This stop-motion animation by Toshiko Hata won the 2012 Jury’s Choice for Short Film at the 2012 Puchon Inter­na­tional Fan­tas­tic Film Fes­ti­val. It is creepy in the way that only Japanese films seem to be able to pull off.

(via Cat)

Fairy Hunter – This awesome artwork from Davesrightmind depicts one of the natural predators of fairies.

Head in a Jar – Easy, striking kid’s costume, which appears to be inspired by this how-to guide. xJane, who sent the link, plans to make a Marie Antoinette version for herself.

Horror Fiction – A good roundup of vintage-y, free, fiction.

Creepy Skull Slouch Hat – Crochet pattern for a hat full of li’l skulls.

Steampunk “Thing” – Lovely sculpture which reimagines the Addams Family “Thing” as a clockwork hand.

8 Hilariously Nonthreatening Monsters from Japanese Folklore – A list of creatures who are somewhat less horrifying than ghostly long-haired little girls.

Armor Corsets – Although these look like they’d be rather ouchy to sit down in, they’re undeniably lovely.

Freya Jobbins – Artist who makes sculptures out of doll parts. A little NSFW; really damn creepy.

Colorized History – There’s a whole subReddit devoted to colorizing old photos. LEAP provides a small sample.

Skull Cake – Easy way to make understated skull-and-crossbones designs in icing. (Hat tip to Pixel Pixie)

A lot of steampunk costumes have a military bent, making a chestful of medals de rigeur. They’re a popular DIY item, so tutorials are abundant, but most of the ones I’ve seen either start with a premade ribbon (which limits your decorative options) or require you to go through way too many steps to achieve the desired effect. I’ve done a (hopefully simpler) take on the technique. I gothed things up a bit with my choice of pendants, so you can wear these and sneer, “That’s Admiral Frankenstein to you.”

These go together really fast, so after you fill your uniform with them, you can make extras for personalized party favors or just to award randomly to friends and co-workers (“For meritorious service in clearing the copier jam, I present you this medal of honor”).

All the gory details are right here.

Two odd “meaty” things have come across my purview lately, which is my cue to pretend they’re related and try to hang a post on them.

The first was a wonderful refrigerator ad campaign done in Germany. Bosch’s “VitaFresh” technology promises to keep food fresher longer, so they placed packages of “fresh dinosaur meat” in supermarkets to hyperbolically illustrate how long they could keep food fresh.

I adore this kind of fake-artifact thing; the packaged “meat” puts me in mind very much of the products sold in 826 stores. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to create something similar out of carved styrofoam and/or polymer clay, and they’d make awesome decorations at a time travel-themed party.

The other meat-related thing is BiteLabs, an organization which purports to grow meat from “celebrity tissue samples” and use it to make artisanal salami.

We start with top-quality ingredients, and time-honored recipes for the creation of fine cured meats. We mix celebrity and animal meats, grown in house through a proprietary culturing process, into curated salami blends. Starting with biopsied myoblast cells, we grow our healthy, rich, meats in Bite Labs’ own bioreactors.

Our process yields high-quality, luxury protein, in a sustainable manner that eliminates the environmental and ethical concerns associated with traditional livestock production.

Much like the Bonsai Kittens of old they play it completely straight, with blurbs touting their “vision” for a healthier planet and a request that fans urge their favorite celebrity to contribute cells. There’s even a wish list of celebrities they particularly want to incorporate in their sausages, along with a description of what each product would taste like. The Ellen Degeneres salami, for instance: “As a salami, we see Ellen Salami composition blended with ostrich. Black pepper and garlic with a playful kick of mustard give the Ellen salami a highly approachable and well-rounded flavor. A hint of brandy and shallots will finish off the Ellen salami in exquisite fashion.”

It’s an amusing trip down the rabbit hole, and it’d be fun to see how many friends you could convince that it was legitimate. Even better, serve salami at your next party and then provide a printed “fact sheet” about which celebrity sausage your friends had just eaten. (Shadow Manor takes no responsibility for lost friendships or punches in the nose which may result from this suggestion.)

I’m feeling silly today, so I’m going to resurrect a feature from the old SF site I used to maintain. Each month we posted a screen grab from a cheesy movie and invited readers to write their own captions. One of my favorites was this shot from Dark City:

For which Shadow Jack submitted this:

As Freddy stumped wearily through the door after another fruitless day of job-searching, Jennifer couldn’t help wondering, once again, what her life might have been like if only she had married the Goblin King instead.

Get the idea? Want to play along? Submit your own caption in the comments!

Harrison Browning’s creepy stop-motion short Pluto and the Vessel is “both homage to early science fiction horror tropes and as a personal contemplation on the impossible differentiation between containers and their contents.”

MYX – Lampshades made of fibrous substrate upon which you grow mushrooms. Well, it’s…original. (Hat tip to Cookie)

Lestat Returns – Anne Rice has announced a new vampire novel, Prince Lestat.

