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2011/10/21

Neatorama

Neatorama

Attack of the Killer B-Movies!

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 05:05 AM PDT

During the Golden Age of Hollywood, big-budget movies were classy affairs, full of artful scripts and classically trained actors. And boy, were they dull. Then came Roger Corman, the King of the B-Movies. With Corman behind the camera, motorcycle gangs and mutant sea creatures filled the silver screen. And just like that, movies became a lot more fun.

Escape from Detroit

For someone who devoted his entire life to creating lurid films, you’d expect Roger Corman’s biography to be the stuff of tabloid legend. But in reality, he was a straight-laced workaholic. Having produced more than 300 films and directed more than 50, Corman’s mantra was simple: Make it fast, and make it cheap.  And certainly, his dizzying pace and eye for the bottom line paid off. Today, Corman is hailed as one of the world’s most prolific and successful filmmakers.

But Roger Corman didn’t always want to be a director. Growing up in Detroit in the 1920s, he aspired to become an engineer like his father. Then, at age 14, his ambitions took a turn when his family moved to Los Angeles. Corman began attending Beverly Hills High, where Hollywood gossip was a natural part of the lunchroom chatter. Although the film world piqued his interest, Corman stuck to his plan. He dutifully went to Stanford and received a degree in engineering, which he didn’t particularly want. Then he dutifully entered the Navy for three years, which he didn’t particularly enjoy. Finally, in 1948, he set his sights on something he did want -to make his mark in Hollywood.

Rising from the Ocean Floor

Corman’s career began at the bottom. He started in the film business as an entry-level reader for 20th Century Fox, wading through the worst scripts at the studio. The job was thankless, but the incompetent writing inspired Corman to give screenwriting a try. He moved to Paris to focus on his craft and eventually sold a script to Allied Artists Pictures. However, the resulting film was so awful that Corman vowed never to let a studio meddle with his work again. From that point on, Roger Corman was determined to make his own movies.

It was a bold statement at the time. Because Hollywood studios owned all the theater chains, movies couldn’t be shown without studio backing. But in 1948, the Supreme Court decided the system constituted a monopoly, and it forced studios to sell off their theaters. Suddenly, every Ed Wood with a camera could get his movies on the big screen. But without big stars or big budgets, indie flicks had to find other ways to attract audiences. And so the “exploitation movie” was born. The films shamelessly drew in crowds with shocking subjects, jazzy titles, and special effects -three things right up Corman’s alley.

In fact, part of Roger Corman’s legend sprang from the fact that he could create an entire movie out of a single good special effect. One of his earliest films, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), was conceived when Corman posed as a major producer and convinced inventors to lend him their new, one-man submarine for his “next project.” With a spiffy prop secured, all Corman needed was the little stuff -a title, a story, a screenplay, actors, and money. After scrounging up $12,000, he concocted a film about a man-eating, mutant sea creature that terrorizes good-looking tourists until a dashing marine biologist rams the beast with a submarine. (clip) Then he sold the movie for $100,000. All in all, it provided Corman with his trademark recipe for success -cheap production values, a wild sense of humor, and pulp-fiction plots all whipped briskly into a hefty profit.

Little Shop of Hormones

It wasn’t long before Monster caught the attention of American International Pictures (AIP), a production company that believed in the then-revolutionary idea of marketing movies to teens. And Corman fit right in with their mission. With AIP’s backing, Corman began churning out an unbelievable six movies a year. At that pace, logic and continuity went out the window. Vikings appeared on screen wearing sunglasses, and actors were reused in multiple roles. In one Western, a cowboys shoots at himself dressed as an Indian. But with the cheapskate director behind the camera, it wasn’t just the actors being repurposed; it was also the scenes. Corman liked some of his footage so much that he used it in other movies, again and again.

Corman also ruthlessly jettisoned elements that bogged down big-budget Hollywood films -elements such as nuanced characters and storylines. Instead, Corman focused on bells and whistles. In Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), he drew on his engineering background, meticulously placing a horror scene every five minutes throughout the film. (trailer/full movie) With a running time of 62 minutes, only the basics of plot and humor survived. The final product wasn’t art, but it wasn’t boring, either.

