Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

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Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Fri Oct 01, 2021 10:03 pm

Each day this October, I'm going to post something scary-related in this thread. Might be a movie clip, might be a videogame review, might be a spoooooky story that happened to me personally. It's whatever I want until the 31st! Think of it as an advent calendar except for Halloween! And instead of a piece of chocolate, you get a terrible post!

:party:

October 1st

I'll start with a simple offering: scary scenes in movies. I'll provide three, only one of which is technically from a horror film. NOTE: Clips 1 and 2 contain jumpscares.

CLIP 1: The diner scene from Mulholland Drive is on a lot of people's lists. I don't think I'm into David Lynch on the whole, but does anyone do a better job of putting dream logic (and nightmare logic) to film than him? Nah. Here's a self-contained little anecdote of a scene -- IIRC we don't know these characters and they don't appear anywhere else -- and if it has any significance outside itself I couldn't tell you. Does it symbolize something profound? Is Lynch just showing off his talents? Which is more frightening, to live with your fears or to confront them? Why are you asking me? Let's just watch the scene.



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CLIP 2: These five minutes from Exorcist III show what you can do with a long hallway and a fixed camera.

You understand the cinematic language of horror. You know something's going to happen. You know there's a jumpscare coming. You're waiting for the shoe to drop ... and then you wait ... and you wait some more. It's a five-minute masterclass in the building and release of tension, and the hallway set is so perfectly crafted for it. There's a dozen places where the jumpscare might come from, and your brain goes into overdrive watching every door. And the camera? The camera just sits there and lets you stew.



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CLIP 3: "Hi, I'm Pinocchio and welcome to jackass."



What the everfucking fuck, Walt.

What are some of YOUR scariest scenes/moments in film? Discuss.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by PonyHag714 (?) » Sat Oct 02, 2021 2:23 pm

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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sun Oct 03, 2021 1:10 am

That's well chosen because I was this close to putting the final scene of that film on my list. One reason it didn't make the cut was that the ending really needs the earlier scene you posted for context.

So since you provided that, let's watch it now! :yay:



Good times.

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October 2nd: IMSCARED

Look, some days these are gonna get posted pretty near midnight. But that's still on theme because it's the WITCHING HOUR!

Enough preamble, today's topic is the horror game IMSCARED which I played earlier tonight.

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IMSCARED, a "pixelated nightmare" is from indie developer Ivan Zanotti and my Steam version dates to 2016, I think. I finished the bulk of it in two hours but there are extra secrets and endings I haven't reached yet. This is a first-person experience where you explore a house and other locations while a ghostly entity (or possibly two?) plays "games" with you.

A core mechanic of the game is that it breaks the fourth wall and interacts through your PC, for example putting notes in a folder on your desktop which provide clues to puzzles; similar to OneShot and other games of the sort. I found that aspect pretty fun, but at times it got tedious when I was required to quit and restart the game multiple times in order to trigger a series of puzzle flags. English does not appear to be Ivan Zanotti's first language, which makes the notes he leaves a little vague and "off" and that actually enhances the weirdness.

Is it scary? It did make me jump a few times. It got me, I have no problem admitting that. Especially in the early stages when I didn't yet know what kind of scares I was in for. After a while you get the sort of vibe the game is going for and then the experience becomes fun in addition to scary. The game is extremely low-res, as you can see in the above screenshot, which I think is fine; for the most part nothing in the game requires more. I don't think the crude graphics make it scarier particularly, but at the same time I don't think better graphics would have changed much either. The only exception is when there's writing in the game, which the blocky pixels make a pain to read.

Overall I felt I got my two hours' worth and probably will go back at some point to try and finish the achievements. I got some simple jumpscares, some puzzles and a few fun interactions between the game and my real-world computer. A solid B.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Mon Oct 04, 2021 1:19 am

October 3rd: THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER

What is The Blackcoat's Daughter, the horror film I watched today? It's the 2015 debut of writer-director Osgood Perkins (son of Tony Perkins) and for a debut, there's a lot I appreciated and a fair bit I had criticisms with.

It's Catholic high school girls in trouble! Winter break at Bramford Academy leaves two students twiddling their thumbs while they wait for their respective parents to arrive and pick them up. Most of the faculty has also left, and the only adults are a couple of nuns who are rumored to worship Satan. Things get creepy when one of the girls (Kiernan Shipka, being excellent) starts acting really sus. Also escaped mental patient Emma Roberts is on her way to the school.

So here's the good: great camera work, lighting and set design. From a technical standpoint it's great: the snowbound and mostly empty school makes a great horror setting reminiscent of The Shining. There's some really interesting cinematography too. All the actors do a fine job, with MVP going to Shipka who, it turns out, can also sing really well.

As far as the overall plot and structure, I had my problems but I'm going to table them since the DVD skipped and I wasn't able to watch at least one scene in the middle. It would hardly be fair for me to make story criticisms when I hadn't actually seen the whole film. But I feel more confident complaining about the slow pace within scenes, and the unnatural dialogue which sounds more like how characters in a horror movie would speak than how people actually speak. Much of the film consists of creepy, off-putting people saying creepy, off-putting things to each other with a lot of long pauses. I was unnerved for a lot of the time but rarely if ever scared.

Y'know, listing my complaints second makes it seem like I disliked The Blackcoat's Daughter more than I liked it, which isn't really true. I would recommend it with qualifications. Let's go with a B-.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:11 am

October 4th: NIGHTMARES

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It's possible I'm already overextending myself on day 4. After all, what's scarier than a nightmare? What book, game or film could possibly top your own brain plucking your personal fear strings while you're lying asleep and helpless? Fear is ultimately a state of mind, and if you have a dream scenario in which your subconscious decides you're experiencing terror, then terrified you will be. Basically the human brain is a sadistic SOB. It could let us experience literally anything in our dream state -- pure bliss, or the sexiest of babes -- but instead makes us be chased by Cookie the Clown while our feet are stuck in ankle-deep mud and our teeth fall out and turn into cockroaches.

People have had nightmares since before we were technically people. Popular culture associates the word with horses or riders on horseback, but the "mare" in nightmare has a separate etymology from the pony thing. Mare in this context is a type of imp or demon, who in Northern European folklore would sit on a person's chest while they slept, causing bad dreams and general discomfort. I can't help but wonder how different human culture would be if there were no such thing as sleep paralysis.

