Ah, the good old days, when there were no government agencies regulating what you could and couldn’t sell as a medical miracle. The 1800s were a time when people knew enough about medicine and the human body to be dangerous—and enough about capitalism to be doubly dangerous. There were few, if any, drug regulations and no agency was insisting that companies list their miracle cures’ ingredients on bottles. The result was babies addicted to heroin and adults swearing by the hydrochloric acid they rubbed on their scalps.

1 Victory V Lozenges

Victory V Lozenges were an extremely popular cough drop in Britain starting in the mid-1800s. Developed in part by confectioner Thomas Fryer, they were advertised to relieve symptoms of the common cold. Because of their pleasingly sweet liquorice taste and the warm feeling they created in those who took them, their popularity skyrocketed. They were a particular hit with sailors because, in a 19th century stroke of marketing genius, they were tied to Admiral Nelson and his ship.

For many years, they continued to be made in the sweets factory of Fry and Company, continuing their candy-like advertising campaign. Unfortunately, that warm feeling was created by the lozenges’ other active ingredients—ether and chlorodyne, a mix of cannabis and chloroform. Victory V Lozenges are still available, without the ether and chlorodyne.

9 Dr. Thomas’s Eclectric Oil

Dr. Thomas’s Eclectric Oil was a miraculous cure-all that made some unbelievable claims, purporting not only to cure a wide variety of ailments, but to do so in a very specific amount of time. A backache would be gone in 2 hours, while an earache would disappear in 2 minutes. Toothaches, deafness, coughing, and sore throats could all be cured by this miracle drug, and it would also relieve the pain associated with burns when applied to the skin.

Developed in the mid-1800s by Dr. S.N. Thomas of New York and later marketed under the name Excelsior Eclectric Oil, this remedy had as an eclectic mix of ingredients as ailments it claimed to cure. Active ingredients were opium, chloroform, hemlock oil, turpentine, an unspecified type of alcohol, and alkanet (for color). The commercially produced product was so popular that recipes were published in books like 1899’s Secret Nostrums and Systems of Medicine by Charles Wilmot, giving people the chance to mix their own version.

8 Perry Davis’ Vegetable Pain Killer

Perry Davis was born into a poor family in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. An apprentice shoemaker turned failed inventor, his middle years were haunted by chronic aches and pains from colds, coughs, stomach pains, and kidney distress. He turned his inventor’s mind to curing himself, mixing a concoction of all herbal and naturally growing ingredients.

Several centuries before “all-natural” would become a popular catchphrase and marketing tool, Davis created his Vegetable Pain Killer. Testifying that it had cured him of all that ailed him, he went on to become known worldwide for his concoction that cured everything from cholera to coughs. It was even administered to horses in the Civil War to alleviate their aches and pains. The concoction was, indeed, all-natural—and included a hefty dose of opium and ethyl alcohol.

7 The Microbe Killer

William Radam took quack medicine and hoaxes to a whole new level in the late 1880s. Standing on the shoulders of recent scientific discoveries that suggested disease was closely tied to the presence of tiny microbes in the body, Radam’s Microbe Killer made some pretty hefty claims. The tonic was supposed to purify the blood and rid the body of any microbes that were causing disease and discomfort, and Radam had the support of a handful of people who claimed to have been completely cured of their ailments by his miraculous cure. The Microbe Killer wasn’t just a miracle cure, it was a safe miracle cure.

Made by exposing water to the vapors that came from sulfur, sodium nitrate, manganese oxide, sandalwood, and potassium chloride, it was touted as not just another one of those so-called miracles of modern medicine that attracted gullible people with hope of a revolutionary, scientific cure. This was the real thing, created by a humble gardener with no other interests aside from making the world a better place. Fortunately for Radam, more people read advertisements than read the transcripts of lawsuits and the findings of an analysis by the Department of Agriculture. Radam made a fortune from the sale of a miracle tonic that was 99 percent water.

6 Gripe Water

Gripe water is another modern medicine that is simply a safer version of what it once was. An American invention of the 1840s, gripe water was given to colicky babies to stop their crying and relieve their discomfort. It certainly did its job, as it contained sodium bicarbonate, dill seed oil, sugar, water, and as much as 9 percent pure alcohol.

An offshoot of a medicine designed to treat a strain of malaria in babies, gripe water is still commonly recommended by doctors to soothe a baby suffering from colic. Now, however, the active ingredient is the combination of herbs that breaks up air bubbles in the baby’s digestive system—not alcohol that knocks them out.

5 The Seven Sutherland Sisters Hair Grower And Scalp Cleaner

Fletcher Sutherland was a reverend in Cambria, New York in the late 1880s. Another early genius of marketing, Sutherland used his seven daughters and their singing act to promote his Hair Grower and Scalp Cleaner. More important than their singing ability was their collective 11 meters (37 ft) of hair. Rumors had started that their long-deceased mother used a special tonic to grow their hair to such lengths. Sutherland saw no reason why he shouldn’t capitalize on the rumors, so he created a concoction, bottled it, and started to sell it.

The girls, who had since joined Barnum & Bailey Circus, promoted a hair product that eventually raised them more than $3 million. With the honest reputation of their preacher father and living proof in the girls’ long hair, who would think that the mixture of rum, salt, magnesia, and hydrochloric acid wouldn’t work?

4 Coca Wine

Coca wine was the original energy drink. It wasn’t just marketed as a wine, but also as a medicinal drink that would cure fatigue of the body and mind as well as offer an emotional pick-me-up. It certainly would, as it was mostly a mixture of alcohol and cocaine.

Vin Mariani, a Corsican company founded in 1863, was at the forefront of coca wine production. Boasting more than 7,000 written endorsements from physicians on how the product stimulated brain, body, and nerves, they also had one stellar endorsement that topped them all—a gold medal from Pope Leo XIII. The pope was said to carry a hip flask of the stuff for those times when prayer just didn’t cut it and appeared on a promotional poster, along with his endorsement: “His Holiness The Pope writes that he has fully appreciated the benefits of this Tonic Wine.”

Another notable producer of coca wine was American John Pemberton. His original concoction of wine and cocaine hit a production roadblock when prohibition outlawed the sale of wine. He was forced to replace the wine in his drink with a sugar syrup, marketing it as “the temperance drink.” eventually, the cocaine was removed as well, but the name Coca-Cola stuck.

3 Dr. Scott’s Electric Devices

While not containing opium, heroin, cocaine, or alcohol, Dr. Scott still deserves a place among the others due of sheer volume and mislabeling of his devices. Though he called his creations electric devices, their curative powers lay in the magnetically charged iron rods that were in each of his hair and flesh brushes. While it might be a given that an “electric” hair brush would relieve headaches and prevent baldness, Dr. George Scott went a few steps further and claimed they could also cure constipation, blood diseases and paralysis.

He didn’t stop at brushes, either—he released a whole line of magnetic devices including corsets, belts, button hooks, curling combs, bracelets, toothbrushes, nail brushes, hats, anklets, rings, shoulder braces, shoe insets, and even brushes for horses. In perhaps his most brilliant marketing move, Scott warns against sharing his electric devices, because the more people that used an item, the more its healing powers would be depleted.

2 Cocaine Toothache Drops

At least Lloyd Manufacturing was truthful in the labeling of their Cocaine Toothache Drops. Boasting an “Instantaneous Cure!” for only 15 cents, Cocaine Toothache Drops were made in Albany, New York in the 1880s. And, perhaps frighteningly, they worked. The cocaine was prepared in such as way that it acted as a topical anesthetic while minimizing the mood-altering effects of the substance, but somehow, it still doesn’t seem as safe for both children and adults, as advertised.

Cocaine-based throat lozenges were also extremely popular—they also acted as a topical anesthetic, numbing the pain of a sore throat. Many druggists and chemists would buy tablets in bulk and repackage them under their own labels.

1 Bayer Heroin

In the case of Bayer, it wasn’t a matter of a company or individual using what’s now a controlled substance as a cure-all. With Bayer, they invented it. The first manufactured heroin was a product of the Bayer pharmaceutical company in Germany. Production started in 1897, and within two years, the company was making a ton of heroin each year. It was exported around the world, where it was used as a cure for tuberculosis and pneumonia and as a pain-killer.

Oddly enough, heroin was also marketed as a solution to a problem that had grown to be worldwide by the late 1800s—opium addiction. The first solution to getting people off their opium addiction was to switch them to the supposedly less dangerous morphine. When that didn’t work, they tried weaning opium and morphine addicts onto this new, also supposedly less dangerous drug called heroin. Medical reports around the world gave heroin a cautious thumbs-up into the 1900s, and it was even approved by the American Medical Association in 1906. Obviously, it didn’t work, and by 1924, it’s estimated that 98 percent of New York’s drug addicts were addicted to heroin.

Long before board games such as Monopoly, Yahtzee, Clue, and Candy Land were enjoyed by families on game night, ancient board games were thriving in parts of the world. The ancient Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese were creative in the ways they made boards and pieces from stones, rocks, and wood. Many of these games resemble modern games in the way they look and play. Here are ten ancient board games that inspired the board games of today.

10 Gigantic Versions Of Childhood Games

Long before board games such as Monopoly, Yahtzee, Clue, and Candy Land were enjoyed by families on game night, ancient board games were thriving in parts of the world. The ancient Romans, Egyptians, and Chinese were creative in the ways they made boards and pieces from stones, rocks, and wood. Many of these games resemble modern games in the way they look and play. Here are ten ancient board games that inspired the board games of today.

10 Ludus Latrunculorum

Ludus Latrunculorum, which translates to Game of Mercenaries, is an ancient Roman strategic game. The game is similar to checkers and played on boards with grids of 7×7, 7×8, 8×8, 8×9, 9×9, or 9×10. Two players move their pieces forward and backwards across the board trying to capture their opponents pieces while protecting their own pieces.^[1]

The ancient game of military tactics was first mentioned in the Roman writings of Varro (116-27 BC) in his book titled De Lingua Latina. His writing mainly mentioned the grid of the game board, but the rules were first found in the anonymous Roman poem Laus Pisonis, which was written in the 1st Century. Several Ludus Latrunculorum boards of different sizes and materials have been found in various places and can now be seen in museums.

9 Patolli

One of the oldest known board games in America is Patolli. The game was mostly played by a range of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, and it is even reported that Montezuma enjoyed watching the nobles play the game at court. The game was enjoyed by both commoners and nobles, and it was a game of strategy mixed with some luck.

Patolli was a game that focused on gambling. Players would bring the same number of items to gamble (usually six items), and they would inspect each other’s items before beginning. The object of the game is to move the six game pieces from the starting square to the ending square before the other player. The game is played until one player earns all of the other player’s items. Players were known to gamble away their money, blankets, precious stones, food, homes, and even their family and freedom. The gambling game would be so detrimental to some that the Spanish priests outlawed the game during the Spanish conquest of Mexico.^[2]

8 Senet

Ancient Egypt introduced us to a board game known as senet, which means “Game of Passing.” It is one of the oldest known board games dating back to 3100 BC where fragments of boards were found in burials in Egypt. The tomb of Merknera (3300-2700 BC) features a hieroglyph resembling the senet board, but the first painting of the game appeared at the tomb of Hesy (c. 2686-2613 BC).

The game board is made up of 30 squares that are evenly arranged in three rows of ten. There are two sets of pawns with at least five pawns each. The original game rules are still unknown, but there have been pieces of texts revealing parts of the rules. The rules have most likely changed over time, meaning the rules of modern senet sets don’t reflect those that were used in Ancient Egypt.^[3]

7 The Royal Game of Ur

The Royal Game of Ur was widely popular across the Middle East and dates back to the early third millennium BC. The two-player strategy board game hit a spiritual high and was believed by many to reflect a player’s future and convey messages from the supernatural.

The race game is played using two sets of seven game pieces and a game board made up of two rectangular sets of boxes. You will need strategy and luck to dominate your opponent while trying to move your seven pieces along the course before the other player. The Game of Ur lost most of its popularity during the late antiquity, where many believed the game evolved into an early form of backgammon.^[4]

6 Gyan Chauper

A popular dice game in India is known as gyan chauper, and the earliest versions of the game date back to the 10th century A.D. Back then, the game was played on a painted cloth called patas. The game was entertaining, but it was also played to instruct morality. The central theme of the ancient game was the liberation from bondage of passions. It is more popularly known in today’s society as Snakes and Ladders.^[5]

In gyan chauper players start from the bottom of the game board and roll the dice in order to move forward according to the number that lands on the dice. The game is based entirely upon luck and is a simple race to the top while trying to avoid obstacles in the shape of snakes that hold players back. The board and gameplay have been slightly modified over time in different areas of the world today.

10 Bizarre Video Games That Actually Exist

5 Alquerque

Alquerque is an abstract strategy board game that is believed to have originated in the Middle East. Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani first mentioned the game in literature in his 24-volume work Kitab al-Aghani that was released in the 10th century. Unfortunately, the rules were never mentioned in his work. However, rules of the game were found in the 13th century Libro de los juegos by Alfonso X of Castile.

Before the game begins, each player places their 12 pieces on the two closest rows and in the two right spaces on the center row. The object of the game is to eliminate the other player’s pieces by jumping an opponent’s piece that is adjacent and the point beyond the piece is empty. Alquerque is considered to be the parent game of the U.S. version of checkers.^[6]

4 Mehen

The ancient Egypt board game mehen was named in reference to a snake deity in ancient Egyptian religion. Evidence of mehen has been found dating from around 3000 BC until the end of the Old Kingdom around 2300 BC. Physical boards and game pieces have been found that mostly date to the Predynastic and Archaic periods.

The game board resembles a coiled snake that is divided into several rectangular spaces and game pieces were often made of stones. Game boards have been found with different numbers of segments, but it seems that the number of segments had little importance on the game play. The game pieces are believed to be formed into the shape of a lion or lioness and came in sets of three, four, five, or six along with a few small sphere-shaped pieces. The rules of mehen are entirely unknown today.^[7]

3 Go

More than 2,500 years ago, the Chinese invented the abstract board game Go. The game of strategy is believed to be the oldest board game to be continuously played to the present day. A recent survey showed that more than 46 million people in the world know how to play Go, and over 20 million of them are current players. A majority of the current players live in East Asia.

