood" doing today...all very "We're all trying to make it in the movies, let's help each other!" and things haphazardly falling into place, rather than the kind of impenetrable front and implacable sang froid it feels like you have to have to be in the business nowadays.

PHANTASM movie promo t shirt TALL MAN cult horror

At ANY RATE-- how about going to work every day in your "SEND MORE COPS" Return of the Living Dead t shirt? I want one that has the Tina quote "YOU'VE GOT TO LET ME EAT YOUR BRAAAINS." That whole movie is golden, really:

RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD vintage 1985 t-shirt

I have always loved spooky scary stuff, but it wasn't until I was out of college and teaching high school that I got mondo into 70's and 80's horror movies. I was reading a book called, appropriately enough, Horror Films of the 1970's, by John Kenneth Muir...it is a FABULOUS reference guide/gateway drug to the genre. As I was taking down copious "what to watch" notes in my composition book, a fellow member of the English department who worked across the hall said, "Oh, are you into horror movies? Have you seen any Argento?" Having had a bad experience with Suspiria (which is, of course, a super-accomplished movie in the horror canon, but not one I particularly "liked"), I tossed my chesnut lack-of-curls and said, "Yeah, I didn't really like him as much as I thought I was supposed to." Undeterred, my colleague went, "Ok, but have you seen Deep Red? Opera? Tenebre?" These would all soon be titles I myself would be spouting to others when they asked me about my interest in horror movies, because the guy was SPOT ON, and I was a complete convert. He ended up lending me those, Phantasm and Phantasm II, Zombi, and a whole slew of movies that had otherwise flew under my radar. God bless him.

Vintage Hellraiser Pinhead t-shirt, medium

Without that book, its companion piece Horror Films of the 1980's, and my co-worker/cinephile's gentle nudge over the edge of a VHS horror treasure trove I never knew existed, I might not be overly familiar with the movie Monkey Shines, which is actually a VERY GOOD George A. Romero helmed horror movie about a paraplegic man and his overly-attached helper monkey. 

Vintage original 1980's Monkey Shines horror movie t-shirt, small

Or Maniac (1980), which was remade in 2012 with Elijah Wood as the titular maniac. I haven't seen the new version, but it would be hard to top the skin-crawlingly creepy and gory original.

VTG MANIAC 1980 ORIGINAL MOVIE PROMO T-SHIRT 80S CULT HORROR FILM TOM SAVINI

Well nigh perfect Night of the Living Dead shirt? Yes, please. Could watch this for days (and the 90's remake is just as good!)

Night of the Living Dead Zombie Hands T-Shirt Vintage 1980s S

Little Goldblum love up in this piece:

1986 THE FLY cult horror movie t-shirt vtg unworn 80s David Cronenberg

Can't help loving Norman Bates...while the original is a masterwork, I still think the franchise is solid in a drive-in movie kind of way. I used to watch the mess of out of them back-to-back when USA network would run them in block succession in the summer when I was a kid. "No-o-o-orman....?" Have you seen Psycho II, III, IV?

Original Psycho II Movie Shirt Horror 1983 Norman Bates Vintage Rare T Shirt m

WHY IS THIS IS $214.99? I love how the $14.99 is just more torment-- get your two hundred bucks for that shirt AND two free pizzas, why don't you.

XS  vtg 70s 1978 DAWN OF THE DEAD george a romero ZOMBIE MOVIE t shirt

Gregory Peck/Lee Remick realness:

Vintage The Omen 1976 Donner Rare Horror Movie 666 Logo Promo T-Shirt Deadstock

The aforementioned Zombi was the first Lucio Fulci movie I saw-- while they're all gleefully over the top, this one, with Mia's sister Tisa Farrow in the lead, is still the most coherent and horribly enjoyable if you ask me.

RARE VINTAGE 80's LUCIO FULCI ZOMBIE HORROR CULT MOVIE ZOMBI T SHIRT

ALSO remade, ALSO a solid original to begin with. Two words: speedboat death.

RARE VINTAGE 80's I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE HORROR CULT MOVIE T-SHIRT

Anyway! I gotta head for the hills, but tell me what you think! Which of these shirts would you almost spend that much money on? Have any horror movie favorites? Do you know anyone who used to work in the movie or music industry and just got tons of free promotional shirts a gal like I would drool over (just making conversation here, no ulterior motive...)? Let's talk!

