Tag: ephemera

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but transparent masks are visually disturbing. In this 1981 short film, they transform a simple story with stiff dialogue into an otherworldly and unsettling nine minutes of moralistic terror.

Bizarre, terrifying, and humorous, 1963’s ONE GOT FAT is a horror movie masquerading as a bike safety film.

Nearly two decades after creating the horror classic, CARNIVAL OF SOULS, director Herk Harvey terrified machinery operators the world over with this violent safety film.

Years before it was a hotbed of technological innovation and unaffordable housing, the San Francisco Bay Area was the “headquarters of occult and metaphysical activity in the United States.” This is just one of many bizarre assertions by the creators of the 1972 religious short film, THE OCCULT: AN ECHO FROM DARKNESS, that makes it perfect viewing for the spooky season.

While the Halloween costumes of today are often clever, shameless, or absurdly referential, their burlap and paper counterparts from last century still hold the all-time crown for creepy (doing an online image search for “creepy vintage halloween costumes” is the new “Bloody Mary”)! The main character in 1953’s HALLOWEEN PARTY brandishes one such mask in a way that inadvertently sets off a chain of events which concludes with him wearing a straw hat and made up in his mother’s lipstick.