Exte: Hair Extensions is a campy Japanese horror movie. It did a great job of never taking itself too seriously while offering gross-out body horror. The most unforgettable image was when a character’s tongue would grow thick with hair. Something about the idea of hair coming out of your tongue was too disgusting for me 🫣.
Sono, Sion. Exte: Hair Extensions, Toei Company, 2007.
I am fascinated by cults and by what attracts people to them. I am particularly intrigued by the Peoples Temple, which had the seeds of being a meaningful agent of good social change if it had not been led to such a destructive ending by a troubled leader. The California Historical Society has published a digital library of photos from the Peoples Temple Publication Department. The catalogue of over 2,000 images portrays insights into the group, its activism and its final home in Guyana.
From the Yale Center for British Art:
This is one of several paintings Walter Sickert made in response to a gruesome murder of a prostitute that took place in Camden, North London, in September 1907. Sickert, who had worked in the area for several years, was intrigued by the unsolved case, using the title The Camden Town Murder for a group of paintings between 1908 and 1909. None of these works depict an actual murder, with the woman in this painting popularly supposed to be sleeping rather than dead. Sickert’s use of the alternative title in parentheses—a wry parody of Victorian narrative paintings—confirms the artist’s refusal to confirm a single meaning for this enigmatic picture. What is never in doubt, however, is Sickert’s commitment to subject matter that many of his contemporaries would have seen as sordid, rendered in a markedly modern style.
Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016
For a full discussion on the painting and the series, visit Walter Sickert: The Camden Town Murder and Tabloid Crime by Lisa Tickner published by the Tate.
Tour of Madame Tussauds London – 1998
Tour of Madame Tussauds London Chamber of Horrors – 2022
In honor of All Saints’ Day, here are gruesome paintings of their trials. Visit Daydream Tourist’s Shocking Paintings of Martyred Saints for a full article and more paintings.
Happy Easter, boys and ghouls!
The Devil's Muse 