We reach a point in the Autumn Equinox where the veil is thin and spirits take flight. As we wander this Earth, most of us rarely look for signs of history from the deceased past; time and people dissolve into space as darkness comes quicker at night. How can we convey messages from the past? […]
Fittingly, old haunts surround a couple of skeletons on the cover of Motif’s Halloween issue, as designed by digital artist Matthew Bernier of Barrington. They are the names of businesses now gone: Goldy Records, Chez Pascal, and The Watershed, to name a few. “Some of these places were my haunts when I was growing up,” […]
“Almighty God!-no,no! They heard!-they suspected!-they knew!-they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die!-and now-again!-hark! Louder! Louder! Louder! LOUDER!” “Villains!” […]
For teenager Elliot Langston of Pawtucket, using pipe cleaners to craft characters from monster movies, games, and anime is painstaking work – in both definitions of the term. The 15-year-old spends hours fashioning figures that are as detailed as they are accurate. But working with these implements can be painful. “The metal will poke you […]
There used to be an old, elevated train system in Boston, spanning from the Roxbury area to downtown. Dark and dirty, it wasn’t exactly glamorous, but beneath it sat a storefront displaying boxes of cheap books. It was here that you could find a young Errick Nunnally rifling through boxes of torn-cover books being sold […]
Let’s start with the basics here. We all know the commercialized image of a witch on a broomstick, flying around on a full moon with her black cat. But what if I told you witchcraft is real, and closer to you than you may realize? And what exactly is witchcraft? Ariadne Weaver, an authority on […]
Halloween was a war against the dark, the dead, and the deities. In Celtic Ireland, where the tradition began, many people were druidic. They focused their worship on the spirits and gods of the natural world that they believed held their fate. In a world where their entire religion was based on nature and appeasing […]
Painters: Francisco Goya, Vincent van Gogh, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Rothko, Edvard Munch. Musicians: Ludwig van Beethoven, Chris Cornell, Ian Curtis, Chester Charles Bennington, Kurt Cobain. Writers: Edgar Allen Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Anthony Bourdain, Sylvia Plath. All are artists who suffered emotional disorders, neurosis and breakdowns, and, in […]
Is there any more iconic imagery associated with October and Halloween than the classic witch sailing through the skies atop a broom, beneath a bright full moon? Despite its tragic past and condemnation from puritanical pilgrims of the past, we are fascinated by witchery. For this piece, I sought a well-versed soul on the topic […]
1. HER WEB It looks like a wheel of diamonds you said. My eyes moved to the corner of the porch where you had noticed the spider, bigger than any I’d ever seen, finishing a hoop of her web. A barn spider, an orb weaver, you said. Harmless to us, despite the look of her, […]