AFTERPARTY (2019)

October 27, 2022

Talk your way out of Hell.

Flirt your way out of Hell.

Cheat your way out of Hell.

Dance your way out of Hell.

Party your way out of Hell.

(PC/macOS/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xboxes) AFTERPARTY is another narrative-forward videogame from OXENFREE developers Night School Games. Unlike OXENFREE, a deft interactive teen horror adventure, AFTERPARTY focuses on two platonic 20-something best friends — Milo (Khoi Dao) and Lola (Janina Gavankar) — just about to graduate from college.

Then they die and go to Hell and, in order to escape they need not only outdrink Satan, but also come to terms with each other, their past, and their future.

What follows is an extremely visually striking and darkly comedic game, perhaps containing some of the filthiest, well-crafted jokes I’ve ever encountered in a game. AFTERPARTY is also brilliant with its character work — not just its honest and complicated portrayal of a platonic friendship between a man and a woman — but also with its ancillary characters, including psychopomp ferrier Sam (HORIZON: ZERO DAWN’s Ashly Burch) whose life/death is both over-shared and enigmatic at the same time.

It is worth noting that, while OXENFREE featured some intriguing interface tools apart from dialogue trees, AFTERPARTY’s non-dialogue interactivity is reduced to a number of routine mini-games. While thematically that makes sense — beer pong and rhythm mini-games make perfect sense for the material — they often feel like they emptily get in the way of what you’d rather be doing: advancing the story and learning more about the characters.

Nonetheless, it’s perfect for playing over the Halloween weekend with a friend. AFTERPARTY doesn’t overstay its welcome, and while it actually takes place in Hell, it’s more emotionally substantive than scarring.

OCULUS (2012)

October 26, 2022

(Hulu/freevee/Pluto/tubi/VOD) I find Mike Flanagan to be a frustrating creator. He’s very clearly a sensitive, empathic person and he has a familial perspective that surprisingly rare nowadays. While I haven’t read the King novel that GERALD’S GAME is based on, I found it to be an exquisite one-room thriller. On the other hand, I found THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE — a well-executed horror mini-series — to be a severe distortion of Shirley Jackson’s original work, one that serves Flanagan’s themes instead of Jackson’s.

OCULUS, despite being Flanagan’s theatrical debut, is exceedingly confident with its themes and how it explores them. The surface-level premise starts with a prototypical family in the 90s consisting of husband Alan (CSI: MIAMI’s Rory Cochrane), his redhead wife Marie (BATTLESTAR GALACTICA’s Katee Sackhoff), pre-teen daughter Kaylie (redhead Annalise Basso), and adolescent son (Garrett Ryan). Alan buys an antique mirror that possesses both himself and Marie. He ultimately chains Marie up while ignoring the rest of the family until he ultimately kills Marie, has a moment of clarity, then forces his son to shoot him before he can do any more damage.

Newly orphaned, Ryan (now played by Brenton Thwaites) is institutionalized for years, while Kaylie (DOCTOR WHO’s Karen Gillan) floats around, spending her time trying to track down the mirror. She finally finds it and, when Ryan is finally given a clean bill of mental health and released, she pitches him an elaborate plan to destroy the mirror, to destroy the entity in it, forever.

In other words: it’s comprised of Flanagan’s major recurring themes: fractured families, brothers and sisters coping with loss and hurt and trauma, psychotic breaks, and obsession. You might be inclined to include addiction — Marie being chained up, Alan ignoring the world to the point where his children have nothing to eat — but I’m not completely confident in claiming that.

There’s another way to read the film, of course. This a work explicitly created around uncertainty of vision, of the reversible image of mirrors. I’ll keep my reading deliberately vague as to not lead potential viewers into how I perceive it, but it has depth if you want to seek it out.

The heart of the film is brother/sister bond, another strength of most of Flanagan’s works. There’s a care and interaction there that some folks simply cannot fictionalize, and it was delightful to see that represented on the screen.