Night terrors are a kind of turbocharged bad dream that hits so hard you wake up babbling and inconsolable for a few minutes. Alternatively you might sleepwalk or otherwise act out your nightmare -- I know a guy who once sleep-punched the person next to him because he was being attacked in his dream.

Nightmares can be worse if you have a fever, because the extra heat in your body makes your brain more active, and some of my worst dreams happened while I was recovering from one childhood illness or another. What's interesting is that these nightmares were very brief -- just a few subjective seconds. Dreams don't need introductions, they can trip your emotions on the spot without any setup at all.

My personal worst three nightmares:
  • That an alien was bursting from my chest. I clutched and clawed at it -- and woke up to find I had for-real scratched up my chest with my fingernails. Ow.
  • Another one where I was dreaming of being awake in bed. There's a stingray hovering over my bed. Just this stingray, floating silently above me.
  • This was one of my fever nightmares: I'm in some undefined place and a voice booms out: DO YOU WISH THERE TO BE NOTHING? And for some reason I answer "yes" and the whole universe goes away. And that's the whole dream, but I wake up bawling and my parents come in and they're like "what's wrong" and I'm just crying and totally incoherent "iwishedfortheretobenothingandtherewasnothing!" I imagine when you're a parent, this is just one of those surreal things you have to deal with sometimes.
Honorable mention goes to the the night after the first day of my job as a K-Mart cashier. It wasn't so much a dream, more that I was still scanning and bagging invisible items in my sleep. I woke to find myself sitting up in bed, my hands going through the motions, and for a few freaky seconds I couldn't make it stop, just sitting there, alert but helpless, watching my hands move on their own.

Anyway, the moral of the story is nightmares suck. Try to deal with your suppressed anxieties and don't eat pepperoni pizza before bed.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:42 pm

October 5th: PHOBIAS

It's fun to be spooked! There are different theories on why humans enjoy scary movies and haunted houses, and I'm partial to the emotional catharsis explanation: horror enables us to experience a fuller spectrum of human emotion in a safe space. It's the same reason some folks enjoy tragedy or weepy dramas. In a life where most of us aren't stalked by sabertooth tigers every day, we get a chance to simulate that flush of adrenaline, to purge our emotions and then laugh it off because none of the people and events were real, we're just sitting on our couch with a bag of Chuckles. It's fun!

Phobias are not like that.

The basic definition of a phobia is a persistent, irrational fear -- by which I mean either the source of the fear is irrational, or the response is irrational compared to the risk. For example, a person with pteridophobia (fear of ferns) has a fear reaction to something objectively harmless. (Sigmund Freud was a pteridophobe.) On the other hand, it's perfectly sensible to fear being buried alive, but taphephobia is when this fear is disproportionate to the chance of it actually happening. As with most psychological issues, the question of whether a phobia is a problem depends on whether it's, well, a problem -- that is, does it cause significant distress or affect your day-to-day living.

Phobias are not a sign of weakness. Your brain is simply triggering a panic response to something that doesn't objectively warrant it. This may happen because you suffered a past trauma and your brain associates that thing with the trauma. This is why a person can be triggered by a specific color, like purple (porphyrophobia), or by the sensation of something to the right or left of them (dextrophobia and levophobia).

Because of these associations, phobias can be literally anything. Probably only a fraction of the whole have been catalogued and named, and even these number in the dozens or hundreds. After reviewing, I think most of them can be categorized into a number of buckets (the fear of buckets is kouvaphobia).

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PHOBIA OF SOMETHING BAD: This is when the thing you're afraid of is dangerous or unpleasant, but your reaction to it is intrusively out of proportion. For example, someone with atomosophobia (fear of atomic explosions) might be prevented from living in or visiting cities because of their fear. Few people enjoy needles or injections, but structuring one's life around avoiding them falls into trypanophobia.

PHOBIA OF SOMETHING SAFE: There's a lot in this category, and they're often caused by association with a traumatic event. Maybe you were looking at a clock when some awful news came, and now you suffer from chronomentrophobia. Other times you catastrophize and fixate on the potential dangers of a thing. For example arachibutyrophobia, the fear of having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth. The fear here is that of choking, of having your gag reflex triggered, and to be fair people do sometimes choke or have allergic reactions to peanut butter. That said, I can't speculate on what might create a fear of buttons (koumpounophobia), flutes (aulophobia), chickens (alektorophobia), knees (genuphobia), garlic (alliumphobia), string (linonophobia) or chopsticks (consecotaleophobia).

PHOBIA OF SOMETHING GOOD, ACTUALLY: It's the cruel nature of phobias that they can sometimes turn your emotions against something that's objectively positive. For example euphobia, the fear of hearing good news. The anxiety here is that the good news will turn out to be false or disappointing, and you gradually develop an aversion to good news itself. Or the fear of going to heaven (uranophobia), which expresses itself as a fear of being judged or being unworthy. Former slaves and prisoners sometimes suffered from eleutherophobia, a fear of freedom, as their sudden liberty felt overwhelming to them after years of lacking it.

THINGS MOST PEOPLE ARE AFRAID OF A LITTLE BIT: Like many phobias, the fear of public speaking (glossophobia) overlaps with social anxiety or general anxiety disorder. And of course all decent people feel unnerved by clowns, though not all to the point of coulrophobia, but clowns are their own topic which I'll save for another day. Five Nights at Freddy's gave a rallying cry to our latent fear of animatronics, dummies and mannequins, and I'll bet the number of automatonophobia diagnoses skyrocketed after it released.

MISCELLANEOUS: It's more commonly diagnosed as general anxiety disorder, but there used to be a recognized condition called pantophobia, the fear of everything, and why nobody's made a horror game with this title I don't understand. Complementary to some phobias is counterphobia, where instead of avoiding their fear trigger, the person feels compelled to seek them out, generally in the hopes of curing oneself.

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I hope all your fears this Halloween are the fun kind. Anyway, here are some free phobias for the season: triskaidekaphobia (fear of the number 13), paraskavedekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th), and hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia, the fear of long words.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Tue Oct 05, 2021 10:50 pm

By the way, the fear of Santa Claus is santaphobia. "Claustrophobia" was already taken.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Wed Oct 06, 2021 10:52 pm

October 6th: THARSIS

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I've been meaning to write about and/or LP this game for some time. Tharsis, from 2016, is not first and foremost a horror game, but it has cannibalism and that's good enough for me! :yum:

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The spacecraft Iktomi is en route to Mars when a stray meteor strikes the hull, killing two of the crew and causing a cascade of catastrophic failures on the ship (including the loss of the food storage module). You control the remaining four members as they try to keep Iktomi intact for the ten turns it'll take to reach Mars. As a rule, you will fail in this.