Deep Dark Fears – A growing collection of cartoons providing a whole bunch of new things to worry about.

Star Wars Tarot – A fun, fan-made deck. I love these Star Trek Tarot prints, too.

Dragon Faucet – Attractive antique brass faucet fixture.

Old School Creepy – SubReddit of creepy vintage photos.

NMBC Mayor Lamp – Great repaint of a thrift-store lamp.

Something Wicked This Way Comes to be Remade – Nooooooo……

Victorian/Gothic Mansion with Spaceship Attic – Something something best of both worlds something.

Nicki Hitz Edson – Artist who makes amazing crocheted masks. Her Medusa and dragon are my favorites.

Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day, look at this cute li’l guy.

This mummified leprechaun, complete with remnants of ginger hair and clutching a gold coin, is one of several miniature gaffs made by Lynne of Footsteps in the Wind. She’s also got miniature skeletal mermaids and demons.

These guys are kindred spirits to my mummified fairy, and I’m kicking myself for not thinking of this idea. You could put together a whole collection of mummified supernatural fauna.

The mermaid rather puts me in mind of a fossil, and an interesting display idea might be to present it as such: Glue it to a flat piece of shale (available in the outdoor department of many hardware stores), blend the edges into the stone with polymer clay or papier-mache, and spray-paint to make it look like it’s been carefully chipped out of the matrix.

You could use tattered miniature clothing and accessories to create mummified gnomes, imps, tooth fairies, pixies, and many others. Display individual specimens in shadowboxes or bell jars, or fill a curio cabinet with a whole collection. If you’re feeling particularly macabre, you could display them as though they were live specimens who had died of neglect–a mermaid in an empty goldfish bowl, or a gnome in a jar with the scrawled note, “Air holes….”

I was being a smartass on Facebook a couple of weeks ago, and commented, “There needs to be a goth pasta dish called Penne Dreadful.” I chortled quietly to myself and thought that would be the end of it, but I forgot who my friends are: A dozen people immediately started suggesting ways to make this happen.

Tanya suggested squid-ink pasta (an excellent choice), and said that a cream sauce made with purple cauliflower would make a lovely contrast. xJane noted that with food dye, all things are possible. Then JaniceMars showed up and waxed rhapsodic about the dark puttanesca sauce one could make with purple tomatoes, red onions, and black olives.

And then she went one better and actually made the damn thing.

Her wonderful, appropriately violent recipe can be found on her site, Prodigal Sock. She uses green (spinach) penne, which is nicely creepy and readily available, but if you want to go all the way and use black penne, you can find it here (they have black spaghetti too).

A fun garnish would be these “eyeballs” made from cherry tomatoes and mini-mozzarella balls.

Thanks, JaniceMars! You’re awesome.

(Bonus link: Whilst I was looking for squid-ink pasta sources, I ran across these gorgeous zebra-striped bow ties. There’s apparently an even-Halloweenier black and orange version, but I can’t seem to find an online source for that.)

The inestimable xJane sent this link to me recently under the heading “Things It Strikes Me You Could DIY.” She’s right–this is eminently DIY-able, and would take almost no time to put together.

The assembly could hardly be simpler: It’s polished stones, Spanish moss, and reindeer moss (which the blogger calls “moose moss”), layered in a jar with a prop skull and skeleton hands. All of that stuff is readily available at your local craft store or online (Save-On Crafts is one of my favorite online sources). I really like the footed glass-and-metal apothecaries in this example, but you could use pretty much anything with see-through sides: Large canning jars, goldfish bowls, vases, brandy snifters, and so on. You could also vary the ingredients for different effects: A nautical-themed “Davy Jones’ Locker” decoration layered with dried seaweed, seashells, driftwood, and beach glass and housed in a tarnished brass lantern would be quite striking.

The site mentions a Pottery Barn decoration as the inspiration for this project. I did some looking, and as nearly as I can tell they’re referring to this, which isn’t a purchasable item but instead just a “serving suggestion” for their skull vase fillers (also available in glitter). Other bloggers have been inspired by the same catalogue photo: The Gathering Place uses smaller skulls and Spanish moss for a simpler design; I like the “Arsenic” tag on top. Strawberry Chic layers the skulls with candy corn and dollar-store Halloween trinkets for a kitschier effect. Homespun with Love adds spiderwebs and some kind of coarser floral material that they refer to as “fiber filler;” looks a little like pine needles.

The only difficult bit, this time of year, would be digging up the skulls (so to speak). It’s annoying that so many items which we consider to be year-round decorating accessories are viewed by the wider world as seasonal props. They’re available online a few places like Skeleton Store, Amazon, and Oriental Trading, and they may still turn up in dollar-store clearance bins, but for the greatest selection your best bet would probably be to wait until closer to Halloween when all the skulls come out of hiding.

A couple of these would look lovely on a fireplace mantel or used as a table centerpiece, and they really are attractive enough to use as permanent decor.

(Thanks, xJane!)