That's all for today, but I'll be back tomorrow with more vintage madness. Have a great Wednesday! See you then.

"Creepy" Comics (1964-1983, Warren Publishing on Internet Archive)

Good afternoon!

How was your weekend, kiddlings? Anything exciting on the home front? We had an action packed (ish) weekend-- my dad and I hit the sales on Saturday (natch), Matthew and I went to a baby shower that night for two good friends who only has a little while left until we get to meet their daughter (so exciting!!), and as a married unit, we spent all day Sunday playing old CD-ROM scary video games and eating way too much General Tso's Bean Curd (which doesn't sound as appetizing as General Tso's chicken, but TOTALLY IS). As for this workday, I am ragged but I'm right!

What I'd LOVE to clue you in to today...the find of the century, as far as I'm concerned, for a penurious vintage horror comic lover...INTERNET ARCHIVE HAS OVER A HUNDRED ISSUES OF CREEPY. No, I am not kidding. Creepy fans, rejoice!

I'm a member ! Are you? (source)

Creepy was one of the first and best horror comics to come out of the post Comic Code Authority era. Similar to the film industry's 1931 Hayes code crackdown on Filmland "indecency", the ire of America's concerned parents and civic leaders was raised in the early 1950's by horror comics' shock-til-you-drop aesthetic. Your average horror title of that time managed to fit in a dizzying array of horrible, hideous, and hilarious fates for their characters with an economy of storytelling and excess of splattery gore that delighted its readers, both young and old. We're talking grave robbing ghouls, accursed shrunken heads, witches, goblins, decapitations, immolations, premature burials, zombies, gypsy curses...pretty much anything a Cramps or X song of the late seventies' would be about, Tales from the Crypt (in its original incarnation), Crime Suspenstories, and Vault of Horror had you covered. When William Gaines's EC comics, the parent company of each of those titles, was effectively shuttered by censorship, many of the industry's best artists moved on to satirical comics like Mad magazine, which held their own subversive (but code-approved) sway over the nation's youth. But what about us bats-and-moonlight loving spookies-seekers? That's where Creepy comes in.

source

Founded by Russ Jones in 1964, the idea behind Creepy was to round up some of the best comic book artists in the business back into the job that brought a lot of them to the field in the first place-- scaring the pants off people through beautifully executed, imaginatively rendered horror story panels. Sure, some of the issues may showcase familiar terror classics like Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart" or Ambrose Bierce's "The Damned Thing" (hey! They're in public domain, do you blame them?), but outside of your own imagination, I assure you, you haven't seen it done quite this well. With an average of seven individual tales, along with features like "Loathsome Lore" (an illustrated page of panels featuring "true" horror stories that actually do have some basis in fact) and "Dear Uncle Creepy" (where the magazine's mascot fields questions, comments, and brickbats), you are getting a lot of bang for your horror buck! The magazine ran 145 issues, and even had two sister publications in the horror genre, Eerie and Vampirella.

source

Look. At this Frank Frazetta. Cover. Is this real life? In terms of depth, skill, and creativity, these are to the horror comic what, say, N.C. Wyeth was to children's book illustrations. Meaning: the rest of y'all go home, a gold standard has been set!

See how each panel has about thirty-times the usual amount of attention to detail you would get in a similar comic book of the time? I can't get over the shading and the shadow

While I do miss the "people getting their heads grafted onto other bodies" and a "grave robber with a Frigidaire full of human cold-cuts" storylines of the fifties' pre-code EC output, and it's still technically my favorite type of scary comic, there's a calmer, less-hysteric feeling to these sixties' issues of Creepy while still keeping the wheels of one's imagination turning. The content reminds me less of a Stephen-King-edited-horror-anthology, in tone, and more of say the publication Weird Tales, with a mix of sci-fi and fantasy thrown into the mélange and not just horror. Take, for example, the popular Adam Link series that featured prominently throughout two years of Creepy. Link was actually a reboot, originally appearing in the pages of 1930's-era Amazing Stories. The titular character is a robot whose self-awareness predates Star Trek: TNG's Data and even Asimov's I, Robot (with which it actually shares a title in one installation) by some distance, and asks the same questions about how much humanity you can fit into a tin can, when that tin can can grow human emotions along with its steely, super-human strength and agility. I'm a fan, what can I say.