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Game mechanics revolve around dice; each crew member is allotted a certain # of dice per turn which are rolled to address various situations on the ship. The worse the malfunction, the more points need to be spent to repair it, and you'll often need multiple crew members working simultaneously to finish the task. Unresolved problems at turn's end cause hull damage and other effects, but you won't always have the resources to address everything, and you may have to let some malfunctions slide till next turn.

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Dice rolls not used for repairs can be spent on crew abilities, module functions or emergency bonuses. If you're working in a malfunctioning area, some dice might get sucked into space or injure the crewperson.

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Here's where the cannibalism comes in. Representing hunger, every crew member loses 1 die from their pool between turns. They can replenish dice by eating, but supplies are very limited, and every person you assign to hydroponics is a person who's not putting out fires.

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Luckily, starting on turn 4 you can eat the remains of your crewmates! Two of the crew died in the introduction so "provisions" are on hand, and any crew who die during the trip also go into the freezer. Eating human meat has a poor effect on health and sanity, but it's better than losing your dice and letting the ship blow up. Isn't it?

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Tharsis is a hard game, and as dice are the primary mechanic it's heavily luck-based. I've gotten close to winning on normal difficulty but haven't succeeded. A game passes quickly, though, so it's never a huge time commitment.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Thu Oct 07, 2021 4:23 am

oh yeah, i think i saw this being given away on the epic store
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;) ❤️ :twasnothin: ❤️ :fancyhat:

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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Thu Oct 07, 2021 11:47 pm

October 7th: HORROR VS. TERROR

Stephen King wrote:I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
What distinguishes horror from terror? Every writer seems to go by a different set of definitions. But from what I can tell, there seems to be a feeling that terror is about the anticipation, while horror is about the reveal.

King seems to prefer terror, but I think both are valid and pluck different strings. The advantage of terror (to a storyteller) is that you can prolong it for a long time, keeping the audience agonizing and biting their fingernails over what's about to happen. But the best horror moments, in my opinion, succeed in matching or outdoing the terror that precedes them -- when the scary thing finally happens and oh my god it's so much more wrong than what you were worried about. That "wrongness" is important to horror, the feeling that you're seeing something so not-as-it-should-be that it's as if the whole natural order of the universe were overturned in that moment. This can be achieved through ghosts and aliens, but horror doesn't have to be supernatural so long as it's unsettling, something that pushes roughly enough against your expectations.

Which is why my favorite definition goes like this: terror is when you're speeding on a roller coaster, horror is when you notice the track ahead is missing.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Fri Oct 08, 2021 9:19 pm

October 8th: NO MONEY DOWN

There was absolutely no reason for this upbeat 1986 Lou Reed song to have been assigned this video, but I'm glad it happened.

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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sun Oct 10, 2021 7:08 pm

October 9th (SCARY LATE EDITION): the static speaks my name

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Horror isn't always about explicit scares. Sometimes horror can be about stepping into an unsettling world and just having a look around. And that's the static speaks my name, a free and minimalist (play time ~10 minutes) experience from indie creator Jesse Barksdale.

CONTENT WARNING FOR THIS GAME AND POST: suicide, depression

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You wake up as Jacob Ernholtz, age 31, in your bed. It's 3:22 AM, time to start your day! Jacob's room includes a few bookcases, a painting of two palm trees, and a tank of pet shrimp.

You go to the bathroom, achieving Objective 1.

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Can do!

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Oh. Huh.

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By this point you've explored enough of his house to recognize Jacob is a man with problems. His windows are boarded up. His living room is full of TVs displaying static.

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His social relationships are emotionally unsatisfying.

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And that painting of two palm trees, though it's repeated throughout the house, is not a stock asset. Jacob is obsessed with this painting, owning dozens of prints, to the point of devoting a whole room (and who knows how many months of his life) to deciphering the hidden meanings of this extremely mundane work.

What I'm saying is Jacob is not a well man.

Objective 4 is cleaning the microwave. Then, this happens:

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There may be little reason to avoid spoilers for such a short experience, but I'll stop here anyway.

the static speaks my name has no jumpscares, no action at all really, but it manages to draw a portrait of a severely disturbed headspace of which we only get a glimpse of its end stage. While its simplicity and crude graphics are the result of practical limitations, much like with IMSCARED they are sufficient for the experience.

Hilariously, this 15-minute game has an hour-long developer's commentary. Barksdale goes in on the technical aspects and how he put it together in Unity; it might be an interesting watch for newbie game designers.

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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sun Oct 10, 2021 10:42 pm

October 10th: TRICK 'R TREAT


Well, finally something fun.


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Trick or treating! It's the thing we used to do before a pandemic annhilated everything we laughingly called a culture. I just watched 2007's Trick 'r Treat, a film by Michael Dougherty who would go on to make Krampus (which is also really good). This is pretty much the ideal Halloween movie, not just because it takes place on Halloween night and is all about Halloween, but also because it nails that balance of fun, funny, scary and gross that the holiday should be. I would call this one a hidden ... treat? :ghost: Is that too corny a joke? Well it's how I feel, so hush.

It's Halloween in a town that takes this night very seriously: there's a street festival, folks in costumes everywhere, jack-o'-lanterns every ten feet, the town is just Halloween'd to the nines. It's also a night when murderers, monsters, zombies and vampires can do their thing without earning a second glance. Trick 'r Treat brings us five slightly connected storylines of spooky mayhem with fun fakeouts, twists, pranks, and every horror and Halloween trope you can think of. It's basically an anthology show like an episode of Tales from the Crypt, with whom it shares a lot of DNA and sense of humor -- the credits are even done in a comic-book style to drive the point home.

