As I write this, FINAL DESTINATION: BLOODLINES is premiering across the U.S., the sixth in an unlikely slasher franchise that has no visible murderer.
Despite having attended a film screening at least once a week this year, I never once saw a trailer for it. I have no idea why Warner Bros. didn’t put a trailer for it before I saw SINNERS, as that too is a Warner Bros. picture. However, they did have an ingenious bloody logging truck driving around to promote the film which was how I found out about it, so they did that right.
One of those eps is “Jose Chung’s ‘Doomsday Defense’”. Penned by Darin Morgan, ‘Doomsday’ sees profiler Frank Black investigating the murder of an excommunicated ‘Selfosophy’ church member, a man who died wearing a Selfosophy visor and a forced, teeth-clenched grin on his face.
Beloved, aging cult author Jose Chung — previously seen in Morgan’s acclaimed THE X-FILES ep “Jose Chung from Outer Space” — enters the picture. Chung is a ’Selfosophy’ expert, as he was friends with Onan Goopta, the creator of the barely-disguised take on Scientology. Goopta was an aspiring writer under the literary umbrella as Chung, and heavily inspired by his work.
It features a number of Morgan’s creative tics: unreliable narrators, absurd antics, real-life riffs, and double-negatives. In other words, it’s the same sort of inventive, off-beat, singularly satirical work you expect from him. It’s also brilliant complimented by another beloved cult figure, Charles Nelson Reilly, who infuses Chung with an irreverent but melancholy air.
While I frequently come back to this episode for how unique and nuanced it is, there is one scene that has haunted me:
Chung is alone, sitting at his desk scribbling away at his latest novel and musing to himself.
CHUNG (sighs): “This book will be the death of me. I just can’t write any more. What possessed me to want to be a writer, anyway?”
CHUNG pours a shot of whiskey.
CHUNG: “What kind of life is this? What else can I do now with no other skills or abilities?”
CHUNG drops two Alka-Seltzers into the shot and stares at the fizzing glass.
CHUNG: “My life has fizzled away. Only two options left: Suicide, or become a television weather man.”
CHUNG picks up his pen and commences writing again.
CHUNG: “…like television weathermen, getting information one could gather simply by looking out the window, forensic profilers provide little of practical matter. Mr. Blork, however…”
This scene perfectly captures both being a writer — or any vastly interior profession — and the act of writing. Sneakily, it also provides the crux of the episode, all about writers and readers. Chung and Goopta being two-sides of the same published coin, both seeking readers in their own way, both finding readers seeking meaning in words, and Frank following the impact of those words.
“Jose Chung’s ‘Doomsday Defense’” could be a navel-gazing work about one’s craft, but instead it a ruminates on why we create and how your creations resonate once they’re out in the world, how your works can be celebrated, misinterpreted, abused, used for good or for evil, or all of the above.
Now that, dear reader, is a writer’s horror story.
ADDENDUM
Finally, there’s a single line of dialogue that I also frequently return to. I wish more folks were familiar with this episode so I could use it as a contextual joke. In a scene that segues into the above internal monologue, a Selfosophy member is in a coffee shop, seated in front of his laptop, writing a scene detailing how he thinks Chung goes about his process. To showcase to use Selfosophy’s emphasis on positivity, he declares to himself:
“Boy, my writing has really improved since I got this software!”
Sampling dialogue from film and TV was a staple of 90s electro/industrial bands. As I was (still am) an avid listener of that genre, there are a number of line readings and deliveries I’ve heard hundreds if not thousands of times without ever been aware of the source material.
That’s why when I’m watching a horror or exploitation film, I’m always delighted when my ears perk up at a familiar line recitation. I finally have true context for the sample and a tiny unsolved mystery from my youth has been solved.
This month was the first time I’d seen THE EXORCIST III — despite the fact that I own it — and I was lucky enough to see a print of it with a packed crowd.
Yes, THE EXORCIST III is skillfully plotted with expertly crafted scares and angles and production design. Yes, it has one of the all-time classic jump scares.
However, what resonated most was hearing George C. Scott’s perfectly paced declaration of beliefs, a declaration I heard many, many times in FRONT LINE ASSEMBLY’s ‘Bio-Mechanic’:
“I believe in disease. I believe in pain… cruelty and infidelity!”
Obviously, with such a memorable, dialogue-driven film, it has been endlessly sampled by other bands such gabber act DELTA 9 and the fittingly named XORCIST. However, it’s Front Line Assembly’s use that has echoed in my head for years, and I organically stumbled upon it on my own.