An example of the "Loathsome Lore" feature from issue 11 (source)

Anyway, I have to scoot back to work, but if you're into horror comics, profitez tout suite, avail yourself IMMEDIATELY to this online archive of full-page scans, there's no telling how long they will or won't be available (while Internet Archive is a totally above-board website, I worry about the nebulous copyright issues surrounding who-owns-what with regard to the Warren Publishing oeuvre). Start with issue one via this link, then scroll through the Warren entries (which are kind of jumbled up with others) via this one. And don't get too scared! Or if you do, come back and we can commiserate about how I have to check my chifferobe for ghosts at least once a calendar week because of my steady horror-intake. :)

Have a great Monday! See you tomorrow!

Weekend Finds: CREEPTASTIC Edition (Cow Skull, Tales from the Crypt)

Good morning!

Thanks for all your comments on the post yesterday about weird, weird houses! I'm going to feel a little bit like the pot calling the kettle black, because today, guess what I have to show you? Weird things, in my weird house. This weekend, I was out at an estate sale in Waverly Belmont, when the unexpected struck! I finally bought a skull of my very own.

A girl and her skull.

The estate sale was highly touted by the sellers on estatesales.net as being midcentury and "you won't believe these prices"...both were true, but not in the way I would have wanted it to be. When my dad and I arrived at a 1940's duplex off Wedgewood, ummm...things were midcentury, but they were also so astronomically expensive that I didn't even look too hard at anything. One, everything was stuffed in a tiny front room and the yard of the duplex. Two, a pair of floor lamps on the concrete porch were marked EIGHT. HUNDRED. DOLLARS. Eight hundred what?! Kids, this is NOT my kind of estate sale. I guess there are those among us who would coo remorsefully, "Oh, wow, Milo Baumann side chairs for $1,000 instead of $2,000? What a steal! I wish I could afford that!" but this little ragamuffin was rebuked and rebuffed by sticker shock, and slunk away towards the car with Pappy in tow feeling snookered by the advertisement. "'You won't believe the prices' my eye!" I grumbled.

As we returned to our street parking space, I noticed another sale going on in the ground floor/basement level of the house. "Well, we could just look," I said, and we saw nothing with any price tag on it, but lots of smalls. A seventies' psychiatrist's couch in blue vinyl. Two enormous ceramic sixties' lamps. On a folding tv tray sat this cow skull. I asked the man under the car port how much it was. "That's yours for twenty dollars!" Holding it by its eye sockets, I said, "'D'you take fifteen?" And the skull was mine!

Did it move? Did that just move or did I just move?

Dad was nonplussed. "What'd you want a thing like that for? I'm not carrying that, you carry that." Me ((carrying it)): "It is totally going to look spooktacular in my living room." Dad: "I could have got you one of those up at Grandma Wheeler's farm, attached to the skeleton!" Me: "And that would have saved me fifteen dollars. But let's let bygones be bygones, Pappy. (beat) THIS THING IS SO SCARY!!" Do you ever see skulls in knick-knack boutique shops here in town or at the flea market? One this size I saw not a month ago was sixty five dollars firm at one booth at the fairgrounds. And here, my very own, for less than twenty bucks. The little Museum of Natural History, turn of the century scientist part of my heart is oogin' out.

I feel actual human remorse about not getting a pair of ram's horns that were at the same sale, but at the risk of pressing my luck and or turning my house into something Jame Gumb would feel at home in, I resisted. Farmlife is funny because, as a city slicker, I don't think much about how enormous a cow or a horse is until you see it in person (or in skull form). This skull easily measures the length of my elbow to my fingertips, and comes complete with thumb sized flat teeth. Aren't the jagged little cracks in it interesting!! Aren't its ocular cavities huge? While it would actually kill me to see something like this in the process of becoming a skull (I am as chicken hearted as they come in some ways), having it as this weird little pre-fossil in my living room is thrilling to the nth degree. 

