Jordan Wolfson's (Female Figure), 2014

The Female Figure itself is scantily clad in a white bustier and diaphanous miniskirt, tilted onto its tip-toes by knee-high "stripper boots", its robotic arms painted white to mimic elbow-length gloves.  A cascade of beautiful blonde hair rains down its back and rocks rhythmically as the figure gyrates its luscious hips.  But the purity of the figure is smudged with dark dirt.  It dances sexily to slowed, distorted pop tunes in front of a large mirror in the middle of a great blank room.  If you bother to look up into the figure's face, meet its eyes in the reflection of the mirror, you'll be confronted by a hideous green witch-mask over too-human eyes.  Eyes that gaze back at you as it whispers in the deep, masculine voice of the artist: Jordan Wolfson.

Widely publicized as "The Lady Gaga Robot" or "The Creepiest Robot Ever" in click-bait articles from websites like Buzzfeed to iO9, Jordan Wolfson's installation at the David Zwirner Gallery seemed destined to captivate the internet's attention from the get-go.  Designed in collaboration with Spectral Motion, a special-effects studio in Los Angeles, (Female Figure), 2014 is the perfect cocktail of sexuality, ugliness, uncanny valley weirdness, and social confrontation.

The art installation was not merely an unbelievably life-like animatronic doll in a blank white room, it also included a film about the figure, and a performance aspect: the robot's dance.  A metal pole extended out from the mirror, attaching to the center of the figure, just below the breasts.  This held the life-sized figure up and allowed it to dance and whisper for hours on end.  It also connected the robot to the machinery that controlled its seven-minute, variable choreography, and the facial-recognition software that allowed it to make eye contact with gallery-goers.

If you had the fortune to experience (Female Figure), 2014, you were likely led into the room by yourself, or with two to five other individuals.  The small size of the viewing party combined with the narrow, dim passage that they had to pass through to get to the room, created a sense of formality as well as foreboding.  Once inside the room, viewers would come upon the robot standing at attention on its platform heels, or perhaps dancing gracefully.

The robot included several features designed to confront and discomfort the viewer.  A motion sensor allowed it to detect when other people entered or left the room.  Finding itself no longer alone, the robot would quietly watch any new visitors until they left.  If a viewer stood too closely to the robot, its facial-recognition software would seek out their face, and stare deeply into the viewer's eyes.

The figure was also programmed to murmur phrases recorded in Wolfson's deep voice, its animatronic jaw wagging with weird accuracy.  In fact, the movement of the figure was so life-like that it succeeded in its attempts at sexual titillation (if you avoided the face, of course).  As Lady Gaga's "Applause", Paul Simon's "Graceland", and a slowed version of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" played, the figure would wiggle and squat with Bob Fosse lascivity.  Its expensive plastic fingers would flutter at the end of graceful dancer's wrists.

Altogether, the installation was designed to examine the effect of gaze in our society (among other themes such as humanity, technology, and mirrors qua examining identity).  Specifically, the installation confronts the male gaze, of which so much social theory and commentary has been written.  The male gaze that objectifies women into sexual objects, reducing them to their attractiveness: into commodities carefully calculated to be consumed through the eyes of anonymous people who have the liberty to be actual people, and not plastic things.

But in (Female Figure), 2014 the sexualized object gazes back.  The figure isn't human, but it manages to strike at the discomfort of breaking social conventions.  Don't make eye contact.  Don't stare, robot.  Certainly don't stare at strangers, robot!  And ABSOLUTELY don't stare at the people staring at you, especially with such an ugly face and such lively eyes.

In less pretentious words: (Female Figure), 2014 is awesome because it tempts you to oogle it, and then makes you feel super-weird for doing so.  In fact, it doesn't just stop at trying to embarrass you- it tries to terrify you.

Below I've linked two videos: one that gives you a broader view of the figure, and a second that Wolfson produced himself, full of uncomfortable close-ups.

 

However, the scariest thing about (Female Figure), 2014 is not its uncanniness, and not the juxtaposition between its pop-sexuality and its foulness.  The scariest thing about the female figure is that it they didn't turn it off.  The figure isn't just oriented to dance in the mirror for artistic reasons about viewership.  It also faced the mirror so that when left alone, it could gaze at itself.  The program running it wouldn't shut down when visitors left the room.  If left by itself, the robot would find the only face left in the room: its own.

And so it would gaze deep into its own eyes, dancing and whispering to itself in the empty, blank room.    

Read more here: http://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibition/jordan-wolfson-3/

-J. J. Roye

Kelly Denato

Release Me by Kelly Denato

I'm so excited to finally write about Kelly Denato's art!  Her work is soft, delicate, ethereal, even cute, but always with an undercurrent of foreboding, if not downright grotesquerie.  But, I don't just love her art, I also love her art blog.  At No Punch Backs: The Art of Kelly Denato you can learn about how she creates her art.  I love reading about where she draws her inspiration and her thoughts on things like art shows, color-blocking and composition.  Getting to follow along with how her lovely noodle-armed beasties are made makes me appreciate everything she does all the more.  Please, please, be sure to check out both her blog linked above, and her artist's website where you can peruse practically all of her work.  And then throw money at her.