Surprisingly, the faster Corman made his movies, the better they turned out. Another cornerstone of his legend is the making of The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), which he reportedly conceived, wrote, and filmed in less than one week to take advantage of a leftover stage set before it was torn down. The result (which included an early Jack Nicholson appearance) was one of Corman’s finest movies. (trailer)

Tripping Ahead

Roger Corman aspired to make more than just cheapo flicks. In the 1960s, he began directing bigger-budget films based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, starring Vincent Price. These became instant classics of gothic cinema. The success encouraged Corman to flex his creative muscles further and make what his peers thought impossible -a serious film. The Intruder (1962), starring newcomer William Shatner, told the story of a man fighting racism in the South. (clip) The movie was shot on location in Missouri, but when the locals discovered that the script addressed the evils of segregation, they physically chased the crew out of town. Although the film played well to critics and was hailed as a masterpiece in Europe, U.S. audiences hardly got a chance to see it. American theaters refused to show the incendiary film, and the movie flopped. The director learned his lesson and never made another “message” film again.

Not one to sulk, Corman reverted to what he knew best -fast, cheap entertainment. His assembly-line productions required a huge amount of manpower, and in the process they attracted an entire generation of young directors and actors. Martin Scorsese, Peter Fonda, Robert De Niro, and Sylvester Stallone all apprenticed under Corman, accepting minimum-wage work in exchange for the opportunity to study his low-budget ways. As legendary director James Cameron once put it, “I trained at the Roger Corman Film School.”

But the younger generation provided more than just cheap labor. They also gave Corman a window into America’s growing counter-culture of motorcycle gangs, hippies, and LSD. The result can be seen in his definitive LSD movie The Trip (1967). The fact that he dropped acid before filming (to create a more “authentic” experience) only added to the lore. (trailer)

Through the years, Corman’s films became increasingly anarchic, putting him at odds with the older producers at AIP. The final straw was his 1971 flick Gas-s-s-s, in which  mysterious gas wipes out everyone over the age of 25, and wild subcultures dominate the Earth. (clip)  AIP re-edited the entire film without Corman’s permission, dramatically decreasing its grooviness. Corman retaliated and formed his own company, New World Pictures, where he continually refined his aesthetic. In his own words, he aimed to produce “contemporary dramas with a liberal-to-left-wing viewpoint and some R-rated sex and humor.”

How B-Movies Joined the A-List

Working with Hollywood’s future luminaries, New World raised trashy cinema to an art form during the 1970s. Ironically, Corman’s company also brought legitimate art films to the masses. It distributed the works of critically acclaimed foreign directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Roberto Rossellini to drive-in theaters. Corman knew the films’ casual attitude towards nudity would appeal to the drive-in crowd, while their artistic merits would draw in the intellectuals. Bergman, for one, never decried the crass commercialization of his work, but rather rejoiced at the thought of drunken teenagers necking to his brand of existential dread.

During the 1980s, Corman’s empire slowly dwindled, as companies such as Miramax muscled him out of the foreign-film market. His movies also suffered as VHS killed off smaller theaters, meaning his exploitation films were forced to go straight to video. Worst of all, he lost his pool of talented young directors and writers to the big studios, which were replicating his style of action movies, emphasizing thrills and humor over plot and character. The only difference was that instead of calling them “exploitation movies,” the studios called them “blockbusters.”

In fact, Hollywood’s obsession with blockbusters originated with the success of one movie. The plot? A man-eating sea creature terrorizes good-looking tourists until a marine biologist hunts it down. The movie was Jaws. But it sounds an awful lot like Monster from the Ocean Floor, doesn’t it?

Bonus: Roger Corman’s Frugal Hall of Fame

The Movie: Waterworld (1995)
The Problem: Upon reading the script, Corman famously announced, “We can’t do this. It’ll cost $5 million!”
The Solution: Corman sold the screenplay to Universal Studios, which produced it for $175 million. The movie bombed at the box office.

