I have no particular argument with pink in general. Cerise, Fuschia, Magenta, Raspberry, Cherry Blossom, Rose… They’re not exactly my style, but having gone through an acute Princess-phase with my daughter, I’ve learned to accomodate most pinks in my life. (She has recovered fully, thanks for asking.)
I’m not even bothered by things that are pink that aren’t supposed to be pink. For example:
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I’m not just talking about any old teeth, but teeth bared.
As a sign of anger or threat, it’s one of the most obvious cues that animals can give us about their current disposition. Compare…
As encountered on a summer road trip to the prairies (Elk Island Park in Alberta), these bison wandered across the road all around our car. As huge as they are, I wasn’t alarmed until I saw the bared teeth. Yikes!
(It turns out that a minivan was totalled by these behemoths the week before, so I’m glad I didn’t get them too angry. NB, tip from park staff: Never honk at bison!)
The bared teeth effect is even more dramatic in cutesy animals:
Aren’t they sweet…
Ye gods! Someone call an exorcist!
Related:
Courtesy of Scientific American, some thoughts on bared teeth vs. smiles.
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(and one rock face)
On our camping trip last weekend I kept seeing faces everywhere!
And none of them seemed very happy…
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There’s something about an eel that just geeks me out. Is it the way they wriggle through the water, or their shiny, slippery bodies, or their horrorshow mouths?
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Okay, so I missed my Thursday eldritch post – things have been crazy busy here – but I think I can make it up to you. I just came across a really interesting video that talks about why we find certain things creepy, and just what that means.
While I found his talk really fascinating, I was a little distracted by the narrator, who I found a wee bit creepy. (No doubt that’s his intent here.) The reason? I think it’s the eyes being just a bit too wide open, and the slight wide-angle lens he’s using. A wide angle lens allows you to squeeze more landscape into a shot, which is a good thing, but when you aim it at a person’s face, and the person is a little too close, their face becomes distorted and weird. (A fisheye lens is an extreme wide angle lens.)
Also, just before the switch to the bedroom location, that long pause without saying anything, without blinking, is creepy.
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Harry Clarke’s illustrations for a 1923 edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination are visually arresting – beautiful, but also weird and disturbing.
What gets me about Clarke’s figures is their spidery nature, and those freakishly long fingers and toes… Continue reading
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Stepping into a street that is unexpectedly empty always makes me uneasy. Continue reading
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A day late with this week’s eldritch, or creepy thing, but I was at a farm yesterday, up close and personal with birds with wattles, namely, turkeys.
So the wattle is that ugly skin thing hanging over his beak. Or, in the immortal words of Wikipedia:
A wattle is a fleshy caruncle hanging from various parts of the head or neck in several groups of birds, mammals and other animals. A caruncle is defined as ‘A small, fleshy excrescence that is a normal part of an animal’s anatomy’. Within this definition, caruncles in birds include wattles, dewlaps, snoods and earlobes.
Wikipedia goes on to say: In birds, wattles are often an ornament for courting potential mates. Large wattles are correlated with high testosterone levels, good nutrition and the ability to evade predators, which in turn indicates a potentially successful mate.
So that is supposed to impress girls?? Yikes. Looks pretty horrorshow as far as I’m concerned. I mean, how far a walk is it from this –
To this?
Giant Bug from Naked Lunch
Except that the turkey is even ickier looking than the giant hallucinated bug… but at least he doesn’t smoke.
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Here we are again with your weekly dose of eldritch – something rather vaguely creepy. I say vaguely creepy because I’m not so interested in gross-out, over-the-top stuff, which can easily be found all over the internet. (Oorg.) I’m more interested in those little things that are just unsettling, that geek you out and you don’t even know why.
Today… it’s foreheads.
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What creepy little gem do I have for you today? Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, no less, or at least the film version made in 1988 by Czech animator Jan Svankmajer*. Titled simply Alice, this film gives the old story a stunningly bizarre industrial-age twist.
Carroll’s tale was already a bit nightmarish, and Svankmajer has certainly taken that element and run with it. You know how it starts, with Alice in a lovely forest following the white rabbit? Here’s how Svankmajer reimagines it:
Check out that rabbit! Yikes!
Here’s another, truly eldritch scene:
It’s about time that taxidermy played a larger role in children’s entertainment, don’t you think?
Svankmajer is quoted here talking about the film:
So far all adaptations of Alice (including the latest by Tim Burton) present it as a fairy tale, but Carroll wrote it as a dream. And between a dream and a fairy tale there is a fundamental difference. While a fairy tale has got an educational aspect, it works with the moral of the lifted forefinger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realisation of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realised dream. (interview, Electric Sheep Magazine, June 2011)
* Jan Svankmajer was a tremendous influence on the Brothers Quay, whose animation I posted in a previous Weekly Eldritch
Related:
