Creepy Images: Winter Horror

Now, much of the world dons its icy shroud again. Nature crams us into its temporary casket, like an exhausted vampire whose coffin fills galactic proportions. We prepare to partake in the mysteries of the half-remembered yuletide, while trees take on the appearance of a plucked bone yard. Winter has come. And with it follow the usual horrors.


This hazy pseudo-photo says it all. Beneath the branches is a bizarre quality that's barely tangible, let alone describable. By some trick of the light (or is it deliberate technique?), the skies of this photographic world--our own realm--appear to unleash black snow.


Algernon Blackwood's infamous Wendigo--probably weird fiction's most feared northern terror--is depicted in this fan art by Deviantart's Moonshadow01. This portrait envisions an unholy amalgamation of possession, death, and northern symbolism. The bones and antlers of familiar animals lose their earthly connections completely in a Gigeresque tail. Moonshadow presents the monster in the same way Blackwood intended long ago: as an unstoppable force of nature.


Winter's frights would be shallow if not for ruins like these mingling with the cold. The darkness and environmental peril shielding an ancient church or an abandoned cabin makes each structure far more ominous and exponentially more mysterious than they would otherwise be. Mystery--the purveyor of the great unknowns--feeds on the cold just as the arctic draws back on it, forcing a parasitic cycle into existence.

-Grim Blogger