The Movie: The Terror (1963)
The Problem: After completing The Raven ahead of schedule, Corman had a leftover set and actors, and nothing to do with them.
The Solution: Make another movie. Written in five days and shot in two, The Terror makes absolutely no sense. Corman let his crew take turns directing it, so in the end, the film fell into the hands of Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill (one of Quentin Tarantino’s greatest influences), and even Jack Nicholson -thus earning it the “Most Great Directors Ever to Make One Bad Movie” award. (trailer/full movie)

The Movie: Cockfighter (1974) Tagline: “he came into town with his cock in hand, and what he did with it was illegal in 49 states.” (trailer)
The Problem: The sport of cockfighting was a source of shame in the South, and many people were uncomfortable seeing a movie about it.
The Solution: Corman downplayed the cockfighting by adding sex scenes to the film’s trailer, despite the fact that those scenes didn’t appear in the movie. When Cockfighter’s director, Monte Hellman, argued that this was false advertising, Corman simply inserted the sex scenes into the film. Cockfighter turned a nice profit.

The Movie: The Big Bird Cage (1972)
The Problem: Women in prison make for great exploitation movies, but it costs money to film in a prison. (trailer)
The Solution: A little barbed wire and some bamboo huts in a Philippine jungle helped Corman invent an entirely new (and incredibly cheap) genre -women in prison camp! The increased sweatiness didn’t hurt sales, either.

________________________________

The above article by Ian Lendler is reprinted with permission from the September-October 2008 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

147 Highly Interconnected Companies That Rule The World

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 08:41 PM PDT

That's not just a pretty picture above. My friends, say hello to the 1,318 highly interconnected transnational companies (with a core of 147 "super-entities") that rule the world, as visualized by scientists at the Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology:

From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

Link - via Metafilter

Apparently You Can Fry an Egg in a Waffle Iron

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 07:04 PM PDT

I had no idea, but now I must try it! Jessica Segarra made a croque madame, which is a grilled ham and Swiss cheese sandwich with a fried egg on top. She cooked it with the waffle iron open so that the yolk wouldn’t break. After three attempts, she was successful.

Link -via Craft

Drug Smuggler's Newest Creative Scheme: Parking Lot Smuggling Tunnels

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 06:39 PM PDT

If you're wondering why the roads in Nogales, Arizona, near the border with Mexico are riddled with square, symmetrical patches, the answer is that those are the visible remnants of drug smuggler's newest creativity: temporary drug smuggling tunnels!

In the latest innovation uncovered by law enforcement, smugglers in the border town of Nogales, Arizona were bringing drugs into the U.S. for the cost of a quarter.

The parking meters on International Street, which hugs the border fence in Nogales, cost 25 cents. Smugglers in Mexico tunneled under the fence and under the metered parking spaces, and then carefully cut neat rectangles out of the pavement. Their confederates on the U.S. side would park false-bottomed vehicles in the spaces above the holes, feed the meters, and then wait while the underground smugglers stuffed their cars full of drugs from below.

When the exchange was finished, the smugglers would use jacks to put the pavement "plugs" back into place. The car would drive away, and only those observers who were looking closely would notice the seams in the street.

Link

Shakespeare Insult Kit

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 05:14 PM PDT

Thou pribbling fat-kidneyed maggot-pie! You make me sick! Get out of here!

-via Blame It on the Voices | Image: unknown

P.S. Also available in gum form!

Sculptures from Welded Chains

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 05:07 PM PDT

Yeong-Deok Seo creates simply amazing nude figurative sculptures by welding chains together. The variety of textures that he can make with different types of chains is stunning. This one, assuming that Google Translate is working properly, is mysteriously entitled “Addict — Meditation 3.”

