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Phantom of Death (1988) (AKA Off Balance)

Directed by Ruggero Deodato

Screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino and Gigliola Battaglini

Story by Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino

Music by Pino Donnagio

Country: Italy

Running Time: 90 minutes

CAST

Michael York as Robert Dominici

Donald Pleasence as Inspector Datti

Edwige Fenech as Helene Martell

Mapi Galan as Susanna

Fabio Sortar as Davide

Renato Cortesi as Agent Marchi

Antonella Ponziani as Gloria Datti

Carola Stagnaro as Dr. Carla Pesenti

Daniele Brado as Dr. Vanni

Caterina Boratto as Robert's mother

Ruggero Deodato as man at train station who lights cigarette and then gets on the back of his girlfriend’s scooter

Phantom of Death is a giddily entertaining Italian horror muddle with far more serious themes than one might reasonably expect from director Ruggero Deodato, the man known as “The Cannibal King”. My legal advisers have urged me to specify that this isn’t because Ruggero Deodato is actually the ruler of a bunch of people eaters, but because he directed Last Cannibal World (1977) and Cannibal Holocaust (1980), both of which were hugely successful and are still cited today as significant influences on horror. (This doesn’t mean they are any good, mind.)  Phantom of Death takes on a far more universal horror than going into a jungle and being turned into pulled long pork by cannibals; the fear of ageing and also the horror of realising you’ve run out of time to stop being a dick and actually do something worthwhile with your life.

When the movie opens fantastic pianist Robert Dominici (Michael York) is definitely a dick. Robert revels in the adoration which comes with looking like Michael York and playing the piano by moving your shoulders and making intense faces while keeping your hands hidden. Unfortunately he revels in it to the detriment of his personal interactions. He’s a bit of a dick with the chicks, basically. Time is of the essence both in life and in Phantom of Death, so it doesn’t hang about; opening with Robert’s public tinkling of the ivories intercut with the stalking and slashing of a young woman. Yes, because this is a 1980’s Italian horror movie and so some maniac is going around slashing young women to death. Quicker than you can say “Liberace” the roster of victims expands to include Robert’s girlfriend. Unfortunately for Robert not only do the police led by Inspector Datti (Donald Pleasence) find him stood over her gory corpse, but earlier the pair had had a tiff. It seems pretty clear then that Phantom of Death will be a giallo, and Robert is odds on to be our typically ill-equipped sleuth. Yes, given the way Phantom of Death has gone thus far viewers could very well be forgiven for expecting a choppily edited, intrusively scored, minor giallo, notable mostly for the amount of blood it thinks a human neck can spurt and the presence of Michael York, Donald Pleasence and Edwige Fenech. Which would be fine by me, but Phantom of Death has other, higher ideas. If you’d rather be surprised by them then stop reading NOW.

It should be borne in mind at all times that any praise from hereonin is directed at a movie directed by someone called The Cannibal King; a movie that most normal people would dismiss as “godawful bloody nonsense” (as my Life Partner has opined of my viewing choices on numerous occasions). But if you are okay with the peculiar charms of the Italian horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s (or Christ-like in your tolerance for their failings) then Phantom of Death may be right up your (dimly lit) alley. Particularly impressive is the conviction with which it sets up the viewer to expect a giallo. The opening itself is a suave misdirection in the true giallo style; the two events, piano playing and lady slaying, are not occurring simultaneously, but you naturally assume they are. Then, and it’s quite ballsy this, Robert is given a personal reason to pursue the killer when he is found by the police at the scene of his girlfriend’s murder. He can’t possibly be the murder because it would be to obvious, you think. You think wrong. Admittedly Phantom of Death doesn’t let you think wrong for long, it soon makes it clear what’s going on, because it needs to start the real business of the movie; positioning Robert as a tragic killer, himself the victim of a killer, the disease progeria (AKA Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome).

Now, I’m not a medical professional but I’m going to assume that Phantom of Death takes a little (cough!) artist licence and that progeria itself doesn’t usually cause irresistible homicidal impulses. It’s probably hard to tell since in the real world it manifests in children, who, sadly, usually fail to reach the age of 13. As well as the symptoms required by a 1980s Italian horror movie, Robert also experiences the more usual symptoms of progeria which resemble rapid aging, with death resulting from heart ailments or strokes. Robert’s basically got the real world equivalent of Methuselah Syndrome from Blade Runner (1982) but on fast forward. No wonder he goes a bit loopy. When he isn’t killing women and playing cat and mouse with an increasingly distraught Inspector Datti, Robert indulges in the maudlin activities familiar from many serious Oscar® winning Sad Disease movies. He visits his first love for a bittersweet reminiscence, mournfully watches from afar a child afflicted with the selfsame disease, adopts a stray dog and talks to it soulfully about how tragic is his fate to be trapped in this afflicted cage of flesh. Amusingly though, this isn’t a serious Oscar® winning Sad Disease movie, no, it’s a 1980s Italian horror movie and so his first love is a hooker who he visits while dressed as The Phantom of The Opera, and the reunion is ruined by her violent death at his hands; the stricken child is obviously a fully grown dwarf in shorts playing with a ball. The fact that any soulfulness at all is evident under all this silliness is entirely thanks to Michael York.

