The mysterious origin of Halloween traditions can be traced back to the ancient pagans festivals celebrated by Celts. The Celtic people marked the day as the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the winter. They believed the transition between the seasons is opening a gate to the world of the dead.

The spring of 1816 experienced one of the strangest meteorological phenomena ever recorded: a never-ending winter. This resulted three great writers to lock themselves at a mansion at Lake Geneva. Mary Shelley, John William Polidori, Lord Byron had a competition to see who would produce the scariest story ever written. And they all won. Shelley created Frankenstein; Polidory planted the seed of Vampirism; and Byron, in his poem Darkness, narrated by the last man on earth produced the first item of the apocalyptic horror genre.

1930s movie screens exploit like no other medium before the emotional ride of getting scared in a dark room with strangers. Many movie hits, from Frankenstein, to Dracula, to The Mummy, to The Invisible Man, culminating in Werewolf in London put horror front and center of how the society decides to have a really good time... spawning a creative and lucrative horror-making industry.

Since centuries, across geographies, religions, and cultures people try to innovate ways of scaring each other. Creating a visceral emotion such as fear remains one of the cornerstones of human creativity. This challenge is especially important in a time where we wonder what the limits of Artificial Intelligence are: Can machines learn to scare us? Towards this goal, we present you Haunted Faces and Haunted Places: computer generated scary imagery powered by deep learning algorithms and evil spirits!