Link -via Colossal

Chocolate Gladiator Bikini

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 04:58 PM PDT

It’s like Mad Max 2 was produced by the Food Network! Cindy Fabre, Miss France in 2005, wore this costume made out of chocolate for the chocolate industry’s recent trade fair in Aix en Provence:

They used more than 300 pieces of chocolate including chocolate truffles, chocolate hearts and caramel filled chocolate bites to make the outfit, and even covered the Fabre’s shoes with the confectionary.

The model accessorised with a huge chocolate bangle and some brown feathers in her hair.

You can view more and larger pictures at the link.

Link -via That’s Nerdalicious! | Photo: Rex Features

IQ Can Actually Fluctuate

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 04:37 PM PDT

Does IQ truly measure your intelligence or is it just another achievement test, much like the SAT, with fluctuations in scores as you gain knowledge?

Maybe more the latter, according to a new study by researchers at University College London. Researchers show that IQs of a group of British teenagers fluctuate - sometimes by a lot:

The researchers tested 33 healthy adolescents between the ages of 12 and 16 years. They repeated the tests four years later and found that some teens improved their scores by as much as 20 points on the standardized IQ scale.

"We were very surprised," researcher Cathy Price, who led the project, tells Shots. She had expected changes of a few points. "But we had individuals that changed from being on the 50th percentile, with an IQ of 100, [all] the way up to being in the (top) 3rd percentile, with an IQ of 127." In other cases, performance slipped by nearly as much, with kids shaving points off their scores.

Price and her colleagues used brain scans to confirm that these big fluctuations in performance were not random — or just a fluke. They evaluated the structure of the teens' brain in the early teen years and again in the late teenage years.

"We were able to see that the degree to which their IQ had changed was proportional to the degree to which different parts of their brain had changed," explains Price. For instance, an increase in verbal IQ score correlated with a structural change in the left motor cortex of the brain that is activated when we speak.

Link

TARDIS Teapot

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 04:13 PM PDT

Etsy seller Rebekka Ferbrache made this adorable little teapot. Do not try to stuff more than three cups of liquid inside.

Link and Video -via The Mary Sue

Steampunk Trick-or-Treating Buckets

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 04:05 PM PDT

The standard orange trick-or-treating bucket is going to clash with your clever steampunk Smurfette Captain America in a utilikilt costume. But no worries: Yami Guru has you covered with his steampunk buckets.

Link -via Walyou (warning: auto-sound)

CSI: Legoland

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 03:14 PM PDT


(YouTube link)

The Lego version of CSI is a lot like the real thing, bad puns and all, but the gore is plastic. -via Laughing Squid

Surprise! Welcome Home From Jail Party Ended up in 5 Stabbings

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 02:36 PM PDT

Go directly to jail. Don't pass go, do not collect your "welcome home from jail party" party favors.

That's what happened when a welcome home party for a teen who got released from juvenile detention ended up in shooting and stabbings for 5 people at the party:

The congratulations-for-getting-out-of-juvenile-detention party occurred on the 500 block of Hess Street in Bethlehem Saturday night, police told the Morning Call.

Reports of gunshots in that area brought police to find two people with stab wounds from a huge brawl that erupted on the street during the party. Police brought the two wounded to St. Luke’s Hospital and later discovered that three more people were stabbed and had gone to the hospital on their own.

Good times! Link

Can You Tell Psychopaths Simply by the Words They Use?

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 12:35 PM PDT

Maybe so, according to psychologists studying convicted murderers. In a new study of previously diagnosed psychopaths and non-psychopathic murderers, the researchers were able to discern who are psychopathic by analyzing their word choices:

Psychopaths were far more likely to say they committed the crime because of personal needs, like food and money, and they described their deeds in the past tense, suggesting it happened a long time ago and there was little that the perpetrator could do to prevent it. They seemed emotionally detached from the murder, and as might be expected, they showed no remorse. [...]

The non-psychopathic killers, by contrast, were far more likely to describe their past in terms that reflected social needs, like family, religion and spirituality.

"In the context of a committed murder, it is likely that the non-psychopaths were aware of and affected by the profound effects their crime would have had on their own families and the victim's family," the study says. No such concern was shown among the psychopaths.