If it weren’t for the fact that PROM NIGHT featured a post-HALLOWEEN Jamie Lee Curtis, I highly doubt it’d be remembered much at all today. While it’s a serviceable slasher and does what it says on the tin — a whole bunch of students are stalked and killed in their high school on prom night — it does get lost a bit in the deluge of 1980s slashers.
Now, HELLO MARY LOU: PROM NIGHT II? There’s a film that stands out!
I’ll grant you: HELLO MARY LOU was never slated to be a PROM NIGHT sequel, but it featured a prom queen and murder so the studio appended PROM NIGHT II to the title and that was that.
Unlike PROM NIGHT, HELLO MARY LOU is far more supernatural, focused on the death of a 50s prom queen who, let loose in suburban 1987, inhabits bodies to reclaim her crown by any means necessary.
The result is smart and silly, and has inventively surreal set-pieces that rack up the bodies. Oh, and Michael Ironside is a priest! That’s worth the price of admission alone.
HELLO MARY LOU was followed by PROM NIGHT III, which veers into full supernatural slapstick, but I’ve already featured it! Find a copy of both any way that you can!
If you’re in Chicago on October 18th, 2024? HELLO MARY LOU is playing at the Music Box Theatre and features writer Ron Oliver! It promises to be a night to remember!
French arthouse director Claire Denis’s TROUBLE EVERY DAY is a difficult film to classify, to the point where some misguided souls would argue that it’s not a horror film at all. It is enigmatically subdued but violent. Overt and obtuse. Visually lyrical and strikingly blunt to the eyes. Thick with lust and rarely erotic. Alludes to vampirism but is grounded by human faults.
It’s about feeding bloody need, addiction, restriction, seeking and rejecting assistance, and all of the baggage that comes with all of the above.
It is also a highly unpleasant 101 minutes long that culminates in an act that is incredibly difficult to watch. So much so that more than a handful of folks walked out of the screening I attended.
It is considered part of the New French Extremity for a reason. (Also, it does feature INSIDE’s very feral Béatrice Dalle.)
It’s a film that kept stealing my attention for well over a week, its provocations and intent seeping into me, questions and speculations bubbling out. That may seem overwrought and pretentious, but Denis elicited that from me.
SISSY, from writer/directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes, is a vivid horror subversion of the ‘reuniting with childhood friends’ genre. Cecilia, a.k.a. Sissy (THE BOLD TYPE’s Aisha Dee) is a self-care influencer who displays the veneer of a calm, crisp, clean and put-together 20-something, but instead lives for the glow of her phone while falling asleep eating day-old room temperature pizza.
While out-and-about, Cecilia runs into estranged childhood best friend Emma (Hannah Barlow) and the two quickly reconnect. Emma invites Sissy to her very queer bachelorette party in a posh vacation home nestled in Australian woodland. Unbeknown to Cecilia, her childhood nemesis Alex is hosting said hen party. Tensions build, matters escalate, bonds and bones are broken and blood is spilled.
I’ll refrain from saying much more as it’s a wild ride, and best to only know the above. That won’t keep me for noting that, visually, SISSY is yet another in a line of refreshingly vibrant and colorful horror films. A large chunk of the film takes place in daylight, when the sun falls the frame is peppered with pastel neon glows. That may seem antithetical to a woodland-based horror/thriller, but it works.
There are also a number of small little grace notes that I love. One of the party members pouring a glass of a wine from a carafe and — without any sense of shame or self-consciousness — licks the trailing remainder from the lip of the carafe! There’s a playful nod towards slashers and face masks!
Lastly, I’ll note that SISSY was Autostraddle’s Queer Horrorscope Film pick for Cancers, so apparently I was pre-ordained to watch it this month. Perhaps a gripping tale about self-justifying self-destructive self-delusion isn’t exactly the kind of messaging one wants to hear from their filmic horrorscope, but it is very on-brand.
Classic Troma films are cheap and fun gross-out affairs by misfits, for misfits, and CLASS OF NUKE ‘EM HIGH is no exception.
The premise is paper thin: Tromaville High School — a typical 80s high school with jocks and nerds and a clutch of cartoonishly costumed gang members named ‘The Cretins’ — is situated next to a nuclear facility.
An accident occurs at the plant and nuclear waste spills into high school. Mutations ensue! An atomic baby-monster is birthed! The Cretins graduate from traditional bullying, drug dealing and deviant behavior to ultra-violent and psychotic behavior! Boyfriend and girlfriend Warren and Chrissy try to survive! Students cheer the shutdown of the school!
