The witching hour of the year is among us and as the darkness of the season creeps around the corner, Supersonic Art is pleased to present 13 of our favorite contemporary artists producing terrifyingly beautiful works of art. Take a look below: If you dare!

Sam Wolfe Connelly

Sam Wolfe Connelly, who I've personally called the contemporary master of the macabre, works in the grey tones of graphite and charcoal to create darker-than-nocturnal nightmares that creep and crawl or seep and sponge their way through and over your skin in a chill that could only ever equally be produced by the bone smashing crush of a sepulchre lid as you lay paralyzed in fear below it.

If you dare: Sam's work above, "Autumnal Tithing," is currently available to add to your collection on Supersonic Art Shop.

Joao Ruas

Brazilian artist João Ruas paints allegorical incantations that feel excavated from the beyond rather than invented. His mercurial and ghostly figures, often masked, crowned, or tangled up with animals and symbols, sit in dusty, subdued palettes that call to mind old frescoes and long lost alchemical manuscripts. Each piece reads like a riddle from a lost mythology, heavy with ritual and melancholy. You get the sense that some story of enormous weight is happening just out of reach, and that Ruas has captured the fleeting mystery; presenting it as evidence for the unknown.

Phil Hale

Phil Hale's figures are entrapped in nightmare: twisting and lunging, straining in poses caught mid-collapse or mid-transformation, captured in something of an athletic command of paint on the canvas. Dark voids trap the raw anatomy and struggling figures witnessed in Hale's paintings, these hauntingly beautiful instances handed to us just as the terrible is completing its crushing grasp around the subjects displayed. We are left to contemplate our own mortality in something darker, still.

Kent Williams

Kent Williams's bodies are raw and restless, dissolving in thick, gestural brushwork, as though the paint hasn't quite decided whether to hold them together. Mythic and transformative, that tension gives his work a ghostly quality that has less to do with monsters in the dark, but with just how fragile human flesh and the emotion beneath truly is. Following in the footsteps of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon, Williams draws out the beauty in the smeared edges of human psyche.

Peter Ferguson

Peter Ferguson's paintings have a crackled, antique glaze, as if each canvas was pulled out of a forgotten attic or mausoleum and possessed with either a spirit or curse. Full of eccentric figures, sad or knowing eyes, bizarre contraptions, menacing silence or buzzing electrocution; the unease of his paintings is never shouting but seeps, rather, slowly through (and in odd proportions) into the depths of your soul.

Syd Bee

Syd Bee's glamorous ghouls and their creature-of-the-night familiars glow in a gothic mystery beckoning to the pleasure of horror films and mid-20th century comics, of a Halloween deeply intwined in our collective memories. Entranced by the allure of pinks and purples, one can easily find themselves trapped in a spider web of nostalgia, seconds away from a nightmare.

Jason Limon

Shadowboxes of incredibly haunting curios, Jason Limon's paintings are complex and imaginative webs of spirits and dancing skeletons presented via paper torn away, skulls split open, and surfaces cut out. These portals into spectral dimensions, clearly there all along, reveal a skeletal universe tucked behind the everyday and antique objects we know and love: A through the keyhole peep show we were never meant to see (But are so much better off for having done so).

Travis Lampe

Travis Lampe paints the kind of creatures that would look adorable if they weren't quietly, horrifically melting: His droopy, rubbery figures sag and stretch through candy-colored dreamscapes, all noodle limbs and sleepy eyes, like 1930s cartoon characters who wandered into a fever dream and never found the exit. It's a haunted textbook case of the uncanny, where the familiar has vanished and the bizarre is keyed up to eleven. Because of Lampe's grand talent and despite the strangeness creeping up your spine, you can't help rooting for his monsters.

Sarah Sumeray

Working as THIS IS FUN, ISN'T IT, artist Sarah Sumeray exceptionally draws on classic and current horror pop culture as re-imagined and deceptively inviting Pop Art and comic illustrations to chill the spine, delighting viewer's senses while wonderfully howling back to the (haunting) days when Tales from the Crypt and other EC Comic era treasures were readily available at every turn.

Check out some of her Severance inspired prints on Supersonic Art Shop!

Charlie Immer

Charlie Immer paints horror and the bizarre so sweet you could almost lick it. Displaying his visions in saccharine colors and often cutting them open to show off the complicated beauty of the anatomy inside, he assigns them flavors like blueberry and green apple while he works. Tracing his beating heart of oddities back to the shown too soon images of things like Return of the Living Dead and Skeleton Dance cartoons in his childhood, Immer is able to present - in a fashion unlike any other - the gross gorgeousness of slime and monsters as though he is dispensing them out of a gumball machine.

Nadezda

Growing up in a small, remote village in Russia's Arkhangelsk region, Nadezda's spirit and folklore-filled paintings are a direct result of the dark winters and ancient stories that permeated throughout her upbringing. The peculiar (and delightful) creatures and ghosts that dance and celebrate throughout the sublime canvases make her worlds feel like bedtime stories coming to life as you drift into the otherworlds at the edge of consciousness.

Kikyz1313

Kikyz1313 is artist Laura Lucía Ferrer Zamudio of Querétaro, Mexico, who makes stunningly grotesque works in ink, graphite, and watercolor on paper unlike any other artist of this world. One might stumble upon her work, becoming swept up in flashes of abstract color and odd details, only to quickly realize that what they are observing is a twisted and tragic display of guts and gore. Metaphors and actual recreations on the cruelty of humanity, these are nightmares and discomfort translated into bittersweet beauty. Be forewarned, these works are not for the faint of heart.

Travis Louie

Travis Louie creates formal portraits of the things society never invited to sit for one: werewolves, cryptids, inter-planetary oddities, and tentacled men and women. Working in smooth, tonal grays and sepias, he gives each creature of the shadows the look of a Victorian or Edwardian photograph (and includes a biography for them as well). By granting his monsters dignity, Louie is able to turn what one might term a freak show into a family album, and his outsiders stare back with a quiet, dusty surprise at the monsters staring back.