Two players take turns placing their stones, black and white, on intersections of the board in order to start gameplay. Players must place stones on unoccupied intersections except for those forbidden by suicide and ko. A stone can not be moved once played, but it can be taken off the board if captured. Players may pass on their turn when they feel that nothing more can be accomplished, and the game ends when both players consecutively pass. The game is then scored to find out which player is victorious. Since Go is a competitive game in many parts of the world, many play the game professionally.^[8]

2 Hounds and Jackals

Hounds and Jackals was a popular board game invented around 4,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt. The Bronze Age board game was once found in its entirety in a Theban tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenemhat IV that dates to the 12th Dynasty. The complete gaming set that was found is preserved today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.^[9]

Hounds and Jackals, also known as 58 Holes, is the modern name given to the game by Howard Carter, who is the man that found the complete set in the Egyptian tomb. The original name of the game is unknown. Players move their ten small sticks with either dog or jackal heads along the board that contains 29 holes on each player’s side of the board. The player that reaches the finish point with all their figures wins the game. The modern game of Cribbage features a similar board and may have derived from Hounds and Jackals.

1 Nine Men’s Morris

Have you ever noticed a game printed on the opposite of a checkerboard? If so, there is a good chance it was a board for nine men’s morris, also known as cowboy checkers. The strategy board game dates back to the Roman Empire, but it peaked in popularity in medieval England. Many game boards have been found carved into seats at English cathedrals in several cities.

The two-player game is one of strategy that can result in a draw with a perfect game from both players. The game board consists of twenty-four points across a grid. Each player starts with nine black or white pieces, and they work to remove their opponent’s pieces until they only have two remaining. Once a player has successfully completed that or blocked their opponent from making a legal move, the game ends. There are also variations of the game known as three men’s morris, six men’s morris, and twelve men’s morris which changes the board and number of pieces played.^[10]

Top 10 Best Board Games Of All Time

About The Author: “I’m just another bearded guy trying to write my way through life.” www.MDavidScott.com

Stories have to be bound by logic. Life does not. Authors usually draw upon interesting personalities for inspiration. For these ten people, the writers did not do them justice. As fantastical as many of the characters in the literary canon are, they cannot compare to the absurdity of the following ten people behind notable creations.

Top 10 Mysterious People Who Should Have Movies Made About Them

10 Alfredo Balli Trevino

Thomas Harris stumbled upon his muse on accident.^[1] Harris’ magazine initially deployed him to interview Monterey Prison inmate Dykes Askew Simmons. Simmons told Harris that he would have died in a botched escape attempt if not for Dr. Alfredo Balli Trevino’s generous help. As Harris questioned Trevino, the surgeon eloquently spoke on psychoanalysis’ merits. Harris, convinced Trevino was an employee, was shocked to learn that Trevino was a fellow prisoner with a gory background.

One does not inspire the most infamous criminal in history without being somewhat evil. In 1959, Trevino severed his lover Jesus Castillo Rangel’s throat with a scalpel. Trevino’s ability to navigate both educated articulacy and gruesome instincts inspired the suave cannibal turned serial killer Hannibal Lecter. For a depraved maniac, the actual Hannibal was relatively swell.

If you ignore the murder, Trevino used his surgical prowess for good. Out of prison, Trevino mostly treated elderly and poor patients. He never charged for his services. His patients commended him, “as a good guy.”^[2] Trevino spent his last years tending to those who needed his help the most.

9 Daniel Ruettiger

Unlike other entries on the list, Daniel Ruettiger never had an alter ego. As the titular underdog in the 1993 biographical football movie Rudy, “Rudy” has become shorthand for anybody who strives towards their dreams no matter the obstacles. The real Rudy put up a few of those obstacles himself.

When one becomes an emblem of athletic perseverance, they can slap their name on any item remotely associated with sports. Rudy exploited this to become a con-artist. The previously pure symbol of endurance branded his image on the “Rudy Nutrition” line of sports drinks.^[3] His attempt as a salesman was less triumphant than his career at Notre Dame. Failing to capture any audience, the company artificially inflated the penny stock’s value by defrauding investors with misleading statements. Allegedly, they illicitly profited $11 million.^[4] The scheme was exposed in 2008. “Rudy Nutrition” went out of business shortly afterward.

8 Dennis Ketcham

Dennis Ketcham never lived the idealistic childhood of his cartoon counterpart.^[5] Inspired by his son’s antics, Hank created Dennis the Menace, the mischievous scamp and eternal tormentor of neighbor Mr. Wilson. Naming his most famous creation after his child drove a wedge in the family. His mother, Alice, turned to alcohol. His father receded into his work at the expense of the same child he was depicting.

In 1959, Hank and Alice divorced. Later that year, Alice accidentally overdosed at 41. Hank coped with the loss by marrying Jo Anne Stevens. The family moved to Geneva. As Dennis struggled in Swiss boarding schools, his father sent him back to the United States. Hank stayed in Europe.

In 1966, Dennis joined the Marine Corps. After fighting in Vietnam, Dennis suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. For the rest of his life, he meandered through menial jobs. The only time Dennis ever spoke to his father again was to ask for some of the money made off his name.

7 Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie

Charles Dickens’ most iconic character exists because he had dyslexia. In a fog, Dickens ambled about a cemetery. On Ebenezer Scroggie’s tombstone, read the inscription, “Meal Man,” referring to his career distributing milled corn. With his poor eyesight, Dickens thought it said “Mean Man.”^[6] Shocked that anybody could be so callously remembered, Dickens envisioned an old curmudgeon who died unloved. Barely altering his protagonist’s name, this led to the grouchy miser Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.

Curiously, the real Ebenezer Scroggie was nothing like his yuletide namesake. Whereas Scrooge was a stingy prude, Scroggie was a freewheeling bachelor who scandalized his peers. Scroggie got into trouble with the Church of Scotland after impregnating a servant in a graveyard. A General Assembly of the church was forced to stop after Scroggie grabbed a countess’ butt. No wonder the Muppets did not reenact this version of the story. However, Scroggie’s biggest claim to fame was giving William Smellie the concept for a book storing all the world’s information. Smellie turned that idea into the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.^[7]

6 John Maher

In J. M. Barrie’s 1904 play Peter Pan, the single-minded Captain Hook is plagued by Tick-Tock the Crocodile, an omnipresent reminder of his encroaching mortality. The character is a whimsical reminder that death can come at any moment. Reverend John Maher knew this misfortune too well.

No one in the small village of Brede would have second guessed the parson. The only notable thing about the man was that he had a hook instead of a left hand. A convincing backstory of a carriage accident was good enough to deter any nagging questions. He spent his days honoring the Lord. That is until a former partner drove him insane.

The reverend lived a hidden life.^[8] Before leading Sunday services, Maher was pirate captain in the West Indies with a cohort named Smith. The two had a falling out. Maher abandoned Smith on a Caribbean island. After being rescued, Smith vowed to hunt down the man who left him for dead. Ultimately, Smith confronted Maher by threatening to reveal the reverend’s secrets. Maher was driven mad with guilt. J.M. Barrie lightened this story of blackmail into the bumbling duo of Captain Hook and Smee.

10 Bizarre People Behind Everyday Words

5 Sam Sheppard

The Fugitive stresses that Dr. Richard Kimble was truly innocent. In both the 1960’s television series and the 1993 movie starring Harrison Ford, the physician desperately tried to clear his name after being wrongfully accused of murdering his wife. The real mysterious death of Marilyn Reese Sheppard, wife of neurosurgeon Sam Sheppard, is much more ambiguous. This section will not discuss whether Sheppard got away with slaying his spouse in 1954. Instead, it will focus on his life once acquitted.^[9]

If one wanted to convince the public they were good husband material, it would not be the best idea to immediately marry a relative of the Nazi High Command. One week after being released from prison, Sheppard married German born Adriane Tabbenjohanns. Notably, Tabbenjohanns’ half-sister was Joseph Goebbels’ wife. Even Nazis have standards. When two of Sheppard’s patients died in surgery, Adriane divorced him.

Sheppard eased his depression with alcohol and a quixotic enterprise as a professional wrestler. Playing into his reputation, Sheppard performed for over 40 matches under the name “The Killer.” There he met his last wife, the 19-year-old daughter of his wrestling coach. It was a brief marriage. At 46, Dr. Sam Sheppard died of liver failure.

4 William Hickman

In the late 1920’s, William Hickman’s crime spree scandalized America. Hickman’s sociopathic tendencies were evident since he tortured animals as a child. Gradually, he upgraded to robbing gas stations and drug stores across the country. Along the way, he likely killed a girl in Wisconsin and his partner’s grandfather in California. His nationwide crime wave culminated in the depraved kidnapping of 12-year-old Marion Parker.^[10]

Hickman ransomed prominent banker Perry Parker $1,500 for his daughter’s safe return. Despite their correspondence’s guarantees, Marion was already strangled with a towel. At the drop site, Hickman positioned the corpse to look like she was still alive. By the time the horrified father discovered Marion’s real condition, Hickman was gone.

This needlessly cruel image stuck with author Ayn Rand. Dubbing Hickman a “superman,” Rand admired that somebody could function with such little compassion.^[11] Ayn Rand most directly referenced William Hickman for Danny Renaham in the 1928 novella The Little Street. To a lesser degree, Hickman’s philosophy informed staunch individualistic figures such as The Fountainhead’s industrial titan Howard Roark or Atlas Shrugged’s strong-willed John Galt. In his own demented way, Hickman certainly did whatever he wanted.

3 Robert Leroy Ripley

Robert Leroy Ripley’s name is synonymous with the surreal. His life reflected his bizarre proclivities. Famed for his “Believe It or Not!” cartoon series, Ripley traversed the world collecting oddities. Financed by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, his travels to more than 200 countries netted him fascinating encounters with strange locals. He stored the relics from his adventures on his own private island. Shrunken heads, a menagerie teeming with exotic animals, and antiquities decorated his house. The centerpiece of his collection was a dried out whale penis and a particularly thorough assortment of erotica. He used those to entertain his self-described “harem” of women. He tended to have three to four live-in girlfriends at a time.^[12]

Ripley found great success with the ladies despite not being conventionally attractive. The most notable trait of the balding artist was his protruding teeth. His jagged dentures made it impossible to properly pronounce some letters. In the 1930’s, the Warner Brothers’ character Egghead shared this inability. Appearing in the cartoon, “Believe It or Else” Egghead donned Ripley’s trademark suit and spats combo and repeated the catchphrase “I don’t believe it.” Egghead, a more inept hunter than his inspiration, eventually morphed into Elmer Fudd.^[13]

2 Jean Ross

Fame alluded Jean Ross in life. She found it in fiction. Outside of a few movie cameos, her success as entertainer was limited to a small gig as a cabaret singer in the Weimar republic. One of the prominent political writers who saw her perform was Christopher Isherwood, who used her as the model for his 1937 novella Sally Bowles.

Transformed by multiple adaptations, Bowles one consistent trait is that she is a sexually adventurous singer of middling talent. Reworked on stage and screen, Sally Bowles is most closely associated with Liza Minnelli’s Oscar worthy portrayal in Bob Fosse’s 1972 film Cabaret. She inspired the similarly glamorous libertine Holly Golightly in Breakfast of Tiffany’s. These versions pigeonholed Ross as simpleminded.

Ross was no ditz. Fleeing Germany following the rise of Nazism, Ross became a leftist journalist for the British publication The Daily Worker.^[14] Novelist George Orwell accused Ross and her husband Claud Cockburn of being secret propagandist. While Cockburn notoriously fabricated stories to promote Stalin’s regime as member of Comintern, Ross tenure as a war correspondent was marked by tales of the human loss. Embedded with Republican defenders, Ross witnessed nine aerial bombardments of the Spanish Civil War firsthand. The literary versions turned Ross into a star, but undermined her even more impressive real history as a brash investigator.

1 John Chapman

As a fixture of American folklore, the specifics surrounding Johnny Appleseed depend on the speaker. One universal feature of the pot adorned arborist’s tall tale is his communion with nature. This seemingly bizarre feature is the story’s most accurate part.

John Chapman was not motivated by an urge to promote botany. He was more infused by a mix of drunken bluster and divine calling. The apples he distributed over the Midwestern United States were planted to claim land and ferment for a stable source of booze.^[15] In an alcoholic daze, he entertained local children by sticking pins in his feet and walking on hot coals. Inebriation helped him brazen into the wilderness unafraid of the natural lurkers like rattlesnakes or black bears. Nature was not always as kind. In his twenties, Chapman removed a chunk of his brain after a horse kicked him in the head

This lobotomized state might explain how he started talking to angels. Along with each bundle of apples, Chapman carried the message of the Church of Swedenborg. Like founder Emanuel Swedenborg, Chapman remained celibate, except for having what he called “spiritual intercourse” with angels.^[16] Disney cut the part when Johnny Appleseed has drunken sex with ghosts.

10 New Facts About Famous People And Places

About The Author: The greatest fictional character Nate Yungman ever wrote was his social media persona. If you want to read more of his thoughts, you can follow him on Twitter, @nateyungman. If you had a question or comment, you can send him an email at [email protected].

Interior and exterior sets and settings, themes and motifs, monsters and menaces, even dialogue and sound effects—all these horror movie elements have been suggested by famous paintings.

Inspired by the works of acclaimed artists, horror movie directors have added audio, visual, and dramatic effects to their own creative visions, enhancing their artistic works with those of masters of expressionism, magic realism, realism, surrealism, modernism, romanticism, and the Baroque.

The results are striking, adding richness and depth to the films’ own images and themes of the horrific and the terrible.

10 Picture of Dorian Gray

Although he may not be as famous as some of the other painters on this list, Ivan Albright, the acclaimed “master of the macabre,” was director Albert Lewin’s choice as the artist who would paint the portrait of the protagonist of his horror film The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel.

In the film, as in the novel, Gray, a handsome young man, commissions his portrait. As the result of a deal with the devil, the effects of Gray’s “dissolute and evil life” make their marks on the painting, rather than on Gray’s own appearance, and the vain reprobate remains as young and handsome as ever, despite the passage of time and his multitude of vile deeds. Although the movie was filmed in black and white, Lewin shot the portrait in full color to highlight Gray’s horrific transformation.

In Albright’s oil painting, Portrait of Dorian Gray (1943-1944), Gray is aged, his brow wrinkled, his decayed flesh gray, his nose bulbous, his mouth twisted, and his face and hands smeared with blood. He looks quite mad, with staring, bulging eyes, and his filthy, tattered clothing, also smeared with blood, appears moldy. The furniture in the room in which he stands is likewise ruined, and plaster is missing from the walls. Bizarre faces and monstrous shapes seem to leer from walls, furniture, Gray’s clothing, and the floral carpet under his worn, blood-flecked shoes. Thanks to Albright’s “portrait,” it is clear to the audience that the state of Gray’s soul is, indeed, hideous, however youthful and handsome his fleshly form and countenance may appear; the painting is a perfect expression of the movie’s theme: evil corrupts the soul.