Over the Lake by Kelly Denato

Denato's art is amazing in multiple ways.  Immediately, one can see that it is dream-like, ethereal, and soft.  Her subjects are composed of curved lines, noodle-arms, and flowing sheets of hair.  There's rarely a harsh, jagged shape to be found among these pillow-y landscapes of curved backs, calves, and knees.  The gentle feminine nature of the work is not just in the form, either, but also the lush colorscapes that Denato layers with her acrylics on wood.  Smears of pink, red, grey, and blue amid shifting fields of light and shadow give her work a delicacy, a fragility that plays into the second point of brilliance in her art.

Sweet Nothings by Kelly Denato

There is another facet that is equally as immediate as the sweetness in Denato's art, and that is the horror of it.  From body-horror blisters like those seen in Sweet Nothings to the eldritch unspeakableness of Winter Coat to the straight brutality of I'll Eat You Up, Denato doesn't rest in a bubbly, cartoonish Wonderland.  Her work is more like the ratcheted-up nightmares you'd have after binge-watching Adventure Time and reading some particularly diesel Lemongrab fanfic.

Winter Coat by Kelly Denato

The overall effect of this juxtaposition between soft cuteness and revulsion is the stricken kind of horror of tortured puppies and broken children.  It reminds me of the night my cat Malcolm brought in a dead baby bunny he'd caught and proceeded to devour it in front of me, its tiny stomach still full of curdled mother's milk, leaving only the tip of one velvety ear.  There's something about the gentle, pretty femininity of Denato's work that disarms the viewer in preparation for the darkness of her content.  Made vulnerable in this way, the viewer is then more powerfully disturbed by the sadness and loathing in Denato's creations.

I'll Eat You Up by Kelly Denato

Gold Leaf by Kelly Denato

On a final note: some of Denato's work is just excellently surreal.  The kind of vivid strangeness that makes me pleased with the history of art.  It makes Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase go down easier knowing it left a legacy where Denato can make something as lovely as Wolf Life Me.

Wolf Like Me by Kelly Denato

Hopefully, I've given you a taste for Denato's incredible paintings.  Please do check out her sites linked near the top of the article.  Sweet Dreams!

She's So Phi Above Me by Kelly Denato

-Joanna

Stranger Visions

Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg wins my award of the year for simultaneously being a classy, poised, creative genius and a weird, invasive, street creeper.  You see, D-H has found a way to create realistic 3D renderings of people all around the state of New York by simply gathering cigarette butts and chewed gum off the streets and sidewalks.

How, you might ask?  Or better yet, WHY?  Well, let's go back to the beginning.

D-H's creepy foray into scavenging for discarded items began in a public bathroom in Penn Station where she collected hairs from the sink of a bathroom. [Gagging already.] Her collection expanded shortly thereafter to fingernails, cigg butts, and best of all, already chewed and spit out bubble gum.  D-H is a PhD student studying electronic arts at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute.  She is able to extract DNA from the items she collects and sequences their genomic regions into a computer program, creating a model of the person who the discarded item once belonged to.  But D-H takes it one step further.  Instead of just being creepy on her computer in her own time, she creates actual sculptures of these people's faces using a 3D printer.

And thus was born "Stranger Visions."  Each creepy floating head is hung on a gallery wall, often accompanied with a wooden box holding the original sample that was collected and a photograph of the street or alley in which it was discovered.  If you are truly interested in the specific scientific process that D-H uses to analyze the DNA, I will link below an article from SmithsonianMag.com which has a few paragraphs detailing it.  If you're like me, however, you want to see the creepy pictures.  So, let's get to it.

 

 

D-H has even created a DNA derived self-portrait.  Judge for yourself its accuracy.  I think it's not too shabby.  D-H is quoted as saying, "It came from this place of noticing that we are leaving genetic material everywhere.  That, combined with the increasing accessibility to molecular biology and these techniques means that this kind of science fiction future is here now.  It is available to us today.  The question really is what are we going to do with that?"

The overarching problem I have with this is, um, this whole concept of, you know, CONSENT.  I mean, really, I am guilty of launching a piece of chewed gum in the air to see how far it can go.  I'm damn sure every smoker doesn't religiously deposit his/her butt into the designated ashtray.  And if every time your fingernail breaks off, you run to the nearest trashcan to properly dispose of it rather than letting it fall to the earth, I am going to sit here and silently judge you.  That being said, the gift D-H leaves with us all is now we have to be super paranoid that someone out there is collecting these items and, for all we know, a 3D model of our head could be plastered on the wall of an art gallery somewhere.  WTF.  Could you imagine if you happened to be in New York and wanted to check out some cool new art shows and, BOOM, there's your face looking back at you, soulless, unblinking, staring.  I mean, really, I'm sure there would be a way for her to identify these people based on their DNA to go ask their permission and this could even have a great forensic link for solving criminal cases if she were to hone her craft, but D-H isn't in this for the science.  She's in it for the art which makes her both cool as hell but so...so...sketchy. (Disregard the terrible art pun.)

