The charm, as well as the bafflement, of any Asian street festival is that you never quite know what you're going to see. This is especially true with the Drowsy Horror Festival, which began on the 18th. Some of the quaint little canvas stalls are selling things you'd find anywhere--tees, skirts, there are cute little games to play...or at least they look like games...
Like this one. It's...a pool? With colored balls, and a glowing...crowned...fishlike thing? The fish-esque thing you can buy, by the way, runs about thirty, for something I swear was called the Les-Fish-Necklace...though I could be misremembering.
Miss Neome and I were endlessly charmed by the little skeleton dolls in this display. They randomly appeared and disappeared, first one, then two, then four, then all of them.
Technically they're selling the skirts on the dolls...but we just wanted the dolls! Or the skins on them...
At the back of the festival was an old and weathered wooden house. It had a slatted door you could touch. When you did, inside was either pitch-dark shadow, fading darkness, or a giant dead girl.
Any way you look at it, that, at least, was genuinely creepy.
I'm still trying to figure out what this stall sold. Was it a set of ghostly arms dangling from chains? Was it an attachment of two arms coming out of your stomach? Was it a half-arm blocking your face? What?
Though finding a set of spirit-green limbs in the side field--attached to nothing--helped reinforce the creep factor, too.
And the full version of the creepy little girl. That half-face is so pervasive, too, I keep wondering if it's directly from some Asian horror film I don't quite remember right now...
Just over the mountain, by the way, is the main store for Kurotsubaki, Situ Yifu's main store. (The Drowsy Horror Festival is being sponsored by Situ Yifu and Kurotsubaki.) I found this fellow just standing, looking out the window. Strangely, he reminds me of 2D...
The main store has gotten a lot larger, and there's room to wander, many fun things to see. She may even have other vendors. She's always had a defiantly quirky design sense, it's one of the things I love about her work.
At the very least, the Horror Festival is worth a visit. After all, if you can't walk around somewhere else on the grid with ice cream made of eyes and hallucinogenic mushrooms, what's the point?
2 comments:
My first thought was "leave it to the Japanese to make a bish version of Jack the Pumpkin King!"
You know, that's rather apt, too. And he's not a greeter, he's just...there. Watching the courtyard through an open French door.
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