I had a great ol' time with this one and I'd recommend it to anyone. I never heard anyone mention this film before Red Letter Media mentioned it once; it should be more well known than it is. Have it playing during your Halloween party, or watch it while drinking vodka on your Halloween night self-quarantine, or whatever we end up doing this year.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sun Oct 10, 2021 10:55 pm

Also in the credits I recognized the name Britt McKillip, who would go on to voice this pony --> :allright:

so that happened
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Tue Oct 12, 2021 1:21 am

October 11th: THE MYSTERY OF CHIMNEY ROCK

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Kids lead a sheltered existence, and that's why Choose Your Own Adventure books are indispensable: they represent a child's first exposure to the capricious, pitiless and above all arbitrary nightmare we call Life. It is within these pages that young minds receive their first lesson about what the future holds: no matter where they may find themselves -- in college, the 18th century or aboard an alien spaceship -- their choices will be few, their decisions blind and their outcomes unjust. Their second lesson comes when they play Monopoly for the first time.

Many publishers have walked the gold-paved CYOA path, but none have mastered the form more thoroughly than the original Bantam Books series. Some might disagree. What about Goosebumps, they ask? To which I say, bah. When it comes to nightmares, R.L. Stine is little more than an artless pretender to the twin thrones of Edward Packard and R.A. Montgomery. More like Really Lame Stine, amirite? CYOA books get reliably freakier than him even in their non-horror titles. So what happens when the series actually does try to scare you? You get volume #5, The Mystery of Chimney Rock, the book that totally fucked up my nine-year-old self.

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(My copy's long gone, these images are from the internet)

Chimney Rock opens, as many CYOA titles do, with you vacationing with your cousins so there's someone to dialogue with. One of them dares to enter the spooky old mansion on the edge of town, and when she doesn't return you're obliged to go in after her. You make your way around the musty, crumbling interior while meeting Jervis the caretaker, Lena the maid, and if you're even more unlucky than usual, the owner herself Mrs. Bigby. Mrs. Bigby is a witch who owns a cat, but I think can also turn herself into a cat? And can turn people into mice? And probably turned her husband into a mouse and had him stuffed? Don't eat the cheese and crackers she offers you.

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Needless to say, dire fates abound. Although in the majority of endings you escape with an injury and a stern talking-to by the police, you can also end up suffocated in a closet, shrunken to oblivion, buried in a cave-in, transformed into a mouse, or worse. One trick that never fails to creep me out is when CYOA does a variation on their classic The End, and this book has a few of those. There's even one ending -- where you take one last look at the house despite a ghost's warning -- that doesn't have The End at all; just a page of you screaming in big, descending text, leaving what you could have seen entirely to your overstimulated imagination.

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Just look at that, will you? I don't want to turn pages and see shit like this. Fuck you, The Mystery of Chimney Rock, but also thank you The Mystery of Chimney Rock for teaching my younger self crucial lessons about the dangers of old houses, old women, cedar closets, and especially cats.

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Unburden yourself of the CYOA moments that traumatized you here. Don't say you don't have any, you big liar.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Wed Oct 13, 2021 9:25 pm

October 12th (SCARY LATE EDITION): EDITING


Comedy is horror.


Horror is comedy.

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The line is thin, and perception is everything.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Wed Oct 13, 2021 10:28 pm

October 13th:

There will be no post related to the 13th. It's bad luck.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Fri Oct 15, 2021 12:37 am

October 14th: THE PLATFORM

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Horror is a genre of many niches, one of which is what in TV is known as the "bottle episode". This is when your cast is confined in a place, usually with some external threat to turn up the heat, and they must either cooperate or turn on each other; usually it's the second one, human nature is the real monster, etc. Cube, The Belko Experiment and Circle are all examples of this subgenre. Tonight I watched 2019's The Platform, a thriller from Spain which might be described as a vertical Snowpiercer.

Every day, a large sumptuous banquet is prepared and lowered on a platform through a series of prison-like cells, each containing two people. The platform stops at each level, allowing the occupants two minutes to eat their fill. Each level subsists on the leftovers from the higher levels. Everything edible is gone by level 50 or so. There are a lot more than 50 levels.

The Platform is a directly-on-the-nose metaphor for society and never for a minute pretends not to be. The horror comes not only from the degradation and violence that results from this system, but the way the system erodes the ethics of those trapped in it. There is in theory enough on the platform to sustain everyone, were the inmates to take only what they needed; but there is little incentive for those at the top to not gorge themselves, and little incentive for those hungry at the bottom to starve themselves further to help those even worse off. Inhumanity is the almost inevitable result at every level. Also cannibalism, lots of cannibalism.

While the film is mainly about the symbolism, there's enough going on in the plot to keep things compelling for its 90 minutes, making it a good watch in its own right.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Fri Oct 15, 2021 12:53 pm

Mechanical Ape wrote:
Wed Oct 13, 2021 10:28 pm
October 13th:

There will be no post related to the 13th. It's bad luck.
coward
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Fri Oct 15, 2021 1:21 pm

this is a thread about fear, no coward-shaming allowed
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Fri Oct 15, 2021 2:39 pm

i do not experience fear
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sat Oct 16, 2021 1:07 am

October 15th: BONBON

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2017's Bonbon, on itch.io and Steam, is described by its developer as "a short-form domestic horror narrative (or walking sim, if you like), made in Unreal Engine 4, set in a suburban UK home in the 1980s, in which you navigate childhood events beyond your capacity to understand, and without parental context." Fellow toddler simulator Among the Sleep is an acknowledged inspiration.

Being a toddler is an inherently trippy experience. Even when surrounded by love, support and safety from the most well-meaning parents, their developing awareness is still learning to make sense of all the large and mysterious things in their world. Even toys can take on a sinister aspect with their painted-on faces; a toy-strewn room, even with the lights on, can either be a place of fun or a surreal menagerie of garish, possibly sentient entities. Small children tend to humanize things in their environment, treating familiar objects as acquaintances with names. It's not always clear to a toddler what's truly alive and what isn't, especially when adults aren't around to provide context.

So we come to Bonbon, a very brief and linear 20-minute experience in the day (and night) of a three-year-old. This child is loved, but in normal '70s and '80s parenting style, is often left unsupervised in the yard or living room to entertain themself with their collection of toys. The world as we experience it through this child's eyes is at once familiar and strange: toys which are seen but never speak, and parents who are heard but never seen, perpetually in the next room doing grownup things.

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Less easily categorized is the giant rat named Bonbon that seems ever-present throughout the child's day. While disturbing to look at, his role in this child's life is at first unclear -- is he an imaginary friend? A threatening nightmare? As events progress, he comes to take on a decidedly more threatening presence, and in the end we come to understand Bonbon somewhat better, or at least unravel a few of the layers of symbolism and fancy that define reality as a child sees it.