While OCULUS is a stirring and expertly crafted film, my favorite part of watching it was my endless speculation as to the whats and whys and how it would be resolved. It’s a film that ignites your imagination, one that you’d walk out of a theater excitedly discussing the myriad possibilities of the film. The end result wasn’t as wild as where my mind went, but it was still extremely satisfying.

ORPHAN (2009)

October 25, 2022

(VOD) There’s been renewed interest in ORPHAN primarily because of the recent release of a prequel to the original featuring Isabelle Fuhrman — the lead child actor of the 2009 film — returning to play an even younger Ester. ORPHAN: FIRST KILL is a bonkers conceit that reportedly pays off handsomely, although I have yet to see it. (I imagine it won’t be too long before I pen some accolades regarding it on these digital pages, though.)

For now, however, I’m here to extoll the first film. ORPHAN, from director Jaume Collet-Serra (BLACK ADAM, THE SHALLOWS) and writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (AQUAMAN, THE CONJURING: THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT) flew under my radar as it was released around the time of a fair number of middling domestic horror thrillers and I felt had more pressing works to watch. Sadly, my intuition there was misguided, as it’s an economical, inventive take on the ‘monster child’ trope.

The premise reads relatively simply: a middle-aged couple, wife Kate (Vera Farmiga) and husband John (Peter Sarsgaard) were expecting a third child to accompany their adolescent son Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) and young, deaf daughter Max (Aryana Engineer), but there was a problem with the pregnancy, then Kate started drinking, then they almost lost Max when Kate was drunk and didn’t notice Max was drowning in the creek by their house. She then lost her teaching job at Yale, got sober, and they decided to adopt instead. They immediately become enamored with the hyper-articulate nine-year-old Ester (Isabelle Fuhrman) and take her into their home, and matters escalate from there.

To say more could ruin matters, although due to the recent prequel release, I already knew the twists going into it and it didn’t spoil the experience. Fuhrman is absolutely brilliant as Ester — it’s a shockingly nuanced performance from a 12-year-old, especially for a genre flick — but Farmiga also commands your attention as the stock ‘woman no one believes’. There’s also under-utilized character actors CCH Pounder and Margo Martindale, subtle soundtrack work, surprising attention paid to background window tableaus, as well as nuanced camerawork making the most of the architecture of their home.

While it’s meant to be a slow burn, it could have been at least 15-20 minutes shorter, but it never sags. This film doesn’t pull its punches and, even if you do know the beats, you desperately want to see how they handle them.

Again, while there’s a trailer below, it gives away some of the best set-pieces so perhaps stay away if you are interested in going in blind.

HELLRAISER (2022)

October 24, 2022

(Hulu) HELLRAISER (1987) never needed a sequel. Like the best horror films, it said all it had to say — a paean to want and need and physical sensations and hedonism — and got the fuck out. However, Hollywood is never content to leave a well-crafted character design alone, so we ended up with over ten Pinhead — excuse me, The Priest — films.

I bailed after the second. Maybe there’s a gem in there somewhere. I wouldn’t know; I’ve spent enough time trying to mine gold from long-running franchises to realize it’s usually a fool’s errand.

Reboots are another thing entirely, and a reboot of a singular BDSM horror film over thirty years old certainly intrigued me, especially since they recast Pinhead — excuse me again, The Priest — with SENSE8’s Jamie Clayton.

Unfortunately, they placed it in the hands of stolid David S. Goyer, then punted it to the creators of THE NIGHT HOUSE — a mighty fine film, but an incredibly icy work. The end result is a defanged property, almost completely removed from the messy, horny entity of its origin. This is just another slasher in different makeup.

So why am I recommending it? It is a visual marvel, a literal puzzle-box-in-a-puzzle-box. The decision to model the mansion around the original HELLRAISER puzzle box is inspired and expertly handled. The new puzzle box, and the explications regarding its transformations? There’s a lot going on there! Also, Odessa A’zion is amazing as the lead, all wild eyes and curls and smart and savvy while also being a fuck-up! It’s a fun time!