9 Witches Sabbath

In filming The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015), director Robert Eggers, who also wrote the movie’s script, strove to re-create the world of the seventeenth century, in which his drama takes place, so that the setting’s realistic depiction would add credibility to the film’s premise that witches really existed. To this end, he also sought to depict his own witch as believable.

Although witches were “a lot more primal and a lot scarier” than people today might imagine, Eggers said, the witch in his movie must also impress his audience as someone whose existence would have actually been believed by her contemporaries. For this reason, she couldn’t resemble “fairy tale” versions of witches. One way he ensured the accuracy of his depictions of the time of his movie’s setting was to consult “historians and museums and living history experts.”

Eggers also turned to a masterpiece by a famous painter for inspiration concerning how to depict his witch: Francisco Goya’s 1798 Witches Sabbath. Although the work is “outside” the time frame of Eggers’s seventeenth-century world, it is a timeless depiction of the subject, the director said, and the “best visual representations of witches you could ask for.”

The painting shows the devil, in the guise of a goat, seated upright, its horns encircled by a garland, surrounded by witches, one of whom offers the central figure a nude newborn baby, while another presents a naked, emaciated child. Some of the witches are older than others, but none are young. Besides the presentation of the children, presumably as sacrifices, one of the more disturbing images in the painting appears in the background: three naked children’s bodies hung by their necks from a bare, sharpened branch stuck into the ground.

Ironically, although Eggers uses Goya’s painting as a study of witches, seeing in their depiction a realistic presentation of how they might appear, Witches Sabbath, like the other paintings in the six works Goya devoted to “the theme of witchcraft,” are viewed by critics as “a satirical criticism of the superstitions of the educated society to which . . . the painter belonged.”

8 Necronomicon IV and Necronomicon V

The airbrushed paintings of surrealist H. R. Giger are disturbing, unforgettable, one-of-a-kind works featuring half-human, half-machine biomechanical figures; anthropomorphic shrubbery; eel-like monsters; fetuses; phallic shapes; machinery; and a bizarre, monstrous being that inspired the extraterrestrial creature in Ridley Scott’s 1979 science-fiction horror movie Alien.

Painting and sculpting the creature on the set, as well as sculpting the interiors of the spaceship, Giger gave Scott what he wanted. Although the artist had preferred to design the alien creature anew, Scott, impressed by “the unique manner in which” Giger’s Necronomicon IV (1976) and Necronomicon V (1976) paintings “conveyed both horror and beauty,” demanded that Giger “follow their form.” As a result, not only was Scott’s audience terrified by Giger’s alien, but the artist won a 1980 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on the movie.

7 The Garden of Earthly Delights

Regan MacNeil, possessed by evil spirits, spouts, in addition to green projectile vomit, profanity, obscenity, blasphemy, insults, and invective at the two priests who have come to her home to exorcise the demons within. The teen’s bizarre behavior presented a problem. What does the voice of the devil sound like? The Exorcist’s director William Friedkin and Chris Newman, who worked in the film’s sound department, found their answer in an unlikely source: Hieronymus Bosch’s famous surrealist triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510).

Because Linda Blair, who portrayed Regan, was a child actor, the husky-voiced Mercedes McCambridge delivered much of the 1971 film’s foul language. Friedkin showed Newman Bosch’s painting, pointing out the dozens of demons in the panel of the triptych that represents the painter’s vision of hell. “That’s what the voice of Satan should sound like,” Friedkin suggested. To create the “elaborate . . . cacophony of sounds suggested by Bosch’s images of the demonic, “hundreds of . . . recordings” were used to create a mix of “diverse sounds” which included, among others, those of “croaking tree frogs and bumblebees.”

6 The Empire of Light

Rene Magritte’s surreal series of oil and gouache paintings, collectively called The Empire of Light (1940s-1960s), provided the inspiration for an exterior shot in Friedkin’s film. The paintings present a similar scene: a house, surrounded by nighttime shapes of trees, shrubbery, and shadows, illuminated only by a lamppost on the lawn and a light in an upstairs window, stands under a cloudy, blue daytime sky.

Because the painting juxtaposes day and night in an impossible manner, many regard the scene it depicts as eerie—a perfect image for a film about a girl’s deliverance from demonic possession. Magritte’s painting inspired the scene in Friedkin’s film that shows the arrival of Father Merrin, as he stands alone on the street, beneath a lamppost, outside the house in which the devil awaits him. The bright sky represents heaven, the dwelling place of God, perhaps, while the darkness of the earth, the devil’s domain, symbolizes evil.

5 Amedeo Modigliani Paintings

The monster in Stephen King’s It is a shape-shifter, able to assume the form of anyone’s worst nightmare. Often, It appears as Pennywise, the mad, menacing clown, but, in director Andy Muschietti’s 2017 movie adaptation of King’s novel, It also transforms itself into such guises as a werewolf, a leper, and a female flutist who emerges from an Amedeo Modigliani painting in the office of the father of young Stanley Uris.

The flutist is terrifying because her face is incredibly elongated, the features are beyond asymmetrical, because impossibly out of alignment, and the misshapen skulls seem to waver upon elongated necks. This particular avatar of It, the director explained, is “a literal translation of a very personal childhood fear. In my house, there was a print of a Modigliani painting that I found terrifying. And the thought of meeting an incarnation of the woman in it would drive me crazy.” The painting’s depiction of a female figure was so “deformed,” the director added, that it struck him as monstrous. In a sense, the bizarre flutist in his version of It is how King’s monster appears to him; It has taken the form most terrifying to the director, a realization of Muschietti’s own worst childhood fear.

4 The Nightmare

In 1781, Henry Fuseli painted Der Nachtmahr (The Nightmare), in which an incubus, or male sex demon, perches upon the abdomen of a sleeping woman dressed in a nightgown, her arms and head dangling off the bed and the rest of her body in a sensuous attitude. A horse’s head (belonging to the night mare, or nightmare) emerges from the bedroom’s dense shadows.

In 2015, the famous painting inspired the motif for the film of the same title, directed by Akiz, a pseudonym for Achim Bornhak: the movie’s main character, Tina sleeps with the hideous demonic creature next to her. Is she imagining its presence? Is she the only one who sees it?

Real or imaginary, how does the entity relate to Tina, and what does it represent? It seems that Bornhak is purposefully ambiguous about the creature’s significance and, therefore, the theme of his movie. The fetus-like being could represent Tina’s incipient madness. It could symbolize her estrangement from her peers. It might suggest Tina’s fear of rejection.

The movie’s allusions to Stanley Kubric’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and to his A Clockwork Orange; to the mystical English romantic poet William Blake; and, of course, to Fuseli’s painting seem to frustrate interpretation as much as they might offer clues to the movie’s meaning, which makes critics wonder, even more, what Bornhak’s intentions could be. Perhaps, the film’s meaning depends on the audience’s own interpretations.

3 House by the Railroad

Known to millions, Norman Bates’s Victorian house, standing alone, on the hill overlooking his isolated motel, is one of the most unforgettable parts of the setting for Alfred Hitchcock’s macabre 1960 masterpiece Psycho. Far fewer are apt to know that the inspiration for this house of horrors is the 1925 painting House by the Railroad, by the celebrated Edward Hopper.

The Museum of Metropolitan Art in New York City describes the painting’s residence as “a grand Victorian home, its base and grounds obscured by the tracks of a railroad [which] create a visual barrier that seems to block access to the house, which is isolated in an empty landscape.” It is just this mood that Hitchcock’s house atop the hill creates. Rather than inviting, the house is forbidding. It exists not as part of a larger community, but is, instead, isolated and alone; it cuts off its resident from the larger world, allowing Bates to live in an imaginary reality of his own devise, a world, which proves to be one both of loneliness and of madness.

2 Susanna and the Elders

Other paintings besides that of Hopper also inspire one of the settings for Psycho, the parlor behind Bates’s office in the motel. According to a trailer for the movie, Bates himself describes the parlor as his “favorite spot.” Pointing out one of the paintings on the parlor’s wall, he starts to explain its “great significance,” but fails to finish his thought. The painting is a print of William van Mieris’s 1731 Susanna and the Elders, which has more than a merely decorative or an aesthetic purpose; it covers the peephole through which Bates spies on Marion Crane.

The painting itself recalls the thirteenth chapter of Daniel in the Catholic Bible (the book of Susanna in the Protestant apocrypha), in which Susanna, an upstanding young woman, is spied upon by elders as she bathes. When she refuses their demands to have sex with them, they then endanger both her reputation and her life by lying about their having caught her in the act of adultery. The presence of the painting therefore creates an allusion that underscores the parallels between Susanna’s plight and Crane’s own, intensifying the movie’s suspense. It also implicates the film’s audience, who, like the painting’s elders and Bates himself, also “spy” on Crane as she showers.

1 Venus with a Mirror

The parlor behind the office of the Bates Motel also displays Titian’s 1555 masterpiece Venus with a Mirror. Voluptuous, the half-naked goddess sits, her right arm and lower body draped in red velvet, gazing into a mirror held up for this purpose by a winged Cupid. A similar second attendant holds a hand mirror behind her head, so she can examine herself behind as well as to the front. Her rapt gaze suggests that she is pleased with what she sees.

As Katrina Powers observes, in her discussion of the painting in The Journal of American Culture, “She holds her left hand up to her chest, perhaps to admire the gold bracelet and ring that adorn it,” as she also considers whether the jewelry is a good match for “her pearl earrings and the gold and pearl decorations she wears in her blonde hair.” In no way should her raised arm be interpreted as “shielding her nudity,” Powers declares, for it is rather, more likely, “one of [the] many poses” she strikes while contemplating “her own loveliness.”

In the display of the Venus portrait alongside that of the Susanna painting, critics have seen multiple meanings, including “the connection between voyeurism, desire, and violence” (Donald Spoto); “voyeurism, wrongful accusation, corrupted innocence, power misused, secrets, lust and death” (Erik Lunde and Douglas Noverr); and “a rape fantasy” (Michael Walker). It may be, too, that, for Bates, Marion represents the temptation of female sexuality that his “mother” forbids him (Venus) and the desire to surrender to this temptation, through voyeurism (Susanna) that ends in violence and death for Marion, the embodiment of these conflicting impulses and needs.

We all know comic books have had a massive influence on pop culture. Fans can find their favorite superheroes and supervillains plastered on t-shirts, mugs, stickers, toys, posters, and hundreds of other kinds of merchandise. But what are some unexpected — or even shocking — things that were inspired by comic books? This list highlights ten unique examples of just how far the popularity of comics can reach.

Top 10 Famous Paintings That Inspired Horror Moviemakers

10 Cars

Comic Book characters are famous for having incredibly stylish modes of transportation that exemplify coolness. Wonder Woman flies through the skies in an invisible jet. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ride through New York in their Party Wagon van. Ghost Rider terrorizes criminals while on his Hell Cycle. And of course, Batman famously zips through Gotham City in his batmobile, batplane, batcycle, and batsub. Whether by land, sea, or air, superheroes use their trusted vehicles to help them fight crime and save lives.

It turns out comic books have also influenced real-life transportation for people looking to up their coolness factor. Car customization is a beloved process among vehicle owners, and several have chosen their favorite Marvel and DC characters to give a visual punch. Numerous car owners with money and creativity have fully customized their automobiles to honor iconic superheroes such as Superman, Batman, Captain America, Iron Man, The Hulk, Wolverine, Wonder Woman, The Flash, and Aquaman. And it’s not just heroes who get immortalized on car frames; villains like The Joker, Mystique, and Two-Face have also been immortalized in full-body car customizations. Even motorcycles can get the same fan treatment, with some having been converted to pay homage to Spider-Man, Ghost Rider, Groot, and The Punisher.

9 Pizza

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aren’t the only superheroes associated with pizza! Comic book fans visiting Florida can visit Ormond Beach’s Gotham City Pizza. This aptly named food spot offers customers a comic-themed experience consisting of decorations and dishes that pay homage to beloved heroes and villains. The menu stars nearly two dozen signature pizzas, each themed around a popular comic book character. There are traditional pizza styles such as the Boy Wonder (cheese), the Avenger (pepperoni), the Hulk (variety of meats), the Poison Ivy (veggies), the White Queen (no tomato or marina sauce), and the Cowabunga (Hawaiian style). Bolder pizzas include the Caped Crusader (sirloin, grilled onion, alfredo sauce, mozzarella), the Wolverine (barbecue), the Phoenix (chicken and ranch in hot sauce), and the Gotham City (supreme style). And, of course, the Clown Prince of Crime gets his very own zany Joker pizza topped with ranch, bacon, and French fries. Who knew evil could taste so delicious?

8 Guns

Guns are very much a hotly debated topic in modern times. For devoted gun owners who also carry a love for comic books, weapon customization can involve iconic visuals of a beloved superhero or notorious villain. The Oregon-based company Cerakote specializes in manufacturing ceramic coatings for firearms. Their website showcases a gallery of highly themed guns featuring colors and images associated with iconic comic book characters. The displayed weapons include handguns, shotguns, rifles, and revolvers that are themed after figures like Captain America, Batman, Iron Man, Wonder Woman, Dead Pool, Harley Quinn, Black Panther, and the Joker. These customized coatings don’t make guns look less dangerous, but they do make them more colorful.

7 Flowers

Weddings, birthdays, showers, parties, or any other celebratory events that benefit from flowers can be uniquely enhanced by the vibrant visuals of comic books. Superhero fans can opt for a creative alternative to real flowers: paper flowers made out of hand-cut comic book pages. Companies like Paper Flowers by Nicky in England take pages straight out of comics and turn them into paper flowers to be made into custom bridal bouquets, boutonnieres, wreaths, roses, floral arrangements, and hair combs. Superhero fans who want long-lasting keepsakes, or want to avoid allergies, can indulge in the whimsical look of faux flowers and colorful heroes.