-Amanda

Reference Article #1

The Art of Edvard Munch

This is Edvard Munch.

This is the painting you all have seen and know him best for.

 

HOWEVER, there are so many more paintings by Munch that are creepy, intriguing, unsettling, beautiful, sad, and downright chilling.  Munch was born in December of 1863 in Norway.  His mother died of tuberculosis when he was only five years old.  Edvard was often sick and kept out of school for much of the winters, during which he developed his drawing skills to keep himself occupied.  His father was obsessively religious to the point of psychoneurosis and often sternly reprimanded his children saying their mother was watching them from heaven and grieving over their misbehavior.  Munch's persistent illness combined with his father's temper helped inspire many of his nightmarish and melancholy paintings.  He felt that death was constantly advancing on him.

Later in life, Munch left college to become a painter, much to the chagrin of his father.  He experimented with naturalism and impressionism but didn't feel a true connection with these art styles.  Munch began a period of reflection and self-examination and recorded his thoughts in his "soul's diary."  His most famous work The Scream, first painted in 1893, exists in four versions, two pastels and two paintings.  The Scream has been widely interpreted as representing the anxiety of modern man.  Here is Munch's description of how The Scream originated: "I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature."  So...that's creepy.

Inheritance (1897-1899)
Munch witnessed an event in Paris that led to the creation of this painting.  A mother in a hospital waiting room held her dying child on her lap as she cried.  The child had contracted syphilis and is depicted with an abnormal-sized head, gaunt limbs, and rashes.  The falling leaves on the mother's skirt represent death.  This picture provoked much backlash in Munch's day.  Sexuality and venereal diseases were seen as taboo subjects and many felt Munch had crossed the line with his depiction of a harsh reality in this painting.

Self Portrait in Hell (1903)
Munch's peculiar self-portrait depicts himself naked in the garden of his summer home.  This unnerving painting indicates how troubled Munch was and how he perceived his position as a man and an artist, figuratively in hell.  The large black mass to the left forms a threatening shadow believed to be either the grave or a giant black wing.  However, Munch has not painted himself succumbing to his demons.  He poses strongly, confidently, as though he is the dark ruler of his own private hell.

Death of Marat (1907)
Based off of the painting by Jacques-Louis David of the murdered French revolutionary leader, Jean-Paul Marat.  Munch's style is erratic, agitated, and heavy.  This was said to reflect his disturbed mental state at the time, as this was painted shortly before his mental breakdown and resulting therapeutic treatment.  Munch stated with this painting, he had an urge to "break the areas and lines."

Workers On Their Way Home (1913-1915)
"Under a cloudy, winter evening sky, a gaunt column of workers, an unstoppable human tide, flows ‘through the cold blue shadows’ of a sunless, treeless, Nordic street. The central figures challenge us with their dark, hollowed-out eyes, their upright posture and clenched fists conveying a sense of determination, solidarity and defiance. They sport beards, soft hats and blue jackets with brown trousers and dark vests. One has a distinctive white face—from dust or disease?"


Shown below are more works from Munch I find to be particularly unnerving and sad, though beautifully executed.

Golgotha (1900)

Jealousy (1895)

Agony (1895)

Throughout the course of his career and life, Munch suffered from crippling anxiety coupled with excessive drinking and brawling.  Munch entered therapy in 1908 and was treated with "electrification."  Interestingly, in the 1930s and 1940s, Nazis labeled Munch's art as "degenerate art" and removed 82 of his pieces from German museums.  Munch died at the age of 80 in his home near Oslo but not without having left his mark on the world in both pop culture and to us creepy aficionados who always like to dig a little deeper.


-Amanda


Source #1
Source #2
Source #3

Creepy Twins - Part 2! The Eriksson Twins

Warning: Video footage below contains elements that may be disturbing.  View with caution.

Way back in January, I did the first installment of Creepy Twins with the Gibbons sisters.  Today I bring you part two, the even creepier, definitely more insane, Eriksson twins, Ursula and Sabina.  The documentary above "Madness in the Fast Lane" details the events that took place on May 17th, 2008 when Sabina and Ursula flung themselves into the busy traffic of the MG motorway.  Police were alerted when witnesses saw the sisters attempting to cross the motorway, acting strangely and erraticly.  Once stopped on the side of the road by officers, the twins spoke briefly to the police before Ursula, without warning, dashed and ran into the side of a 40 ton truck traveling 56 miles per hour.

Moments later, Sabina ran into traffic and was hit by a Volkswagen.  Amazingly, both women survived.  Ursula was immobilized as her legs had been crushed but after being unconcious for 15 minutes, Sabina began to fight paramedics and police officers screaming, "They're going to steal your organs" and "I recognize you - I know you're not real."  Sabina punched a female officer and ran into traffic again on the other side of the motorway.  She was finally caught and restrained by emergency workers and sedated in an ambulance.

