Just in time for Halloween. . . creepy, icky gifs!

The rotten skulls and hanging strips of flesh make this mini-version of Murnau's Faust especially icky. In a previous post I compared this snippet with a similar bit from Disney's Night on Bald Mountain from Fantasia. The ghostly horsemen images are practically identical. Disney only stole from the  best.

From Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Everything is more-or-less OK until she opens her eyes.

Here you have to ask yourself: why? Why would a giant bottle of castor oil chase two characters (cats?) around and around the moon, until the cats jump off?

You know I hate clowns. I even wrote a poem about it once. I was going to include that master of the macabre, Milky, but somehow this tiny clip of Enrico Caruso performing Pagliacci was creepier. I have it on reverse here to make it extra creepy. What's really weird is that he's singing it silently.

I want you to pay close attention to this one. It's the "reveal" from the Lon Chaney silent version of Phantom of the Opera. It reverses, so that in a couple of seconds he's "unrevealed", which is the important part.  Just before she puts the mask back on, for a nanosecond you see that Chaney's face looks completely normal. This means that almost none of the macabre effect is done with makeup. It's all done from the inside.

I don't understand this - any of it - and it's so bizarre and grotesque as to be almost unbelievable. It's a pig dance, but the pig looks carnivorous, or perhaps rabid. Where did this come from? The devil knows.

I wasn't going to post two from the same source, but you have GOT to see this.

It's Willie, the Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met! This is an unfortunate mistake Disney made in the 1940s. Willie has his mouth where his belly button should be (if whales have such a thing - hey, they're mammals, so maybe they do). This means he has a giant head that careens around like one of those bulky 1940s cars going out of control. Bambi he ain't. Nor Pluto. He looks like a foam rubber toaster. Here he combines TWO of my creepy fetishes - make that three, I don't like foam rubber toasters much either - clowns (especially sperm whale clowns) and Pagliaccio. The outfit is a bit femme, too, don't you think? Maybe he's Pagliaccio's girlfriend Gnocchi or something.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Victorian porn: BORING!

Before there were movies, there were mutoscopes. I remember making flip books as a kid, but they weren't this good. The mutoscopes in penny arcades around the turn of the last century qualified as "peep shows", but damn it all, I haven't been able to find one that is even remotely pornographic.

I did find a link for a Victorian magazine called The Pearl, and though it is indeed sexually explicit, it's boring. The sexual encounters are all the same, the writing atrocious. The plump young maidens are all interchangeable, and no actual "lovemaking" takes place. Too bad.

I love the idea of watching a movie by turning a crank. Love the flipping images that give a jerky, eerie sense of real movement. I'm not sure how they took all these photos, didn't think they had the technology to "film" something like that. But obviously, someone was on to the basic principle of rapidly-moving still pictures creating the illusion of movement. A principle that remains to this day.

OK, here's the link to all the issues of The Pearl, but I warn you it's BORING.

http://www.horntip.com/html/books_&_MSS/1870s/1879-1880_the_pearl_journal/index.htm

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