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What Bonbon does, it mostly does well. But there is not much of it: it's a short and linear experience with no puzzles and little to do other than interact with toys and perform a few simple objectives. Object manipulation is fiddly and frustrating, even beyond the given excuse of toddlers lacking manual dexterity, and it's not really essential to gameplay so it feels like added hassle with no purpose. What Bonbon is, is a one-person project with a brief story to tell, a surreal aesthetic and a few well-directed scares. Worth a look, though whether you want to spend $2.99 for 20 minutes or just watch a playthrough on YouTube is up to you.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sat Oct 16, 2021 1:13 am

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I mean seriously, how did parents think these night light projectors were anything but creepy?
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sat Oct 16, 2021 8:11 pm

October 16th: WE WENT BACK

Another mini horror game, 2017's WE WENT BACK is a short, atmospheric experience best described as P.T. on a moon base.

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Here's something you never want to hear when waking up in a glass tube: "Cryosleep interrupted. Lifeform detected." From environmental clues, the player works out that this is a moon base in an alternate history where we bothered to build a moon base: it's the 70s possibly, or at any rate that's the aesthetic. Nobody is here but you, which is strange, but even stranger is that something, or someone, appears to be outside ...

The objective is simple, to examine objects and figure out the password needed to open the exit hatch. The trick the game pulls is equally simple: the station is ring-shaped and you are constantly going around in one direction, and each time you loop back to the starting room things have changed. At first these are subtle changes, such as the text on a poster or the status of an experimental rat (living, dead and decapitated, missing, alive again with its head stapled back on). Later changes get more concerning, such as the temperature becoming cold or newspaper headlines changing.

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Are you looping through alternate realities? Is your character hallucinating? Are you in Space Purgatory? There's not a clear answer; this is an atmosphere piece. The actual gameplay is minimal and disappointing. There are few objects to interact with and those that you can, only come into existence when certain obvious flags are triggered. You find another piece of the mystery, then you can expect the monster to pop up soon and say "boo". Basically you're walking in a big circle through the same six or seven rooms and looking at things.

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But my complaints aren't really complaints. This a free game and clearly intended as more of a tech demo or proof of concept, and should be judged on that scale. The graphics are terrific and the setting feels realistically claustrophobic with a retro Alien style. The sound design is also effective with the station and its machines thrumming atmospherically. The developers clearly understand how to make a scary experience and if their intent was to make the player say "yes good, more of this please", in my case mission accomplished.

It don't cost nothin' and it takes about 45 minutes depending on how long you take your time and examine things, which you should because that's the whole point, after all.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:44 pm

October 17th: ERIE

You never want to judge a free game too harshly, unless you can get a really good joke out of it. Such projects are a labor of love by somebody (or a team of somebodies) who understood the limitations of resources, time or skill and made something anyway and put it out there for free. It's not something to get angry about or anything. That said, it's still a valid endeavor to look at a work within its own context and judge how well it succeeds in what it set out to do.

Even allowing that it's the work of students and is 10 years old, Erie didn't scare me and it's hard for me to imagine it scared people in 2011 either. It's better than I could do, but that's not much of a standard.

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It's 1966, a nuclear reactor near Lake Erie has shut down, and you're assigned to learn what went wrong. This being the Cold War, it's hardly surprising to discover they were using radiation to create atomic mutants, one of whom is stalking the concrete halls of the facility. The stage is thus set for a game of cat and mouse, with you hunting for keycards while the monster hunts you.

This is the monster:

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Again, even acknowledging the technical limitations at play, I was unable to be scared of the mutant. And I really did try! I did my part to hold up my end of the horror bargain. But its AI is simple and the death animation is goofy as hell. Your one trick is to evade it in one of the many crawlspaces, although at one point it got stuck in the architecture and I left it there for the rest of the game. Sometimes I'd pass by just to taunt it.

The facility is mazelike, which brings me to the one mechanic I found pretty interesting: you have a spray can which you can use to mark places you've been or leave yourself notes.

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Sometimes I play a budget indie game and think "there's some interesting ideas that I'd like to see the developers flesh out in their next effort", but Erie didn't leave me with that feeling. I'm at a loss to why it shows up on various "Great Short Horror Games" listicles like the one I got it from. I did jump once when the monster got me as I was turning a corner, a scare fairly earned. But other than that, I'm afraid I had to go through Day 17 decidedly un-frightened.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:47 pm

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Where to go next? If only the game provided some kind of hint.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sun Oct 17, 2021 9:03 pm

I forgot to mention that there's collectibles in the form of black cats that you can rescue. Their presence is signaled by a yowling sound effect which I swear I thought was a baby the first time. Anyway, I'm amused at the thought of fleeing from a nuclear mutant while carrying as many as 8 injured cats.

I'd like more games to explore the concept of collectibles that are manifestly impossible for the character to realistically carry, such as pianos.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Mon Oct 18, 2021 4:03 am

i will forever hold it against amnesia for creating a entire genre of mediocre video games based around running away from shitty monsters in crappy hallways
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Mon Oct 18, 2021 11:57 pm

October 18th: MY WIFE AND I BOUGHT A RANCH

You need to understand that there is a spirit in this valley ... It is not a spontaneous force. It does not act on a whim. It is fairly predictable. Its behavior, or its methods, are based on the seasons. Almost like it has earthly rules to which it must adhere. But if you anger this spirit, or cross it in some way, you will fiercely regret doing so for the very brief and terrifying remainder of your life.
Today we a take a slurp from the steaming hot cauldron of creepypasta. My Wife and I Bought a Ranch is a six-part story posted on r/nosleep in 2020, and has been optioned for a Netflix adaptation which seems to be in development hell, maybe for the best. It's a good story but I'm not sure how well it'd translate to live action.

A couple buys a small ranch, their dream house, in a gorgeous part of rural Idaho. Shortly after unpacking they are briefed by their neighbors of the situation: the land is home to some kind of spirit or entity, and if they plan to live there they need to understand the rules. The spirit manifests each season in bizarre but predictable ways. These manifestations can be unnerving and even dangerous, but if you follow the rules you will be fine. It's just one more thing a couple needs to deal with living in the boonies along with coyotes and bears.

