Category — Other Haunts

My affection for werewolf tales is no secret.  Stories of tormented creatures of one kind who transform into tormented creatures of another kind speak deeply about so many of the profound changes we endure.  Or should I say they *can* speak deeply about such things.  So often, werewolf stories stink.  But that’s never dulled my affection.

So I was delighted to find a blog devoted solely to werewolf movies.  (http://www.werewolf-movies.com)  It doesn’t have the largest collection of reviews or articles yet but it sure seems headed in the right direction.  I also really appreciated the generous links section which has clued me into various different facets of werewolf related culture.

  With its finger firmly monitoring the pulse of weirdness, The Fortean Times has a great profile of a Lithuanian museum devoted entirely to depictions of devils.  Like many great collections and for that matter, many other eccentric achievments, the Devil Museum started as the obsession of a single collector.  There are devils from around the world, mostly depicted on their own but frequently the depictions are incorporated into useful objects.

     So ya don’t believe in devils?  The collection is interesting even to a staunch materialist because of its political dimension. During  Soviet times, this collection was illegal because it fell afoul of the prohibition of religion and religious artifacts.  Ironic to think that, say, a nutcracker shaped like a kitschy/folk-arty demon could land you in the gulag which was one of humanity’s better attempts to recreate hell on earth.

Lithuanian Devil Museum 

As a kid, I preferred the Addams Family to The Munsters but you’ve got to admit that the the cars that the Munsters drove were pretty cool. Here is a papercraft version of the Barris designed Munster Koach. The guy who turned this car into a paper model has a link for donations so send him a buck or two. The model is quite fantastic.

http://paperinside.com/munster-koach/

Yesterday I mentioned the cool papercraft coffins at Ravensblight.com — I’ve got one on my desk as I type this.  And right next to it is another papercraft model that is, if this is possible, even cooler.  It’s a “Shambler” from the video game Quake. Remember that? It was the first papercraft model I ever assembled and it was relatively simple to make.  Just print the .pdfs on heavy paper, ideally from a color printer, cut them out with an x-acto blade, fold and glue ‘em up with normal white glue.  I became quite addicted to papercraft for a little while last summer since it’s so cheap and the models can be pretty darned fantastic.

 http://cow.mooh.org/paper/

Ravensblight.com is a fun, well-conceived and executed concept website that takes as its central metaphor a haunted town. The MOST fun part for me at least was the “Toystore” which features a couple DOZEN creepy papercraft models to print out and build.

Papercraft for those not familiar with it is a craft somewhat similar to origami in that you start with a flat sheet of paper and you end up with a three-dimensional object. But since the “rules” of papercraft allow scissors and elaborately printed paper, the object are — to be blunt– WAY cooler than origami. The technique behind papercraft is a pretty cool mixture of high-tech and low-tech. High tech computer-aided-design tools are used to create 3-d models of things… in Ravensblight’s case, for instance, mechanical bats or the tiny coffins shown above. Then another program “unfolds” the object into a 2-d surface and saves it as a .pdf. From a crafter’s perspective, it’s all low-tech simple: all you have to do is download the .pdf’s, print them with a color printer ideally on stiff paper and assemble. It’s a great rainy day activity and heck it’s a blast to have a little line of coffins on your desk!

http://www.ravensblight.com

Zombies invaded my household awhile back and occupied my family’s attentions night after night for several weeks. By “zombies” I of course mean the addictively amusing table game from Twilight Creations. I’m not enough of a game aficianado to know the correct term for this kind of game; it is card-based but also has a board that is assembled piece by piece as the game progresses. And the coolest part of the game perhaps are the plastic zombies that serve as obstacles to the players. In the expansion sets, there are even cooler variants of these zombies including glow-in-the-dark “radioactive” zombies and zombie dogs.

The object of the game should be familiar to anyone who knows a thing or two about zombies and that is, brute survival - and since only one person can fly away on that helicopter at the end (the victory condition) the side objective is making sure that other players don’t escape before you do. The theme changes nicely based on the different expansion sets, ranging from Night of the Living Dead (zombies original recipe), Dawn of the Dead (zombies in the mall), Day of the Dead (military zombies) and on to zombie dogs, college zombies and sewer zombies. Our household has got ‘em all and they’re all great though the expansion sets, obviously require the original Zombies! game. One piece of advice I’d pass along is to pick up an extra “Bag o’ Zombies.” The number of zombies figures in the starter box isn’t really enough for even a middle sized game. And who wants to run out of zombies?

The artwork on the cards graphically illustrates the action of the card. In fact there are a couple cards whose illustrations are so intense that my daughter insists we take them out of play. The only drawback to the game that we’ve found is that the board sometimes ends up snaking out larger than our table, especially when adding an expansion set. The remedy that we’ve found is to push all the furniture to the edges of the room and play on the floor!

In short, Zombies! is a blast. Games without an expansion set seem to take a little over an hour which is a nice length for an evening’s entertainment — with an expansion set or two… well, don’t start one of those if you don’t want to be occupied til the wee hours. And heck, Zombies! or any table game is a great excuse to shut off the TV and actually look at the members of your household.

http://www.twilightcreationsinc.com/zombies/