What is the skull sitting on? That would be my big acquisition of a week or two ago, this half-set of Man, Myth, and Magic from the Goodwill Outlet. I dug, and I dug, and I dug, and I dug through the book bins, but finally, I had to give up that nine of the twenty-four volumes might be the best I could do on a busy Friday afternoon in a competitive shopping environment. Subtitled "An Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Supernatural", this series originated as a serial magazine published in England, overseen by occult writer Richard Cavendish. All 112 issues were eventually collated into this encyclopedia format, and is it ever a doozy of a bound volume set. Mind, I didn't have any prior knowledge of this when I picked the books up-- I just knew the covers were insane and the inside articles not much less bizarre!

Volume seventeen might have been the best selling point...Native American spirit man, take me away!

Inside, articles range from secret societies to tribal taboos to "things that go bump in the night". Take this article on "Belial, the demon of lies". I can't remember which of the recent horror movies uses him as a plot device (Paranormal Activity? Insidious? Sinsiter? The Conjuring? I swear to goodness one of these mentioned him by name but my pre-coffee brain is coming up goose eggs and Google is not helping), but one of them does. Look at the walking demons in the top-of-page illustration ("Court of Satan, how may I help you?"), and whatever the hell-o is happening in the lower illustration ("What? Why? Huh?").

Look at the hands swooping down to steal the guy on the left's guitar, the other guy's coat, and tie them up to boot! This illustration refers to the Davenport Brothers, which, according to Wikipedia, "were American magicians in the late 19th century, sons of a Buffalo, New York policeman. The brothers presented illusions that they and others claimed to be supernatural." HECK YES THEY DID. This broadside is practically framable...if only I didn't fear breaking up the text:

The war between heaven and hell...see the angels, butterflies, pigs, people...

And tribesmen in ceremonial garb (not sure location) that you would hate to bump into on the way back to the campsite in the middle of the night. THESE BOOKS HAVE EVERYTHING. I got all of them for about nine bucks, so I'm wary to spend that amount on a single volume on Amazon, but I might have to buckle and try and slowly complete the set. IT'S TOO GOOD NOT TO.

Last but not least in this parade of creepy weekend finds, I was at Great Escape in Madison the other day, checking out the comic book section. I don't know Marvel from DC from whatever else, which I know is physically stinging the flesh of people who used to hold me in high regard prior to this declaration...but I spend a lot of time in the comic section of Great Escape looking for old school scary horror titles. I've talked about my allegiance to scaring the skin off my own body with these ghoulish tales before in this post, so imagine the thrill of me finding this complete set of Tales from the Crypt covers that were reprinted in 1979 from the original fifties', pre-code titles. Sadly, they were more than the original $15 cover price-- happily, I had had a margarita or two at Las Maracas prior to our arriving at said comic book store, so I pulled the trigger on these amazing lithographs sans hésitation:

The color on the prints alone is worth the price of admission. SO! GORGEOUS! SO! OOGY! Frequent horror contributor cartoonist Jack Davis (who later co-founded Mad magazine) did these three deliciously disgusting covers. First one? Features not ONLY a mouldering mummy, but also some two-headed Homunculus creeping out of its jar. Sign. Me. UP!

Don't step there! No! There's some ancient zombie prospector! And a tiny frog! You will find no gold here, tenderfoot, best be on your way!

 This werewolf is all "Look, I am not afraid of vividly murdering whosoever of you m'f'r's keep MESSIN' WITH ME, SWEARTAGAAAD...." And I kind of agree with him and or feel like this at the end of a long day at the biblioteca. The color and detail of these, again, just take my breath away.

And there's TWENTY SEVEN more where that came from! Amazing. I'm thinking of replacing the Woody Allen Annie Hall wall in the kitchen with these creepsters for a time.

So! There you have it. My house is ghost-central right now, and ain't I proud of it! How about you? Found anything feeeearsome and friiiiightful at the estate sales or out at the thrift lately? If you like this kind of stuff, what is it that appeal to you about being spooked out of your wits? Do you collect anything a little off the beaten path? Let's talk!

That's all I got for today, but I'll be back tomorrow with more (probably non-terrifying, but I'm not making any promises) rants and raves. Have a great Tuesday! I'll see you tomorrow. :D

Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories (2013)

Good morning!

Just in time for Halloween, Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories is one of my best internet discoveries of late! Like well-crafted horror, a vintage aesthetic, and/or Japanese culture? You are in luck, my friend.

