Portland Playhouse A Christmas Carol Portland Oregon

Mighty frights: The art of the scare

Photographer K.B. Dixon haunts the neighborhoods to discover what Halloween artists have wrought. See what he scares up.

October 22, 2022

K.B. Dixon

Culture

Dying To Get Out

Call it folk art, call it yardscapes gone wild, call it a seasonal frenzy, call it visual tales from the crypt. Every October you can count on it: a rising of ghosts, zombies, witches, skeletons, and other denizens of the dead and undead, haunting front yards and porches and other perches across the land. Sometimes a surprising amount of skill and imagination and homespun artistry go into these Halloween tableaux of bumps in the night.

As this autumn’s season kicked into high horror gear, photographer K.B. Dixon braved the otherworld and haunted the Laurelhurst and Cedar Hills neighborhoods, looking for a few good visual scares. He found ’em, and snapped ’em, and scurried away. And here, he opens his bag of tricks and shares the tricks he found. It’s a frightful world out there. Take a look if you dare.

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Oz

Rocking Duck

Scream

R.I.P.

Scream 2

Mom & Kids

Babies

Top Hat

Skulls

Angel

Buried

Foothill Cemetery

Ghost & Spider

K.B. Dixon

K.B. Dixon’s work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and journals. His most recent collection of stories, Artifacts: Irregular Stories (Small, Medium, and Large), was published in Summer 2022. The recipient of an OAC Individual Artist Fellowship Award, he is the winner of both the Next Generation Indie Book Award and the Eric Hoffer Book Award. He is the author of seven novels: The Sum of His Syndromes, Andrew (A to Z), A Painter’s Life, The Ingram Interview, The Photo Album, Novel Ideas, and Notes as well as the essay collection Too True, Essays on Photography, and the short story collection, My Desk and I. Examples of his photographic work may be found in private collections, juried exhibitions, online galleries, and at K.B. Dixon Images.