The ending to this short film by Rodrigo Blaas isn’t terribly surprising, but I like its general creepiness.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best ones. Country Living Magazine featured a home ostensibly made over for Halloween although the decorations are so minimal and restrained that their “Whooo, spooky” is more subtle than my everyday decor.

However, I really love these ravens.

The ones shown here are just paper cutouts (the article includes a template) in glass vases, but you could do something a little more permanent using (depending on your budget) plastic or taxidermied specimens. You can usually find decent-looking crow props around Halloween, and they’re also available online from outdoor suppliers some toy companies.

Square glass vases are easy to find at florists and craft suppliers, although if you’re planning to display them in the bathroom or other high-humidity area you would probably want something sealed. You might look for cloches and bell jars or for the kind of glass case used for displaying dolls or other tall collectible items.

I like the varied height of the specimens in the example, so you might arrange one on the floor of the case, one on a rock or other low mount, and the last on a perch: For a “Victorian curiosity” look, a simple wooden T-shape is good (available at pet stores, or just make your own out of a couple of dowels), and an interesting branch is good for a more natural setting.

This sort of accent is the kind of “stealth goth” project that’s great if you want to inject a little darkness in your decor without being overt about it. The look is somber but sophisticated, letting you entertain dreams of Poe without making your in-laws nervous.

(via theLENNOXX)

Halloween Army – Group devoted to emphasizing the positive aspects of Halloween.

The Most Beautiful Spider in the World – That sort of sounds like the title of a children’s book. Gorgeous close-up photos of jumping spiders in all their cuddly glory. (Hat tip to xJane)

Meg Matthews’ Home – A couple of shots of the interior of Noel Gallagher’s ex-wife’s home. I sort of love the bathroom.

Girl in a Vestibule – The comments are divided on whether or not the video is staged, but this kind of prank amuses me either way.

Hitchcock Reimagined – Some very slick updates of posters for four classic movies.

Alien vs. Pooh – An odd little Webcomic…thing that’s about just what it sounds like it’s about. I think my favorite panel involves the thing that Tiggers do best.

How to Speak Zombie – Learn the language and blend in seamlessly when the apocalypse comes. (Hat tip to Kitten Herder)

Sometimes Para Abnormal really speaks to me.

Fashion Infusion has a great tutorial for gussying up a pair of plain shoes with chains and studs. I love this kind of DIY embellishment: It’s fairly simple, but the result is really stunning and looks like it took far more effort than it really did.

Check out some of the blog’s other DIY ideas too: I’m especially fond of these fingernail gloves and these decorated tights. There aren’t any instructions for those two, but they’re wonderful inspiration nonetheless.

(via Haute Macabre)

Just a tip, but apparently they are really serious about this whole “voodoo has to be done on a DOLL” thing.
— debihope

I had planned to teach my robot right and wrong, but so far I’m pretty impressed with its choice of victims.
— badbanana

I hope my wife realizes one day I will come home with magic beans.
— sween

“You’re never alone.”: A phrase that’s maybe cute to find in a love note, but horrifying to find smeared on a fogged up bathroom mirror.
— tehawesome

You can tell a lot about a person during the opening of Queen’s “Under Pressure” depending on how bummed they are it’s not “Ice Ice Baby”.
— kellydeal

We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books–some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails–we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.
— Cory Doctorow, in a speech about DRM (This isn’t funny; I just really liked it)

I love the elegant look of wax seals, but it’s sometimes difficult (or expensive) to find the perfect design. The RageHaus blog has a great tutorial on making a custom seal using a wooden dowel.

The pattern is incised with a wood-burning tool, so unless you have a very steady hand you might not be able to get the same kind of fiddly little detail that you would with a cast metal stamp. If you don’t have a wood-burning tool, I expect that it might also be possible to carve the design with an X-Acto knife or a small Dremel tool.

The technique should be fine for things like monogram initials in the font of your choice or patterns with a fairly simple outline (say, bats rather than intricate spiderwebs). Making your own is certainly cheaper than having a custom stamp designed for you, and the dowel should hold up much longer than stamps made of linoleum or other soft materials.

The DIY method gives you great flexibility in matching a seal to its intended purpose: The invitations for each party you throw could have different themed seals, and RPG props, Halloween decorations, or special documents could all benefit from a seal with an appropriate design.

(via MAKE)

Alice in Wonderland Hair Clips – Cute and easy idea for using scraps of fabric you can’t bear to part with.

Paint Strip Wall Decoration – Room “wallpapered” with decoupaged hardware-store paint swatches. This would be an interesting design done with things like wine labels or vintage photographs, too.

8 Unconventional Ways to be Buried – The title is a bit of a misnomer, since this is actually a list of ways to dispose of human remains, none of which involve actual burial.

Miskatonic University Hazard Labels – Downloadable labels warning of various dire supernatural hazards.

404 Page – This site’s error message amused me.

The Trembling Veil of Bones – In addition to having a seriously awesome title, this film’s plot sounds intriguing.

Potency – Artist Nina Maria Kleivan dressed her baby daughter Faustina up as various evil dictators to illustrate how everyone begins life the same. Now that the kid has a taste for minions (not to mention a name like Faustina), she’s bound to grow up to be an Imperial Overlord.

These are kind of brilliant. I ran across them on Orange and Black, and a bit of sleuthing revealed that they were part of an ad campaign in Romania. Guinness is a niche brand there, and the coasters were created as a low-cost idea to drive sales on Halloween.

These would be a fun and not-too-terribly-difficult project if you’re handy with an X-Acto knife. The coasters could be cut out of acetate or other thin plastic, or possibly fron thin sheets of cork; if they won’t be used heavily they might also be cut from sturdy felt.

A set of these coasters would be an interesting hostess gift, particularly if paired with a six-pack of Guinness or a dark alcohol like Blavod. For a simple idea, they have an enormous amount of style.

This is just adorable. Craftster member isfive is decorating her son’s nursery, but she can’t paint the walls because she’s renting. Instead she’s adding a big dollop of color by hand-stenciling this fantastic dresser. There are photos on her Craftster post and great project details on her blog.

I love the clean graphic look of the stencils, and this is just a wonderful (and inexpensive!) way to bring some color to a room without painting the walls. I particularly like stencils because they don’t require the artistic level that hand-painting does, so you can turn out professional-looking results with relatively little effort.

Obviously, you could go a bit darker by replacing the pterodactyls with bats; it would still be cute for a child’s room if they were nonthreatening fairy-tale sorts of bats, perhaps issuing from a castle window. For a more grown-up look, you might use bolder colors and spookier bats. Other creepy critters with strong silhouettes would also be good candidates for the stencil treatment: A dresser with drawers that alternated spiders and webs would be wonderfully dramatic.

(via CRAFT)