This story takes a more ugly and disturbing turn a day later.  Sabina was released from police custody without a full psych evaluation.  She began to wander the streets of England before being stopped by two men, one of which was Glenn Hollinshead.  Sabina stopped to pet their dog and they had a brief conversation.  Although noticing her odd behavior, Hollinshead offered Sabina a room for the night.  Sadly, the next morning, Sabina stabbed Hollinshead five times and killed him.  Sabina then ran out of the house with a hammer, hitting herself in the head repeatedly.  The police were notified and Sabina was again chased before jumping off of a 40 foot bridge, breaking several bones in the fall.  She was charged with murder and gave no explanation for her behavior despite repeated questioning.

Folie a deux is a French term for "A madness shared by two."  In other words, a shared psychosis, a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from one individual to another.  The defense council in Sabina's trail claimed that she was a secondary sufferer of folie a deux, influenced by the presence of her sister Ursula, the primary sufferer.  The defense claimed Ursula had a history of mental illness which then transferred to the weaker personality of Sabina.  The defense also tried to assert that Sabina suffered a case of bouffe delirante or "puff of madness" where a perfectly sane person will lose their mind for a small time and then return to normal.  Sabina was sentenced to five years in prison on the plea of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

The most recent updates on the Eriksson twins is that Sabina was released from prison but her current whereabouts are unknown.  Ursula is thought to be living in America looking after Sabina's two children.  Ursula also underwent an exorcism at her local church to help drive away the demons that forced her onto the motorway back in 2008.

As strange and horrific as their actions were, we will never know the true reason the Eriksson twins ran across that motorway, what possessed them to fling their bodies into oncoming traffic, one right after the other.  Were they possessed by supernatural forces?  Did they suffer from undiagnosed mental illness?  Are folie a deux and bouffe delirante plausible excuses?  If Ursula's legs had not been crushed resulting in a multiple week hospital stay, would she have joined her sister in killing even more people?  If Sabina were truly suicidal, why did she not turn the knife on herself instead of killing an innocent man?  There are too many questions unanswered that I don't even believe Sabina and Ursula would be able to clarify themselves.  Unfortunately an innocent life was lost in this tragic and confusing story and Sabina and Ursula are both still out in the world today.  There have been no further widely known reports of criminal activity from the Eriksson twins, so perhaps they truly have been exorcised or healed of their psychosis.  Maybe a "puff of madness" truly can make an average day take a horrific turn.

-Amanda

Starry Eyes - Movie Review

Starry Eyes
2014
Dir. Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch

Spoilers ahead

Starry Eyes is a recently released horror film and I have to say, though I had heard nothing of it before randomly running across it on Netflix and the user reviews were mixed, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked Starry Eyes.  It was a reasonable mix of gore, supernatural elements, human depravity, and uncomfortableness.  Very often horror movies start out with a big scare and then trickle deaths or scary moments throughout the film, culminating in the final epic death scene.  Starry Eyes took a bit of a different approach, starting out slow and creepily building throughout the entire film until all of the epic-ness was crammed into about the last 25 minutes.  But it wasn't in a boring or dull way.  There wasn't a ton of filler and then a bit of action.  It was consistently unsettling and curiosity-evoking throughout the entire film.

Our film focuses around Sarah, a skinny self-conscious diner waitress by day and aspiring actress by night, as so many seem to be these days.  She has an audition for a film "The Silver Scream" produced by Astraeus Pictures in which she meets two super dicky casting directors who basically blow her off and she goes to have a meltdown in the bathroom, pulling her hair out, screaming, acting generally crazy.  The female casting director catches this tantrum and brings her back to the audition room to reenact it.  Sarah falls on the ground convulsing and screaming and the casting directors are intrigued by her passion and unbridled emotions and she gets a callback.

It all goes downhill from here.  On her second callback, Sarah enters a dark room and is asked to disrobe.  The lights go out and then proceed to flash in a strobe light effect as we see shadowy figures and quick shots of Sarah with sharp teeth and bleeding from the mouth.  This whole scene is very artsy but done quite well.  Throughout the film, we are also introduced to Sarah's roommates/friends who are all douchey southern Californian "stereotypical theater kids."  They are critical of all of Sarah's attempts at acting and do nothing but condescendingly criticize her on a regular basis.  Sarah learns that the producer of the film wants to meet with her and he is a creepy older man who explains to Sarah that "The industry is a plague of shallowness" and he "Wants to capture the ugliness of the human spirit."  He offers her the role in the film but also wants a BJ, of course.  Sarah runs away, disgusted.

A bit later, Sarah and her friends take some ecstasy and have a pool party and in the midst of her high, Sarah calls the producer back and says she really wants the part.  She heads to Astraeus Pictures and basically is propositioned by the producer to kill her old life and step inside the gateway of a glorious new life as she is surrounded by men in creepy black masks and hoods.  The music builds, the tension increases, the audience is on the edge of their seats as we wonder what Sarah is going to do...

He gets the BJ he wanted, afterall.

