Saturday, October 2, 2021

Where does this Kodak snapshot rank on the Mild Fear scale?

Times are tough, so I'm trying to keep Mild Fear 2021 on the mild and fun side. But it's Day 2 and I'm not sure I'm doing a great job with this post. This vintage Kodak snapshot falls somewhere on the spectrum between Disturbing and Dandy, but I'm not quite sure where. I guess it depends partly on one's tolerance for children in bizarre masks. 

Personally, I lean toward dandy, and I like the nostalgia of the faded square photograph and that gigantic television. Simpler times, when there were just four channels and not 40 billion social media feeds. On the other hand, I reckon I wouldn't want to see that kid standing silently in my kitchen, looking like he's wearing every piece of clothing he pulled out of a local theater group's props chest. I've seen those scenes in movies, and they never end well.
Does anyone recognize that witch mask from the 1960s or 1970s? It looks sort of like a Disney crone, but I'm also getting some Baba Yaga vibes.

Anyway, it'll be full speed ahead with the Mild Fear posts in the coming weeks. This year's batch is going to be heavy on books from across the spectrum of spookiness. In the meantime, I'm also busy sending out Halloween-themed postcards to Postcrossing folks around the globe. As always, it's artist Ryan Conners that I turn to for wonderful Halloween-themed folk art.
Meanwhile, here in the desert, we're doing another Halloween movie festival all month long, kicking it off today with Boris Karloff and Neve Campbell. I wrote about the 2020 festival in this post, and the 2021 schedule of events is below (subject to change, of course, if there's a zombie uprising):

1 comment:

  1. That's a good one. I checked the archives (aka Google) and couldn't find any that matched it. It's amazing how many variety of witch masks Collegeville and Ben Cooper produced.

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