However, it’s a dull echo of the original film. There’s no sensuality; it’s simply a basic slasher film that leans a tad more into flayed flesh for scarlet fashions. While there’s nothing wrong with that, I wish that for once someone would embrace Barker’s original vision.

HELLRAISER (1987)

October 23, 2022

(hoopla/Pluto/Prime/tubi/VOD) The original HELLRAISER is a very specific film. You are either very into it or you are not. I remember watching it as a young teen and laughing at it. My friends and I would routinely trot out the line: “The box. It summons us.” as camp, but the film held an odd, unknown allure to me. Then I rewatched it early on in college — I still have my HELLRAISER 1 & 2 VHS box set — and as a burgeoning club-going goth realized how it is literally wall-to-wall kink.

I’ve seen it more than several times since — once at the Music Box with Clive Barker to discuss it, which was amazing and I still can’t believe happened — and my appreciation for it only grows. The costume and creature and production design is absolute perfection. Jane Wildgoose does not get enough credit for her contributions.

The film is relentlessly, unapologetically horny in an unsettlingly thrilling way. The great Amy Nicholson posited that, at the heart of it, it’s a neo-noir, that Julia is a femme fatale and I certainly agree: it is a film centered around morally dubious people who are off-kilter, and what is more noir than that?

THE BAY (2012)

October 22, 2022

(VOD) A found-footage horror film might not be the type of project you would expect from the director of THE NATURAL, DINER, GOOD MORNING VIETNAM, and RAIN MAN, but Barry Levinson’s always been game for tackling genre films. The most blatant example is the box office sci-fi bomb SPHERE, but also the thriller DISCLOSURE as well as ENVY, a comedy that features Jack Black as the inventor of a spray that dissolves dog shit.

Clearly some of his genre offerings have been misfires, but THE BAY is not one of them. It’s an inventive and taut take on the genre which is an accomplishment that even some seasoned horror directors have failed at.

The premise is simple: a water-based parasite is mutating and killing whatever they can wriggle into, including humans. The story is told via a pastiche of media footage, cell phone video and surveillance cameras, resulting in a satisfyingly gruesome flick.

DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS (1971)

October 21, 2022

“While passing through a vacation resort, a newlywed couple encounters a mysterious, strikingly beautiful countess and her aide.”

A stylish, surreal cult queer vampire film, featuring the brilliant Delphine Seyrig. Very giallo, prioritizing sensation over plot, like most quality vampire films.

STORIES UNTOLD (2017)

October 20, 2022

(PC/PS4/PS5/Switch/Xbox One) Yesterday it was just announced that OBSERVATION developer No Code has quietly been working on a SILENT HILL game entitled SILENT HILL: TOWNFALL and, based on their prior psychological horror game STORIES UNTOLD, I’m delighted by the news and can’t wait to play it.

STORIES UNTOLD started off as a one-off short horror game called THE HOUSE ABANDON that took place in one room, in front of an old-school 80s computer where you’d interact with a text adventure (although the player does so via a LucasArt-ish SCUMM interface — in other words: a visually selectable number of verbs and nouns — instead of having to manually type commands in). It then grew to be a collection of four self-described episodes, all four (mostly) utilizing the similar single room tableau, but also incorporates interactive puzzles that somehow don’t feel contrived or shoehorned into the setting, as well as some ‘walking simulator’ elements. (I do hate that term, but it’s concise.)

This game will not be for everyone. No Code loves to focus on interfaces. Unlike OBSERVATION, which you played primarily through future-ish surveillance and digital interfaces, STORIES UNTOLD features different ones for each episode: one being the previously mentioned text adventure, another heavily relying on a microfiche reader, and another leaning hard on analog buttons and dials. It’s all supremely inventive, although I would suggest that if you can do so, play it on PC — there is a macOS version but it won’t work with Catalina or above — as the PS4 port I played was occasionally very frustrating and fiddly: the text is often too small if you’re playing in a living room and one chapter — which initially required keyboard input — is downright frustrating thanks to the reduced ‘selective’ input interface required by a controller-first sensibility.