The bottom line: "Psychopaths operate on a primitive but rational level," say the researchers.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: Psychologist: Leaders Are Four Times as Likely as the Average Person to Be Psychopaths

Caution: Exotic Animals

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 10:02 AM PDT

A Zanesville, Ohio, man who owned a large private menagerie of tigers, lions, bears and monkeys opened the cages to many of the exotic animals then killed himself in his home Tuesday. Around 5:30pm, his neighbors began calling the Muskingum County Sheriff’s Office to report sightings of animals wandering off of Terry Thompson’s land.

When police went to investigate, they were met by a herd of about 50 exotic animals, and Thompson’s body in the driveway. “I had deputies that had to shoot animals with their side arms,” said Muskingum County Sheriff Matt Lutz. Soon after, officials from nearby Columbus Zoo came armed with tranquilizers to help locate and rescue as many of the animals as possible. But it didn’t go as planned: ”We just had a huge tiger, an adult tiger that must’ve weighed 300 pounds, that was very aggressive. We got a tranquilizer in it, and this thing just went crazy,” Lutz said. After the incident, he ordered a shoot-to-kill for the remaining animals.

49 of Thompson’s 56 animals were dead and buried on his property, at the request of his estranged wife, by Wednesday morning. Authorities captured a grizzly, three leopards and two monkeys, which were sent to the Columbus Zoo for safekeeping. A baboon possibly infected with hepatitis B was still missing as of Wednesday night.

How did this happen?

Ohio has extremely lax governance over the ownership of exotic animals. The state’s “inadequate regulation” puts it near the bottom of the list in a 2009 report from the Humane Society of the United States. And earlier this year, an emergency rule which “prohibited people convicted of animal cruelty from owning exotic animals” expired, allowing Thompson, who was previously charged with and found guilty of animal cruelty and neglect, to keep his 56 lions and tigers and bears.

Public safety vs. animal protection

Immediately after this story broke, Zanesville residents and national news viewers began calling the sheriff’s office and Zanesville area shelter to ask why the animals–many of them listed as endangered species–were being killed rather than tranquilized or recaptured. The short answer: No time. The longer answer is best explained by Jack Hanna, beloved animal rights activist and director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo:

“[Y]ou can’t tranquilize an animal in the dark. It upsets them … they settle in, they hunker down, they go to sleep. Obviously, we can’t find them in the dark. So what had to be done had to be done. Even a bear came after one of the officers last night, and she was just trying to get out of a car. … No one loves animals more than me, but human life has to come first.”

As night descended on Ohio and liberated exotic animals ran loose, swift and decisive action was needed to protect the human residents of Zanesville; unfortunately, it was at the expense of Thompson’s pets. The Humane Society supports Lutz’s actions and those of his team, and PETA, in a written statement, blamed legislation instead of law enforcement for the deaths.

Preventative action

Over the years, Lutz received “around 35 calls” about Thompson’s farm–all concerning “animals running loose to animals not being treated properly.” He went on to say that his office has “handled numerous complaints here, we’ve done numerous inspections here. So this has been a huge problem for us for a number of years.”

Former governor of Ohio, Ted Strickland, imposed the legislation that was allowed by current governor, John Kasich, to lapse in April. Of Thompson, he said, "Someone with a record like this man was not intended to have these animals." Strickland asserted that Thompson “would almost certainly have had his animals removed by May 1, 2011, if the emergency order had not expired.”

PETA, for its part, has been petitioning Ohio (and a number of other states) for years to institute “an outright ban” on owning exotic animals. The group is currently asking the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to “exercise its authority to declare emergency regulations to prohibit the keeping of exotic animals” as well as petitioning the state to “seize the animals over whom the agency has jurisdiction and see that they are placed in reputable sanctuaries.” Whether Gov. Kasich will comply has yet to be seen.

Is an outright ban on owning exotic animals the right move here, or should there just be stricter limitations on who can keep the animals (and where)?

