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One of the most persistent critiques frequently lobbed at the modern era of filmmaking is that Hollywood is in the middle of a creativity crisis. The rise of mega blockbusters-with budgets starting at $200 million- and the success of the Marvel cinematic universe has created a false perception among disgruntled cinephiles and industry professionals alike that auteurs have suddenly become an endangered species in Tinseltown. — Read the rest
Here's a weirdly disturbing 10-minute film in the genre of "camcorder horror" or found footage horror, entitled "Teaching Jake about the Camcorder, Jan '97." It was written and directed by Brian David Gilbert, who also stars in the film.
The film shows a father teaching his son to use a camcorder, while the son is filming him. — Read the rest
Enjoy this charming little horror-themed parody of the cute children's show, Peppa Pig, (at your own risk). The grotesque-looking pigs look as if they climbed out of the depths of hell. The artist nailed it. Take a look at an image of the real Peppa Pig right next to the creepy pigs for a good chuckle. — Read the rest
There's a Chuck E. Cheese family entertainment center for horror fans? Well, not really. Last November, Mixed-reality Artist Siriu$, also known as Cabel Adams, created virtual art for a "Chucky Cheese Pizza Arcade & Bowling," complete with a giant Chucky doll wielding a knife in one hand and a pepperoni pizza in the other. — Read the rest
Around this time last year, I wrote about my love for The Department of Truth by James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds, a sort of meta-level X-Files riff about conspiracy theories that literally bend reality. I deeply enjoyed Tynion's work on Detective Comics and tend to get a kick out his newsletter, but I hadn't read that much of his other work*, which until recently was largely DC Comics-based. — Read the rest
October is far behind us, but why not make a horror themed pie like this one in January? This horror pie is brought to life (or death) during the baking process when the red filling seeps into the face-shaped crust, resulting in a gory dessert-creature. — Read the rest
It's kind of bizarre that more horror properties don't crossover in modernity. Why should superheroes have all the fun with interconnected movie and television universes? Especially when you consider that the legendary Universal monsters were the characters that comprised the first shared movie verse. — Read the rest
So, Babyface is a thing I made. It’s a creepypasta-style Southern Gothic horror story. I’ve entered the game into the 26th annual Interactive Fiction Competition (IFComp for short). You can play Babyface right now! I’ve followed IFComp for years—since at least 2007—but this is the first time I’ve made anything for the competition. Not that I haven’t wanted to, but finally everything lined up: my idea, the time to write it, the skills to do it, and finally the deliberate shift in my professional life from conventional scholarship to creative coding.
IFComp authors often share a “developer’s diary” that details their creative and coding process. I don’t really consider myself a developer. I’m more of a “I make weird things for the internet” person. But still, I thought I’d give this dev diary thing a try. If nothing else, than to debrief myself about the design process. I’ve blurred the text of any spoilers—just hover or tap on the blurred text to read it.
Babyface wasn’t supposed to be my game for IFComp. I was working on another game, a much larger game, a counterfactual history of eugenics in America. The game is basically asking what if CRISPR-like gene editing technology had been invented in the 1920s, the height of the eugenics movement. The game is heavily researched and includes meaningful choices (unlike Babyface, which is more or less on rails). But! But! But—I ended up talking about the game in conference talks and symposiums and showing it to enough people that it felt like it would be disqualified for IFComp, which has a strict rule that the competition must be the public debut of the game. So I released that game (or rather, the first “chapter” of it) back in May as You Gen #9. Play it, please!
Anyway, I was left without a game, which was fine. But then I had a horrific nightmare in May, and I couldn’t get one image out of my head. It literally haunted me. And then in July Stacey Mason on Twitter announced a fortnightly interactive fiction game jam. So I started playing around with my nightmare, trying to give it context and a narrative frame. Pretty quickly I realized the game was going to be too ambitious (LOL, it’s really quite a modest game, but it felt ambitious to me) to finish in two weeks for a game jam. So I continued working on the game all through August and September. On one hand three months to put together a polished game is not a lot of time. On the other hand, I had been working in Twine almost every day for the past year, and the story is modest (my best estimate is around 16,000 words, though it’s tough to measure word counts in a game with dynamic text). Plus there’s not a lot of state logic to keep track off. No complicated inventory systems, no clever NPCs. Just the narrator, a few interactions, and her memories.
I’ll talk more about specific design choices in a future post, but for now I wanted to say a few words about the setting. Like most Gothic fiction, the setting itself is a character in the game.
I was working with a concrete geography in Babyface. The old brick house is based on a real house in my small North Carolina college town. I could walk there right now in about 20 minutes, all on pleasant neighborhood streets. Less than five minutes by car. A recluse lived there, and the house, as in the game, is down the street from the local elementary school. The recluse died a few years ago, and it was some time before anybody even knew. Somebody eventually bought the property, tore down the old brick house, and put up a gaudy McMansion.
One detail I had wanted to include in the game but decided against, because it would have seemed too unbelievable: between the old house and the elementary school there’s a cemetery. I had considered incorporating the cemetery into the story as the narrator runs away from the house, but it just seemed too forced. One of those instances where real life out-narrativizes fiction, and in order to make the fiction more palatable, you have to dial back the realism.
The Southern backdrop is understated, though I dropped in enough clues that some readers might realize the centrality of the South in the game. More about those later…
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