7 Instagram accounts you need to follow before Halloween
It's never to early to start getting freaked out
It's never too early to celebrate Halloween. Once Labour Day ends, the cobwebs appear, the pumpkins pop up and it's only a matter of time before you're elbow deep in a pillowcase full of candy corn. In fact, many of us prefer to stay scared all year round - the Halloween spirit never leaves. So if you'd like to join our secret society, you may want to follow these delightfully ghoulish Instagram accounts and scroll in total horror.
Our first follow is a frightfully artistic one. Susete is a Toronto-based miniaturist, making bite-sized models, dioramas and portraits from classic and cult classic horror and science fiction. In excruciating detail, she most prominently recreates houses and set pieces from horror films, like the Shining, Beetlejuice and Psycho, to bring to life the worlds we've all had burned into our memories. If you want more props and portraits of her work, Susete also has an Esty store.
If those replicas have you hankering for the real movie, @scaryflix has got you covered. The account is a cinephile collection of some of the best, worst, gruesome and weirdest scenes in horror movie history. Every horror fan knows that the only thing better than a good horror film is a bad one and this profile has creepy and campy clips from them all. It's a great way to remind yourself of films you need to rewatch and discover fright films you've never seen. Oh, and as you can imagine, this profile is kind of NSFW.
We've all had the nightmare of bizarre creatures invading our neighbourhoods. Well, digital artist Joe Pascale was kind enough to bring those worlds to life. He films locations around Toronto (TTC, Kensington Market, Rogers Centre) and then digitally animates strangely-shaped men roaming over top of them. Using familiar locations, Joe's work takes that extra step towards reality and it's hard to visit those locations again and not expect something strange to appear behind you.
If you want to get back down to reality, there's plenty of creepy places all around us. @tonydetroit is a Michigan-based photographer who finds the most eerie locations around the Motor City. A city very much still in economic and infrastructure regeneration, there are many abandoned, neglected or dilapidated locations that would be the perfect setting for a haunted house. Tony manages to capture these locations in such a way that you can feel the lost lives that used to roam there and get a chill down your spine.
Not much is known about @mothmeister and perhaps it's better (and creepier that way). Billed as a "taxidermy collector and curiosity cabinet" who creates "post-mortem fairy tales" by way of staged photographs, the account has haunting individuals in front of barren landscapes that seem ripped right out of American Horror Story (so many clowns…). The photographs often combine a variety of taxidermied species (which is unsettling enough in itself) as well as vintage and surreal costuming to create images that are both classic and futuristic-looking horror. And for those of you who find this terror artistic, there is an Etsy site with all their prints available.
After the shock and screams, the best part of a fake scare is seeing how it all came together. Kyle Huculak is a Canadian makeup and special effects artist, specializing in crafting monsters, creatures and the undead. His profile is a fascinating behind the scenes look at how his creations come to life, from the concept, to the crafting, testing and completion. But even though you see the process from the beginning, the final result will still freak you out.
You don't always need props and gore to freak people out, sometimes all you need is words to get in their heads. Enter @tinyscifi, whose posts are science fiction premises that are often (at most) only a few sentences but can send your mind on an adventure. Often tongue in cheek concepts that parody classic sci fi tropes like time travel, alternate dimensions and robots, this profile is a great way to kickstart your daydreaming of another life.