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From the Artist
October 25th, 2002
Ravenswood Revisited by Dave Brasgalla
An Edwardian tale Of Terror… Poor Lucrezia Ravenswood! As the young bride of wealthy landowner Reginald Ravenswood, she goes to live at foreboding Ravenswood Manor as the new lady of the house – and enters into a shadowy web of murderously dire mysteries…
What really happened to Reginald’s first wife? Reginald isn’t talking… only drinking. Does the taciturn Nurse Mortem know more than she claims? What was contained in the parcel of documents Auntie Medusia stole from Reginald’s study? What dark deed is Uncle Theodore planning to do with that rope? Is the insolent Dankwell really trying to poison her? And who is the spectral figure Lucrezia has seen walking the manor grounds at midnight…?
Perhaps you and Inspector Griswold can unearth the sinister truth before it’s too late!
Production Notes: The original Ravenswood Manor icons were created for Halloween ‘00 and they were crafted especially for OS 9 and below. In one of my rare concessions to popular demand, I’ve re-created them as OS X icons for your edification. I made the original icons in just one day, in a flurry of activity. These OS X versions took more than a month to complete! Such is the nature of X.
Some people have written to ask if Ravenswood is an actual story or book, and the answer is that it is just something whimsical from my imagination. It’s a melting pot of different horror themes and styles I have soaked up over years. The various sources range from the “Mystery” series I used to watch on PBS in the U.S., to gothic-styled etchings and drawings by artists like Edward Gorey, Mervyn Peake and Tim Burton, not forgetting films like Hitchcock’s 1940 “Rebecca” and 1941 “Suspicion”, and Robert Wise’s 1963 “The Haunting”.
Lastly, the icon called “The Skeleton Bride” is based on an indelible image from a film I once saw as a child, that of a veiled bride drifting through manor gardens in the moonlight towards the main house, and finally knocking on the front door. For years, I had no idea what this film was, as I only saw the second half on television one day. I finally tracked down the name of this film: 1958’s “The Screaming Skull”, evidently considered a poor-quality B-movie by most. I believe it was even roasted once on “Mystery Science Theater 3000”. At any rate, that scene scared the daylights out of me at the time, and the icon is my recognition of this persistent memory.
The accompanying desktop picture for these icons (in all the latest resolutions) can be found at the Pixelhaus.
Happy Halloween, Dave
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