MWAIBAR plays a neat trick by laying its cards on the table at the start. We are told at the outset which otherworldly manifestations to expect each season and how to deal with them, and the main body of the tale is showing that to us. Even though we're told what to expect, the situations are so strange and so specific that no suspense is lost in watching them play out. The well-written descriptions add a lot as well, notably the grueling "bear chase" scenes which are presented in literally visceral detail.

But what puts MWAIBAR above the pack for me is that it tells a genuine story. The husband, who narrates, is a former marine and Afghanistan veteran, and this becomes significant in the events to come: the story can broadly be seen as a metaphor for PTSD or other mental disorders. I myself suffer from anxiety and depression, the symptoms of which come on strong every so often. They are manifestations which I have to live with, but by following a set of rules I can learn to coexist with this depression-entity in my brain. The couple who bought the ranch discover that they, too, must cope with an unwanted visitor -- one which can never truly be understood but whose appearances can be coped with; one which can never be made to disappear, but with whom one can learn to coexist and accept in pursuit of one's desired life.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Tue Oct 19, 2021 11:35 pm

October 19th: KRAVEN MANOR


Well hey, here's a good one!

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Today we're back to horror games with 2013's free-on-Steam Kraven Manor, a fun little title that gave me just enough creeps and just enough puzzles to have a good time, and not so much of either to wear out its welcome. Just right!

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There's no setup at all: you're stuck in a creepy mansion on a dark and stormy night. Go. Go explore and get scared. From the start you have stuff to do and look at, because the main hall is your hub and full of locked doors and reading material. The centerpiece of the room is a scale model of the house itself, and as you explore you can find new tiny rooms to connect the tiny doorways, which causes the room to appear there in real life. (Real life in the game, I mean.) There's not a ton that's done with this mechanic -- I believe they toned it down to focus on linearity -- but it's a nifty idea.

The house is well-realized and full of dark, creepy rooms with secret passageways, shelves of old books, levers and switches, cobwebs, lightning flashing outside, all the classic haunted house touches. There are a few simple puzzles and a backstory about the mansion's owner, a mad genius who learned how to store people's souls in bronze statues. A few of these statues show up as the monsters of the piece; in Weeping Angels style they move when you're not looking at them, and they definitely had me on edge during the scenes where they appear.

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This is a free game I can easily recommend. You get about an hour and a half of play out of it, there are puzzles but nothing hard enough to break the vibe or make you feel dumb, killer bronze statues to provide well-crafted scares, notes to read for background fluff, that dynamic floorplan mechanic I mentioned, and there's even a bit of a boss fight at the end. It's all there! I give this one 10 out of 10 jack o' lanterns.

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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Thu Oct 21, 2021 3:45 am

this looks familiar
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Thu Oct 21, 2021 5:07 pm

October 20th (SCARY LATE EDITION): MINOR CHORDS


Welcome back to the thread that asks the big questions, like "why is scary music scary?" :rip:

Music theory is a complex and erudite field of study, and I want to make clear up front: I am not a complex and erudite person. I'm just an ordinary jerk with an internet connection and a question on my lips. There are people on this very forum who know way more about music than I do, so don't take what I have to share as authoritative or even necessarily correct. What I do know for sure is my subjective experience, and friends, I know scary music when I hear it. Sometimes, after just the first few notes. But how do I know? :ponder:

When comparing major vs. minor keys, a thing you often hear is that major keys sound "happy" while minor keys sound "sad" or "mournful" or "spoopy". Think about your favorite funeral dirge; it's probably in a minor key (but not always; for example "Taps" is in C major). And your cheerful tunes tend to use major chords, but again not always, like "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor" is an absolute banger but isn't in a major key, and Pharell Williams wrote a non-ironic song called "Happy" in F freaking minor. So yeah, there's a lot that goes into the emotion of a piece of music, and key isn't the only thing. But it's certainly a thing. YouTube is lousy with songs swapped from major to minor and vice versa, and the change in vibe is undeniable.



:saddershy:

Something's happening that our brains are noticing, but what? I mean, musical notes are just notes. Surely, either by themselves or in arrangement, they don't and can't contain any inherent emotion. So is that to say it's all acquired, that we've simply learned from cultural experience to interpret chords this way? Short answer: yes. Long answer: yes but also something else maaaaaaybe.

We're back to our Day 12 observation that context is everything. Those of us reading this thread probably grew up in a western society in the modern era; we've been receiving musical influences since basically the womb. We hear happy tunes presented in major keys, spooky songs presented in minor keys (preferably on pipe organs) because that's the prevailing paradigm. These associations are ingrained in our tender brains long before we've developed the ability to evaluate music critically; they become part of our musical vocabulary, which we in turn pass unconsciously to our own kids.

Of course, this can change as our associations change. "Stuck in the Middle with You" was a happy, bouncy classic for 20 years before Quentin Tarantino reframed it, probably for all time, as Music To Slice Ears Off By. When I think of "Singin' in the Rain" I'm generally not thinking about the lyrics or about Gene Kelly, I'm thinking about droogs and home invasions (and actually "A Clockwork Orange" uses the changing of musical associations as an explicit plot element). So in short, yes, it's a bit of a circular thing: we associate minor keys and pipe organs with scary because we grew up with scary songs that had minor keys and pipe organs.

-------

But is it entirely arbitrary, or is there some reason our culture ended up with "major=happy, minor=scary" and not the other way around? Here we get into speculation, and not everyone is on board with it, but some suggest that our brains associate wide spaces with energy and pep, and since the tones in a major chord are more spaced apart (in a sense) than they are in a minor chord, major chords carry a connotation of brightness and minor chords more of a subdued, downbeat feel. I feel like I just gave aneurysms to actual music people who may be reading this by how poorly I explained that.

The main thing I want to communicate is that, in music as in so many other things, scariness comes at us by emotional triggers that are deeply ingrained in our psyches. Understand the base expectations of your audience, and you can play on that to freak them the fuck out.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Fri Oct 22, 2021 1:00 am

October 21st: ONE LATE NIGHT

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In my foray into freeware horror games, I've had some hits and some misses. This one, interestingly, is a bit of both.

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I've put in more than one late night at the office, and it's a solid setting for a horror game. In One Late Night you're putting in a heck of a late shift (12:08 according to the clocks) on a dark and stormy night, and at first it's not so bad except for the fact that you're using Linux. You head to the break room for a coffee and it's then that the true horror reveals itself when you discover how slow your walk speed is. There's a sprint option but it doesn't do much and tires you out after literally 3-4 steps. Also, when you get back to your desk your monitor says "I SEE YOU" and a creepy voice over the phone says the same thing.