The day after the wedding but the day before the honeymoon, we were both in a daze and spent most of that Sunday curled up in the green room watching these Asian horror snippets that, in spite of looking like a friendly little animated series, are completely terrifying. Each episode is available to watch for free on the anime site Crunchyroll, and don't think I haven't done exactly that. 

The title of the series is a play on the word "kamishibai". A storytelling technique that originated in 12th century Japan, kamishibai enjoyed a resurgence in the first half of the twentieth century. The performance art utilizes paper scrolls to illustrate morality stories, and was popular in twenties' through the fifties' in the format you see above-- the storyteller would arrive on a bicycle outfitted with a wooden "theater" to display a series of still pictures. Yamishibai uses the framework of that as the introduction to each episode-- as a portly Hitchcock or a bushy eyebrowed Serling would introduce each of their spooky tales, so does the kamishibai storyteller (did they wear creepy masks like this? Or is that some to-make-it-scarier touch?) introduce each little snippet of horror.

I can't not look!

A lot of what appeals in this and other terror imports from Japan is the economy with which each story is told. I'm reminded immediately of Hontoni Kowai Hanashi (Scary True Stories, which I posted about last year)...I spent like two days straight watching six minute segment after six minute segment of that show on Youtube, because the thrills and chills just kept coming! With less than 10 minutes to get your scare across, you don't have time to set up jerry-rigged character motivations and interlace multiple flimsy plotlines-- in other words, there's no room for the "fat" of a lot of exercises in horror, just the lean, straight terror. Lots of old time radio shows were that way-- with thirty minutes, you don't have the luxury of spending fifteen of them explaining why you're going up to a haunted cabin in the woods; the show had better open with you there, about to find something terrible crawling on the roof! One of the best of this genre was "Inside Out", by Lights Out, Everybody genius Arch Oboler (it appears under the title "The Dark" on a sixties' record Mr. O put out, also here on Youtube). In eight minutes, there's a full opera of horrible things happening in the sub-basement of an abandoned building, and it's only after you're scared out of your skin that you might even pause to think why x happened at z moment. Who cares! It's just scary! 

You would noooot like what this cute girl is seeing with that flashlight.

Yamishibai is like that. The off-kilter, paper-theater way the animation is presented only makes it more effective. Nothing is still in the frames, but ever-so-slightly moving. One of my favorites (they're all my favorites) of the baker's dozen of entries up on Crunchy Roll is "Contradiction", which opens with a ringing telephone in the middle of the night and a desperate call from a friend who thought it would be fun to break into an abandoned hospital with her boyfriend (you know, like you do). Spoiler alert: bad things happened at the hospital. I love how the emphasis in these little cutlets is not on working out, in a cerebral, mystery murder kind of way, why things are happening. The spare fact, just that things are happening, that is deeply unsettling. You know how, in a dream, there's no logic to what is terrifying about "that door", but you just know, somewhere in your primal little guts, that whatever's behind it is wrong, or bad? There's the exact nerve this and the other Japanese series hits. I wish someone in America would adopt this kind of gut-level horror! I'm so tired of all these wan Saw remakes-- pictures where people who don't understand what is scary try to make a whole movie about it. What we need is real, old-fashioned, curl your hair scares!

Turns out yes, they did. SO. FREAKIN. SCARY. (episode here)

It's neat, too, that the chapters are presented in their original Japanese with subtitles. Nothing in this world is worse for a foreign film o phile than sitting through something serious that has been dubbed. NOTHING. EUUGH. I can't bear it. Also, watching a ton of them back to back, my little parrot brain loves picking up a word or two in another language. Things I learned, which are things you need to know in a Japanese horror setting: chotto matte (wait a minute), Taihen-da! (something terrible, or an emergency), dou shita no (what's wrong?), oka-aah-san (mom!). Matthew, from his scholarly obsession with j-rock, old school anime, and Japanese video games, can speak actually quite a lot of Japanese (he took classes at TFLI, too, which couldn't have hurt his fluency), so I can be like "WHAT DO THEY KEEP SAYING?" and he can actually explain to me the vocabulary being used. Nerd alert. 

Have you watched anything deeply unsettling lately? Got a yen for horror that just isn't sated by your run of the mill teen scream movie? What do you like to watch on Halloween to get you in the proper spooky spirit? Let's talk!

If you end up watching an episode or two (or...again, all of them at once), let me know what you think!! Show link here.