Sources:

Image

The 8 Most Wildly Irresponsible Vintage Toys

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 09:38 AM PDT

We’ve posted about some extremely unsafe toys here. the one that came to mind immediately when I saw the title of this Cracked post was the Atomic Energy Lab, and it’s included. But the others are just as shockingly dangerous! However, I remember some of them from my own childhood, the childhood with no seat belts or bicycle helmets or minimum age for babysitting. Shown here is a kit for children to learn how to melt and mold their own lead, which could not only burn a hole through flesh, but poison your brain as well. NSFW text. Link

Animals Reflected in Water

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 09:32 AM PDT

Reflection of desire

I wouldn’t exactly call it narcissism, but animals like to look at their reflections just like people do. And when a photographer is there to capture the moment, you get double the subjects! See 16 photographs of animals and their reflections in water in a gallery at Environmental Graffiti. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user ucumari)

The Proof is in the Pudding

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 08:41 AM PDT


(YouTube link)

Flula Borg is German buts lives in Los Angeles and finds that English idioms make no sense. If you are at work, be warned that the audio has the word “bastard.” Continue to see more of Flula’s videos. -via The Daily What

Rock, Paper, Scissors

(YouTube link)

Shooting Fish in a Barrel

(YouTube link)

You can follow Flula on his YouTube channel or at his blog.

What Is It? game 198

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 06:30 AM PDT

It’s once again time for our collaboration with the always amusing What Is It? Blog. Can you guess what the pictured item is? Can you make up something interesting?

Place your guess in the comment section below. One guess per comment, please, though you can enter as many as you’d like. Post no URLs or weblinks, as doing so will forfeit your entry. Two winners: the first correct guess and the funniest (albeit ultimately wrong) guess will win T-shirt from the NeatoShop.

Please write your T-shirt selection alongside your guess. If you don’t include a selection, you forfeit the prize, okay? May we suggest the Science T-Shirt, Funny T-Shirt and Artist-Designed T-Shirts?

For more clues, check out the What Is It? Blog. Good luck -you’re going to need it!

9 Creepy Places to Visit For a Good Scare

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 05:05 AM PDT

If you're the kind of person who finds commercial haunted houses boring and instead loves traveling to macabre places, then you'd better start booking your tickets because we've compiled some of the creepiest and scariest places on earth. Of course, if you're squeamish and don't like to read about death or look at pictures of long-dead bodies, then you should probably skip ahead because this article just isn't for you.

Japan's Suicide Forrest

At first glance, the Aokigahara Forest near Mount Fuji is an ideal nature destination, filled with stunning trees growing on hard volcanic rock, and icy, rocky caverns. But the forest has a much darker side, one that was popularized with the 1960 novel Nami no T?, where the main characters end up committing suicide in the area. While Aokigahara was always a destination for the forlorn to end their lives, Nami no T? made the idea much more popular and since the book was released, an average of 30 people kill themselves in the area every year, with a record-setting body count of 108 deaths in 2004.

The government has put out a number of signs in both Japanese and English urging people to reconsider their decision and seek psychiatric help. Once a year, a group of volunteers patrols the forest looking for bodies. These body hunters mark off the areas they are exploring with plastic tape that is never removed. Thus, even if you never see a dead body or ghost roaming the forest, you are still bound to see signs of the forest's secrets wherever you happen to go.

Image Via Al Kaiser [Flickr]

Mexico's Island of the Dolls

Unless you already have a doll phobia, the idea of an island filled with dolls doesn't sound all that creepy at first. It's once you learn that the dolls are mutilated and left hung in trees while they rot away, all in honor of a drowned little girl that you start to realize just how creepy this macabre tourist destination really is.

