It’s funny how serendipitously following one link can lead to the discovery of something entirely unrelated here on the ol’ intartubes.

Ask MetaFilter recently considered the question, What are the worst songs?, and in opining that teen death songs (such as “Tell Laura I Love Her” are the absolute worst, commenter jenfullmoon noted in passing:

Amusingly enough, Seanan McGuire’s book “Sparrow Hill Road” uses those characters in a few stories, in which Laura has become a vengeful professor and ghost Tommy has long since forgiven the main ghost character for not managing to stop him from being an idiot.

At which I cocked my head like a quizzical basset hound and discovered that the book was born out of a linked series of short stories that McGuire wrote for online magazine The Edge of Propinquity. The series focuses on Rose Marshall, a hitchhiking ghost seeking revenge on the man originally responsible for her death.

The first story is still online at the magazine site (along with some introductory notes). The rest are available through archive.today:

1. “Good Girls Go To Heaven” in The Edge of Propinquity (January 2010)
2. “Dead Man’s Party” in The Edge of Propinquity (February 2010)
3. “Tell Laura I Love Her” in The Edge of Propinquity (March 2010)
4. “Building A Mystery” in The Edge of Propinquity (April 2010)
5. “El Viento del Diablo” in The Edge of Propinquity (May 2010)
6. “Last Dance With Mary Jane” in The Edge of Propinquity (June 2010)
7. “Do You Want To Dance” in The Edge of Propinquity (July 2010)
8. “Dead Man’s Curve” in The Edge of Propinquity (August 2010)
9. “Last Train” in The Edge of Propinquity (September 2010)
10. “Bad Moon Rising” in The Edge of Propinquity (October 2010)
11. “Faithfully” in The Edge of Propinquity (November 2010)
12. “Thunder Road” in The Edge of Propinquity (December 2010)

I quite like the idea of the old urban legends having deeper, interconnected roots.

Here’s Trent Reznor and Peter Murphy performing Bauhaus’ best-known song.

(Hat tip to Pixel Pixie)

The post title is the subject line of an email I recently received from intrepid commenter xJane, and once I saw what she’d sent I could not help but concur. She wrote:

These are translated Korean horror-comics that make excellent use of the webpage medium. (Yes, there is flash and scroll-tracking involved.)

Ok-su Station Ghost

Ghost in the Masung Tunnel

Bongcheon-Dong Ghost

(in the order I think goes from best to worst.) Even being prepared for it—in the second reading—they’re creeptastic and make me want a wall at my back.

Yup yup yup yup yup. I encountered the original Korean version of one of these (the one that I now know is called “Bongcheon-Dong Ghost”) a couple of years ago and shared it in a link dump, commenting “This Webcomic strip uses Javascript to unexpectedly animate some of the frames. It is unnerving as hell. Really. You have been warned.” I was not kidding. Even having no idea what the text said, even knowing what was coming, this thing creeped me right the hell out.

I didn’t realize there were more of them (nor that there were English translations), so I researched a little further: I had suspected that “Naver” wasn’t actually the name of the comic, and this is the case; Naver is the name of a popular South Korean search engine which also offers a lot of original content within the same site (sort of like Yahoo). Part of its comics section is devoted to “webtoons,” comics that are either fully animated or enhanced by animation. The three webtoons that so thoroughly creeped xJane (and me) out are by an artist called HORANG; the front page of his/her site seems to indicate that there might be additional comics, but I don’t read Korean so I couldn’t swear to it.

Anyway, the examples linked above are like mini-horror movies right in your browser. There are likely many similar ones to be found if you feel like doing a bit of digging; webtoons seem to be particularly popular in South Korea, so both the Naver site and the web portal Daum might be worth trawling for ghosts.

And if you can’t sleep tonight, blame xJane.

“Anna should have had a closer look at the fine-print of her rental contract – for the old Viennese apartment is a creature with never ending appetite, living off the youth of its residents.”

(via The Presurfer)

Here’s one of the reasons I really love the internet: Nothing is ever truly lost.

Back in 1983, when Tim Burton was working in Disney’s animation department, he directed a live-action Japanese adaptation of Hansel and Gretel for the Disney Channel. It aired exactly once, on Halloween, and was promptly shelved (ostensibly because Disney execs didn’t appreciate the “twisted” subject matter). According to Wikipedia, “prints of the film are extremely difficult to locate, fueling rumors that the project did not exist.”

And…here it is. This appears to have been transferred from videotape, so presumably some home viewer happened to tape it the single time it aired and eventually converted it to digital. Awesome.

(Hat tip to Pixel Pixie for the very cool find)

As usual, here’s a bunch of images I’ve run across which I want to share but might not be able to hang a whole post on. Some of them have no attribution, so if you happen to know the source for any of these please leave a note in the comments. (Click to view larger.)

