You may have seen Xenomorph costumes before- they usually consist of a tight fitting body suit and some kind of foam rubber head/mask, but you’ve never seen an alien suit as frightfully fancy as this!

This regal alien queen costume was created by Ashley J Long, who summarily pronounced herself “queen of the monsters” after its completion.

I don’t think anyone will be contesting her claim to the throne after they see her amazing creation, it’s simply to die for!

Ashley combined the bizarre head shape of the xenomorph with a fancy outfit that would make any alien feel like the belle of the interplanetary ball.

And the best part is- Ashley created an Instructable that details how to make the entire thing, in case you’re looking to add a little alien inspired fashion flair to your Halloween, or you're looking for a new cosplay. 

-Via Make

Witches are typically depicted with green skin in pop culture, like their research into the occult arts has resulted in some sort of strange mossy skin condition.

Most of the time it adds to their creepiness, and makes them the perfect social outcasts, embittered and hell bent on revenge, but where did this tradition of greenification come from?

Linda Rodriguez McRobbie at Boing Boing explored the origins of the green witch and came up with one fairly obvious root cause- the Wizard of Oz.

The 1939 film changed the face of pop culture, and ever since Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch of the West was shown sporting skin a glorious shade of Technicolor green the color has become a witchy standard. 

Read more about the day witches turned green here

Come on in and pull yourself up a chair (which probably isn’t as cool or fun to be around as Chairy), and we’ll tell you a tale of a man named Pee-Wee Herman and his amazing Playhouse. 

Growing up in the 80s meant sharing your Saturday mornings with the hilarious Mr. Herman and his (mostly puppet) pals in the Playhouse, which to my young eyes looked like a dream home built just for a puppet/cartoon nerd like me. 

Pee-Wee's Playhouse was a groundbreaking series in many ways- it launched the careers of celebs like Phil Hartman and S. Epatha Merkerson. In addition, Rob Zombie and John Singleton were production assistants on the show, and appearing on the Playhouse was an important early milestone in the careers of Lawrence Fishburne and Jimmy Smits.

To top it all off, Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is largely seen as the film that launched Tim Burton's career as a filmmaker, so without Pee-Wee we might not have been exposed to Burton's brilliance! 

Want more tasty info nuggets? Read more fun facts about Pee Wee's Playhouse over at mental_floss

Mike Tyson is one of the greatest boxers of all time, and his short but sweet career will forever be remembered as being controversial, powerful and the inspiration for a classic video game…sort of.

You see, Mike never fought sluggers like King Hippo and Don Flamenco in real life, so his career did nothing for his video game skills, and Mike probably had better things to do than fight himself on the NES.

(YouTube Link)

Jimmy Fallon challenged the former champ to a game of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! On The Tonight Show, to see if Tyson could beat Tyson on national television.

As anyone who has played Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! knows beating the big boss is no easy task, and the pixelated version proved to be more than a match for the real life version. Somebody get that man a Game Genie!

-Via BJ Penn

Adamite85, an origami artist in the Czech Republic, made a simple but remarkably accurate model of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. I wouldn't try the Kessel Run in it, but I'm sure that it would do fine for in-system operations. Either way, if they follow standard Imperial procedure, they'll dump their garbage before they go to light-speed, then we just float away.

Charlie Brown has dealt with some tough childhood moments in the last 65 years, from being rejected by girls to losing his dog to getting bad grades in school, but the heaviest thing he ever had to deal with came courtesy of a little girl named Janice. 

Janice was diagnosed with leukemia, and Chuck struggled to find an answer for the TV special's title "Why, Charlie Brown, Why?", leaving him feeling even more nihilistic than before.

And then this short film happened:

(YouTube Link)

Good Grief! Cancer Boy! is a strange little film made by Todd Graham in 1990 that reveals the utter futility of Charlie Brown's very existence- in German!

Todd shows us what Charlie Brown might have become if Charles Schulz had allowed him to grow up...I guess it's a good thing he never aged!