6 Wedding Rings

While we’re on the topic of special days, comic book fans can enhance getting married even more by getting specialty wedding rings. Companies like Staples Jewelry in Kentucky give options for customizable wedding bands for Grooms who want to express their love for both their spouse and comics. Staple Jewelry’s website advertises three wedding bands inspired by DC superheroes. The first listed option is their Green Lantern ring, a black-base band mixed with elements of green emeralds, an optional centered flat stone setting, and a custom Green Lantern logo engraved on the inside. There is also an option to choose a yellow gemstone for Grooms desiring to display affection for Green Lantern’s notorious supervillain Sinestro. The company’s second superhero-themed option is their Superman ring, a band highlighting red rubies in honor of Clark Kent’s red kryptonite class ring from the hit series Smallville; an optional large “L” can also be engraved on a band to represent the man of steel’s Legion ring. The third listed ring is one inspired by the visual look of the Flash; the gold band is decorated with red detailing and a lightning bolt symbol prominently featured in the center. Nothing says eternal love like superhero jewelry!

5 Sermons

Holy sermon, Batman! Since most comic book stories are rooted in the traditional good vs. evil theme, it shouldn’t be surprising that superheroes have made their way into churches. In recent decades, pastors have preached sermons from the pulpit that are meant to inspire their congregations through blending stories straight from the pages of the Bible and comics.

The Billings Gazette, Montana’s largest newspaper, interviewed pastors about examples of their holy approaches to comics. A Kentucky-based pastor centered The Fantastic Four in sermons about the importance of family and supportive relationships; the pastor also discussed Superman as a symbolic Messiah-like figure who comes to Earth to save humanity (an obvious comparison to Jesus Christ). A preacher in Tennessee incorporated Spider-Man into his sermons on the responsibility that comes with power (the power of being a follower of Christ). Similarly, a children’s minister in Michigan taught a six-month Batman-themed series in a church room decorated with painted murals of Gotham City. His topics included sin is no joke (the Joker), the Devil is a two-faced liar (Two-Face), God never tricks us (the Riddler), and Christians need to rely on God just like Batman relies on others (Robin and Batgirl) to help him save the world. For these pastors and their congregations, God and Jesus are the ultimate superheroes.

4 Healthcare

Pastors aren’t the only people teaching lessons inspired by comics. The visual storytelling style of comic books has inspired medical professionals to innovate ways of teaching information and sharing meaningful stories. An exhibit at the United States National Library of Medicine showcases a method known as “Graphic Medicine”. Graphic Medicine, similar to graphic novels, uses comics to tell stories within a book format. Interestingly, these health-themed comics are not just for children or families. Medical school professors and students are utilizing medical comic books in creative ways for learning knowledge and expressing experiences from the perspective of patients, physicians, and med school students. Comic books and medicine seem like a perfect marriage of two worlds built on heroes who save lives.

3 Illegal Drugs

This entry is the darkest one on the list. The popularity of comic books influences drug dealers who peddle illegal substances. Police and families worry about the rise of the drug MDMA (commonly known as Ecstasy) and its reshaping into colorful images of beloved fictional characters. A 2009 Seattle Times article reported on authorities discovering highly themed Ecstasy pills being sold by street dealers. The tablets were manufactured to look like the iconic cartoon figures Snoopy and the Simpsons and the well-known comic book characters Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Reported sightings of these Ecstasy pills in various states verified their nationwide spreading. According to the Seattle Times article, dealers purposefully market these types of fun-themed pills to minors and promote them as lighter candy-like drugs, despite the products actually containing little to no Ecstasy and secretly being mixtures of dangerous substances. Dealers who use beloved comic book characters to trick minors into ingesting illegal drugs laced with harmful substances are just some of our real-life villains.

2 Scientific Names for Species

Scientists possess the superpower of officially naming new species they discover. This process has led to numerous scientific names inspired by famous real and fictional people, including beloved comic book characters. Several examples can be highlighted. Ninjemys oweni (named after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) is an extinct species of horned turtles in Queensland. Two species of Iranian spiders are named Filistata maguirei and Pritha garfieldi in honor of two actors who famously portrayed Spider-Man (Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield). Similarly, Wolverine actor Hugh Jackman inspired scientists to name an Australian wolf spider species Tasmanicosa hughjackmani. Batman directly influenced the labeling of a catfish species named Otocinclus batmani. And just last year, a group of researchers in Australia named five newly-discovered species of assassin flies after the iconic Marvel figures Black Widow, Loki, Thor, Deadpool, and the recently deceased comics creator Stan Lee.

1 Courtroom Trials

Ever since comic books became popular in America during the mid-1900s, lawyers have frequently argued their purpose and influence in courts of law. Those arguing for censorship and regulation of comics have brought numerous cases before judges and juries in the last 100 years, ranging from district court levels to the United States Supreme Court. Benchmark cases involving arrests or lawsuits have argued if the creation and distribution of mature comics is either obscene material harming America’s youth or art protected under the First Amendment. Despite prosecutors having argued that comic books are inherently geared towards children (no matter the adult content), important rulings have consistently upheld the freedom of artistic expression and declared that efforts to protect young people from obscene material should not infringe on the constitutional rights of adults. The history of these arguments in courtrooms across America paved the way for society’s modern-day acknowledgment that the colorful pages of comic books can sometimes be filled with violence, gore, sex, offensive language, and provocative themes. It can be controversial, but it’s not illegal.

They’re creepy. They’re crawly. They’re literally everywhere we go, whether we notice them or not. They’re also the inspiration for innovation! What?

Most of us don’t want spiders anywhere near us. It’s always unsettling when they sneak up on us in the shower, while sleeping, walking into an unseen web, suddenly leaping massive distances, or appearing abruptly from a crevice. Their reputation even prompts thoughts of burning down our homes when we come across them! Some are huge, some are deadly, most are harmless, and they eat a lot of things that can harm us.

But it turns out they can inspire much more than fear or super-humans who can sling webs and save those in peril. Who knew these frightening, little, eight-legged creatures could give us way more than we ever imagined. Here are 10 innovations we can thank these little “horrors” for influencing. So maybe they’re not as bad as we like to believe they are. Our nightmares are giving way to dreams of a brighter future.

Related: 10 Strange Facts And Mysteries Involving Spiders

10 Better Than Band-Aids: Surgical Tape That Adheres to Wet Surfaces

Chances are you have definitely needed a band-aid, stitches, or gauze and medical tape to keep a healing wound clean at some point in your life—unless you live in a padded room with no sharp edges anywhere and don’t have any fingernails (but that’s a whole other list). So you probably also know how annoying it can be to have to constantly replace them when they get wet and start slipping around, losing their original purpose. So frustrating…and a bit expensive over time. Here come spiders to save the day and your skin.

Scientists at MIT are in the process of perfecting a surgical tape that can adhere to and seal wounds in seconds by using water the same way spider webs absorb water, resulting in a stickier insect grabber. It is a two-sided adhesive with an incredibly strong bond and has been successfully tested on pig skin and lungs. They used a polyacrylic acid to absorb the water and create a bond reinforced by gelatin that will break down harmlessly in the body as the wound heals. No need to schedule a second appointment for stitch removal or itchy rashes from adhesive medical tape. That sounds pretty great.^[1]

9 Step Back, Kevlar: Spider Silk Body Armor

Kevlar may become an invention of the past even though it, too, was inspired by spider silk. The light, intensely strong polymer used in things from body armor to sailboat sails pales in comparison to some of its newer off-shoots also developed from that sticky elastic that we’ve all unknowingly and unhappily wandered into at some point.

It takes 33 layers of Kevlar to stop a .22 caliber bullet. But a new material, dubbed “Dragon Silk,” made from silk produced by Golden Orb Weaver spiders, can stop the same caliber bullet with only 4 layers. Now that is impressive! It’s so promising that the U.S. Army has invested in its production and expects to be using it extensively in the future. It has taken millions of spiders to create what they have so far. Thank you for your service, you webby geniuses.

And then, there is artificial silk resulting from work being done at Washington University in St. Louis that is called “polymeric amyloid” fiber. This is a derivative of spider silk created from an “engineered bacteria that produced a recombinant silk with performance on par with its natural counterparts in all of the important mechanical properties.” The aim is now to create something even stronger than spider silk. Turns out smarty human brains, bacteria, and spiders make a great team.^[2]

8 Webs Used for Micro-Imaging: Tiny Dome Lenses

The medical world is really fostering a love for incredible spider abilities. At the Tamkang and Yang-Ming Universities in Taiwan, researchers are designing minuscule lenses that can be used for imaging inside a human body. These lenses are so small that they are almost comparable in size to a red blood cell. So they’ll pretty much be able to go anywhere in the body blood goes…so everywhere. That has some extremely promising applications.

They did this by using the actual “dragline silk” of Daddy Long Legs used to frame their webs. A resin was then dripped over the silk frame and baked inside of an ultraviolet oven. As a result, the lenses are also bio-friendly in the body and capable of nanoscale imaging. It could be truly revolutionary for medical research and far less invasive than current technologies. Wouldn’t it be awesome if we ended up with Spidey-senses as a side effect?^[3]

7 Cheeky Devils!: Spider Venom May Be Better Than Viagra

Men who have had the misfortune of being bitten by one of the world’s most venomous spiders, The Brazilian Wandering Spider, have had another detailed side effect beyond pain and torture…very persistent erections. Now there is no recommendation to go find one of these nightmare-inducing beasts and goad it to bite you before a private get-together! But science has taken a cue and some toxins from them to fabricate a gel that achieves the same result.

Granted, the BZ371 gel probably needs a more enticing moniker for the public. But it apparently does its job very well within 20-30 minutes of application without any stimulation, with no side effects as well. And it is reported to last for about 60 minutes. Let’s help out the marketing departments. What are some good names for this wonder gel?^[4]

6 Eight Spindly Limbs: Inspiration for More Efficient Robots

Even if the spiders’ crawl sends chills up your spine, you have to admit it’s one of a kind and lets them do some very remarkable things. If we could all move as well as they do, we’d be fairly unstoppable. Unfortunately, we’re just six legs short with very limited joint direction and flexibility. Even practicing yoga for eight hours a day will never get us anywhere close to the movements of our arachnid brethren. But this ability hasn’t been lost on the robotics world.

Researchers have created limbs and joints in imitation of spider legs that allow greater functionality and fewer components needed for robots used in many different ways. The results are much lighter, smaller parts with superior mobility that can be used in virtually any robot. It has been hailed as a true leap forward in the robotics field. High-eight, Spiders!…but from way, way over there, please.^[5]

5 We Can All Potentially Be Spider-Man!: Real Web Shooters

Who hasn’t wanted to be able to shoot webs after watching or reading Spider-Man? It’s one of those things you pretend you can do even as an adult play-acting alone because it’s so cool (don’t lie, you can admit it—this is a safe place!). Rest assured, someone is working on making it come to life. It may even allow us to swing from building to building eventually as they are perfected. Well, maybe by those physically adept enough to do some gymnastic-like stunts or parkour. Time to start working on that upper body and core strength.

A mechanical engineer and YouTuber from South Africa named JT has created some pretty awesome web-shooters for a thesis project that he has featured on his channel, Built IRL. This is one you’re going to search immediately—because why wouldn’t you? He uses metal cylinders with a long cable embedded with metal hooks that can grab onto metal bars. They’re powered by compressed propane and “a custom-designed igniter.” It’s fun to see life inspired by art stolen from something that truthfully creeps most of us out! Go Spidey-JT.^[6]

4 Trendy, Functional Spider-Wear: Sustainable Web-Inspired Fashion

Now, let’s just admit that the fashion world can take things way too far and look pretty ridiculous in practical life. Of course, these are opinions of someone whose fashion sense is comfortable, plain sneakers, a blank T-shirt, and yoga pants or jeans. Not exactly runway ready! But fashion change can also energize and galvanize an industry that has become environmentally unfriendly with its throw-away culture, synthetic fibers, and toxic processes. Here come spiders to the rescue, again.

A company called Bolt Threads, the first of its kind, has bioengineered a yeast with a spider silk protein gene. As the yeast ferments, it creates a silk protein that is then purified and spun into a textile called MicroSilk. Adidas has already used a hybrid of this material to make a lightweight tennis dress. Another company, AMSilk, has produced a similar material called BioSteel which Adidas has used in a sneaker. And now it seems the airline industry is becoming more interested in these synthetic silk materials because of the weight reduction. Innovation that mimics nature to save nature. Glorious.^[7]

3 Poison Can Kill Pain: Tarantula Venom Could Replace Opioids

We’ve all recently become aware of how real, destructive, and threatening the widespread use of synthetic opioids has become. The side effects can come in many forms: rash, constipation, nausea, respiratory distress, even addiction, and more. The need for alternative pain treatments for people suffering chronic and neuropathic pain is real, and science is on the case.

At the University of Queensland, researchers have found molecules in tarantula venom from the Chinese Bird Spider that can be developed into mini proteins that adhere to pain receptor cells. When used in the correct amount, it can surround the cell membrane around the pain receptors, blocking their abilities. And so far, there have been no recorded side effects.

Now, that is real relief. All the studies have been done on mice for now, but the results are very optimistic for future pain reduction. Who would have ever thought something that delivers some vicious pain could also be used to combat it? Gotta love, or at least appreciate, science.^[8]

2 Spider Silk Milk: Goat Genes Manipulated to Produce Spider Silk

Move over, Dr. Frankenstein! Biomimicry science is growing leaps and bounds. We’re finally taking more lessons from nature instead of trying to dominate her. A company called Nexia has been genetically manipulating goat eggs with Golden Orb Weaver silk genes to create goats that produce spider silk proteins along with their milk. This is possible because the glands in goats that make milk and the glands in spiders that produce silk are very similar. And goat milk has been used to produce other medicines too. So it was a reasonable leap in the scientific mind despite the inevitable controversy.

But, why, right? It’s somewhat common knowledge that spider silks are as strong as or stronger than steel. This strength, along with the flexibility and durability, could have a huge array of usable applications in our daily lives, from engineering buildings and roads in earthquake-prone areas to surgical grafting. So mass-producing the silk is an attractive idea. It’s still not up to snuff with what the spiders can make…yet. But they’re going to keep on weaving until it gets there.^[9]

1 Reflective Webs Can Save Birds: UV-Reflective Glass

Birds have a very unique aspect to their vision; they can see ultraviolet light. How many birds have collided with the glass in your home’s windows? That loud, telling thud is usually startling and occasionally damaging to the glass. Some birds are just stunned for a bit, and some end up quite dead. Well, it turns out that spider webs reflect ultraviolet light that our feathered friends can see. This is why they don’t have to constantly rebuild those dainty insect death traps with all the birds sharing the same spaces. Instead, our feathered friends can see them to avoid them, saving the spider time and work and the bird a sticky, unwanted mess. That’s actually pretty cool!