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Sure enough there's a ghost in the office, seemingly related to your officemate Robert and the ouija board you find on his desk. At first her manifestations are simple, cabinet doors swinging and the radio turning on by itself, but soon enough she appears in person. Standing as still as a mannequin, she floats toward you and you need to slow-motion run away to escape. Film scratches appear on the screen when she's near.

You eventually find a flashlight and some batteries which are supposed to drive her off, but they never worked for me plus they only lasted about 3 minutes. You can also hide underneath desks, but that never worked either because the ghost would just hang around and not leave. There's also a candle and supposedly a lighter somewhere which I never found.

Then my save game bugged and every time I reloaded I fell through the architecture. And that's when I stopped playing One Late Night.

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So okay. As I've said before, you can't get mad at free games; you can only analyze what they were attempting and how close they came to achieving it. There's a lot of One Late Night that hamstrings itself with gamey frustrations. For example, progress through the story's events appear to be triggered by flags that aren't obvious; there were times when I was wandering around, trying to figure out what the game wanted me to do to make the spooky stuff come back. Did I need to check my email again? Snoop around Robert's office some more? Is there something new in the conference room?

Then there are annoyances with the interface. Sometimes you can hide under a desk, sometimes you can't, even if you haven't moved. Some interactable items are highlighted, others aren't. Flashlight batteries are scattered around, but are so small that locating them borders on pixel-hunting. You can't crouch, and some drawers and cabinets are too low to click on unless you're doing it from under a desk. Some of the content seems to expect you to figure out your email system, which I never did. And of course there's the game-breaking architecture bug I mentioned. I can deal with simple graphics and so-so sound in my indie horror, but interface and stability problems are harder to overlook and they never failed to take me out of the experience.

Here's the thing though: despite everything I've mentioned, did the game scare me? Yes. It actually did at times. The ghost had her moments of surprise, I jumped a couple of times, and the overall situation -- playing hide and seek with a ghost in a darkened office -- had me feeling tense and imagining her around every corner. Erie couldn't manage the premise, but One Late Night did.

So even though I gave up in frustration, and had plenty of frustration before that, the game succeeded in its job of supplying scares! That's what matters! Not sure I'd recommend it, but I regard it as a half hour spent well enough.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Fri Oct 22, 2021 5:32 am

much like people being afraid of clowns, minor chords is one of those things i find more funny than "scary"
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Fri Oct 22, 2021 2:43 pm

DaikatunaRevengeance wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 5:32 am
much like people being afraid of clowns, minor chords is one of those things i find more funny than "scary"
That actually relates to today's topic!

October 22nd: HORROR v. COMEDY


I've seen the two big Ari Aster films, Hereditary and Midsommar, and in both cases I saw them in the theater with an audience. And in both cases there was a moment -- near the end of the film, as the horror was really ramping up and layering upon itself -- when the audience laughed. I don't remember the specific scenes, but something was happening on the screen that was so bizarre that the reaction turned from terror to laughter. And I think about that sometimes and muse on how thin the line is between horror and comedy.

Humor and horror both rely to some degree on surprise, on a reversal of expectations. The storyteller creates a scenario where we're primed to expect one thing but receive another. We have the rug pulled out from under us, just for a moment. We expect when someone "walks into a bar" they mean a drinking establishment, so it's a surprise to find they mean a literal iron bar. We expect internal organs to be inside the body, so it's a surprise when they're not. One surprise induces laughter (maybe), the other induces horror (maybe). And just as a joke has its rising action and punchline, so does a scary moment have a build and release of tension.

The zone where funny and scary overlap is the surreal, that realm of dream logic where things are completely absurd. And those moments can strike an audience as silly or nightmarish or possibly both. David Lynch basically lives in this zone. It's hard to tell when he's legitimately trying to unnerve you and when he's just being a goofball. Or take this scene from Evil Dead 2:



Horror-comedies are a genre, of course, but what that means a lot of the time is comedy offset by scary bits, and/or scary bits undercut with jokes. In either case the 2 elements are separate and contrasted. A harder trick is to find that zone where funny and scary are the same thing. Ari Aster's upcoming film is described as a horror comedy, and I feel like he has the capability to succeed in that -- to go over the top and baroque, but in the name of humor as well as terror.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Fri Oct 22, 2021 2:47 pm

A couple weeks ago I posted that Lou Reed video for "No Money Down". The first time I ever saw it I was horrified. Every other time I've laughed, because it's such a wonderful mean prank to play on the audience. I think of it as gruesome on a basic level but really funny on a meta level.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sat Oct 23, 2021 10:14 pm

October 23rd: AMERICAN ELECTION


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If horror is the upending of expectations, the sickening vertigo of reality turning inside out, then the 2016 U.S. presidential election fit the bill for many. Millions bore clear witness, some perhaps for the first time, to the monsters in our midst and in the American psyche, and in the institutions upon which we'd placed faith that they might be strained but could never break too badly. Some went mad from this revelation; but unlike a Lovecraft protagonist, we haven't the luxury to flee back into a new dark age of ignorance. History, once taught, should be remembered. Into this comes Greg Buchanan's American Election, a work of ... political horror? Sociological horror? Personal horror? However you define it, this Twine-based tale put a lump in my gut like nothing else in this thread has -- simply by preserving a snapshot of a time in history when we all got a good hard look at ourselves, and it wasn't pretty.

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In American Election it is 2016 and you are Abigail Thoreau, a campaign staffer for a presidential candidate for whom there is no ambiguity: Truman Glass is Donald Trump with a different name and a slightly more coherent command of the English language. Why Abi, a lesbian and also possibly of mixed race, has chosen to hitch her career to Glass' wagon has a few possible answers, some of which lay in her personal background and others defined by player choice, but all reasons soon fall away as repeated interactions show that when it comes to Glass, there is nothing there. Abi experiences the horror of realizing, in terms too undeniable to ignore, that her boss and possible next POTUS is a sociopath, a cruel abuser, and the embodiment of all the forces that have caused pain in her life. Compounding this is Abi's personal horror in recognizing her own complicity in all this.

