Horror Curios

bendk

bendk

Grimscribe
This thread is devoted to horror curios that you have stumbled upon and would like to share. I first saw this item on eBay a few years back. It is a Cthulhu chess set. I believe only two were made and they sold for hundreds of dollars each. (too much for me!) I love the game, but I'm not very good. Anyway, I think this is very cool.

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It is very cool indeed.

However, after many years of playing amateur chess I think that the best chess set is the traditional one, with white (or light yellow) and black (or dark brown) chessmen. The ones that are hand-carved, or have "hard to understand" chessmen are incredibly complicated to play with, specially when one needs extra time to understand which one is the rook and which one is the king. It doesn't look too complicated at first sight, but in the middle of a game, which one is the king, Cthulhu? The same could be said of chess software where the best one to play with is the simplest one, the one used by most newspapers as well.
 
I agree that playing chess with the Cthulhu chessmen would be difficult -- but maybe they were designed to be horror curios rather than practical chessmen.
 
I bought a number of 54mm horror figures from a man in the north east of England who casts and paints them. In this picture, we see (from left to right) the creature from black lagoon, the wolfman, the mummy and Mr Hyde. Thr picture is too dark to see them properly. Maybe I'll try to take a better picture of these (and other) 54mm horror figures.

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Russell Nash said:
It is very cool indeed.

However, after many years of playing amateur chess I think that the best chess set is the traditional one, with white (or light yellow) and black (or dark brown) chessmen. The ones that are hand-carved, or have "hard to understand" chessmen are incredibly complicated to play with, specially when one needs extra time to understand which one is the rook and which one is the king. It doesn't look too complicated at first sight, but in the middle of a game, which one is the king, Cthulhu? The same could be said of chess software where the best one to play with is the simplest one, the one used by most newspapers as well.
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Odalisque said:
I agree that playing chess with the Cthulhu chessmen would be difficult -- but maybe they were designed to be horror curios rather than practical chessmen.
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I agree. For practical play a traditional set is the best. The House of Staunton makes some beautiful sets. But I wouldn't mind having a go with the Cthulhu set... on second thought, you never know what might be at stake. See "The Dreams of Albert Moreland" by Fritz Leiber or "The Grand Masters Final Game" by Mark Samuels.
 
bendk said:
I think the King of Curios has to be Clark Ashton Smith.

http://www.eldritchdark.com/galleries/by-cas/all/a/1
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I think these images were scanned from the book "The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith", published by Mirage Press in 1973. In fact, Eldritch Dark has also published Grahm Wilson's introduction and Dennis Rickard's foreword to the book.

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I have a copy somewhere, but I was not able to easily locate it this weekend when I looked. (My poor Archives have been a little unorganized since I moved to my current home in 2006.) Copies show up on eBay from time to time - I got mine 6 or 7 years ago for much less than the current prices of used copies on Amazon ($114-$258 as of this posting).
 
Sam said:
bendk said:
I think the King of Curios has to be Clark Ashton Smith.

http://www.eldritchdark.com/galleries/by-cas/all/a/1
Click to expand...

I think these images were scanned from the book "The Fantastic Art of Clark Ashton Smith", published by Mirage Press in 1973. In fact, Eldritch Dark has also published Grahm Wilson's introduction and Dennis Rickard's foreword to the book.

b775619009a0d2438b0e4110.L.jpg


I have a copy somewhere, but I was not able to easily locate it this weekend when I looked. (My poor Archives have been a little unorganized since I moved to my current home in 2006.) Copies show up on eBay from time to time - I got mine 6 or 7 years ago for much less than the current prices of used copies on Amazon ($114-$258 as of this posting).
Click to expand...

I bought a copy of that book while it was still in print (sometime in the first half of the 1970s). I don't think that it cost me more than £5, and probably less. Alas, my copy slipped away. To be honest, though, I don't think that it's worth the prices you quote. It's all in black and white, and at least some of the photographs didn't seem very good to me. (The photos of CAS's paintings, if I recall correctly, are especially poor.) My personal opinion is that a price of £20 would be pushing it.
 
Not really horror, but it does have a monster. Plus this is my favorite present that I got last Christmas. It is a Hallmark tree ornament based on Maurice Sendak's book Where the Wild Things Are.

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Military Burial Ground, from 1860s, almost in downtown Toronto.

This is a curiosity more than a curio. It is just 2 blocks from my place. Most of names on the remaining tombstones placed on the wall are wiped away by time.

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I had a large plaster Dracula statue similar to this when I was a kid. My little brother had a Frankenstein's Monster. We had a good time fighting with them. But I also had fun with this statue as a late teenager. A new group of youngsters were in the neighborhood (they were about 5 or 6 years old) and I thought it would be fun to give them a fright. When they ventured into our yard, I bent down out of sight and held the Dracula statue up in the window and shouted "Hey, what are you kids doing around here!" They all yelled "Dracula!" and ran away. That shows just what an iconic figure he is to everyone that even little kids would know his name. They later grew more bold and deliberately provoked Dracula to the window. "Dracula? Dracula?" I would here them calling from outside. No doubt playing chicken. I didn't disappoint them, they got the scare they wanted and deserved. I have to admit my voice immitation was somewhat shoddy, more of a curmudgeon than a Lord of the Undead with a thick Hungarian accent.
 
Memento mori, literally 'remember that you must die', were worn by the living as protection against the temptations of this world, in order to ensure acceptance in the world to come. This striking English example from 1540- 50, made of gold enamelled in black and white, is inscribed with an intricate design.
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my Lament Configuration Hellraiser DVD set. other stuff that I have but haven't photographed: coffin-shaped metal Nightmare Before Christmas lunchbox, little Gashlycrumb Tinies metal lunchbox, Pilsbury Doughboy figure I modded to resemble Psychodoughboy from the horror comic "Johnny the homicidal Maniac," and assorted Cthulhu toys.
 
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