Then the movie progresses into the second half, which I consider to be the gross but awesome half.  Sarah is at a true turning point and starts to experience oddities that both confuse and exhilarate her.  Sarah experiences intense stomach pain, drools at work at the diner and slaps her boss, gets fired, vomits, has her hair fall out and her fingernails fall off, asks her roommate if she is on period because she can smell her, and tells her best friend to F off.  Granted, I summarized all of these occurrences in one run-on sentence but this evolution of Sarah's character from a walked-all-over but quiet sweetheart to a gross, dirty, sick asshole is simultaneously intriguing and heartbreaking.  Her physical corruption alone is hard to watch and I really have to give it up to the hair and makeup team on the film as they made Sarah look repulsive in a very sad way.

Our movie reaches its highest tension point when Sarah's eyes cloud over, she bleeds from the mouth and private parts, throws up a ton of maggots in the bathtub, and starts to lose all of her hair.  She gets a call from the producer telling her she can die and be forgotten or be reborn.  "It's time to become one of us.  It's time to be remembered."  Sarah goes on an absolute rampage killing all her friends/roommates.  Several are stabbed multiple times and the goriest death is when Sarah pounds her friend's face in with a dumbbell, completely obliterating her face and head.  At the end, hooded figures come out of the shadows and bloody naked Sarah emerges from a grave, bald, muddy, and with freakishly long fingernails.  She receives a special birthday package from Astraeus with a gown and wig inside as she admires her beauty in the mirror and we see shots of various old Hollywood glamorous stars in the background, as we are led to believe perhaps they too were patrons of Astraeus Pictures.

 

The thing I like about Starry Eyes is even though it's gross and gory and sexual and desperate, it never spells out exactly what the leaders of Astraeus Pictures are.  Are they members of a cult?  Are they vampires?  Are they witches?  I thought they were vampires due to the various comments about blood throughout the film but Sarah isn't seen with the generic vampire teeth at the end of the film.  My husband watched it as well and he found it to be somewhat boring and he didn't pick up on the vampire theme at all, so maybe I'm crazy?  However, that's what I actually love about the movie.  It makes so little sense and leaves so many questions unanswered but not in an enraging way.  It doesn't project the annoyance of sparkly Twilight vampires but instead has the audience witness a nasty, gory, gross, and debilitating process of being reborn and the struggle that comes with choosing a new life and abandoning everything you thought you once knew.  The rebirth, the brainwashing, the ravenous side of Sarah is glamorized.  Even after she has killed all of her friends, she feels beautiful, sophisticated, and more alive than ever.  Starry Eyes is twisted.  It's complicated.  It's sad and it's gory.  More than anything, it's different.  I grow tired of the same old repetitive horror movie formula, so for that reason alone, Starry Eyes gets two thumbs up from me (but only one thumb up from my husband!)

-Amanda

13 Sins - Movie Review

13 Sins
2014
Directed by Daniel Stamm

No ending spoilers.

Our movie begins in Perth, Australia with a Professor Edgar Sullivan at a benefit honoring his accomplishments. Sullivan stands up and delivers a speech filled with vulgar and disturbing limericks and then proceeds to cut his wife's fingers off on the podium before being shot by the police and grasping for his ringing cellphone.

The audience watching at home collectively goes "WTF?" Yes, this is the beginning of 13 Sins, a remake of the Thai film, 13: Game of Death. Most American remakes are terrible. Yep, I said it. There have been a plethora of American remakes especially of Japanese horror films with very few being able to compete with their predecessors. I cannot say I have seen the Thai version of this film but as a standalone, the American version kept me very entertained.

After this amusing opening, we meet our main character Elliot, who has been trying for a promotion at his job but instead we see him get fired. Elliot has a special needs brother, Michael, a cranky dad who just got evicted and has to live with him, and a pregnant fiancee, Shelby. Just as the future seems pretty bleak, Elliott receives a mysterious phone call about an opportunity to compete on a game show for a fantastic cash prize. Whoever the mysterious man is on the phone knows all of Elliot's personal information, life history, and current debts.


Skeptical, Elliott plays along. The first challenge seems simple enough....

Challenge #1: Elliot has to swat a fly in his car. He does and gets $1,000 credited to his bank account.

Challenge #2: Eat aforementioned fly in order to pay off a $3,622 MasterCard debt. Success.

Elliot is now alerted that if he fails to complete a challenge, he will lose everything. However, if he completes 11 more challenges, he will claim a life-changing fortune. The game also ends if you tell anyone you are playing or attempt to interfere with the game.

Challenge #3: Make a child cry. Elliott tells a small girl at the park that her mommy doesn't love her and a man from an orphanage is coming to take her away.

Challenge #4: Elliott must steal a nativity scene from church and set it on fire. He does, but the fire also spreads to a set of curtains and the whole church starts to burn.

Challenge #5: Offer to trade a homeless man an ostrich and $1,000 for his clothes and shopping cart. Success. However, the homeless man is then taken to the police station and we see the little girl from before's mother filing a police report. Elliott is now on a Wanted poster.

Challenge #6: Take Mr. Shaw to a diner and get him a cup of coffee. Elliott follows directions to a dirty old apartment and here's where the film takes the turn from dark comedy to more gruesome and uncomfortable. You see, Mr. Shaw is found dead in his bathtub, yet Elliott still must complete the task, so he puts some clothes on him and wheels him down the street in a shopping cart and orders him some coffee in the diner as a large group of cops walk in and sit at the table behind him.