Narratively, the game is a scarring treasure. I don’t want to go into any detail, mostly because trying to describe its delights might rob you of some of them but, while it does utilize a lot of standard psychological horror tropes, the execution and tone make them feel fresh and well-integrated with some of the more higher concept story choices.

Additionally, thanks to No Code’s resourceful reliance on environments instead of character models, it’s a visually striking game, one that knows its limitations but uses them as strengths.

It’s a thinking person’s psychological horror game, one that leans on the past while creating something completely original. Based on STORIES UNTOLD, I can’t help but believe that their iteration on SILENT HILL will be the most interesting and compelling and original one in some time.

SILENT HILL: SHATTERED MEMORIES (2009)

October 19, 2022

(PS2/PSP/Wii) The obvious SILENT HILL videogame recommendation would be any one of the first four. After all, the first two are especially iconic with their use of fog and sirens and psychological horror and trauma and mystery and brilliant horror character design. However, the third and fourth certainly shouldn’t be overlooked, as the third has exceptional character work — at the time, one of the more complex depictions of a teen girl in a videogame — and the fourth (SILENT HILL: THE ROOM) is brilliantly claustrophobic.

The series departs significantly after the fourth, from a depiction of Japan-based development inspired by Western works to Western development by mostly uninspired Western developers. They’re not exactly -bad- games, but it’s a case of fundamentally not understanding why these games resonate with people. These are games that take inspiration from psychological horror works like JACOB’S LADDER (itself a loose adaptation of the TWILIGHT ZONE episode named AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDE, itself an adaptation of Bierce’s short story) — not games inspired by basic slashers like FRIDAY THE 13TH, which is what most Western developers brought to the franchise. It feels like studios often wanted to turn the series into RESIDENT EVIL — more combat, less emotional monologues — which betrays the spirit of the series.

However, SILENT HILL: SHATTERED MEMORIES (SHATTERED MEMORIES from here on out) is a different matter, primarily because of British designer Sam Barlow. Barlow — who would go one to create one of the most memorable interactive media (IM) games with HER STORY, the ambitious IM game TELLING LIES, and just released another IM game with one hell of a cast: IMMORTALITY.

A slight aside: I absolutely love HER STORY, especially its use of the traditional murder ballad The Twa Sisters:

(“Anything you sing can be used as evidence against you!”)

Barlow is fundamentally concerned with people lying to themselves and others — he loves Hitchcock, which is no surprise — which is the crux of SILENT HILL 2, and the reason why SHATTERED MEMORIES works so well. There’s the classic amount of atmospheric town exploration, however it’s interspersed with therapy sessions where the player guides the story (slightly), but contains far less combat than most SILENT HILL games. You’re often endlessly pursued, chased down by demons of a sort. Sadly, as it launched first as a Wii game — which is how I played it — it has a lot of fiddly waggle controls, which is one strike against it, because it is often a tad frustrating, but it’s worth the struggle.

It’s a singular experience, which is more than I can say about most of the post-THE ROOM sequels. Obviously, unless you have a decade-old console/handheld, it’s hard to play nowadays and that’s a shame. As I write this, we’re about to receive a litany of SILENT HILL news from Konami and, while I wish a SHATTERED MEMORIES re-release was part of it, I’m not holding my breath.

NEEDFUL THINGS (1993)

October 18, 2022

(DVD/VOD) NEEDFUL THINGS is a Stephen King novel I can’t recall reading, but the film has stuck in my mind since I watched it many years ago, mostly because it’s extremely chaotic for King, but also exceedingly devious in more ways than one.

It’s probably not quantifiably good, but it is a lot of fun. It reminds me of FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE SERIES and features Max von Sydow as the devil; what more could you ask for?!