Post #490132 by bigbrotiki on Sun, Oct 25, 2009 2:18 PM

The above kudos are very much appreciated, thank you. About the Tiki and the Horror genre intersecting: To me, they are two different things. Being who I am, I am the watchdog of good Tiki, who is very trigger-happy when anything comes by that waters down or muddles up what Tiki is. I am not saying you guys are doing that, so hear me out:

In the course of the Tiki Revival, (which has been an amazing, inspired explosion of creativity), other genres like Rockabilly and Hot Rod/Big Daddy Roth style have successfully ursurped Tiki, even though they had no direct connection to it -other than that they are 50s/60s retro culture. This is somewhat understandable: When we "we-don't-wanna-grow-up"-kids run out of toys to play with, we go look for other like-minded playmates, and then we wanna make them all one happy family.

Horror/Goth/Steam punk are lovely genres, but in my opinion too many "Tiki" mugs have already been made that look like Monster mugs, not Tiki mugs. There even is a so-called "Tiki" mug out there that looks like the Ghostbuster's demon dog!

Call them Monster/ Horror/ novelty/ what ever mugs, but not Tiki mugs, please. The only cross-over between Tiki and Horror is the Zombie, and shrunken head/ head hunter trophies.

Now one perspective from which we can view the intermingling of Horror and Tiki as presented in this thread is that of the COLLECTOR. Private collections of curiosities, from the 17th century on, mixed all sorts of objects of strange and unknown origin, because there was a general curiosity for other cultures and the natural sciences:

In the 20th century, many artists like the Surrealist Andre Breton assembled eclectic collections of Oceanic art mixed with contemporary art and found objects:

Andre Breton's apartment:

A wall in his office:

Detail of the collection:

Sooo....the question is not so much if Tiki and horror collections cannot be combined like shown, it is more if Tiki Central is the right place for the posting of tons of pics of horror collectibles and the subsequent discussion of them. :)