The (doubtful) success of Phantom of Death is aided no end by Deodata’s cast being  topped by two Legends; the insanely watchable Donald Pleasence and plummy voiced ‘70/’80s heart throb Michael York. York, normally cast as a bland lump,  is pretty great here; obviously relishing the chance to do some acting for once. He evidently recognises it’s a gift of a role; even if it is wrapped in the ostentatiously crazed genre trappings and poor editing of a 1980s Italian horror movie. As the young, handsome Robert, York is in his element wallowing in the feminine attention but surprisingly, as Robert gets older, more scared and ever madder York’s performance keeps pace. It’s possible he might be overdoing it, but since he’s acting from inside steadily accumulating layers of 1980s prosthetic face make-up and a pair of fake brown teeth any hamminess is muted, leaving only a bizarrely touching performance.

Donald Pleasence, as Inspector Datti, gets less to do but manfully struggles to forge a character from some pretty dull dialogue. He is a charmingly concerned father to his daughter and a determined hunter of the mystery killer. When Robert’s increasingly deranged telephonic harassment of the cop expands to include his beloved daughter, Datti’s compartmentalised roles collide and Pleasence revels in the slow burn to full blown mania. One of the finest cinematic sights of my life has been seeing Donald Pleasence spinning round a shopping plaza yelling “I kill you! I kill you! Bastard! Kill you! Fucking Bastard! Bastard!” Thank you, Phantom of Death. No thanks though for under-using Edwige Fenech. Yes, gialllo regular Edwige Fenech is also here, speaking English in her own voice for once; but she is more of a niche attraction as she doesn’t have much to do. Obviously, what she does do she does with the usual effortless Fenech panache. Regally sporting terrible, shoulder padded ‘80s styles is the bulk of her role, but she’s mostly there to get pregnant with Robert’s child and so give the climax some emotional resonance among all the screaming and stumbling about. Not many movies end with a savage fight between an arthritic old man and a heavily pregnant woman, but Phantom of Death dares to go there.

Despite initially looking like a run of the mill giallo, Phantom of Death opts instead to try an allegorical rumination on the inescapable nightmare of senescence that awaits those of us who don’t die young. Fret not though, all this high mindedness is done in a relentlessly tasteless fashion. And no serious fan of 1980s Italian horror movies would want it otherwise.

Hiya! Could you please write an angst scenario for Pro-hero Bakugou when his pro-hero s/o suddenly gets called to work on the day of their anniversary so she leaves promising she’d come back soon, but later that day, Bakugou gets a call from the Police telling him he needs to come to the station and claim his s/o’s dead body? All the angst please!

Oh boy just reading this made my heart break, I’m just pre-warning you I am veRY bad at angst so please don’t @ me

“We deeply apologize Mr. Bakugou..”

Never had the ash blond felt more of a punch to the gut than this moment, 

Never had he known the day of his anniversary with his beloved would be the very day he lost his beloved.

Never had Bakugou known that today was the last time he would hear your adorable giggle and your see angelic smile.

“You’ve gotta be fucking joking, tell me you’re fucking joking.” Bakugou growled into the phone, his place on the couch already up and running out the door.

———-

“I’m not letting your ass out of bed.” The gruff voice of your husband growled, his calloused hands wrapping tighter around your hips while he buried his face in your neck.

Letting out a soft giggle you ran your fingers through his spiky blond locks before kissing the top of his head gently, “Babe I have to head to the agency today, they just need me for a quick mission then I’ll be back before you know it.”

“The day of our damn anniversary? They can find another fucking hero, your cute ass is staying here.” Bakugou hissed into your neck, his hand snaking around to squeeze at your but causing you to squeak suddenly.

You didn’t have to see the ash blond’s face to feel his lips curve into a smirk at your response. Narrowing your eyes you pried yourself from your husband’s grasp before rolling off the bed and onto your wobbly feet.

“It’s only till three pm, then I’ll be home in time for the special dinner you planned,” You explained, lifting your pajama shirt over your head while grabbing your hero costume from your shared closet, “And we can do whatever you want after that.”

