Creature Feature Short Take: Krasue

Because what's better than decapitated love? Say hello to Yuthlert Sippapak's GHOST OF VALENTINE (KRASUE VALENTINE) featuring the classic story of boy meet girl ghost, boy falls in love with girl ghost, girl ghost wants to eat the living, etc.

The Krasue has a similarity with a ghost from Malaysia called the Penanggalan or the Puntianak. This type of ghost has been depicted before in films such as Hong Kong's 'Witch with the Flying Head' (1977) and Indonesia's 'Mystics In Bali' (1981)."

Interestingly, according to some accounts in China, there was a group known as the Falling-Head People or Luotou Min in the South, whose heads could fly. Once, a General Zhu Huan acquired a concubine whose head would fly away every night when she was asleep. That caused quite a scandal, so they promptly determined ways to dispatch her. And all she wanted to do was terrorize the living...

Other readers of OTOSOTE will remember a Hellboy issue that dealt with the Penanggalan:

So the next time you go running around, just remember:

Floating heads attached to their internal organs and nothing else are a poor choice for company. You can always do much better...

Oh and in the meantime, you can hop over to http://www.tripmastermonkey.com where they've got an article of mine up about other creatures of the night. Happy halloween!

Creature Feature Short Take: Vampires. Sort of.

With the US elections only a matter of days away now, and Halloween too (my wife's favorite holiday for any number of reasons. If you knew her, you'd say that's just typical of her...) now seems as apt a point as any to discuss vampires and other blood-sucking fiends.

It would seem that with his arrest, MN's chance at electing the first vampire for governor have been dashed for now. Pesky America and its inconvenient laws about statute of limitations... ;)

Amusingly enough, Jonathon 'The Impaler' Sharkey's website on the matter has also gone poof into the netherealm, much like a bolt of sunlight on more fictitious fiends, so we must make do with the boingboing.net article instead, and miscellaneous snarkiness we find around on Google.

We once elected Jesse 'The Body' Ventura here, after all.

Who's to say Jonathon didn't really have a chance?

Oh sure, the impaling terrorists and wrong-doers near the front steps of the capitol might go against our usual principles of Minnesota-nice, but we also love theater here.

I'm not saying he'd have been better than Pawlenty or Hatch or Hutchinson, but I think elections are always more interesting when we see true democracy in action- when anyone, and I mean anyone, could have even odds at making it into high office.

Take Melody "Mimi Miyagi" Damayo, for example, who made a tilt at the Nevada Governor's office on the Republican ticket.

Single mother, Asian American entrepreneur with a background as an immigrant in entertainment and the media, it was a little bizarre, but hey, most of the candidates in Nevada could barely point at one another without the accusation of the pot calling the kettle black.

Of course, now there's recent news that she's gone Libertarian and is making a run for mayor of Vegas in '07, which is apparently what she'd really wanted to do in the first place.

At least she made a run, and put her money where her mouth is, which is a lot further than a lot of people have gone. And interestingly, she went on to do it without making an ass of herself, unlike:

But back to vampires and other blood-suckers:

On the one hand, while we have Hogula, dread pig of night, I'm running into an occasional reference or two to the Vampire Pig of Soc Trang in Vietnam, who sounds more or less like an ordinary pot-belly pig, but I'd still like to see a picture if anyone's got it.

And all this is assuming the portly fellow's not a plate of spare ribs by now.

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On a more gruesome note, there's the 1999 case of Cambodian 'vampire' Pheach Phen who serves as a sobering reminder of the importance of supporting good health education internationally.
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Today I'm also giving a report on porphyria, which is interesting because in 1985, biochemist David Dolphin suggested it as an explanation for the origin of vampire and werewolf legends, based upon a number of similarities between the condition and folklore.

This is only a THEORY, but many people seem to be forgetting that and treating it as a truth, much like the idea that King George III may have suffered from it.

Right now, I should also mention that I'm re-watching "They Live" again, and it's still a riot. Longtime readers of this blog may also understand its influence on the format of On The Other Side of the Eye as a result.

Hmm. And in closing, it's amazing the things you find photoshopped on the internet these days. Thanks, random google link:

Have a great day, everyone.

Obey.

Creature Feature Short Take: Shuten Doji

It's been a few days since my last post, so today's Creature Feature Short Take is that loveable fratboy of the Asian Underworld, Shuten Doji:

Not to be confused with the crummy Star Hand Kid series a while back:

But rather the monstrous oni from Japan, particularly residing at the top of Mount Oe until the hero Raiko and 4 BFFs snuck into his house during a party and cut his head off.

I'll be honest, I first ran into the term Shuten Doji while playing Legend of the Five Rings back in the 90s and seeing Steve Morales' design:

And until I bothered to do the research I thought he was some sort of vampire.

But au contraire, it turns out that Shuten Doji's full name translates into Giant Drunken Boy. Or Big Drunkard Demon, or some similar combination involving "large", "blitzed" and "being an ass."

It seems old Shuten Doji is also a cannibal demon. It's bad enough of course that he's either a cannibal or a demon, but he's both!

And he liked to kidnap beautiful girls from the capitol to 'hang out' with him and his oni buddies at their Tower of Murder during their keggers featuring buffets of human sashimi and blood.

If anyone had it coming, it was Shuten Doji:

Japundit.Com has some great pictures of the Nebuta Festival of Aomori City, including this float of Raiko taking down Shuten Doji.

These floats have to be seen to be believed. In fact so much so, that I'm going to call attention to their other entry:

The Vampire Cat of Nabeshima! Bad kitty!

If you like fun and gruesome ghost stories and Japanese art, this entry at Japundit will keep you busy for an afternoon. Great stuff!

That's all for now!

Creature Feature: The Werewolf

Well, things have been coming up a lot recently, but it's time to blow some steam off by taking a look at everyone's fun buddy, the Loup Garou! AKA the Werewolf, the Lycanthrope or Fuzzy-Wuzzy.

Well, just kidding about the last one.

Hollywood's treatment of the werewolf typically sees him as an impotent man who suddenly gets accidentally bitten by a wolf and soon becomes an alpha male, sort of a 'from zero to hero' kind of thing.

With the unfortunate side effect of becoming a man-killing freak in the process, and one who has to use the lunar calendar, of all things.

And it's interesting that over the years, people used to be really conflicted, nay, tormented over this sort of thing, blood of the innocent and all that.

But lately it seems like werewolf victims treat it all as just a really big inconvenience or vent on people using the Texan 'He Had It Coming' principle.

Oh sure, they're officially looking for a cure, but whether it's An American Werewolf in London, Wolf, Werewolf the TV series or any number of other recent werewolf films too wretched to utter their names, (I'm looking at you, Wes Craven) it seems the 'heroes' really dawdle at finding the cure.

It takes half the episode/film to figure out they're even a werewolf, and then there's the ranting around like they'd never heard of the things.

It makes you just want to throw your hands up in the air like you don't care.

For me, I always saw the roots of our primal fear of the werewolf grounded in the idea of a person who is out of control, who returns to a bestial, savage state, becoming feral and murderous.

And perhaps, in an odd paradox, they're not completely 'wild' and 'carefree' beings of pure chaos. After all, their existence is now guided by the regularity of the lunar cycles.

It's savage, but largely predictable.

The werewolf strikes me as a being we dread for fear of reversions. Well, yes, and the big pointy teeth.

And what strikes me more is the more forgotten lore that werewolves used to be people who MADE THE CHOICE to be so. Beings whose monstrous natures were not bestowed by accident, but design. Which I find an intriguingly more horrific idea.