This discovery inspired a German glass company, Glaswerke Arnold, to develop the Orinlux Bird Protection Glass. Buildings that use this glass embedded with UV-reflective strands have reportedly had 75-90 percent fewer bird strikes. To us, the windows just look like your average, transparent pane of glass while the “invisible,” chaotic, UV patterns warn birds there is no open air to soar through. It was developed in 2006 and is finally taking hold across many new buildings while being projected to be very widely used in the near future. Yay for bird safety and spider inspiration!^[10]

+ Spider Music!

If you haven’t heard it yet, people have now used the construction of spider webs to create music with 3-D video, and it’s as eerie as you would imagine it to be! Have a listen. Spider Canvas was a collaborative project between MIT’s CAST faculty, a Ph.D. student in the Civil and Environmental Engineering department, the head of the same department, a Music and Theatre Arts lecturer, and a composer and video artist.

This amazing web of work is truly beautiful and haunting. Halloween just got a new theme song.^[11]

The narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1835 short story “Berenice” asks a disturbing question: “How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness?” What if the narrator had asked this question in reverse, as “How is it that from unloveliness I have derived a type of beauty?” How much more disturbing might have been the inquiry?

This list of 10 eerie works of art inspired by horrific events offers an answer to our question, and the answer is disturbing, indeed

Related: 10 Crazy Things That Make Us Love Or Hate Art

10 Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II by Eric Fischl

The “Tumbling Woman” part of the title of Eric Fischl’s bronze sculpture, Ten Breaths: Tumbling Woman II (2007-2008), seems self-explanatory. However, it poses several significant questions. Why is the tumbling woman naked? If she is a gymnast, why isn’t she clothed? Why are her earthen skin tones streaked with red-orange? Why is she tumbling? What accounts for her awkward landing on her head, neck, and upper left shoulder? Such questions indicate that there is more to Fischl’s portrait of the tumbling woman than meets the eye.

The mystery is solved once the context, the painting’s origin, is revealed. The text on the plaque that accompanies the statue reads: “We watched, disbelieving and helpless, on that savage day. People we love began falling, helpless and in disbelief.” “That savage day” was September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda perpetrated a series of attacks against the United States.

In one of these attacks, the terrorists piloted two hijacked airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City. As a result, some people leaped from the towers’ upper floors to avoid burning to death inside the buildings. As the Smithsonian American Art Museum points out, the sculpture’s depiction of “the vulnerability of the human body…takes on special significance in this tragic context.”^[1]

9 The Raft of the Medusa by Theodore Gericault

The pyramid of desperate human figures in Theodore Gericault’s oil painting The Raft of Medusa (1818-1819) calls attention to the pathos of their plight, as does the steep pitch of the approaching wave, the force of which can almost be felt. Some of the figures are clothed. Others are half-dressed. Still, others are naked. Their lack of attire suggests that their departure was headlong and sudden, underscoring the panic they felt as they’d piled onto the raft, a precarious perch amid tempestuous seas. Closer attention to the passengers suggests that one or two among them are dead or dying. In a corner of the planks, a body lies, supine and listless, its head back. Another lies half-on, half-off the raft, head underwater.

As Dr. Claire Black McCoy observes, the subject of the painting, which was exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1819 and is now displayed in the Louvre, would have been recognized by those who saw it in the Salon. The July 1816 event it depicts, which had recently appeared in the news, would become “a political scandal.” Officials aboard the French naval ship Medusa, including the governor of Senegal and his family, McCoy explains, were headed for the colony to secure its French possession and assure the continuation of the covert slave trade, even though France had officially abolished the practice. En route, the captain accidentally ran the ship aground on a sandbar off the coast of West Africa.

When the ship’s carpenter was unable to repair the damage, the governor, his family, and other high-ranking passengers boarded the six lifeboats. The remaining passengers—nearly 150—were left behind to fend for themselves aboard a raft the carpenter constructed from the ship’s masts. Of their number, fifteen were rescued, of whom only ten “survived to tell the tale of cannibalism, murder, and other horrors aboard the raft.”^[2]

8 Grey Day by George Grosz

At first glance, George Grosz’s art often suggests ordinary incidents of everyday life. However, the grotesquery of his portraits, a common feature of his work, hints that the occasions he depicts may involve more than is initially apparent. His post-World War I painting Grey Day (1921) is no exception. A worker carrying a shovel strides briskly past a factory and its smoking chimney, while a businessman walks toward the viewer, down a narrow sidewalk alongside a building.

Before them, but behind another figure, a grim, angular, scar-faced, one-armed veteran in uniform walks along, carrying a cane. There is a partially-constructed brick wall between him and the figure before him, a wealthy, cross-eyed man who struts past in the opposite direction. He wears an expensive suit and carries a briefcase and an L-shaped ruler. His tool suggests that he may be a carpenter engineer. Outwardly, he is a man of respectability. However, his crossed eyes and the scars on his egg-shaped head, implying, perhaps, that he is an “egghead,” suggest that he, too, has experienced violence personally.

According to an article by the Tate, the British art institution, Grosz’s painting “illustrates how the wealthy profited from war [while] the disabled and forgotten veteran was left poor and divided from society.” This is revealed by the partially-built wall indicating the separation of “the two groups.” The wall itself, the Tate article suggests, is ambiguous to the extent that “the viewer [must] decide whether this half-built wall is being constructed or brought down.”^[3]

7 Big Electric Chair by Andy Warhol

After their conviction for espionage against the United States, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were electrocuted on June 19, 1953. Although Julius succumbed quickly, dying after the receipt of one shock, his wife survived three applications of electricity. The fourth charge finally killed her but caused a “ghastly plume of smoke [to rise] from her head.” Irene Philipson notes, in Ethel Rosenberg: Beyond the Myths. Ethel experienced a much harder death than her husband had.

Andy Warhol pioneered silkscreen painting, which allows “the artist to translate photographs as multiple, ‘mass produced’ works.” Initially, he used this mechanical printmaking process to market pictures of celebrities and everyday objects. However, his work later depicted more macabre subjects in his Death and Disasters series.

One of these paintings, Big Electric Chair (1967-1968), was inspired by a press photograph of the execution device taken inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York, where the Rosenbergs were put to death. Perhaps Warhol’s gruesome series was intended to desensitize viewers to the horrors of existence his paintings depicted. “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again,” he maintained, “it doesn’t really have an effect.”^[4]

6 Guernica by Pablo Picasso

A bull, a horse, bodies and body parts, terrified faces, a broken sword clutched in a dying man’s fist, a woman in agony—these are some of the macabre images in Pablo Picasso’s nightmarish Guernica (1937). According to a website devoted to the artist, the commissioned work represents Picasso’s immediate reaction to the Nazis’ devastating casual bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

The mural, painted in black, blue, and white oils, is an amalgamation of pastoral and epic style showcasing “the tragedies of war and the suffering it inflicts upon individuals, particularly innocent civilians.” The lack of colors expresses the “starkness of the aftermath of the bombing.” Although interpretations of the painting differ, the rampaging bull is thought to symbolize fascism, while the horse represents the people of Guernica, a stronghold of the Republican forces who resisted the Nationalists led by Francisco Franco.^[5]

5 The Course of Empire: Destruction by Thomas Cole

For hundreds of years, starting in 27 BC, the Roman Empire essentially was the Western world. Although the Empire was by no means an earthly paradise, it did provide law and order, protection, and a way of life for a vast region of the Middle East and Europe. During the Pax Romana, or “Peace of Rome,” which lasted about 200 years, art and culture flourished in the Empire. To Roman citizens, it probably appeared that the Empire would exist forever. However, when Rome finally fell to barbarian invaders, it must have seemed to them that life itself had come to an end. Indeed, life as they had known it had changed drastically.

Not surprisingly, this catastrophic event became the subject of several paintings, one of which, Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire: Destruction (1836), dramatically envisions this monumental event. Displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the painting pictures great armies contending for victory during a dark storm against the backdrop of the city in flames. A flotilla of enemy ships (of unlikely Viking origin) besieges the defenders. One of their vessels is used to cross a gap between sections of a bridge leading to the steps and rooftops of buildings where Roman centurions have made a desperate stand.

Although a ship sinks, it is clear that the invaders have gained the upper hand. Many Roman soldiers are dead or lie dying. The city has been put to the torch. At the edge of a rooftop, one of the barbarians arrests a terrified Roman lady intent upon casting herself into the sea. A larger-than-life statue of a Roman soldier, rushing forward with shield aloft, symbolizes the fall of the legion and the imminent fall of Rome itself: part of the sculpture’s head lies broken on the rooftop below. The panoramic painting is a sweeping vista of the disaster that has befallen the Empire and its citizens.^[6]

4 Human Laundry by Doris Clare Zinkeisen

The Nazis’ dehumanization of Jews is indicated by the title of Clare Zinkeisen’s stark 1945 painting Human Laundry: Belsen, 1945, which is displayed in the Imperial War Museum in London. Painted mostly in grays and whites, the work shows a row of skeletal figures laid out, on their backs, atop rough tables. German nurses, supervised by a uniformed German military doctor, bathe them with soap and the water kept in pails at the ends of the tables. A pair of bearers has just arrived with the covered body of another item of “human laundry.” Or, perhaps, they are removing a body that has ceased to survive the harsh extremes of the Belsen concentration camp.

As a set of notes concerning the painting states, “Zinkeisen finds an effective motif in the contrast between the well-fed, rounded bodies of the German medical staff and the emaciated bodies of their patients.” This effect is heightened by the unconcerned looks on the nurses’ faces as they go about their duties; by the resigned and hopeless postures of the prisoners they handle, whose faces are not shown, further heightening their dehumanization; and by the nurse who nonchalantly carries a pair of buckets past the tables beside a long puddle of spilled water that has collected on the floor. The medics are nurses and doctors from a nearby German military hospital pressed into service to wash and de-louse the prisoners to prevent the spread of typhus before they could be admitted to the makeshift Red Cross hospital nearby.

Another set of notes offers additional information concerning the plight of the World War II prisoners and the theme of the painting: “The ‘human laundry’ consisted of about twenty beds in a stable where German nurses and captured soldiers cut the hair of the inmates, bathed them, and applied anti-louse powder before their transfer to an improvised hospital run by the Red Cross.”(LINK 9) ^[7]

3 Stories Behind the Postcards by Jennifer Scott

Jennifer Scott’s 2009 series of paintings and collages, Stories Behind the Postcards, was exhibited in America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The inspiration for them, she said, were souvenir postcards which, according to the museum’s website, “depicted images of lynching [and were] mailed around the country.” Such lynchings occurred between the 1880s and the Second World War. Upon seeing the cards, Scott wondered about what she did not see in them, such as “the family members left behind to take down the victim, to mourn and bury the remains—if there was enough to bury.”

Her objective in creating the series, she said, was to encourage viewers to relate to the plight of the victims and to “try to imagine the victim’s life before death was captured in a postcard.” In addition, she hoped to move the viewer “beyond typical politically correct thoughts and feelings about race and race relations” so that their reflection on her work and its subject matter might have a lasting impact on the next generation.

Concerning three of her paintings, Three Generations, The Impossible (pictured), and My Son, My Grandson, Scott explained that unlike the postcards—which were in black and white or sepia-toned, her paintings are in full color. Without the color, the viewer might be able to distance themselves from the disturbing images. However, her versions remind the world that “these horrors took place amidst the beauty of nature and often in clear daylight.” Three Generations shows a middle-aged woman comforting an anguished older woman who is “beside herself with anger and sadness” as she leans over the victim, a young woman who, Scott explained, was lynched after being raped.^[8]

2 The Price by Tom Lea

The Price (1944) is a gruesome reminder of the cost that individual fighters paid on the World War II battlefield. A U.S. Marine advancing across a field in Peleliu in 1944, amid thick smoke on the ground and in the air, seems to stagger. The left side of his face, his left shoulder, the left side of his chest, and his left arm are shredded and bright red with his blood. That Marine, the artist, Tom Lea, explained, was “hit with a mortar blast, staggered a few yards like that, and just fell down.” The Price hung outside of Eisenhower’s office at the Pentagon after the war, the artist added, “to remind him of the price of war.”

Adair Margo, a gallery owner and friend of the El Paso, Texas, artist, said, “He was the only eyewitness painter of the war who depicted shots being fired and U. S. soldiers being blown apart with blood and guts on the ground.” Lea’s artwork, Margo added, represents honest portrayals of the truth of war, then and today. Two reasons that Life dispatched Lea to paint the war, Margo said, were that Lea “could paint battle in color, when photography was in black and white,” and he had the skill to “piece together parts [of the fighting] to communicate the whole of battle.”

Larry Decuers, the curator of The National World War II Museum in El Paso, said that the Life and World War II exhibit of Lea’s paintings from the U.S. Army’s art collection, on loan from the U.S. Army Center of Military History, included twenty-six images which Lea painted during the war. The paintings in the exhibit were the ones that appeared in Life magazine during the conflict itself, offering readers a no-punches-pulled glimpse of the war. During the U.S. operation against an entrenched Japanese force at Peleliu, 1,100 Marines died and 5,000 were wounded, while virtually all 11,000 Japanese soldiers on the island were killed.”^[9]

1 The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo

Not all catastrophes are criminal, martial, social, or political, and they don’t all affect entire groups or nations. The tragedy that befell Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was accidental and personal. It was also responsible for the vast majority of her work as an artist. Her paintings largely depict her physical disabilities and suffering and their effects on her personal life.

Kahlo, who suffered from polio as a child, nearly died in a bus accident as a teenager. She suffered multiple fractures of her spine, collarbone, and ribs, a shattered pelvis, a broken foot, and a dislocated shoulder. Soon after this devastating accident, Kahlo adopted painting as a way to cope with and overcome her ordeal, the effects of which continued throughout her life. “From the outset of her recovery,” a website dedicated to the artist explains, “she began to focus heavily on painting while in a body cast.” Despite having 30 operations, she persisted in painting largely autobiographical, if symbolic, portraits of herself.