It all started over fifty years ago, when the island's only resident, Don Julian Santana found the body of a dead little girl in the canal where the island sits. He was haunted by her memory and soon started hanging dolls in the trees to appease the girl's spirits and to ward off evil spirits from entering the island. Doll heads, arms, legs, etc. are sprawled out across the island in a strange sacrifice to prevent further evil. Strangely though, in 2001, Don Julian suffered the same fate as the little girl, drowning in the canal beside his home. Some people believe this was the work of the dolls who have since become inhabited by evil spirits. These days, the dolls remain the sole occupants of one of Mexico's darkest tourist attractions.

Image Via SkilliShots [Flickr]

Italy's Catacomb of Mummies

The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo started when the local monastery outgrew its original cemetery, so the monks decided to mummify one of their recently deceased brothers before placing him in their newly opened catacombs. The process seemed to work well, so the monks began mummifying all of their fallen comrades and placing them in the catacombs. After a few centuries, word spread about the monk's unique burial methods and it soon began to be a status symbol for rich people to be entombed in the catacombs buried in their finest clothing. Some people even left wills requesting that their clothing be changed by their family members at regular intervals.

The last friar was buried in the catacombs in 1871, but famous people from the area continued to be interred up until the 1920s. There are now about 8000 mummies lining the walls of the many hallways, which have been organized into categories: men, women, virgins, children, priests, monks and professionals. Some of the bodies are even set in poses, including the bodies of two children who sit together in a rocking chair.

Austria's Skull Ossuary


Halstatt is one of the oldest cities in Europe, but it's not the town's long history span that brings most tourists to the area. Instead, it is the small town's massive ossuary that is filled with the painted skulls of more than 650 deceased residents of the town. The ossuary was built back in the twelfth century when the town became so large that the cemetery could no longer provide a final resting place for the residents. As a solution, graves began being rented for a span of 10-15 years, at which time, the bodies would be removed, the bones bleached in the sun and then left to rest in the ossuary.

While there are plenty of ossuaries in Europe, it's the fact that the skulls in Halstatt are painted that make this one so special. The practice began in 1790, when members of the deceaseds' families began adorning skulls with paintings of flowers, their names and the victim's date of birth and death. Since their family members weren't going to have a tombstone, it was their way of marking the "grave" of their loved ones.

These days, Halstatt is small enough that residents are no longer removed from their graves, but most people prefer cremation anyway. Anyone who wishes to be interred into the ossuary just needs to make the request before they die. The most recent addition to the collection was in 1997. Nowadays, most visitors to the ossuary are morbid tourists, not residents paying respects to their ancestors.

Image Via ambivalence [Flickr]

Portugal's Chapel of Bones

Most of us like to relish life and ignore death as much as possible, but for the devoutly religious, the greatest rewards often come long after life has passed. That's precisely what led a 16th century Franciscan monk to build the Capela dos Ossos (meaning "Chapel of Bones" in English) for his fellow monks. The concept that life is transitory was reflected both in the macabre décor and in the warning sign above the chapel's entrance, which read, "We bones, lying here, for yours we wait."

Of course, the ominous sign is still far less creepy than the interior, which is adorned with skeletal remains of around 5,000 monks held in place with cement. The bodies were removed from several dozen nearby cemeteries and, of course, the bodies of the monks who died while the chapel was being completed. As if the bone-covered walls weren't enough, there are two bodies dangling from chains coming from the ceiling –one of which belonged to a young child. Near these bodies, along the ceiling, are written the words "Better is the day of death than the day of birth."

Image Via Chrisiano Maia [Flickr]

Rome's Bone-Riddled Chapels

Rome has a lot of tourist attractions, but located below the lesser-known church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini sits a tourist attraction that Frommer's describes as "one of the most horrifying images in all of Christendom." That's because in the chapels below the church's main floor, are the bones of more than 4,000 Capuchin friars. Like Capela dos Ossos, the intention here isn't to be morbid, but to remind visitors of the swift passage of life.

Construction of the chapels began in 1631, when the monks brought 300 cartloads of deceased friars to be buried in the crypt, which contained soil imported directly from Jerusalem. As monks died while the crypt was open, the body that had been in the crypt the longest would then be exhumed and his bones would be used to adorn the chapels. There are six rooms in the underground area, including the main chapel, which does not hold any skeletal remains. Three of other rooms are decorated only by certain body parts, skulls, pelvises and torsos, and legs. The other two rooms are the most interesting.