Bakugou groaned at the feeling of your warmth escaping his grasp, his arm lazily moving the hair from his eyes so he could watch you change, “Hell yeah we’re doing what I want, I have plans for you tonight.”

“Katsuki!” You hissed, while looking back to him with a deep blush. Of course he was staring at you with that smug little grin of his, though you acted as if you were disgusted his mischievous hints really made your heart race.

———-

Bakugou wasted no time in running down the flight of stairs in your shared apartment building, knowing the elevator would take to long.

“Damn it!” The ash blond yelled once he reached outside, not even bothering to run through the crowds of people outside. Rather he lowered his arms downward before creating explosions to launch him into the air, ignoring the startled cries from down below him.

Just like he did at the sports festival, Bakugou soared through the sky in record time to get to the police station. The words from the phone call echoing in his head.

“We couldn’t save her sir, we tried everything in our power…”

Gritting his teeth the ash blond squeezed his eyes shut, ignoring the voice in his head while he flew closer to the station.

You couldn’t be dead right? You were just here this morning! This was just one of your shitty pranks to get back at him for teasing this morning.

Right?

———-

“Now you don’t get into too much trouble while I’m gone young man, do you hear me?” 

Bakugou rolled his eyes at your nagging voice, watching your clothed form lean down to the bed he remained in to grasp onto his hand, “Stop talkin to me like that, you sound like my shitty old hag.”

“Now, that’s no way to talk about your mother.” You purred teasingly, running your fingers through his hair while looking down to him with a loving smile.

Letting out a huff, the ash blond used his free arm to lift himself up so he could be leveled with you, except for his slight height difference. Even in your hero uniform you looked so beautiful in his eyes- mind, body, and soul- everything about you just screamed perfection.

After all, Bakugou never settled for anything but perfection.

“You better come back safe or I’ll blast your ass all the way to hell.” Bakugou growled, his crimson eyes glaring down into your own (e/c) ones.

Smiling warmly to his blunt words, you knew deep down the brashness to them secretly held a true care and concern for you. Reaching up to cup your hand in his cheek, you leaned up and pressed your smooth lips against his own.

Gladly accepting your lips, the ash blond quickly made this kiss take a heated turn- like most things in his life- as he shoved his tongue in your mouth. This time instead of fighting the stubborn blond you accepted, letting him kiss you with every bit of passion you knew he had for you.

Upon breaking away you kept your faces close to each other, his arms around your hips while your own were cupping his cheeks.

“I promise I’ll be back Katsuki.”

———-

Barging through the doors of the police station, Bakugou didn’t even bother going to the front desk, knowing exactly where the Chief of Police would be.

Ignoring the confused looks and concerned voices, the ash blond blasted the chief’s office door open, his crimson eyes glaring holes into the startled man who immediately stood up at his presence.

“Mr. Bakugou I know you’re-”

“Shut the fuck up, where is she?!” Bakugou growled, his fists steaming with fury and worry as he challenged the man before him to say anything but ‘yes’.

The chief looked the pro-hero up and down before seemingly reading his thoughts, realizing he wouldn’t be able to say anything to the ash blond until he gave him what he wanted.

“This way…” The chief said a bit hesitantly, walking past Bakugou and out into the main room. At this point everyone had their eyes on the two men, knowing why the ash blond was here and why the chief looked so sullen.

The feeling of pity was being radiated around the office, making Bakugou furious to say the least. His crimson eyes remained glued to the floor so he wouldn’t have to look at the extras in the room, that is until the chief stopped before a door.

Whatever was in the room was hidden behind the heavily tinted window, making Bakugou’s heart race even faster than it had been before while the chief turned around to meet his gaze.

“Listen now kid, what’s in that room is going to be disturbing, especially to you. I’m going to need you to act like an adult, got it?”

Looking the man square in his face Bakugou opened his mouth to respond before he shook his head and growled lowly to him, shoving the man aside and swinging the door open.

Disturbing? Disturbing was an understatement. This was more along the lines of horrifying, deranged, sickening, unbelievable.

Few people were in the room, a seemed reporter talking to one of the officers and medics in the corner while another nurse sat by your side with a dreary expression.

But the only person Bakugou saw in the room was your resting body. While there was not a scratch or bruise to be found on you, the normal (s/c) tone of your soft skin grew more pale by the second, the sight making Bakugou’s stomach flip.

Slowly he walked to your side, taking the chair by the nurse while he grabbed at your hand. Not even noticing his body begin to slowly tremble.