-Via Dangerous Minds

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series reinvented the concept of religious horror, and brought the fear of bodily harm to the audience with some mighty inventive anatomical gore that made them squirm in their seats.

Hellraiser has become a mainstay in the world of horror, yet Pinhead and his Cenobite crew haven’t had their carcasses picked over like other classic horror movies, and many of their dark secrets have remained unknown for decades.

Everybody knows that Hellraiser is based on Clive's novel The Hellbound Heart, but did you know that he wrote and directed the film?

Clive didn't want the film to become one of those "truly appalling adaptations", so he took it upon himself to learn how to direct. He ran in to one problem, though, when he discovered that both books on film directing were checked out at his local library!

Read All The Weirdest Secrets You Never Knew About Clive Barker's Hellraiser over at io9

Making a film, short or otherwise, used to involve hiring a crew, managing tons of equipment and finding someone to invest in your project.

Nowadays a few people on a shoestring budget can make an enjoyable film to share with the world via YouTube, and horror is a favorite genre for budding filmmakers.

Halloween is the perfect time to dig up some new shorts to watch in the dark, and this collection of 7 Deeply Bizarre Horror Shorts to Watch on YouTube is a great place to start!

There’s something for every morbid taste, from the cinephile who demands a story with their scares:

(YouTube Link)

To the pediophobic who find dolls and mannequins disturbing:

(YouTube Link)

There's even short for lovers of dark comedy:

(YouTube Link)

Enjoy your trip down the rabbit hole, but try not to scream too loudly!

(Some films may contain content considered NSFW, viewer discretion advised)

-Via Film School Rejects

Let's none of us play any games right now, okay? I think we ALL know that Interstellar looks like the best movie of the forthcoming holiday season. You take a little bit of the genius of Christopher Nolan, and you add a dash of McConaughey swagger. You mix it all together, have some of it take place in outer space, and what do you have? The recipe for the next big movie that everyone wants to see.

But is it any GOOD?

Well...click play and find out (what IGN thinks about it, at least).

(YouTube Link)

Don't tell me what they said. I want to eventually pass judgement on my own. My early prediction is that it will be very pretty with some massive holes most of the public will ignore because we love pretty things. In other words, another Christopher Nolan movie.

A backlot known as “the 40 acres” in Culver City, California, has been the setting of so many movies and TV shows that it takes an extensive website to cover all of it. It was owned successively by RKO, Desilu, and Paramount, among other owners. The lot contained the entire town of Mayberry used for The Andy Griffith Show, but that wasn’t the only use for the fake town. It was built long before Andy Taylor and his family inhabited it. You might recognize the buildings when you watch old reruns of Superman from the 1950s, because the town was also Metropolis.

Hardcore Star Trek fans already know this, but casual fans might be surprised to know that a couple of episodes of the original series were filmed on the Mayberry set: "Miri" and "The City on the Edge of Forever.” They didn’t even change the name of Floyd’s Barber Shop.

They should have used some of the Mayberry characters, too, as imagined by this image manipulation by Brian Hague. See his Thelma Lou T’Pau as well. -via Metafilter

Gamers are passionate about their hobby lifestyle, and the more die-hard the gamer the more frequently they play, so it’s in a gamer’s best interest to find a romantic partner who also enjoys gaming.

The couple that games together stays together, but gamer couples who team up to take down noobs either become a force to be reckoned with, or let their competitive nature tear them apart.

George Rottkamp from Dorkly created this comic that details the 6 Types Of Gamer Couples, from the classic Cutthroat Couple to the always absent Amorous Duo.

As one half of a gamer couple I think we're any and all of these couples, depending on the game we're playing or day of the week. Are there any gamer couples out there that feel the same way?