Challenge #7: Avoid arrest from aforementioned cops. Success because Elliott caught one of them slipping liquor into his coffee while on duty.

Challenge #8: Some time passes and Elliott comes across a bus parked in an alley with a creepy driver in a white mask and jester costume. Elliott must take a ride on the bus.

Challenge #9: Elliott gets dropped off at a motel and enters the room to see a bully he went to middle school with. The next challenge is to amputate this guy's arm below the elbow. Bloody, nasty, gruesome, weird.




Challenge #10: The next challenge is to wreck his rehearsal dinner, shatter some glasses, and urinate upon the centerpieces while singing the communist anthem. We are witness to the beginnings of Elliott's mental unraveling.

Challenge #11: Surrender and turn himself over to the security guards that witnessed the entire rehearsal dinner fiasco.

Around this time, we also learn that other people around town are playing the game as well, including Elliott's brother, Michael who gets in trouble for exposing himself to a girl on the basketball court. The cops start listing off various crimes that have been committed around town, none of which Elliott is responsible for.

Challenge #12: Elliott escapes from the cops and comes across an elderly woman hobbling down the street. Elliott's paranoia is sinking in and he thinks she is the next challenge. She is.  The woman asks him to hang up her clothesline to her trailer. He does and wins $1 million.  However, Elliott realizes too little too late that the clotheslines stretched all the way across the street and a group of bikers are fast approaching. Elliott panics and runs to pull the stake out of the ground that's connected to the clothesline just in time to save all of their lives. Dun, dun, dun, a shadowed figure walks out of the woods and puts the clothesline back up as the bikers turn around and start to come back down the street.



Elliott is too late to save them and they all, one by one, lose their heads, their scalps, some even cut in half. This scene was the most gruesome but also the most well-done in the movie. It actaully reminded me of the beginning of Ghost Ship if anyone remembers the opening sequence of that classic film, haha. At this point, Elliott has lost his mind and "quits the game" and flees the scene. It's not too long though before he realizes that Michael is his opponent, keeping him from winning the entire game and the final challenge is a doozy.




Challenge #13: Kill a family member. Now I'm not going to spoil for you what happens here at the end, but I'll just say it is intense and you won't be disappointed.

So from my plot summary, it may not seem that 13 Sins is an outright horror. Yes, there are comedic scenes. Yes, there are intense chase scenes. Yes, there are touching family moments. However, underlying all of this is the unsettling darkness of the human pysche and the lengths to which we may go at the promise of a better future, the end of our financial struggles, a day in the sun. 13 Sins has certain classic horror elements - the amputated arm, the biker beheading, the dead man in bathtub - which are scattered throughout the film at a decent pace and will leave your creepy appetite satiated. It is only when you start to delve underneath the outward gore and violence that you realize 13 Sins is a psychological horror escapade, our sympathetic hero forced to complete challenges against his will, only wanting to create a better future for his fiancee and unborn child.  Sadly, by the end of the film, the possibility of a better future is left extremely unclear.

Does Elliott win the game? Does Michael? Do they both die? Do they both survive? Who is the family member that must be killed? Does everyone live and the game isn't won by anyone? Are we left to celebrate the winning of a game for winning's sake or simply left feeling sad and uncomfortable at the depravity of human nature and our inherent greed?  I would definitely recommend giving 13 Sins a view. It is a healthy mix of humor and darkness combined with the thrill of a game and the internal anguish and conflict our leading man, Elliott, must face. We feel sorry for him as he cuts off someone's arm. How many people can you say that about?

So, about those student loans....

-Amanda

Making Friends

The short film "Making Friends" was released in 2011 and won an award for the Best Thriller/Horror Movie at the 2011 Canton Film Festival.  "Making Friends" was featured at the Dragon*Con Independent Film Festival, the Horrorfind Film Festival, and the Canton Film Fest.  Directed by Marvin Suarez and written by Greg Bartlett, "Making Friends" is based on the short story by Gary Raisor.  I will copy and paste the short story below as it is relatively short.


"Jack-o’-lanterns smile their secretive, broken-mouthed smiles as they peer out from behind darkened windows. Eight-year-old Denny Grayson hurries down the sidewalk. He is barely able to contain his excitement. Tonight is Halloween.

A hint of chill hangs in the air and the tang of woodsmoke carries. It’s a good smell. The huge yellow moon tags along, floating over his shoulder like a balloon on a string. When he glances up, he sees the man in the moon smiling broadly. Beneath his green latex Frankenstein mask, he smiles back eagerly. He has waited with much anticipation for this night.

A small group of kids pelt by, anonymous in their costumes. Only the patter of their expensive new Adidas and NIKES link them, to an exclusive club; one to which Denny will never belong. He watches enviously as they pound on the door. “Trick or treat,” they demand in high, childish voices. He turns and scurries to the next house.

A quick stab of the doorbell brings a smiling, silver-haired, woman to the door. “My, aren’t you scary looking?” she laughs merrily. “Are you going to say trick or treat? What’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”

Denny shakes his head and asks, “Ccould I hhaff a ddink of, wwatah, ppleese?” Her smile wavers and she blushes as understanding comes. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Of course you can.”

