ArtSEA: Eerie arts events haunting Seattle this Halloween

But movie monsters and demonic cars make for great escapism (see film recommendations below). In addition, several art shows around the city feature images and ideas that will haunt your thoughts — in the best way. 

We’ll start with the striking new show at Frye Art Museum. Look Me in the Eyes (public opening events Oct. 25 - 26; runs through Feb. 2, 2025) showcases work by Los Angeles-based artist Hayv Kahraman, who grew up as an Iraqi-Kurdish refugee in Sweden.

Kahraman’s paintings are as unsettling as they are beautiful, and draw the viewer close with an abundance of heavy-lidded eyes. Some sprout from plant stems, accompanied by eyebrows resembling fern fronds, while others appear ghostly white, as they’re missing irises.

“Unsettling” holds a double meaning here, as the paintings address the fraught experiences of migration and border crossing. 

At the press preview, Kahraman explained that some of the eyes look directly at the viewer as a means of confrontation. Having studied the work of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, she began her eerie plant series (some bloom with human lips) as a way to reject Eurocentric classification methods. Her invention of surreal species defies Western taxonomy and works as a wider metaphor for otherness.

As for the iris-less eyes, Kahraman explained: “My cousin worked with refugees coming into Sweden. Some had poured acid or used sandpaper to remove their fingerprints — doing anything to hide their identity.”

That knowledge was at the back of Kahraman’s mind as she created these works, as was the fact that border police employ iris-recognition scanners. In some paintings, she uses her own fingerprints to create patterns and more eyes.

Kahraman prefers to think in terms of a “multispecies world,” where people, plants, landscapes and the cosmos meld. She incorporates traditional methods of marbling paper to suggest this idea in her works, where mysterious swells and bubbles of paint could be deep seas or rocky substrate, cellular structures or starscapes.

“Interconnectedness” is what she hopes to emphasize, versus deeply ingrained “human-centric thinking.”

Also at the Frye is the ongoing show the edge becomes the center (through Jan. 5, 2025), which beckons the viewer with shadowy whispers. The large-scale, abstract, black-and-white works by Seattle artist Mary Ann Peters may at first look like animal fur or grain fields or misty landscapes. But soon it appears as if there’s something shifting underneath, a quiet rippling that suggests darker forces deep below. 

A second-generation Lebanese American, Peters created the paintings in this series (called this trembling turf) after researching archives in Lebanon, France and Mexico, where she glimpsed troubling stories muffled by the public accounting of historic events. Standing in the gallery alone, I could almost feel these stationary works pulsing, unable to contain the secrets hidden within. 

Also in the show is Peters’ impossible monument: gilded, a mysterious and glowing gold cabinet of curiosities, whose contents can be seen only from certain angles. Squint and you’ll find many locks and untouchable keys. 

There’s more mystery to be found at the National Nordic Museum, in the final weekend of the show A Place of Opportunity and Transformation (through Oct. 27). Featuring installations and short films by Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, this show combines animated gore and cute creatures to bring repressed fears forward in the guise of whimsy.

Roq La Rue Gallery can always be counted on for pop-surreal spookiness, and that’s true of the current show Fantasmagoria (through Oct. 26). In this group show, featured artists delve into the trick-or-treat bag of the subconscious and pull out devilish aliens, ghostly figures, rats and one cuddly bat.

Meanwhile at SAM Gallery (attached to the Seattle Art Museum gift shop), you’ll find memento mori by Seattle artist Troy Gua in Beyond (through Nov. 2), where each skull is composed of slices of famous skulls made by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Andy Warhol. 

And at Spectrum Gallery in Madrona, there’s something slightly goth in the vignettes staged by North Carolina photographer Heather Evans Smith, whose show Alterations (through Oct. 26) weaves surreal elements into crisp scenes of childhood memory.

See: a lock of hair threaded into a sewing machine, a zipper tracing the spine of a young girl, sharp pins pressed against lips. It feels like a fairy tale lurks behind the works, one in which the protagonist gets buried alive in colorful buttons. 

Watching scary movies is one of the best Halloween rituals, and there are tons of hair-raising (as well as LOL-inducing) options around town. 

SIFF and Scarecrow Video have teamed up to present a slate of cinema terror titled Scarecrowber (SIFF Cinema Egyptian through Oct. 30). That title may be painful but the lineup is a lot of fun, featuring witches, demons and ghouls as seen in films from the 1960s through the 1980s. Coming up: Christine (beware the Plymouth Fury!), the original Halloween and (tonight) a restored version of 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead.

As part of the popular Silent Movie Mondays program, the Paramount Theatre is showing The Phantom of the Opera (from 1925!), featuring organ maestro Tedde Gibson literally pulling out all the stops on the Mighty Wurlitzer (Oct. 28). 

Through Halloween, Grand Illusion Cinema — which as I mentioned last week is currently looking for a new home — is showing a bunch of horror flicks that look way too scary for me, but I know I can handle the hilarious Young Frankenstein (Oct. 24 - 26). The Mel Brooks classic is also part of a Frankenstein double feature at Benaroya Hall, for which the Seattle Symphony is playing a live score (tonight at 7:30 p.m.; seats still available). 

Central Cinema is pairing goofy witches with a beloved Sam Raimi fright fest, with multiple screenings of both Hocus Pocus and The Evil Dead (through Oct. 31). And you can catch the sequel to the latter, Evil Dead 2, at fellow small cinema house The Beacon in Columbia City (through Oct. 29).

Look on the bright side: If the election goes sideways, you’ll be well-rehearsed in screaming.