Dark Arts Festival

After the holidays, it’s time to cover other topics. One might argue that you shouldn’t wait until two and a half months after the holidays in order to do so, but here we are. Naturally, I’m picking something out of the archives that was held up due to the aforementioned holiday necessities, and by the datestamp of the photos, it appears to be from last August. We’re closer now to next August than we are to the prior, but I don’t have much else to go on, and the POG writeup is no closer to being started after five years than it ever has been.

So let’s take a look at the Dark Arts Festival. The banner promises monsters and ghouls and horror, etc…, but will the imagery hold up to the hype?! I’m not going to get too sarcastic here, since you typically know what you’ve getting into when there’s an event hosted in rented out rooms at some place trying to pull in a little extra revenue. Might be a hotel, might be an office building, but here it’s a paintball complex.

This does lead to a bit of unintended humor, where next to the severed pygmy heads and animal remains, there’s a Happy Birthday flyer that remains perpetually on the wall since it’s more efficient to bridge the gaps between occasions when hundreds of children run amok. There’s also the No Shooting sign featuring Scary-Black-Gun ™, which somehow works better out of context in this case…especially when it only notes “in this area”. Perhaps it’s to stifle the sales of the vendors over in the next room. Those are the sales tactics they DON’T teach you in college. Gotta learn that on the streets…

So what is here then? Well if you read my previous vendor articles: Freak, Antiques, and Uniques and RetroXpo , then you will have a general idea. It’s a mix of artisans, pop culture, and horror memorabilia at varying degrees of value. You’ll find handmade crafts that range from expertly painted ceramics, to 3D printed figures from an .STL file downloaded the night before. There’s also tables that would have felt at home in 1994 during the comic card hey-day, but for some reason the prices match what I *thought* they were going to reach back when I blew all my allowance money what I imagined were sure-fire investments. Perhaps I wasn’t wrong after all.

The main issue I have with these lay in the amount of money I, first, need to bring, and ultimate feel like parting with by the end of the day. You don’t go there to *not* pick something up, but at the same time, there’s a nagging part of your brain that really wonders if you need the marmot skull hot-glued onto a daisy in a turtle tank. You definitely do, but the second-thoughts are there nonetheless. Sometimes it’s worth getting the mystery brown-bag of goods and hoping for the best. You’ll surely only end up getting a sticker, two spider rings, and the gross half of a beavers tooth where it’s still forming in their skull, but it’s only $10 and that’s escaping dirt cheap.

Cynicism aside, there are some things of genuine interest. Often independent writers will have their books for sale. These mark some of the few chances to get better deals. Self-published books often have a terrible profit margin, but the asking price at places like Barnes & Noble aren’t really much better, so it’s worth throwing a few bucks directly at the source. Plus it’s probably the only time you can get a book about H.P. Lovecraft’s lunches with his neighbors without a collective ‘tut-tut’ing from society at large. There’s also the indie comics, but as much as I feel I should like and support those, something just keeps me from doing so.

Now any event wouldn’t be complete without some larger attraction. Fate would dictate that most do in fact end up being incomplete, but not this time. Stashed in the corner was a full size vintage refrigerator decked out in bloody teeth and begging for photo ops. It was there mainly to promote the upcoming sequel to the Killer Refrigerator, which coincided with a free screening of the original indie flick over in the next room. Photos of participants are on Facebook, but digging back to August on that platform is an exercise in futility, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Watching the movie was certainly more fun in this atmosphere. I could have went without the brief shot of some guy’s hairy butt, but the cat-eating scene was lightened up when everyone could clearly see the not-quite-out-of-frame hand tossing the kitty into frame. The trailer for the follow-up came after and it doesn’t look half-bad. The camera used likely cost more than the entire previous movie, but that’s show business baby.

After all this complaining, did I pick up anything? Just what you see above. Jason, trapped under water, makes a fitting water lamp. It leaks, and the power switch only works one way unless you remove the cap and smack it on a table, but overall it’s a clever idea. The Alien figure was the last one needed in a series that I started picking up at flea markets. I didn’t need it, but I also didn’t need the regret of letting a missing piece of the collection slip through my fingers. The rest was from a grab bag and all seemed to be ghost face related. I never liked the Scream series, so now I have to forever live with this buyer’s remorse.