All Hallows' Eve Countdown: Devil's Horse Cake

Sorry for the slowdown in posts, everyone. There was an unexpected family crisis here. Never fear, there are more posts to come in the last few days leading up to Hallowe'en! The photos of the day go to edible horror from Tattooed Bakers in London, UK. This very sweet monstrosity is a super scary devil horse cake - a red velvet cake body with rum pouring out of its flared nostrils. From i09:

How do you follow up a pony-sized unicorn cake with rainbow filling? If you're the Tattooed Bakers, you don't rest on your equine laurels and instead concoct a demonic rotting horse-shaped confection with liquid rum snot.

Following the unicorn's meadow that was Baketopia, the Tattooed Bakers participated in Feed The Beast 2013, adding this monstrous confection to the festivities. Kraken rum poured from the horse cake's nostrils and into a skull font below. And the cake's interior is red velvet, meaning it looked perfectly gory even as the partygoers dug into its sugary hide.

Head over to Miss Cakehead's blog for more photos of the cake; all of its various gashes look much better photographed up-close than from a distance.

You can see a gallery of other cakes from Tattooed Bakers here. Images from i09 and Eat Your Heart Out.

See all my posts on Horror themes.

See all my posts on Ghosts.
 

Check out other blogs observing the Countdown to Hallowe'en!

Amnesia Around the Present Moment

Illustration by Lonni Sue Johnson. 

After a bout of encephalitis, Lonni Sue Johnson suffered brain damage to her hippocampus in 2007. Since then, she has lost all her memory and lives entirely in the narrowest sliver of the present moment. Time has covered her case, with a focus on the ways she has retained her creative knowledge, talents and skills after her unfortunate affliction. For example, she can still recall how to play the viola - but cannot remember that her father died many years ago. She illustrates her experiences in the present moment in order to continue to retain and build ideas through the course of the day. See the video below the jump.

All Hallows' Eve Countdown: The Girl Who Survives

Image Source: Djano23 at deviantART via In the Mouth of Dorkness.

In Halloween II (1981), Donald Pleasence's psychiatrist character mumbles about the meaning of Hallowe'en. He says it really refers to the pagan Gaelic festival of Samhain, the start of the darker half of the year. This seasonal shift provides an elemental connection to the other world, to memory, death, and ancestors. The spiritual dimension is also an elaborate folkloric metaphor for access to the darker parts of ourselves. The screenplay combines Christian symbolism with these ideas:

Samhain, it means the loft of the dead. The end of summer. The festival of Satan. ... In order to please the gods, the druid priests held fire rituals. Prisoners of war, criminals, the insane, animals were burned alive. By observing the way they died the druids believed they could see elements of the future. 2000 years we've come no closer. Samhain is not spirits, it's not goblins, ghosts or witches. It's the unconscious mind. We're all afraid of the darkness inside ourselves.

Dr. Loomis says repeatedly that Michael Myers is not human; he is "pure evil." Michael is a violent supernatural force, an instinct to kill that never stops, which is why he can be shot repeatedly and not die. Of the first 1978 Halloween film, director John Carpenter said, "The movie's about the 'revenge of the repressed' and Jamie Lee has a connection with the killer because she's repressed too."

Horror films are morality plays. The horror stems from some transgression or violation through indulgence of the unspeakable. The story is about a collapse due to that degradation and the effort to correct the problem, to return to safety and security, to survive.

A collection of African horror stories on Wattpad offer typical examples. Swish, Swish! is a warning against laziness, vanity, selfishness, shortcuts around hard work, and hurting others to get ahead. Another, The Witch's Mist, is a grisly injunction against black magic and vampirism (here the literally cannibalistic form, not the soul-sucking variety). Cannibalism, the ultimate horror, is never far away, as the current lifestyle and tribal subculture of human-blood-drinking vampires show.