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Heartbreakingly well-written, there's a grim inevitability to American Election as Abigail and the nation slide toward tragedy on a wave of their own fears and frustrations, a tragedy that at every stage is so apparent yet they choose each time not to see. When the sudden but inevitable betrayal occurs, it is too late for anything but to reflect on the decisions that led them there.

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There's not a single otherworldly element in this tale. Possibly the most grueling sequence is that of an ordinary teenager browsing YouTube videos. It is simply a record of what it was like to live through that moment in history. The characters are fictitious; the story is true. As such, American Election might hit a little differently from more reassuringly abstract works about mutants and demons. The feelings may still be a bit raw, and I wouldn't blame anyone for opting not to revisit them. But as a portrait of that moment, and as a story of how human beings allowed themselves to be governed by their inner monsters, inevitably to be governed by greater monsters, it is invaluable. I do recommend it deeply. But you will be depressed, and rightly so.
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sun Oct 24, 2021 11:49 pm

October 24th: IT COMES AT NIGHT


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Stop me if you've heard this one: following a world-ending disaster, people who are barricaded in a house fall prey to paranoia and distrust. 2017's It Comes at Night provides a quiet, slow-burning take on the standard apocalypse narrative, taking the focus off the apocalypse itself and more on the character relationships. Despite the title, it is not a typical horror movie (though it was misleadingly marketed as one) and is not really scary, being more of a psychological drama. It doesn't really fit with the other stuff in this thread. But for what it is, it's extremely well-made, impeccably filmed and emotionally acted.

There's a sickness. Gas masks are needed if there's any danger of infection; corpses need to be burned. That's about all we know before we're introduced to Paul, Sarah and Travis, a family surviving on their own in a big house in the woods. They've been doing it long enough to have a safe and reliable routine for maintaining their lives. A change comes when the family meets a second family low on supplies and invites them to move in. Can the newcomers be trusted? Is Paul's overabundance of caution prudence or paranoia? And what's up with the nightmares Travis is having?

Things do happen in this film, but not many. Ambiguity feeds paranoia, and many events in the plot go unexplained; the characters never quite learn the truth about everything and neither does the audience. That decision leads It Comes at Night to feel slow-paced and vague at times, and when tragedy strikes the feeling we feel is less horror and more sadness. What kept it compelling for me were the performances and the really excellent camera work. The entire film takes place in and around a single house, but it's a gorgeous house. And I rarely notice a film's lighting, but the lighting is super good. Visually it's great.

It Comes at Night is a good film if you're in an atmosphere-over-action mood. I recommend it, just not as a horror film.
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Mechanical Ape
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Wed Oct 27, 2021 6:39 pm

October 25th (TRULY HORRIFYINGLY LATE EDITION): MY FATHER'S LONG, LONG LEGS


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The next offering in this month's spooky safari is another Twine game, 2013's my father's long, long legs. This is a short and almost entirely linear experience, a creepy little snack for when you're in the mood for a brief shot of weird.

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The narrator recalls her childhood home and memories of her father, a factory worker who comes home and begins digging in his basement ... and digging ... and digging, obsessively, for years, gradually excavating a dirt-walled labyrinth underneath the house, returning upstairs only for meals and, later, not even for that. Eventually Mom has had enough and leaves, taking the kids with her.

Years later, as adults, the narrator and her brother return to see what's become of Dad and his tunnels.

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Playing my father's long, long legs is brief and easily experienced over a lunch break, and there's little need for replays due to its linearity. Its strengths are the creepiness of its story, the quality of the writing and the creative use of the Twine engine. Text is white on black, and as the paragraphs scroll up it gives the sense of descending into a hole yourself, toward ... something. Sounds and flashlight effects are introduced in the second half, neat ideas which I feel hold more potential than their brief use here. Maybe I should check this dude's later games to see if he's built on the concept.
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Mechanical Ape
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Re: Netflix and KILL: 31 Days of Scary Posting

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Wed Oct 27, 2021 9:33 pm

October 26th (SCARY LATE EDITION): THE UNCLE WHO WORKS FOR NINTENDO

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I'm too old to have heard uncle-at-Nintendo stories growing up, though I did know a classmate who tried the girlfriend-in-Canada routine. For as long as there have been kids, there have been kids who've tried to make themselves appear special or important, or at least important-adjacent. The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo is a 2014 Twine game by Michael Lutz, creator of my father's long, long legs. Like I said in that review, I wanted to see whether Lutz went on to bigger projects, and Uncle is indeed a larger game, less linear and with more variability, and also more sound effects.

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Your best friend [insert name] has invited you to a sleepover at his/her house this weekend! Just you and your best buddy, pizza, soda, and all the cool video games he owns -- including a few nobody else knows about! He's got an uncle who works for Nintendo, you know.

What? Of course the uncle is real. He's coming over tonight, in fact!

He's arriving at midnight.

He'll be very hungry.

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The clock moves ahead toward 12:00 as you take actions, be it playing video games, getting snacks from the kitchen, or recalling your friend's older brother who seems to no longer exist. In fact there are a number of things about your friend that aren't quite as they appear, and dialogue options will change to reflect oddities you've discovered. Even so, it will take several playthroughs to collect all the endings.

I do recommend getting all the endings, since that's where the "true" ending is found and it also unlocks the author's notes, which provide interesting commentary about intent and subtext. By chance this game was written during August 2014, that shitty month during which shitty people calling themselves "Gamergate" were busy acting like monsters themselves. Lying about your uncle is fairly harmless compared to other falsehoods that have been spread in the name of this hobby.

The uncle who works for Nintendo serves, if you want to see him that way, as a metaphor for the lies that drive apart friends, the toxicity that gaming -- which let's not forget should be about fun and pleasure -- engenders, and the way it can isolate and dehumanize when not pursued in a healthy fashion. Or it could just be a metaphor for a cursed Game Boy. That also works.
Michael Lutz wrote:What [videogame creepypasta] stories reveal, I think, is an underlying anxiety we have about games in general: that beneath their smiling faces and heroic poses Mario and Link are somehow hostile to us. That if these emblems of childhood and adolescent pleasure had their way, we would keep playing with them until it killed us.

Perhaps here we can find the "pretense of truth" that seemed to otherwise go missing: there is something about games culture, its particular awareness of itself in its own moment of history, that facilitates the experience of horror at the industry's own promises of endless and repetitive play.

Games, in this perspective, both loathe us, and need us.
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