The Broken Column, a 1944 portrait of the artist, shows Kahlo topless, her arms at her sides, weeping as she gazes toward the viewer. A sheet is wrapped around her hips, and an orthopedic corset composed of straps over her shoulders and around her torso binds her abdomen. She is split by a large, wide fissure that shows, in place of her spine, the somewhat broken column of the painting’s title. The fissure, or cleft, writes art historian Andrea Kettenmann, author of Kahlo, becomes a symbol “of the artist’s pain and loneliness.” Another symbol of Kahlo’s pain is the nails that pierce her face and body. What Kettenmann states about another of Kahlo’s painting The Landscape (1946-1947) is also true of The Broken Column: “The desolate and fissured landscape [suggestive of the artist’s broken body] provides the background for Frida Kahlo’s work.”^[10]

On September 8, 1966, Star Trek (often referred to as The Original Series) aired on NBC for the first time. The episode was called “The Man Trap,” and it featured a woman who could morph into a rather gruesome salt vampire, both shocking in appearance and behavior. It also grabbed the attention of the American public, which was starting to take science fiction seriously. Though the series was canceled in its third season, it had an incredible following in reruns and inspired a large, globally well-known franchise.

As of 2021, there have been 13 Star Trek movies and 11 television series (three of them animated), with several other TV projects in the works and another movie due in 2023. Star Trek is everywhere, and its influence has pervaded our media, language, technology, and even the future of our nation’s military and exploratory missions. The presence of Star Trek in our culture is a phenomenon unto itself…

Related: 10 Modern Technologies That Almost Turned Out Differently

10 Let’s Start with the Enterprise

In 1775, a British sloop-of-war named George was captured by American forces led by none other than Col. Benedict Arnold, who rechristened the ship USS Enterprise. It served in the Revolutionary War but was burned in 1777 to avoid recapture. For two centuries, a long line of Enterprises, one after another, would serve the U.S. Navy, the last two gaining a lot of public glory. The USS Enterprise commissioned in 1938 was an aircraft carrier and the most decorated ship in WW2, and the one commissioned in 1961 was the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the world!

So when Star Trek was in the planning stages during the mid-1960s, the name Enterprise was in common usage and held in high esteem in the U.S. It was the inspiration for naming the ship that Captain Kirk would command. But with the popularity the show would gather, the naming game took a significant turn…

In 1974 NASA started building the first space shuttle, choosing the name Constitution for their revolutionary new spacecraft (though in truth, it was destined to be experimental and never left the Earth’s atmosphere). However, a large letter-writing campaign targeted NASA over that decision, and in 1976 when the shuttle made its first public appearance in Palmdale, CA, the word Enterprise was painted on its side. Several Star Trek actors were in attendance for the ceremony, along with Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator.

Virgin Galactic’s first SpaceShipTwo spaceplane, the VSS Enterprise, took its premier flight in October 2010. Of course, it had also been named in honor of Star Trek, but it lacked the fictional ship’s longevity, crashing four years later due to premature deployment of its descent system.

The U.S. Navy is currently building a new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier called, once again, the USS Enterprise, due to launch in 2025 to replace the older warship, which was decommissioned in 2017. And it’s a sure bet that there’ll be more toasts to Captain Kirk at the ceremony than to a historically scandalized Colonel Arnold.^[1]

9 The NASA/Star Trek Connection

Since NASA’s compliance with that mid-1970s letter-writing campaign to rename their first shuttle Enterprise, a partnership of sorts has seemed to develop between the government agency and the influence of Star Trek. It’s almost as if the show’s huge popularity in its many manifestations has helped to mold and shape NASA as it reaches out into space, and the agency isn’t fighting the collaboration one bit…

After writing a series of columns in magazines encouraging minority and women participation in the space program, Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura) was invited by NASA to work with recruitment. This stint lasted from 1977 to well into the 1980s. Nichols was a huge success in her alliance with NASA, and one of her ’78 recruits was Dr. Sally Ride, who would become the first female American to reach outer space. She would also have a Federation starship named after her—the USS (Sally) Ride—at least in the realm of Star Trek: Discovery. This is only one of the many examples of Starfleet crossover themes that influence NASA and the agency’s decisions.

The thing is, people who work at NASA grew up watching Star Trek, and the show helped influence the job paths they would later choose, which is why you can see pop-cultural references scattered throughout the agency. For example, in 1993, the entire crew of the shuttle Endeavor posed for a picture dressed in Starfleet uniforms, one of them offering the Vulcan greeting. And in 2012, when the shuttle Enterprise arrived at JFK Airport en route to its final destination—the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum—Leonard Nimoy (Spock) was there to return the gesture. Actually, it’s not unusual for American astronauts to publicly pose in Star Trek uniforms. However, in 2014, when William Shatner received NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal, he chose to wear a cowboy hat and jeans.

And back in 2010, when the Space Shuttle Discovery brought the newfangled Window Observational Research Facility up to the International Space Station, the crew wore mission patches that contained letters from the fictitious Klingon language. It seems the moment someone at NASA realized that the acronym for the project—WORF—was also the name of a Klingon character played by Michael Dorn, they just couldn’t help adding the name in his native language to their patches.

But the most shocking display of Star Trek’s influence on NASA would have to be the IXS Enterprise, a conceptual starship capable of warp drive. Through CGI, the ship is made to look somewhat like the TV Enterprise mixed with design elements of the space shuttle, though it is surrounded by two warp rings. It is incredibly profound that engineers who grew up watching Star Trek are currently designing starships that will one day perform like the ones in Starfleet and resemble them. Freaky!^[2]

8 Mobile Devices

While the development of individual cellphones sprang from preexisting cellular technology such as car phones and pagers, and while these gadgets predated the Star Trek franchise by a good 20 years, still the handheld communicators used by the crew of the Enterprise cannot be discounted from the evolution of our present-day mobile phones. Martin Cooper of Motorola, who led the team that developed the first portable cellphone in 1973, has admitted part of his inspiration came from watching Captain Kirk speak into his gadget. In truth, he’s also stated that Dick Tracy’s wrist radio was his inspiration, but in the ’90s, manufacturers began designing phones that looked an awful lot more like the one Kirk held…

The very first flip phone released in 1996 was called the Motorola StarTAC! Coincidence? Ask Cingular, who released in 2006 the HTC Startrek, not even trying to mask the spelling. Of course, the following year, Apple released the iPhone, completely changing the direction cell phone design would take. However, flip phones are still marketed and have loyal followers who enjoy emulating Kirk each time they make a call.

Smartphones with large touchscreens—predominantly iPhones and Androids—became incredibly popular shortly after their inception, and the technology they used was extended early on to tablets. Perhaps iPad owners should feel as if they’re emulating Captain Jean-Luc Picard each time they use their device. On Star Trek: The Next Generation and other shows set in that timeline, the crew members utilize rectangular, computerized personal devices of various sizes with touch screen technology. These were introduced on TV a good twenty years before Apple rolled out the innovative iPad to the public.

And back in the day, you might have enjoyed playing MP3s on your tablet—digital files developed by Karlheinz Brandenburg after watching an episode of The Next Generation in which Data (Brent Spiner) used the computer to listen to music selections.^[3]

This type of inspiration hasn’t just happened with mobile devices. The first home computer—the MITS Altair 8800, which came out in 1975—has been rumored to have been named after the star mentioned in the episode “Amok Time” on The Original Series. It was also a good place to play a text-based video game called Star Trek…if you didn’t mind waiting like FOREVER for the game to load.

7 The Thingamabob in Uhura’s Ear

Communications Officer Lt. Uhura was a stylish gal if ever there were one, what with her groovy-green hoop earrings, flawless hairdo (unless the ship was attacked), super-chic boots, and crazy-cute mini-dress in lipstick red. Her nails were polished, her eyes sparkled, and she had the legs of a ballerina. Yet, she sat at her post each day with an unsightly, metal doohickey in her ear that looked like something that fell out of the wall in Engineering—and probably should have been returned to Scotty pronto!

Her earpiece was a wireless receiver connected to the ship’s computer, and it allowed her freedom of movement while monitoring signals and messages. The Original Series actually boasted a heap of wireless technology, from subspace communication to instantaneous viewscreen transmissions. Even their transporter technology could be considered to be an extremely complex stream of wireless information.

Back in the ’60s, when the show was on the air, most of what we consider today to be wireless was in stages of development. If asked to find something wireless at home, the average American might have pointed at a transistor radio, perhaps the TV (uncertain if the power cord counted), and possibly the kids’ walkie-talkies. Today, however, we don’t give those reruns with Uhura’s earpiece or Kirk’s communicator a second thought, for we are constantly surrounded by wireless signals that help us communicate, recreate, and even navigate to our destination. But back in the ’60s, this stuff was really progressive and, well—far out!

Today we are totally dependent on wireless communication. We are surrounded by WiFi signals, hotspots, radio frequencies, cellphone networks, WANs, MANs, and LANs, often bouncing off and interfering with each other, especially in crowded areas. And as if all that wasn’t enough, we also utilize PANs (personal area networks) such as Bluetooth, which delivers our music and phone calls directly to an earpiece. This is just perfect for screaming out our private conversations on elevators, in restroom stalls, at the gym, and while on public transportation, where we risk disturbing other riders attempting to blast music from their radio apps…^[4]

Perhaps Uhura’s eyesore of an earpiece wasn’t so bad after all.

6 Synthehol

While the crew of Kirk’s Enterprise seemed to enjoy genuine alcohol, Picard’s crew instead indulged in synthehol. The booze that Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) served in Ten-Forward had apparently been re-engineered so as not to cause hangovers, excessive intoxication, or illness, and it supposedly tasted similar to the original. Wouldn’t it be great if we had libations like that in real life? Perhaps we will very shortly…

A scientist in England named David Nutt has been trying to devise an alcohol substitute for years, and he may have found it. The formula, initially called alcosynth (a play on synthehol), has been renamed Alcarelle and is a synthetic substance that targets specific GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) receptors in the brain, much like alcohol but without the deleterious effects. Alcarelle consumption does not lead to hangovers, and long-term usage will not cause liver damage. The substance is currently in the development stage, and GABALabs plans to sell the finished product as an ingredient to companies that will market the actual drinks.

They are hoping Alcarelle products will be available in the UK by 2025, and hopefully, they’ll go over well in Scotland, where alcohol is both highly appreciated and consumed. But wasn’t it Montgomery “Scotty” Scott (James Doohan) who once exclaimed, “What in blazes is this!” after his first taste of synthehol while visiting Picard’s Enterprise? The gang at GABALabs has noted that Alcarelle doesn’t really taste good and needs to be mixed with juice to be palatable. Good luck with that, guys.^[5]

5 Space Burial

When Starfleet officers die in the line of duty, they’re often placed inside a photon torpedo and jettisoned from the ship, where they will either burn up upon re-entry into a planet’s atmosphere or journey forever into the dark void of space. While in outer space, death is a concern that real astronauts will have to deal with someday as we begin to send manned missions farther and farther out into the unknown. Certainly, space burials will be the answer during long journeys to distant stars.

The very first space burial, interestingly enough, was that of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, though it was basically honorary. Roddenberry died in 1991 of cardiac arrest, and the following year, a portion of his ashes were flown into space upon the shuttle Columbia, though they were returned to Earth with the ship.

Likewise, James Doohan really got around after his death. The character of Scotty had a huge following, and many people were inspired by him to pursue a career in engineering. In 2005, Doohan died at age 85, and two years later, a portion of his cremated ashes flew into space for four minutes on the SpaceLoft XL rocket. In 2008, however, his ashes left Earth twice, first in August on the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket, which failed to reach orbit, and secondly in October when entrepreneur Richard Garriott smuggled him aboard the International Space Station as a private citizen astronaut on a 12-day mission. The plan had been concocted by the actor’s son, Chris Doohan, who claims his father’s ashes are still aboard the ISS hidden under floor cladding. And a portion of Doohan’s remains went up in space again in 2012 on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket—successfully this time—for nine days.

And guess what? Yet another portion of Doohan’s ashes will be going up into space in 2022 on a Celestis Memorial Spaceflight—the maiden flight of the Voyager Service whose “passengers” will not be returning to Earth. This mission has been dubbed the “Enterprise Flight” because Doohan will be joined by the ashes of Gene Roddenberry and his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who played numerous roles such as Number One, Nurse Christine Chapel, and Lwaxana Troi and who died in 2008. These three icons of the Star Trek franchise, along with the ashes of others, will zip by the moon to get a fly-by, gravitational boost which will propel them out of the solar system and into the unknown depths of outer space where no human—nor human remains—have ever beforehand traversed…^[6]

4 Virtual Reality

Gene Dolgoff, the CEO of Holobeam Technologies Inc., has been an innovator in the science of holography and 3-D imaging since the early ’60s and was the inventor of holographic transfer printing for credit cards in 1971. One of the highlights of his career was meeting with Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel in ’73 when he explained how holograms work and their potential for changing the future of entertainment and engineering. Roddenberry was fascinated with the concept of “matter holograms” and the possibility of entire rooms comprised of a “holographic environment,” a concept introduced just one year later on Star Trek: The Animated Series.

The Animated Series was probably the least popular of all the series considered canonical, and most people didn’t take it very seriously, then or now. For starters, they booted Chekov from the bridge; they added a feline character who looked as if she’d just beamed up from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon; plot lines were often pretty bizarre; and the animators frequently miscolored items, uniforms, and people. But in an episode of the short-lived second season called “The Practical Joker,” an area of the ship capable of employing holographic environments, simply called the recreation room, was introduced. After the series’ cancellation, however, the concept would not be further explored for thirteen years.

In September of 1987, Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered, and Picard’s Enterprise was still housing that holographic rec room when it did. However, it had been rechristened “the holodeck,” with entire episodes revolving around this unique form of off-duty personal entertainment. Of course, Quark from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine rented out such units, called holosuites, for profit, but what else would a Ferengi do with such lucrative technology?

Just as a generation of astronauts at NASA grew up fascinated with Kirk’s Enterprise, the tech developers and engineers working with virtual reality today grew up watching Picard and his holodeck. Likewise, the direction VR is heading is directly inspired by the show. But how far along are we? Sure, we have virtual gaming and cockpit training, not to mention computer-generated engineering applications, vacation test runs, and house shopping. But how soon will we have holodecks in our homes just like the one on the Enterprise?