It’s a wild time, featuring all of the colorful camp and good-natured buckets of bodily fluids that you’d expect from Lloyd Kaufman’s scrappy DYI studio that brought you THE TOXIC AVENGER.
The Cretins are ostensibly the film’s villains as it’s the nuclear weed that they peddle that is the catalyst for the film’s mayhem, they punch down literally and figuratively, and their makeup and costumes are garish at best and culturally offensive at worse. However, they’re also a warm representation of smart-but-willful societal dropouts.
See, before they were The Cretins they were Tromaville High’s honor students. Now? Now they’re a whirlwind of disrespectful and abnormal behavior with no tolerance for conventional norms, ready to upend the system in every way they can. Body paint, fetish gear, severe piercings and gender fuckery! They’re society’s gremlins and damn proud of it!
I will note that the reason why these honor students became The Cretins is somewhat unclear. I like to think of them as having voluntarily checked out of normative culture and into fringe subcultures, much like myself as a teen.
Do they commit terrible acts, acts that damn them to gruesome deaths? Yeah, sure. Do we still root for them? Well, I certainly took glee in doing so. That’s because, well, at heart? I’m a dirtbag cretin.
Does SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II feature a slumber party?
Yes.
Does SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II feature the Driller Killer?
Yes.
There you go. It has all of the hallmarks of a slasher sequel. Except…
SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE II’s Courtney is played by WINGS’s Crystal Bernard instead of Jennifer Meyers.
The slumber party isn’t as much a suburban high school slumber party but an all-women band and their boyfriends squatting in an under-construction housing lot.
…and the Driller Killer isn’t some brutish escaped mass murderer but a maniacal doo-wop singer who brandishes an outlandish guitar fused with the first film’s comically large drill. He’s what you might get if you took MAD MAX: FURY ROAD’s Doof Warrior and dropped him into GREASE.
The end result is a dream-logic slasher/musical that does not take itself seriously. It’s vibrant and inventive and a lot of fun, especially if you simply let it wash over you.
Many student works shoehorn in far too many nods, riffs and homages to their influences, suffocating and overwhelming the original facets of their piece.
I speak from experience. Some of my early student films definitely could have used fewer hat-tips to Jean-Luc Godard.
I mention this because psychological horror game TAPE: UNVEIL THE MEMORIES started off as a Master’s Degree project for Madrid-based Black Chili Goat Studio before it was selected by Sony Interactive Entertainment Spain for release via PlayStation Talents program.
You play as Iria Vega Blanco, a misfit teen girl with chipped nail polish who lives with her mother. Iria’s father Alex Vega — a previously heralded horror filmmaker — has been out of the picture for years.
One day, Iria discovers a tape and is greeted by her father addressing her. Suddenly, she’s thrust into an a twisted walk through places of her past you’d expect from a horror game: childhood homes, hospital rooms and forbidden basements. She navigates these areas, her father’s 8mm camera in her hand to manipulate the temporal position of doors, vase fragments and the like.
Of course she has to do this while trying to evade a malevolent creature haunting her memories.
Given that Iria’s father was a famous director, this gives Black Chili Goat Studios the perfect excuse to litter TAPE with books, movie posters, horror magazines and videotapes. Alex’s THE GLEAMING stands-in for THE SHINING. In this world, JACOB’S LADDER is now JASON’S STAIRS.
The game is overstuffed with references and iconography and designs from other vaunted horror classics such as TWIN PEAKS, POSSESSION, THE HOWLING, the films of Hitchcock and Polanski, and many others. SILENT HILL prominently figures in, with shoehorned backstory about mining accidents as well as a shoutout to Akira Yamaoka in the game’s credits, which play over a very Yamaoka-esque song.
It can feel like a bit much, even if you’re a horror nerd. These references often eclipse Iria’s story and the family trauma she’s endured, especially since the narrative doesn’t exactly cohere. Additionally, the stealth facet — evading the monster — quickly becomes tiresome as it’s sluggish and slightly janky. Thankfully, you have the option to turn it off via a Story Mode, which I did because post-SILENT HILL: THE SHORT MESSAGE, I had no desire to endure more of the same sort of evasion.
While TAPE does frequently stumble paying tribute to their heroes, it does have a specific sort of ramshackle charm to it. I noted Iria’s chipped nails, a detail I always appreciate in a first-person game, but she also energetically reaches for items, as if about to swat them instead of clasp them. Small touches like these go a long way.
The game’s translation from Spanish to English is done via subtitles and the result is warmly clumsy, evoking the same sort of awkward dubbing often found in cult works.