When she goes to the kitchen, Denny reaches into the candy dish sitting so invitingly by the door. He barely retracts his hand before the woman returns with a glass of water. Turning his back, he lifts the mask and takes a short sip. “Ttankk yyoou,” he mumbles thickly, holding out his plastic sack. The woman drops in extra candy. After every house on the block has been visited, he climbs on his bike and heads for home, racing the moon from streetlight to streetlight watching the shadows wheel and dart before him.

Pedaling furiously, he soon reaches the section of town where the houses aren’t so nice. He weaves the familiar route up the rutted street until the small, rundown house comes into view.

Quietly letting himself in, he tiptoes past his mom who is fast asleep on the couch. As usual, the reek of soured whiskey follows him across the creaky floor.

He barely has time to stuff the mask and candy under the bed before he hears Mom’s heavy tread. She enters the room and drunkenly embraces him. “Oh, Denny, I’m so glad you’re home. Momma just had the most awful dream. It was full of blood, and children were screaming and screaming. . .”

Denny pulls away from her and throws himself onto the rickety bed. She stares at him in helpless misery. “I dreamed you went trick or treating again,” she blubbers wetly, and Denny knows she’s going to talk about it. “I’m so sorry, baby. I know I let you down. If only I’d checked the candy. Who’d have ever thought someone would be sick enough to put razor blades in a child’s-”

Denny turns to the wall and stonily ignores her. Stiffly, she reaches a fluttering moist palm toward him that stops short. “I know the kids at school make fun of your problem. But I talked to Dr. Palmer again yesterday, and he says he might be able to help.”

“Hhee ccan’tt hhellp.”

The silence becomes a thick wall between them. For the first time, she notices he is wearing a jacket. Alarm sifts through the alcoholic haze to finally settle on her face. “Where were you tonight, Denny? You didn’t go trick or treating, did you?” She yanks him around, trying hard not to wince as the horribly disfigured mouth smiles crookedly at her.

“Nooo, I wass mmakin’ ssome neww ffriendss,” he utters cheerfully, jumping from the bed and crossing over to the window. He jams both hands into his jacket pockets. His fingers touch a small lump nestled within-it’s a candy bar. For a second, he’d almost forgotten he’d placed one in the candy dishes of all the homes he visited tonight.

As he thinks about the kids who make fun of the way he talks, his fingers curl tightly. A sharp flash of pain causes his hand to fill with sticky red wetness. After tonight, he’ll have lots of friends to talk to. He stares into the night and smiles a terrible, secret smile. The man in the moon is smiling too; only, this time, a river of blood is gushing from his mouth."

Copyright: Gary Raisor. https://garyraisor.wordpress.com/

So am I the only one both disturbed and slightly heartbroken by this short film?  We've all heard the horror stories of "Razorblades in the Halloween candy!!!!111!11 Beware!!!111" but "Making Friends" took it to a whole new level.  You have no choice but to feel sorry for the little maniacal Denny Grayson.  He's young, he's vulnerable, and he's never fit in.  All he wants is some friends, right?  He doesn't understand the ramifications of disfiguring all of the neighborhood kids, making them bleed from the mouth and shriek in terror.  Or does he...?

My only complaint is I feel they could've done way more with Denny's makeup.  They could've made his scar look super gruesome and mangled or even not as gory but still better than what it was which basically looked like some silly putty painted pink.  They don't really explain the stutter either.  I know a stutter can be a result of emotional or physical trauma, but did Denny always have a stutter?  Is it genetic?  Was it brought on by the attack? I do especially love Mom's creepy horrified smirk at the end.  I personally am looking forward to the day when I have children and can impose the standard parental candy tax.  I'll be happy to check for razorblades as I chow down on Kit-Kats and Butterfingers.

-Amanda

Tiny Mummies - Part Two!

As a follow-up to my original post on Aleshenka located here, I bring you today the stories of two more small alienesque mummified creatures: Pedro the Mummy and the Atacama skeleton.

Meet Pedro.

Located in the Rocky Mountains, the Nimerigar are a race of little people characterized as aggressive, who liked to shoot poisoned arrows from tiny bows.  In October of 1932, while digging for gold in the San Pedro mountains of Wyoming, Cecil Mayne and Frank Carr came across a small room in which they found the mummy of a tiny person.  There was instant skepticism surrounding the mummy but x-rays were performed 18 years later in 1950 and it was discovered that there was a fully formed man-like skeleton inside.

Pedro was 14 inches tall, sitting with crossed arms and legs.  His cranium was flat and his eyes bulged and you could even see little fingernails on his fingers.  The x-rays on Pedro provided further enlightenment - several of his bones were broken including his spine, collarbone, and skull.  He also had some congealed blood at the top of his skull, insinuating a violent death.  Pedro was examined by Dr. Henry Shapiro, a biological anthropologist from the American Museum of Natural History, where it was determined that the man was approximately 65 years old at the time of his death.