The Crypt of the Resurrection features a large picture of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, framed by different skeleton parts. In the Crypt of the Three Skeletons, the center skeleton is enclosed in an oval to represent life coming to birth. This center skeleton also holds a scythe and scales symbolizing death and the judgment of the human soul. Beside this fixture sits a sign with translations into five languages that reads, "What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be."

Image Via Thomas van Ardenne [Flickr]

The Czech Republic's Chapel of Bones

While most of the places on this list are minor tourist attractions in their region, the Sedlec Ossuary is one of the most popular travel destinations in all of the Czech Republic, attracting over 200,000 annually. Of course, that wasn't the intention of its creators and designers. Like many ossuaries, the building was created after the city's cemetery became incredibly over crowded.  In the year 1400, the church was constructed in the center of the cemetery with a massive lower chapel designed to be used as an ossuary. It was soon filled to the brim with the bones of around 55,000 people.

In 1870, a local aristocratic family, the Schwarzenbergs, hired woodcarver Frantisek Rint to put the bone heaps in some kind of order. Rint went further than just sorting things out, he turned the bones into works of art. He built massive bell-shaped mounds in the corners of the chapel and an enormous chandelier featuring every bone in the body. Garlands of skulls drape the vault and even the artist's signature and the Schwarzenberg family coat of arms are recreated in bones inside the chapel.

Image Via kostnice03 [Wikipedia]

Paris' Catacombs

This is actually the only place on this list that I myself have visited and I must say, it was well worth the visit. The Catacombs of Paris were created after the city suffered from massive cemetery overcrowding for centuries. It was so bad that all but the rich were buried in mass grave sites. Unfortunately, because the city relied on well water, the rotting corpses started to contaminate the area's drinking supply. Finally in the 18th century, the city decided to close down all cemeteries within the city limits and to move the bodies from the existing graves into a new ossuary located in the city's massive underground stone quarries that had long since been abandoned. The exhumations started in 1786 and the whole process took over two years to complete –it takes a long time to transfer 6 million skeletons. In 1810, the Inspector General of Quarries Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury oversaw the renovations in the ossuary that would transform the piles of bones into a true mausoleum. He was responsible for arranging the bones into their iconic patterns and incorporating the handful of scavenged tombstones he could find into the overall design.

The deep underground ossuary ended up attracting visitors by the early 18th century and by 1867, the area was opened to the public for tours. It has remained a popular tourist attraction ever since.

Image Via Vlastula [Wikipedia]

Pennsylvania's Constantly Burning Ghost Town

(Video Link)

If you've ever played Silent Hill, then you know just how terrifying Centralia, Pennsylvania can be. While it might not be filled with dead bodies or dolls like the other places on this list, the ghost town is creepy enough to have inspired the location for one of the most terrifying video games ever created. Up until 1962, the town was just like every other small American town. But when a fire broke out in the abandoned coal mine below the town, residents started suffering adverse health effects from the resulting carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide emissions. Despite multiple attempts to put out the fire, it continued to burn. Experts now believe it may continue to burn for another 250 years. Things didn't get really bad until the sinkholes started to burst open in the early eighties, revealing burning infernos below the surface.

In 1984, congress offered residents buyout offers to allow them to move to away from the dangerous towns, but many insisted on staying. In 1992, the state claimed eminent domain on the city and condemned all the buildings inside the area. Despite the city's decrees, at least ten people continue to live in the five buildings left in the evacuation zone.

Unlike the town of Silent Hill, these days, practically all the buildings have collapsed and the city looks more like a field filled with too many paved streets. The four cemeteries in the town continue to be well maintained though, despite the fact that one of them continues to have smoke rising around it at all times.

Have any of you ever visited any of these places? Are they worth a visit? Also, do you have any other creepy destinations to add to the list?
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