One of the biggest challenges is offering a full-sensory experience without the headset; in other words, rather than wearing our VR, the “holomatter” would be coming at us—at our naked eyes and ears, our noses and fingertips. And while many tech companies seem to indicate that we’re almost there, many more skeptics warn that we’ll never actually reach that level of virtual reality. The science behind some of the functions of the television holodeck is as hypothetical as time travel and seems to break the laws of physics, but let us remind ourselves that their version of the contraption originated on a Saturday morning cartoon. And do we truly want our virtual experiences to completely echo the ones on Star Trek, which could offer a reality much more pleasant and enticing than real life? We’d never want to come out of the darn thing!

Although…the guy who started all this, Gene Dolgoff, remains optimistic about the possibility of real-life holodecks. He even claims “matter holograms” could one day lead to transporter technology, which would reconstruct a holographic person replacing someone “transporting” from a different geographic location. And therein lies a ton of ethical questions and concerns, such as how to obliterate the original person being scanned, copied, and downloaded elsewhere. Moving along…^[7]

3 Star Trek References Exist Every-Freakin’-Where

Star Trek references, both obvious and subtle, have been inserted into the average American’s life since the vast popularity of The Original Series in syndication. They are part of our everyday vocabulary, imagery, and expression, often showing up in advertising and music, and thus they shape how we think, communicate, and navigate our lives.

There are many sayings from Star Trek that either originated on the show or were popularized by association, such as “landing party,” “class M planet,” “warp speed,” and “make it so.” And mention of “tribbles,” “transporters,” “the prime directive,” or “food replicators” is understood across generational borders. Likewise, words such as “stardate,” “redshirt,” “phaser,” and “tricorder” have entered our pop-cultural lexicon, along with phrases such as “Vulcan mind-meld,” “Alpha Quadrant,” “universal translator,” and, of course, “beam me up.” Star Trek has also lent us a couple of famous fill-in-the-blank lines: “I’m a doctor, not a ___!” and “where no ___ has gone before!”

Star Trek imagery also pervades our culture, with well-known visuals such as the arrangement of the bridge, and the cuts and colors of the uniforms within, being used to set up many a comedic TV sketch (think SNL and Family Guy, for starters). There are also shows such as The Big Bang Theory and Futurama with Star Trek references interwoven throughout most of their episodes. And all genres of popular music contain shout-outs to Trekkies with songs such as “99 Red Balloons” by Nena, “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Intergalactic” by The Beastie Boys, and “Beach House on the Moon” by Jimmy Buffett. The sound of the red-alert klaxon was used mischievously by Ariana Grande in her song “Problem,” and the band Information Society borrows the voice of Leonard Nimoy in their hit “What’s on Your Mind (Pure Energy).”

Possibly the very first Star Trek-inspired commercial aired in 1969 when a Vulcan dressed as a Klingon beamed down to show a bewildered mom the wonders of Cheer laundry detergent. From thereon out, Trek references have appeared in ads for everything from Samsung and MCI to Pizza Hut and Twizzlers. In 2012 an IKEA commercial borrowed an instrumental from “Amok Time” (The Original Series), and in 2016, Andorian aliens helped peddle Mexican avocados in a Super Bowl ad. This particular angle is widely popular in print, television, radio, and internet advertising. The Ferengis should be mighty proud that the fictional universe in which they live is very lucrative for making a buck in this one.^[8]

2 The United States Space Force

On December 20, 2019, President Donald Trump signed into effect the establishment of the United States Space Force, officiating a branch of the military which had been forming within the confines of the Air Force since the 1940s. And a month later, when he revealed the agency’s official seal, people were amazed that it looked very similar to the fictitious seal of Starfleet Command! The internet went abuzz with comparison pictures casting copycat shame, but the simple truth is the delta symbol (the arrowhead) has been used by the Air Force specifically for its early space program since 1961. It appears Star Trek did the actual borrowing of the delta symbol, but the USSF has also done a bit of borrowing…

Though the agency is new, it seems to be having a little fun with Trek-isms, much like NASA. The USSF has a department called the Space Operations Command, the acronym of which—SpOC—is purposely arranged to sound like “Spock.” They’ve also named their new tracking program “Kobayashi Maru” after a simulated training exercise James T. Kirk once outsmarted. But unlike NASA, whose scientists grew up watching Star Trek, the Space Force is made up of military officers, which makes a world of difference between the two agencies and how they will further develop and interact.

Many of the astronauts at NASA, an agency that has always taken a peaceful stance on space exploration, have been or are active military personnel, and the USSF is an actual branch of the Armed Forces straight through. While the starship Enterprise’s credo “to explore strange new worlds” and “to seek out new life and new civilizations” sure sounds like a peaceful endeavor, it was still armed with ship’s phasers and photon torpedoes, its crew likewise armed with phaser pistols. NASA and the USSF have already established a protocol for interactive exploration and security, as they’re literally soaring through each other’s turf, but is the notion of peaceable exploration while carrying an arsenal of kick-ass weaponry feasible for collaborative missions in the future? It seemed to work on TV.^[9]

Time will only tell if the eagle really can fly with the dove…

1 Where No Nonagenarian Has Gone Before

On October 13, 2021, William Shatner—at the age of 90—flew into space aboard Blue Origin’s pilotless New Shepard rocket with three other passengers: microbiologist Glen de Vries, entrepreneur Chris Boshuizen, and Audrey Powers, VP of flight ops at Blue Origin. They bounced around in zero-G for about three minutes before falling back to Earth and touching the ground at a gentle 2 mph. Upon emerging from the hatch, Shatner was embraced by Jeff Bezos, to whom the actor’s first words were, “It was so moving to me.” He followed by saying, “I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”

Another interesting comment came from de Vries to reporters when he described Shatner’s trip to space as “the ultimate manifestation of science fiction becoming science.” Perhaps, as we watch our space technologies expand and flourish, this particular voyage will become the epitome of Star Trek’s influence on and relationship with our modern-day space programs, whether they be NASA, the USSF, or privately-funded endeavors. After all, Bezos has admitted that Star Trek was his inspiration for launching Blue Origin in the first place, and yes, Shatner flew for free on his monumental flight.

George Takei (who played Ensign Sulu) threw some rather critical shade, accusing Shatner of being an unfit guinea pig. But the most interesting observation Takei offered was: “He’s boldly going where other people have gone before.”

And he was right. Back in 1966, when Star Trek first aired, only a handful of people in the world had achieved the title of astronaut or cosmonaut, and only two countries had been represented in the process. In the 55 years that have ensued, we’ve sent men to the moon, built space shuttles, created the Int’l Space Station, and seen the rise of commercial space tourism. As of 2021, there have been 42 countries represented in space through the participation of approximately 600 astronauts (the exact number changes per count as the criteria for having achieved space altitude varies, and the roles of “astronaut” and “passenger” are often counted separately).

So yes, many other men, and women, have made it to space beforehand. But out of all those individuals who have blasted free from Earth’s atmosphere, Shatner, at 90, is the oldest, and kudos might be offered if only for that achievement. And how profound for William Shatner, who first explored space at the age of 35 as James T. Kirk, to have had the unique opportunity to explore it 55 years later in real life as himself.^[10]

With The House of the Dragon on the horizon, many are looking fondly back at the immersive experience that was Game of Thrones (ignoring the last season, of course). Apart from amazing effects, epic battles, and incredible dialogue, the show captured the world’s fascination with an epic plotline and twists few saw coming.

As they say, though, truth is stranger than fiction. Many of these “wow” moments in the series were nods to actual events in history. Here are 10 of them! But if you’re one of the three people who hasn’t seen Game of Thrones, beware—there are spoilers ahead.

Related: Top 10 Real-Life Counterparts To Game Of Thrones Characters

10 The War of Five Kings / The War of the Roses

The underlying conflict in Game of Thrones is largely based on the historical War of the Roses, named the War of Five Kings in the series. In the historical war, raging between 1455 and 1485, several houses battled for control of the English throne, with houses Lancaster and York (Lannister and Stark) being the main contenders.

The hated Joffrey Lannister is very similar to the ruthless and bloodthirsty Edward of Lancaster, who, like Joffrey, was allegedly the illegitimate son of King Henry the VI. Like Robert Baratheon, King Henry’s death was the catalyst for the War of the Roses. Believing the heir to be illegitimate, Richard, Duke of York, believed he had a better claim.

Margaret of Anjou, King Henry’s wife and Edward’s mother, mirrors Cersei in her adulterous affairs, ruthless ambition, and central role to play. Like Cersei’s imprisonment of Ned Stark, Margaret of Anjou was largely responsible for spurring the two houses toward war with her undisguised preparations to attack the York house.

Richard York, just like Robb Stark, initially was winning the battles but, sadly, would eventually lose the war. The War of the Roses came to a close with Henry Tudor marrying Elizabeth of York, uniting the York and Lancasters. Having the Lannisters and Starks marry to end the war clearly wasn’t what happened in the series, but we’re going to avoid talking about the show’s ending…^[1]

9 Jon Snow’s / Julius Caesar’s Assasinations

You likely let out an audible gasp when Jon Snow, handsome and charismatic leader of the Night’s Watch, was murdered by his own men. I sure did. After all, the show had a record of killing off its most beloved characters, and I had already had my heart broken by the deaths of Robb Stark, Khal Drogo, and poor honorable Ned. We know now, of course, that Jon wouldn’t stay dead for long, but boy, was that a miserable wait.

Jon’s death at the hands of his commanders is very akin to the infamous Ides of March, in which Caesar was similarly stabbed to death by members of the Roman Senate. You see, Caesar had worked his way up to become the ruler of Rome and intended to remain in power. Much to the horror of the nominated—not elected—Senate, Caesar was planning on naming himself Emperor of Rome, something the civilization had not yet seen. Despite the many advances Caesar provided for Rome and the peace under his rule, the Senate hated his arrogance and resented the thought of an Empire.

Caesar was ambushed by the Senate and stabbed 23 times to his death, one of his murderers being his adopted son, Brutus (represented by Ollie in GoT). In Shakespeare’s rendition of the event, Caesar’s last words were “Et tu, Brute?” (“You too, Brutus?”), and are hauntingly similar to Jon gasping Ollie’s name before the boy landed the fatal blow.

Unfortunately for the Senate, the people of Rome were horrified by the act and turned on them. With no clear ruler, Caesar’s death created a power vacuum, plunging the empire into years of civil war and making a whole mess of things. In the end, Emperor Augustus came to power, and Rome became an Empire, making killing Caesar both entirely pointless and ultimately a very poor choice. Oops.^[2]

8 The Red Wedding / The Black Dinner

Few scenes were more horrifying than the Red Wedding, in which the beloved Starks were massacred in the halls of the deplorable Walder Frey, ending their war to avenge their liege lord. There’s plenty of death, despair, and twists in Game of Thrones, but the notion of being murdered while being wined and dined by a supposed ally is a different breed of despicable.

Plus—as Talisa was pregnant and had decided on a name—they essentially killed Eddard Stark twice. That’s just so wrong.

Anyway, inspiration for this infamous scene had its roots in history, as confirmed by the writer himself. George R.R. Martin confirmed that the “Red Wedding” was inspired by the Black Dinner, an event in medieval Scotland.

Sixteen-year-old William, Earl of Douglas, and younger brother David were invited to join ten-year-old King James II for dinner. James and William were friends, but unfortunately for the latter, the Black Douglas clan was seen as a threat to the new king’s rule. From the start, the dinner was a trap orchestrated by the Scottish Chancellor, Sir William Crichton.

Once seated, the two Douglas boys were presented with a plate bearing the head of a black bull—a symbol of the death of the Black Douglas. Even in history, it seems, people really had a good time with gestures of symbolism, and George R.R. Martin compared the severed bull’s head to Robb and his direwolf being beheaded.

Following being served this disgusting symbol, the two boys were arrested, given a mock trial, and beheaded.

Another event that partially inspired the Red Wedding was the Glencoe Massacre of 1692, in which the opposite event happened. Captain Robert Campbell sought the hospitality of the MacDonald clan, then murdered his hosts. In both instances, the sacred rules of hospitality were violated, lending to the horror that took place in Walder Frey’s hall.^[3]

7 The Wall / Hadrian’s Wall

One of the most impressive and recognizable visual wonders of the show—other than the dragons, of course—was the dreaded “wall” of ice that separated the 7 Kingdoms from the “Wildlings.” This is a direct nod to Hadrian’s wall, an impressive 117-kilometer (73-mile) wall stretching from coast to coast across the modern-day United Kingdom.

Built by Emperor Hadrian (duh), the wall was constructed to protect the Roman province of Britannia from the unconquered Caledonia. Just like the Wildings of the North, the providences of Caledonia were roamed by clans considered to be lawless and savage, and their raids of Roman villages were common. There was great contempt between the Romans and their tribal neighbors, and the wall was seen as a deterrent to keep them at bay. Thankfully, the Romans didn’t have the army of the dead knocking at their door too.^[4]

6 The Dothraki / Mongol Empire

When little Daenerys Targarian is married off to Khal Drogo, we get a glimpse into the rough, violent lifestyle of the nomadic warlord. In Dothraki culture, strength is valued over all, and across the land, they instilled fear as some of the deadliest warriors in the world.

This was much the same as the Mongol empire, which ruled much of Asia and Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. Like the Dothraki, the Mongols were excellent warriors that defeated their enemies on horseback and were constantly on the move. Mongol children were trained in archery and horseback riding from a young age, a trait the Dothraki copied—learning to ride and fight starting at the age of four.

The Mongol Empire was founded by the fearsome Genghis Khan, a prolific warrior and fornicator who, to this day, is responsible for about 0.5 percent of the world’s male population. He is the direct inspiration for Khal Drogo, who was revered as the fiercest Khal among them all.^[5]

5 The Battle of Blackwater Bay / The Siege of Constantinople

One of the many epic events of the show was the Battle of Blackwater Bay, in which fans were likely torn between wanting Stannis to really stick it to the hated Lannisters and simultaneously rooting for crowd favorite and only redeemable Lannister, Tyrion. In the show, our favorite dwarf outsmarts the larger Baratheon forces with Wildfire, a devastating concoction that burns stone, steel, wood, and flesh alike.

The inspiration for this little trick likely came from the second seizure of Constantinople. During this battle, the advancing Arab army was soundly defeated by a substance known as “Greek Fire,” which, like Wildfire, was able to continue burning on water. Just as Stannis’s naval force was obliterated, so was the attacking Arab fleet during the siege, their vessels soundly destroyed by the blaze before reaching the city walls.^[6]

To this day, the exact composition of Greek fire is unknown.