That's all for today-- if I recover from the series of tiny cardiac episodes the ends of each of these clips has created in my terror-weakened body, I will be back tomorrow with more Halloween postings! Til then. :)

Haikyo: Abandoned Places (Tokyo Times Blog; Nashville Nine)

Good morning!

Well, I straight lied to you about not writing about more scary stuff today. Hope you can find it in your heart to forgive this fear-seeker. I found the coolest website yesterday afternoon while reading an article on the Huffington Post about an art installation/public theater space built using abandoned home material from a house in York, Alabama. While that feature was interesting, the slideshow at the bottom of the article, having nothing to do with the art installation but some connection re: abandoned places, REALLY caught my eye.

Doesn't this look exactly like a castle? Like a wolfman or a consumptive heiress or a plucky governess with ghost children for wardens might live in this very place? The interior is just as spooky as the exterior:

So perfectly abandoned!

Are these stills from a Dario Argento movie? No! They're real life shots from the home of a wealthy turn-of-the-century politician in Japan. Throughout the elegantly emptied rooms, left-behind items include a television, an ice box, sake cups...even, most unnervingly, a pair of false teeth! You can see the rest of the photos from this set here, on the blog from which they originated. Once I saw that there were more under the subheading "Haikyo/Ruins", you know I couldn't just stop there. Bring on the lonely, the once-ornate, those places in a sumptuous state of neglect!

An abandoned clinic (original post here)

Haikyo is a Japanese term meaning "ruins" (sidenote: the most desolate words in English sound so much more pleasant in Japanese-- samuzamu, which sounds like it should be afternoon children's programming, is actually one word for "desolate" in that language). Lee Chapman, a photographer living in Japan since 1988, has assembled lots of fascinating material, period, on his blog "Tokyo Times" (http://www.wordpress.tokyotimes.org/) but what really impressed me was the aforementioned subsection of the blog of photos of abandoned places (hence, haikyo). I always think of Japan as being crowded, clean, efficient, and streamlined in their national urban design, so it's kind of jarring to see these forsaken properties in such extreme disarray and destitution.

Abandoned hotel (original post here)

Seeing these and other urban exploration photos, aren't you just shocked by how much there is just laying fallow in the world? Enough that entire buildings, homes, factories, amusement parks, asylums...WHATEVER...can be left to ruin, much more easily than they could be converted or re-purposed for the years and years of use that they obviously still have left in them? These spaces got me thinking about one literally close to home. Very close to my street, there are the ruins of a state owned Aged Masonic Home and School for Boys. Both buildings date back to the turn of the century, and were active governmental and civic agencies until the late eighties'/early nineties'. Here's a photo the Nashville Scene ran in this article, published in December of 2009:

Pretty serious, right? The site rated the "Nashville Nine" that year, a heartwrenching list of the pitiful few historical properties spared the wrecking ball in my hometown, but left to rot and ruin. The description from that list's publication in Nashville Business Journal reads like this:

Home for Aged Masons/Masonic School, R.S. Gass Boulevard and Hart Lane, Inglewood. This three-story limestone building constructed in 1913-1915 and the nearby boy’s school are the only surviving buildings from a larger complex dating to the early 20th century, when the Tennessee Masons provided a campus to house widows, orphans and the aged in the Masonic family. Designed by the Nashville architectural firm of Asmus & Norton, the Colonial Revival-style home is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. 

The State of Tennessee purchased the property in 1941 for use as a tuberculosis hospital, but it was vacated in the 1990s. 

See what I mean? Still vacant. There was a larger, absolutely terrifying looking building right close to the road on Hart Lane when I was growing up (it's easily within walking distance...but why would you want to walk there! Ghosts partout!), but it's since been torn down. I can remember when I was little getting the ultra-heebies thinking about ghoulish things mingling with dust motes and flaked paint, to the point that I wouldn't look at the many-paned, high, narrow windows as we drove down the hill toward home for fear that some uncanny  face would be peering back at me. Needless to say, I read way too many Tales from the Crypt comic books, then AND now, but it wreaked havoc on my young imagination! With all the attention being paid things east of the Cumberland River (a MAJOR climate shift, attitudinally, from my high school years in which people would outright refuse to pick me up from my house after dark in case they got lost "over there"), I hope the two remaining buildings get a sliver of attention or an ounce of cooperation for the preservationists who would like to help rather than be helpless in this building's future.