-Via Geeks Are Sexy

Did you know that an instance of cosplay back in 1910 led to a man being arrested for “public masquerading”? What made that costume different from the usual fancy dress was that it was designed to resemble a well-known pop culture character, instead of animals or literary characters. In 1939, the first costumed characters showed up at a science fiction convention. We didn’t yet have the term “cosplay,” or even “sci-fi” for that matter, but the hobby itself is a lot older than you thought.

These are things you’ll learn in the new book Cosplay World by Brian Ashcraft and Luke Plunkett of Kotaku. Ashcraft and Plunkett talked to writers, historians, photographers, and costume builders about the history and culture of cosplay, but the book is also packed with profiles and pictures of top cosplayers from around the world. Neatorama is proud to present an excerpt, featuring cosplayer Julian Checkley.

(Image credit: Julian Checkley)

‘I’ve been cosplaying almost all my life, ever since I made my first Darth Vader costume at the age of seven,’ says cosplayer Julian Checkley. ‘It was one of those papier mâché jobs plastered onto a balloon, and I had to steal my grandfather’s sunglasses so I could pop the lenses out and glue them on to complete the helmet eyepieces.’

This boyhood love of papier mâché developed, and Checkley decided to pursue an education and a career in making costumes.

(Image credit: Kamil Krawczak)

But he may have thought he’d made a mistake when he found himself studying hair and make-up alongside fashion industry hopefuls in London. A job in TV creating monster suits and special effects would soon follow, however, where he would not just learn how to develop visual effects and make fantastical creatures, but gain experience performing inside them as well.

(YouTube Link)

Being a nerd and avid gamer for most of my life, I stand behind the fact that gaming is far more beneficial than detrimental. It improves response time, problem solving skills, hand-to-eye coordination, and muscle memory. But gaming has been under fire (intentional pun alert) for decades now because there are anti-video game pundits who spout endlessly about how it encourages real life violence.

But Gamespot has a rather interesting video about how games are actually GOOD for us. While it could be said the study group they used for this research was a tad bit small, it is still a step in the right direction overall for society to learn that gaming is not dangerous, but rather, beneficial (and not going away anytime soon, as it is a billion dollar industry only set to grow more).

See Mom, I told you video games weren't rotting my brain!

(Image Link)

LeVar Burton is a big fan of reading, and his show Reading Rainbow was meant to inspire kids to crack open a book and discover the fantastic story that resides between the covers.

Reading Rainbow will be back in action soon thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, so a whole new generation can be inspired by LeVar’s passion for literature, but this video has nothing to do with Reading Rainbow.

(YouTube Link)

In fact, this video shouldn’t be watched by children due to strong language, but adults will enjoy hearing LeVar Burton read Adam Mansbach's hilariously vulgar book for frustrated parents called "Go The F#%k To Sleep".

LeVar read GTFTS to an eager group of overgrown toddlers to support Rooster Teeth's Extra Life charity drive, a program that aims to help hospitalized children through video games.

Great reader, great book, great cause, great Scott this is one funny reading! (Contains NSFW Language)

-Via Mental Floss

The hit HBO series Game of Thrones films in Belfast, Northern Ireland and Dubrovnik, Croatia. For the show’s upcoming fifth season, scenes are also being shot in Spain, which is a stand-in for the kingdom of Dorne, the homeland of House Martell. Filming began at Alcázar palace near Seville, then moved to Osuna where a large battle will be staged. The opportunity to be an extra led to a response that shows how popular the production is in Spain.

When the local production company Fresco Film put out a casting call for roughly 600 extras for a key battle Thrones scene, fans responded with an incredible 86,000 applications. The company needed to add more server space to accommodate the load. Many applicants needed the work, but one hired extra told the production he took a vacation from his high-level banking job to be on the show.

Meanwhile, others have clamored to get a glimpse of the show’s cast, with one even asking a random production staffer to post for a photo merely because he was wearing a Thrones badge.

Learn more at Entertainment Weekly, but be aware there are spoilers if you’re not current on the series through season four. -via Warming Glow