Plot twist: There was a second mummy found, a female, in roughly the same area where Pedro was discovered.  This mummy was brought to Dr. George Gill for examination.  She was only four inches high and it was determined that she was a prematurely born baby or a child with anencephaly.  Dr. Gill also believed Pedro was an infant rather than an adult and that both mummies were a result of malnutrition of babies born to a tribe still adapting to the harsh conditions of the area. 

To give some more background on the Nimerigar, they lived in the San Pedro Mountains and fought constantly with the average sized humans in the area.  Apparently, when one of their own became sick or old, they were killed by their own people with a blow to the head.  The Nimerigar were believed to be bad luck to anyone who found them and are referred to as "tiny people eaters."  Many considered this all folklore and urban legend until Pedro was discovered.

Sadly, Pedro the Mummy's story ends in his disappearance.  He was purchased by Ivan T. Goodman for several thousand dollars after being shown as an attraction in a local drug store for several years.  Goodman died in 1950 and Pedro was passed on to Leonard Wadler.  Wadler died in the 1980s and Pedro has not been seen since.

*

Meet Ata.

Ata was discvoered in 2003 in a deserted Chilean town in the Atacama Desert by Oscar Munoz near an abandoned church.  Munoz sold Ata to a local pub owner for the equivalent of $51.00 USD who later sold Ata to his/her current owner, Ramon Navia-Osorio.  Ata is only six inches long, with an irregularly shaped skull and two missing ribs.  It is also believed that Ata is a prematurely born fetus suffering from oxycephaly or a combination of genetic disorders.  Immunologist Garry Nolan speculated that Ata suffered from dwarfism but no genes for dwarfism were found during genetic analysis.  Of course, conspiracy theorists/ufologists have labeled Ata an alien but this speciulation is inconsistent with the human genetic material gathered during evaluation.  The film Sirius is a 2013 documentary directed by Amardeep Kaleka based upon the book Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge by Steven M. Greer.  Sirius features interviews from former government officials as well as images and a DNA analysis of Ata.

I guess my overall feeling about Aleshenka, Pedro, Ata, and likely the many other little mummy aliens out there is creeped out but also quite fascinated.  More than anything, stories like these lead me to realize how easy it is to stumble across a little creature like this, near a church, in a cemetary, while gold digging in the mountains (okay, so that one's not quite as plausible.)  What would I do if I stumbled across one of these creatures?  Scream and run away?  Put it in a box and poke holes in the top?  Nudge it with a stick?  (Does this seem insensitive?)  I mean, what would you do?  Regardless, I can't say what my response would be if I ran across my own version of Aleshenka/Pedro/Ata, but best believe if I did find one, I wouldn't sell it to a pub owner for $51.00.


-Amanda


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Art by Laurie Lipton

The above video isn't actually creepy but it gives you an insight into the personality of the quirky and badass Laurie Lipton and you get to see her work on one of her signature giant intricate art pieces.

To give you a little background on Lipton before we delve into her fascinating art pieces, she was born in New York and began drawing when she was four years old.  Lipton has lived in numerous countries including Germany, France, and the UK, to name a few.  While traveling in Europe as a student, Lipton truly honed her style and technique, "building up tone with thousands of fine cross-hatching lines like an egg tempera painting."  Lipton rooted her art in the stylings of Van Eyck, Goya, and Rembrant, even after her teachers told her that figurative art went out in the Middle Ages and that she should express herself using more forms and shapes.

Lipton truly found her soul in black and white art.  Lipton is quoted as saying, "Black and white is the color of ancient photographs and old TV shows.  It is the color of ghosts, longing, time passing, memory, and madness.  Black and white ached.  I realized that it was perfect for the imagery in my work.”  And wow, it truly is some amazing and creepy imagery.  Check out some of my favorite pieces below.

The social commentary is evident in Lipton's work, whether it be the perils of fame, the frailty of age,  the sorrow of mass media consumption, or the distortion of celebrity.  In an interview with beinArt, Lipton is quoted as saying:

"JW: So much of your work is social commentary, on topics varying from overconsumption of materials and media to politics. Yet I’m not sure I can come up with any examples of your work that are squarely on the positive end of the spectrum: what we’re doing right as opposed to what we’re doing wrong. Is this a deliberate choice, and if not, what do you suppose accounts for this?

LL: I only draw about the things that concern me. When I was a child I used to sit alone for hours and draw about all the aspects of school that I hated, all the wrongs I felt, all the anger and frustration that was bottled up inside of me. It helped me to cope and to understand. Unsettling art, whether it is in books, music, or pictures, is an attempt to comprehend life’s trials and tribulations. Pretty, nice, nonconfrontational, “positive” art serves a purpose, too… but I don’t connect to it on any deep level and I don’t wish to waste my time doing it."

Did I mention she's a badass?

If I were to link every piece of Lipton's that is astounding, intricate, thought-provoking, creepy, and disturbing, this post would scroll for days.  Please check out the rest of her work at www.laurielipton.com  It is breathtaking.


PLUS -

DUDE!  You can buy this on a t-shirt!  The only catch is it's $64.00.  I can hear my wallet screaming like the baby whose head is about to be eaten.

- Amanda


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