	Burnt Paper Nails This is a great-looking, fairly easy, nail treatment. Instructions are here.
	Addams Family Easter Eggs From Super Goody Bag. I unfortunately didn’t see these until after Easter, but you can bet I’ll be doing them next year.
	Birthday Cake All roads lead to Pinterest on this one, so I can’t tell you who the originator was. It’s funny and shouldn’t require much skill to pull off.
	Stuffed Bat This is a “Dust Bunny” art doll. There are lots more here and in the artist’s Flickr stream, but this one is my favorite.
	Taxidermunmentionables Oh, look; it’s part of a set.
	Dia de los Muertos Cake This was done by Bleeding Heart Bakery. The color is gorgeous.
	Cobra Boots I…got nothing.
	Necronomicon Costume This is by Alessandro Piva and was shot at the World Bodypainting Festival 2009 in Seeboden, Austria. There’s a closeup of the face here.
	Please Wake Up Originally seen in Weird Tales‘ Facebook feed. I just sort of liked this.
	Star Cloak This gorgeous thing is by costumer Fairytas, whose site is getting a makeover. In the meantime, you can check out her Facebook page.
	Poe Nails I can’t find the original artist so can’t give credit. The effect is really cute.
	Shirtless Vincent Price This is here because everybody should occasionally be reminded that Vincent Price was really hot.

As a child, Scottish filmmaker Lawrie Brewster was fascinated by the Owl Man, a Cornish cryptid who seems like a cross between the Moth Man and Slenderman. The Owl Man features in his new movie, Lord of Tears, and as a promotional stunt they dressed someone up in an Owl Man costume and sent him to lurk around a creepy, abandoned children’s hospital. “Urban explorers” venturing into the hospital to take photos or poke around found themselves confronted by the creature, and their reactions were caught by hidden cameras.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about this. On the one hand, if you’re wandering around an abandoned Victorian hospital it’s presumably with the intention of being mildly creeped out, and bingo! These people hit the jackpot.

On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that second guy is going to need therapy.

They’ve also done a couple of videos where the Owl Man shows up unexpected on ChatRoulette, here and here.

(via WitchArachne)

Artist Ainslie Henderson did this video for the band James. You will watch this, it will bring tears to your eyes, and then you’ll spend the rest of the day wondering how you managed to get so emotionally invested in a ball of yarn.

(via Burning Prairie)

I think I’m going to put a mild trigger warning on this, for unsettling (albeit entirely fictional) depictions of animal cruelty.

Fairies have been very thoroughly Disneyfied these days, but in the earliest stories about them they’re barbaric creatures with often malevolent motives. Artist Tessa Farmer gets back to their roots with works that are both technically astonishing and psychologically unsettling.

Her miniscule fairies incorporate bits of taxidermied insects, and she arranges them in amazingly elaborate tableaux which depicts their savage nature: Tormenting spiders, parading a captured hedgehog, attacking and parasitizing a fox.

Farmer’s site has descriptions and photos of her installations, but the site gallery is extraordinarily annoying to navigate; you can view a sample of her work at Dangerous Minds. She also did a short stop-motion animation, “Nest of the Skeletons,” for an artists’ competition at Tatton Park:

The film introduces viewers to a previously hidden world, where malevolent fairies have constructed a nest for themselves inside the guts of a weathered scarecrow in the Kitchen Garden. Built from seeds, leaves, twigs, roots, eggs, snail shells, mushrooms, moss and a woollen mitten, the nests components have been gathered from the gardens and grounds of Tatton in the tradition of birds and insects, which use external sources and materials to construct their habitats.

The fairy nest is divided into specific, purpose-built areas of activity. The Nursery space cares for the youngest fairies, newly hatched from their cocoons, while the Feeding Room is a containing space in which doting elders throw insects down to the hungry young of the colony. The Arena is a place of spectacular combat, where a fairy and a wasp wrestle in front of an enraged audience. The Larder stores captured insects for later eating and/or torture, as well as a stolen birds egg, which has been pushed inside a child’s mitten, to ensure incubation and hatching of the baby bird prior to its consumption (like the calf that exists to become veal).

These fairies are not the stuff of Disney, but are part of a richer, darker, more ancient mythology that instils fear rather than pleasure-filled fantasy. Their existence reminds us of the harsh realities of the life cycles of plants and animals, which need to consume resources at the expense of their competitors in order to survive.

I don’t know about you, but I’m never going to be able to look at Tinkerbell quite the same way.

Daniel Beaulieu’s final project for the Vancouver Film School’s 3D animation program is Malaise, a stylish, bloody SF short.

(via Neatorama)