The camera’s time powers — reminiscent of BRAID and the first LIFE IS STRANGE — feel underutilized, as many of the puzzles consist solely of ‘rewind/fast-forward a few items into their respective spots without bumping them together. Despite the ease, maneuvering the pieces into place is positively soothing.
TAPE is a labor of love that is sometimes blinded by trying to impart all that it cherishes. However, it is a labor of love and it is worth the handful of hours it requests from you, especially if you want to skip the chase and meander and brandish an 8mm camera through remnants of the past.
There’s a demo available! Otherwise, it’s available for PS4/PS5 and Switch.
CONTENT WARNING: This post discusses abuse, bullying, and suicide.
The SILENT HILL franchise is known for exploring characters disassociating when confronted with guilt from the past, how they splinter in order to endure lived trauma, and the increasingly horrific steps they’ll endure to deny their trauma in order to survive.
SILENT HILL: THE SHORT MESSAGE, the first new SILENT HILL game since the P.T. debacle, certainly follows in that mould. You play as Anita, an insecure, mousy teen schoolgirl who idolizes her talented graffiti artist friend Anya. Anya texts her to meet at her hangout, an abandoned apartment complex where Anya and others display their spray painting prowess.
It’s also a popular place for teens to jump to their deaths.
Anita makes her way there and, upon arriving finds only Anya’s colorful renditions of bodies and cherry blossoms. Anita follows the works through the building. Flashbacks ensue and Anita confronts the neglect and abuse her mother doled out, plus recalling the punishing words she endured by bullies every school day.
She maneuvers that mental minefield while being chased through the building by a twisted manifestation of Anya’s portraits; a figure adorned in white and wrapped in wire and cherry blossoms and named C.B. Matters escalate as Anita dives deeper into her memories, reckoning with her guilt and lived trauma.
In other words, THE SHORT MESSAGE narratively features all of the psychological hallmarks of a SILENT HILL game.
Aesthetically and mechanically, it evokes a wide swath of SILENT HILL tropes:
Holes pepper the walls of the darkened, grimy complex.
You’re relentlessly chased by invincible beings, often through maddeningly disorienting hallways.
Your environments burn and fade into something else entirely.
Texts harp on psychological profiling, teasing out motives and compulsions.
Puzzles strip chains from doors.
Forgotten dolls and fragments of lost innocence and brighter days litter the corners of each room.
Characters act shellshocked, their voices occasionally affectless as if in a trance. Sometimes they utterances are far too heightened.
The major deviation from the SILENT HILL formula? Flashbacks are conveyed through full-motion video, of Anya walking and talking through overly white school halls in a clearly dubbed voice that doesn’t match her lips.
THE SHORT MESSAGE tries to toe the line between emotionally resonant character drama that, despite being rather clumsy on the page or to the ears, becomes far more meaningful with the context and framework of the game’s world and atmosphere.
Anita is stubbornly comprised solely of her guilt and trauma. While that is often the driving force behind SILENT HILL protagonists, there’s usually more complex matters surging through their blood.
The game is free, perhaps because it only lasts a few hours and perhaps because it’s intended as a welcome back for a franchise that hasn’t had a new installment for over a decade.
However, because THE SHORT MESSAGE costs nothing, coupled with the fact that you’re hammered over the head with suicide prevention messages every five minutes as well as Anita’s shallow character depths, lends the game an air of a public service announcement; that it’s an effort solely comprised to bring awareness to issues of suicidal tendencies, child abuse, and the perils of social media.
It doesn’t help that, apart from running away from C.B. and observing items and portraits and text messages, there’s very little in the way of interactivity here. No scavenging for ammo or inventory juggling to be had. The messaging is the primary goal here — not fulfilling gameplay.
Depending on your disposition, you may find the above intriguing or it may frustrate. I’m willing to embrace the myopia of Anita’s trauma because it has overtaken her life and everything else seem trivial in the face of this.
I’m also willing to overlook some of the stilted and irrational dialogue because these are extreme situations and folks act in all sorts irrational ways as a defensive and self-protective measure.
Lastly, if it does feel like a PSA? I am absolutely fine with that. Some messages need to be heard. Addressing suicidal ideation and coming to terms with abuse can help; it can deeply resonate; can be exactly what is needed at that time. It can be the most meaningful game of someone’s life, or it can feel like a hollow and heavy-handed and foolhardy attempt to impart material better handled elsewhere.
That’s the beauty of the SILENT HILL series. More often than not it tries to tackle difficult matters. It doesn’t always succeed, and it certainly doesn’t always succeed for everyone. However, when it works, if it works for you, it is unlike any gaming experience you’ll encounter.
