From the same kind of thinking that gave us reborn dolls and boyfriend pillows comes this doppelganger concept:
One Twitter user offers this helpful amplification of the horrors:
We at Infocult are touched by this tribute to Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and must leave you with a final detail:
(thanks to Jesse "Not Leatherface" Walker)
A British academic tells the story of a graduate student who tried to copy his academic work. Then his bio. Then more.
(thanks to Jesse "The Real One" Walker)
Today's Gothic COVID-19 story concerns a creepy object competition.
What’s a museum social media manager to do with no exhibitions on the horizon? The Yorkshire Museum recently put out a call on Twitter asking for museum experts to submit pictures of the creepiest objects in their collections. And things got weird—fast.
There's a nice plague mask:
And another mask, either for execution or for public humiliation:
And, naturally, one creepy doll:
Museum professionals around the world responded with a series of esoterica that would make the creative director for a B-level horror movie jealous: a petrified sheep’s heart punctuated by nails, a blood-soaked doll with a missing eye, a severed leg turned into a deformed creature in desperate need of an orthodontist.
(thanks to Thomas Burkdall!)
Wouldn't we all like to visit the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park?
An energetic person on Reddit's Worldbuilding board has created this delightfully horrific alternate park. So far it's only a series of images, mock-official documents posted to that board and to a Tumblr blog.
I'm developing supplementary material (maps, guide pamphlets, etc.) for a fictional national park/national monument chiefly characterized by the existence of an enormous living organism which extends deep into earth. The origin of the pit is unknown, as well as it's ultimate size and complete characteristics. The company which discovered the pit, Anodyne Deep Earth Mining Inc., has been granted a contract from the [National Park Service] to operate a tourist experience there with close oversight from the U.S. Government. Though most authorities and experts have determined that the pit is reasonably safe, new and unusual phenomena in and around it continue to be recorded.
For example, this official brochure:
Don't miss the Abyssal Copepods and the Restraining Forceps!
Consider the fine equipment used by a park trail engineer:
There's also a wildlife safety brochure, a gallery of park signs over the decades, and a look at a park ranger's getup.
Following its accidental discovery, the Mystery Flesh Pit and the unique phenomena surrounding it were targets of a headfirst and furiously paced campaign of commercial exploitation. Once architects, engineers, geobiologists and clerical members of the development team had done their work to make the park safe and viable, marketing teams faced the daunting task of selling the public on the intriguing and miraculous phenomena of the Mystery Flesh Pit while downplaying the visceral cosmic horror of the pit itself.
Families were a particularly difficult sell, as children often displayed an overwhelming fear and aversion to descending into the throat of the pit. One strategy early in the park’s history was the creation of friendly cartoon mascot Caver Coop. A brief animated film starring Caver Coop was shown at the park’s visitor center, where the character would attempt to assuage worries about being “eaten alive” or “swallowed”, reassuring children (and often parents) that the pit was perfectly safe and reinforced.
When the attraction was absorbed into the National Park System in the early 1990s, signage and other graphic materials were updated to the NPS Graphic Identity. The architecture of the park’s surface facilities was also expanded and renovated during this time to better fit with the “Natural Resort” image of the Mystery Flesh Pit brand, drawing inspiration from the local Santa Fe style integrated with unique bone formations discovered within the pit itself.
The scribes at Jezebel dug up some very unsettling Thanksgiving cards from a century ago. Most involve children. Several are clearly Infocult's favored stuffing.
For example, a pleasant child gets close to a living bird, with deadly weapon in reach:
Or this sinister image of angelic children, one luring a turkey to its doom, while another readies a - garrotte?
Meanwhile, a lad gets ready with a different killing tool:
(thanks to Thomas "Pardon ME!" Burkdall)
BLDGblog offers a brief and intriguing vision of shadow cells.
It begins with a 1964 discovery:
The blog then ruminates:
It’s easy to imagine the story of an occult 19th-century architect constructing prisons to contain both a person and their shadow self, or perhaps just a sadistic warden installing secret listening rooms beneath the cells of his prisoners to eavesdrop on the growing sounds of loneliness and remorse crying down through the ceiling.
And goes further:
Or, for that matter, imagine a horror novel about some strange and thoroughly debunked folk-magic architectural theory from the 1800s suggesting that all works of civil infrastructure—prisons, libraries, courts of law—had to have both a positive and a negative version constructed, an aboveground world and its subterranean reflection, and that, over the course of the novel, more and more of these underground spaces are discovered in the humid, history-rich soils of the American east coast. And that it ends well for no one involved.
Infocult: always looking out for subterranean reflections.
(thanks to Jesse "Catacomb Projectionist" Walker)
Found on Twitter, an account of accidentally creating a zombie. From a bunny, thanks to a cat and children:
The source is Facebook. Will FB become the new "I heard this from my cousin's friend's hairdresser"?
"A Mulching Proposal" * is a fine bit of Gothic comedy. It manages to connect and satirize big data, science, social attitudes towards the elderly, automation, and more in a few pages of shrieking horror.
Start with the subtitle: "Analysing and Improving an Algorithmic System for Turning the Elderly into High-Nutrient Slurry." Yes. After all, "Sometimes the problem is not how the sausage gets made, but that they’re making people into sausage." Then proceed.
*The title is a play on "A Modest Proposal," a classic text and mandatory in the Infocult canon.
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