4 Ramsay Bolton / King Ashurbanipal

One of the more satisfying moments of the series was watching the cruel and unpredictable Joffrey Baratheon meet his well-deserved, violent end. Had we only known what cruelty lay in our next villain, however, we may have gladly endured Joffrey instead.

Ramsay Bolton took his house’s sigil—the flayed man—quite literally, dolling out the method at a whim. His sadistic joy in the torture was stomach-churning, making it even worse to know that his character takes inspiration from a real person.

The Assyrians were feared not only for their prowess in battle but also for their lust for torture. King Ashurbanipal of the Assyrians was no different, harnessing torture as a means of psychological warfare. Apart from impalement and crucifixion, Ashurbanipal also enjoyed the public display of flaying to flex his power. Beginning at the buttocks, thighs, or lower legs, the unfortunate victim had their skin slowly peeled away. If that weren’t sick enough, King Ashurbanipal had a habit of hanging the peeled skin around the walls of his city in a grotesque reminder of what would happen to those who disobeyed. Gross.^[7]

3 Joffrey’s / Attila the Hun’s Deaths

While we’re on the subject of Joffrey’s death, his demise definitely mirrors that of the infamous Attila the Hun.

Like Joffrey, Attila would meet his demise on his very wedding night. In celebrating his union with his new wife, the beautiful Ildico, Atilla got, well, drunk. As anyone should on their wedding night, right?

Sadly, his joy was short-lived. He was found dead the next morning under suspicious circumstances, bleeding from the nose and mouth. Accounts differ on whether he suffered internal bleeding due to his level of alcohol consumption or whether the inebriated groom choked to death after suffering a nosebleed. Either way, it paints a picture hauntingly akin to Joffrey’s sufferable last moments.^[8]

2 Jamie Lannister’s / Götz von Berlichingen’s Prosthetic Hands

Jamie Lannister is a controversial character. On the one hand, we were rooting for the charming, suave Lannister to make a turnaround and become the honorable man Brienne of Tarth saw in him. Who doesn’t love a good character arc?

On the other hand, he did push a child out of a window.

Either way, Jamie losing his sword hand was a shocking turn of events in which you couldn’t help but feel bad for the guy. Losing a hand to the average Joe is bad enough, but the Kingslayer lost a lot of himself with it—”I was that hand,” as he put it. Upon returning to King’s Landing, Jamie receives a gold prosthetic which, other than being very Lannister, had to be heavy and pretty impractical, right?

It turns out his prosthetic hand has origins in history. German knight Gotz von Berlichingen lost his own right hand at the age of 23 due to enemy cannon fire. Accounts differ, with one saying the blast hit his sword, which then hacked off his arm, while another claims the cannon took the arm clean off. Either way, Berlichingen left the battle one hand lighter.

Like Jamie, this was Berlichingen’s fighting hand, and he was also presented with a prosthetic. Unlike Jamie’s hand, however, Berlichingen’s replacement was made of iron and sported joints that allowed him to continue to use that hand to fight. Using his left hand to tighten the joints of his iron one, he was able to close the iron joints around a sword. “Götz of the Iron Hand,” as he would become known, continued to fight until the age of 64, after which he retired.^[9]

1 The Lord of Light / Zoroastrianism

“For the night is dark and full of terrors.” Another great example of internal conflict when it comes to loving or despising characters is the Red Woman and her “Lord of Light.” By the end of the show—which, yes, was infuriatingly badly executed—it becomes clear that Melisandre had a role to play after all. That said, her eagerness to burn people alive, including the innocent princess Shereen, solidified her place as ultimately evil.

The Lord of Light (known as R’hllor) is a nod to what is arguably the oldest monotheistic faith, Zoroastrianism. Followers of this faith honored one god and held fire as a sacred symbol, as it represented light, warmth, and purifying powers. Melisandre and other followers of R’hllor speak of fire as “burning away the sins” and death by fire to be the “purest death.”^[10]

Although people sometimes think of “art” as only or primarily the visual arts, fine arts are much more varied. According to The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, they include not only painting and drawing but also “sculpture, literature, architecture, drama, music, dance, opera, and television and movies.”

It is in this broad sense of the meaning of the term that the artists on this list are included. Each of them, whether a painter, a novelist, or a poet, is not only famous but also shares the rather surprising experience of having had one or more of their works inspired by a hallucination.

Related: Top 10 Frightening Facts About Hallucinations

10 Futuristic Images

Dr. Jean Kim believes Yayoi Kusama’s art teaches us how to live. The Japanese painter’s work features polka dots, the trademark theme she developed when she was 10 years old, and incorporates imagery from the hallucinations that the artist experiences.

Kim describes Kusama’s art as a mixture of abstract expressionism and conceptual art characterized by its graphic, colorful, and somewhat futuristic images. Kim cites the artist’s Infinity Rooms as an example: “These rooms are small self-contained mirror chambers, allowing the viewer to simultaneously lose one’s identity and sense of self in the infinity of a repeated image evoking the universe.” She adds the paintings capture the reality of selfies, which have become increasingly popular in recent years, as they’ve been distributed rapidly far and wide via social media.

Kusama’s art also helps the artist herself cope with, and even transcend, her mental illness. Kim points out that although not specifically diagnosed, it is consistent with psychosis and possible schizophrenia. While marked by hallucinations and “the disintegration of one’s sense of self and identity, leading to anxiety and paranoia.” Kusama’s art is therapeutic, allowing the painter to reconsolidate the fear of disintegration that the artist experiences.^[1]

9 Stalking Crustaceans and Bizarre Transformations

In 1935, French existential philosopher, novelist, and playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) decided to take a trip—a very special kind of trip. He prevailed upon his friend, Daniel Lagache, a medical doctor, to punch his ticket, so to speak, by injecting his patient with mescaline, which was used at the time to treat alcoholism and depression.

As a result, Sartre experienced a “bad trip.” Writer Emily Zarevich describes some of the more salient features of Sartre’s mind-blowing adventure. Not only did bizarre, frightening crustaceans pursue him wherever he went, but ordinary objects transformed themselves into animals, “his clock [becoming] an owl, his umbrella to a vulture.”

Sartre’s adventure ended with a mental breakdown. Part of his campaign of redemption that followed included his consultation with famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. After that, Sartre understood that the crabs that had pursued him symbolized the philosopher’s fear of being alone. Although he was able to rid himself, intermittently, of the crustaceans that haunted him, the crabs reappeared in Sartre’s experimental and ground-breaking 1938 novel La Nausée (Nausea). In the book, readers are treated to a ludicrous sex scene in which the main character daydreams he’s trapped in a garden full of insects and animals walking crab-style.^[2]

8 Shapes on the Ceiling

Despite his eventual fame, Joan Miro (1893-1983) was once a starving artist. The surrealist painter himself explained the way that he conceived the subjects of his art. Janis Mink summarizes his process in her book, Miro. Upon returning to his Paris studio at night, he would go to bed sometimes without supper, where he would see things, including shapes on the ceiling, before jotting them down in a notebook. Sometimes, the sights were “remembered dreams” from his unrestful sleep; other times, they were images seen in “hallucinations caused by hunger.”

Although Miro might appear to have sufficient funds for necessities and “trips back and forth to Spain,” he was actually impoverished. His hunger, though, like the “ether, cocaine, alcohol, morphine, or sex” that his colleagues employed, helped him to get in touch with his subconscious. This worked out well for Miro, who was too deeply spiritual to destroy his own body and fully enjoyed his own connection to nature. His 1925 painting, The Birth of the World, quickly attained fame.^[3]

7 Blood Sky and Open Chest Wound

Edvard Munch (1863-1944), who, according to Dr. Albert Rothenberg, may have had bipolar disorder with psychosis, experienced visual and auditory hallucinations and received psychiatric hospitalization in 1908.

Munch himself explains the origin of his celebrated, if dark and disturbing, painting The Scream (1893): “I was walking along the road with two of my friends. Then the sun set. The sky suddenly turned into blood, and I felt something akin to a touch of melancholy. I stood still, leaned against the railing, dead tired. Above the blue black fjord and city hung clouds of dripping, rippling blood. My friends went on again. I stood, frightened, with an open wound in my breast. A great scream pierced through nature.”

The experience, clearly a visual hallucination, was creatively transformed by Munch in several phases over a period of eighteen months into a work of art. Five preliminary sketches in the Munch Museum in Oslo, Norway, show changes in the position of the painting’s lone figure, resulting in the subjects being turned to face the viewer and being visually integrated with the scene. The successive changes show how Munch’s artistry transformed his hallucination into a significant and meaningful portrait of an emotional state of mind and reflected the artist’s own healthy creative processes.^[4]

6 Autoscopic Hallucination

An autoscopic hallucination is the perception of one’s own body or a part of it as existing separately and externally to the self. This type of hallucination occurred in conjunction with meningitis, seizures, space-occupying lesions, brain tumors, migraine, delirium, and post-traumatic brain lesions.

The Russian novelist Feodor (also spelled “Fyodor” and “Fjodor”) Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was regarded as an abnormally high-strung personality and suffered from an unknown ailment that made him subject to hallucinations. Even as a child, he had auditory hallucinations. Once, while hiking through a forest, he heard a voice warn that a wolf was loose. As Joseph Frank recounts in Dostoevsky: The Seeds of Revolt 1821-1849, as an adult, the novelist confided, he had become the victim of some sort of strange and unbearably torturing nervous illness that he called “mystic terror.” For a time, the novelist was convinced that someone who snored shared his bed. He had other hallucinations as well.

In fact, the second Mr. Golyadkin featured in the novel The Double may have been inspired by an autoscopic hallucination experienced by Dostoevsky himself. In any case, it is clear Dostoevsky’s “first-hand acquaintance with hallucinatory phenomena and his exceptional talent” allowed Dostoevsky to verbalize and analyze such experiences.^[5]

5 Hypnagogic Hallucinations

The English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1879) experienced hypnagogic hallucinations, defined as fleeting perceptual experiences during the transition from wakefulness to sleep. Such incidents are often associated with involuntary and imagined experiences, hypnagogic hallucinations, and hypnopompic hallucinations (in the period from sleep to wakefulness). Dickens was also an insomniac.

His characters experience similar conditions and hallucinations, including insomnia, sleep promotion, hypnagogic hallucinations, perhaps the first report of restless legs syndrome, sleep paralysis, dreams, nightmares, terror, and drowsiness. One example of Dickens’s literary depiction of a hypnagogic hallucination appears in A Christmas Carol, as Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts, leaving Scrooge unsure whether they are a dream or reality. A second example is that of Oliver Twist, who, when he falls asleep, “sees his enemies, Monks and Fagin, apparently in an episode of dream-reality confusion.”^[6]

4 Archangels and the Face of God

At age four, the poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) saw God’s face through a window of the child’s house. About six years later, he said he saw a tree full of angels, their “bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.” Later, archangels would dictate poetry to him and infuse the themes of his visual art. Blake’s hallucinations, which occurred again and again throughout his life, also included audible voices—those of his dead brother, to whom he spoke every day, and of angels.

A retroactive diagnosis of Blake suggests that he may have suffered from bipolar disorder or temporal lobe epilepsy. This latter condition could explain his seeing “ecstatic aurae,” such as those that typically indicate the presence of deities or angels in paintings and drawings.^[7]

3 Brobdingnagian Hallucination

As Jan Dirk Blom points out in A Dictionary of Hallucinations, the Gulliverian hallucination, aka the brobdingnagian hallucination, refers to a macroptic hallucination in which a human figure or figures are seen as disproportionally large. Terms like “lilliputian hallucination,” which involves the perception of tiny human figures, were inspired by Jonathan Swift’s novel Gulliver’s Travels.

Swift (1667-1745) experienced symptoms akin to those of Ménière’s disease, including cognitive changes, memory impairment, personality alterations, language disorder, and facial paralysis during the last three years of his life. And it is thought that the novel’s gigantic inhabitants of Brobdingnag and tiny people of Lilliput are based on Swift’s own visual hallucinations.^[8]

2 Hallucinations of the Sane

Whoever has seen The Garden of Earthly Delights must have wondered what, besides the fervent religious beliefs of Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450s-1516), inspired the paintings. To say that they are bizarre and perverse characterizes the triptych in relatively mild terms.

Strange architecture, part floral and part stone; hybrid creatures; nude men and women performing acrobatics or sexual acts or riding horses, camels, mules, boars, bulls, and unicorns; huge fruits; lovers trapped inside clam shells, transparent floral bodies, and glass tubes; flowers in strange places—these are only some of the surreal images in the central panel of the triptych, which shows scenes of an earthly paradise awash in lust, preceding the even-worse pictures reserved for the right panel’s depiction of hell.

Roger Blench, author of “The hallucinatory Hieronymus Bosch: Charles Bonnet syndrome?” briefly assesses the possibility that Bosch’s imagery is related to episodes of Charles Bonnet Syndrome [CBS], aka “hallucinations of the sane.” Although Blench dismisses attempts to pigeonhole Bosch according to any one interpretation, he also suggests that there is evidence to see the artist’s work as Bosch’s own hallucinations transferred to canvas framed in an iconography acceptable to his era. According to this interpretation, Bosch wanted to express his paintings’ themes in at least an ostensibly Roman Catholic worldview that could be viewed as doctrinal, if unusual.^[9]

1 Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven

In Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321), we meet a poet whose work is nearly as strange and surreal, if not as obscure, as Bosch’s Garden. It wouldn’t be surprising to find that Dante’s epic depiction of the poet’s journey through hell (The Inferno), purgatory (Purgatorio), and heaven (Paradiso) was based, at least in part, on the poet’s own hallucinations. Indeed, such may very well have been the case, as it has been theorized the author may have had narcolepsy.

In The Divine Comedy, the poet Dante references his fictional counterpart’s sleep, weariness, dreams, and, as Dante himself writes, “rested eyes.” These allusions are explained as indications that the actual Dante suffered from both narcolepsy and catalepsy. The former is a neurological disorder. It interferes with the body’s regulation of sleep-wake cycles, causing sleepiness during the day and the tendency to nap for brief periods during waking hours. The latter condition causes muscular rigidity and unresponsiveness to the stimuli of the objective world.

The fictional Dante’s entire journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven is marked by sudden wake-dreaming transitions, short and refreshing naps, visions and hallucinations, unconscious behaviors, episodes of muscle weakness, and falls which are always triggered by strong emotions. The evidence that Dante is writing from experience about the hallucinations implied by his poetry is there in The Divine Comedy itself, in the behavior of its protagonist, the fictional Dante.^[10]