Mitchell House at Castle Heights, in Lebanon, TN, after its renovation.
The building my dad and I went in was just north of this on the same campus (source)

So! Do you have any spooky, abandoned interiors that have caught your fancy lately? What's the most terrifying real life abandoned place you've set foot in? My dad and I made it halfway into an abandoned Victorian house on the campus of Lebanon's Castle Heights Military Academy, circa 1995, waaay before it was renovated and brought back to life as a restaurant (now closed?) and civic city center. Both of us being big fans of the movie Ghost Story, we snuck in as far as the parlor, seeing that the only item in the house was an old upright piano, and got too scared to continue! "I wanted to get out of there before something started playing that piano!", in the immortal words of my Pappy. See! There's a saved abandoned place! Here's hoping the rest of these buildings get some new life someday, too!

That's all for today...you may or may not hear something scary from me tomorrow! I guess I'm in a weird mood in this final stretch of wedding planning, haha! Take care, and I'll see you then.

Popular Mechanics Does Halloween (Vintage Costume and Party Ideas, 1927-1934)

Good morning!

If you're a mechanically minded young Halloween enthusiast, let me tell you, for the research I did in Google Books today, Popular Mechanics of the twenties and thirties' has GOT YOU COVERED. Can you imagine all these little ragamuffin kids running around their neighborhood alleys, picking up scrap wood and other materials to build their FREAKING AWESOME ROBOTIC COSTUME for Halloween? This might actually top the Halloween parade stuff I mentioned on Tuesday...it's just out of control:

To quote the text: "Making a robot requires a lot of work, but it is worth the effort to create a real sensation at a party, and assuredly, this mechanical man will be the talk of the community." AMEN! I've seen basic cardboard robot people wandering around parties, and been greatly impressed-- think about how much greater of an impression an incredibly detailed and articulated robot would have made! I love his little knee flaps. How could you even suggest going as a sack of potatoes (see the circular inset) or a "tent" (I have no idea why someone would want to go as a tent for Halloween, but there you are) when you'd have to walk in the company of a robot, complete with debonair cigarette holder in mouth? So Ronald Colman. So.

These two are from the same article, and I think they're pretty great! The Roman costume pretty much just requires a little handiwork and great legs...ditto to the clock costume.

These two I was less impressed with....while colored flashlight bulbs hidden in your glasses would look kind of neat, wouldn't they also reflect back into your eyes? The baby costume, comprised primarily of painted cheesecloth stretched across your face, seems way too much like a robbery get-up or a nightmare to be appealing. Onward!

Once you've got your costume figured out, you're going to want to think about what you want to do for entertainment at your Halloween festivities.Look at the little illustrations from this article on different "tricks" you can play on your guests. Also, look at the ghoul in the ghost fortunes panel! What is going on?! He is TOO scary. That same trick requires you to use a "dilute solution of sulphuric acid" which sounds like nothing so much as a bad idea, but you use that to write the fortunes out (they're invisible) and then heat from a jerry rigged curling iron (now known as a "witches' wand") makes the fortune appear at the right moment. It may sound like an episode of Maury entitled "Pranks Gone Horribly Wrong" waiting to happen, but you need to man up! This is the thirties! Child safety doesn't exist yet!

 I put this in here just because I love how innocuous the glove monkey looks when he's supposed to be an object of fear and terror. He's just a little hand puppet! I do like the idea of using luminous paint to one's great advantage, however...there's got to be a use for that this year that I'm not thinking of yet....

Last but not least, a box you put on your party guests' heads that distorts their vision and makes them fumble around the house looking for their way (I usually just use vodka towards this purpose, but you get the idea), and a TRULY WEIRD Halloween costume made of piano wire and pearls and black magic itself:

Have you figured out your costume yet? I did a "dry run" of mine the other day to make sure I really had it together as much as I thought I did...it ought to be good, I think! Have you gone to any elaborate measures before to pull off a truly stunning Halloween costume or trick? Share!

Hope you're still enjoying the holiday focus I've put into this week...tomorrow's Photo Friday! I wonder if I can find any vintage Doris and Ray trick or treat snaps before then. We'll have to see. 

Have a great Thursday and I'll see you tomorrow!