“Tell me she’s sleeping.” Bakugou barely whispered in a monotoned voice, his eyes remaining glued to your body while the nurse jerked her head up nervously.

“S..She saved all of her colleagues.” The nurse muttered quietly, “They all had their lives on the line but she sacrificed herself for them…”

Bakugou grit his teeth while he squeezed at your ice cold hand, of course you sarcrafsixed yourself. That sounded exactly like you, always pulling the same selfless bullshit you always did.

Shoes clicking across the tiled floors could be heard behind Bakugou, suddenly a firm hand on his shoulder, “The villain injected a poison into her bloodstream, whatever the substance was killed her immediately.”

This greatly disturbed Bakugou. No… it enraged Bakugou.

“She didn’t even get to die honorably?” Bakugou hissed, his eyes still remained on your body, “That fucker just took her life away from her in a second? Without even giving her a chance to process what was happening?!”

At this point the ash blond was shaking violently; rage, sadness, fear, and despair flowing through his veins. Soaking up every inch of his body.

“Mr. Bakugou I’m deeply sorr-”

“NO!” Bakugou screamed, causing every person in the room to jump at the high pitched sound while the ash blond stood up from his chair with such force it knocked the metal object back into the wall, “She’s not fucking dead!

“That motherfucker didn’t take her away from me! Not like this! She can’t die like this! Not now, not ever!”

The sound of the young hero’s voice made everyone’s blood chill in the room. Not because of how rageful it sounded, no, because of how desperate it sounded.

The great Ground Zero, Number One Hero in the world broken at the sight of his beloved dead before him. It was the story of a true tragedy.

“H..How could you (S/o)?!” Bakugou cried, his crimson eyes squeezing shut while warm tears fell down his cheeks, “You promised me you would come back!”

Gritting his teeth, the ash blond scooped your form up into his arms, his sharp cries being heard throughout the whole room. Throughout the whole police station. Throughout the whole city. Throughout the whole world.

The cries of a torn young hero in love with the girl who broke her promise.

His True Colours

“We finally get Jack’s green hair back! ...But what do we lose in return?”

Readers beware, you’re in for a scare! ...I’m only kidding. This is just a story idea I’ve been messing with! ‘Cause let’s face it: if Jack ever does dye his hair again, you know he’s gonna make a big deal out of it. So dorks, here’s a late-night spook/theory for you to enjoy!

Links: AO3

It’s been a few weeks since Jack returned from his “How Did We Get Here?” tour, the shows having gone down a smashing success. Those in attendance raved about the theatrics from the natural born showman, with everything from the audience interaction to the special effects working to create an unforgettable performance.

The fans that couldn’t make it to the shows contributed to the hype online, taking to social media and creating a tidal wave of incredible stories, edits, and art. The pieces ranged with everything from fluff to angst, starring Jack and all of the beloved Egos.

Jackieboyman fist bumping Spider-Man; Schneeplestein leering menacingly at the viewer, wielding a needle that definitely wasn’t regulation length; Chase with a variety of flower crowns. The works radiated with the passion and love the community held for both Jack and his characters.

And then, there was Anti.

Cryptic zalgo text littered every fans feed. The familiar lines of "D͏i͞d ̷yo͞u ̵miss̢ me̢?̧” and "You͘ s͢t̢o͝p͟ped pay̕in̛g̢ a͟tt͝eńtio͝ǹ!̡" were eerie reminders of the virus’s ever-lingering presence. The fandom was itching with pent-up fervour, as though Anti had somehow wormed his way under their very skin.

Poems, theories, art; he had it all. 

The only difference was something that the untrained eye might not notice.

It was now old news that Jack had dyed his once-green hair back to its natural brown shade after years of the trademark look. And yes, the fans were sad to see it go. Each Ego sported one of Jack’s varying shades of green. It had been around for the creation of Anti, Schneep, Marvin... everyone!

The community moved on though, deciding that even if Jack had his brown hair back, the Egos could still keep their signature shades.

Except for Anti.

After all, Anti was a virus who depended on Jack’s body to survive. He didn’t have his own, so he should share Jack’s traits, right? It might not have made perfect sense, but the community seemed to accept the general idea, as was evident with nearly every piece of Anti art mirroring Jack’s brown hair, with the rest of the Egos staying the same.

No harm done, it was just the fandom taking creative license.

Cut to another morning upload, where Jack has just posted a brand new “SepticArt” video, the theme being art related to the tour or that period of time while he was away.

He’s as upbeat as usual, excitedly chattering away about all of his favourite moments while pouring over dozens of brilliant submissions.

A few minutes into the video, Jack pulls up an edit of Anti on stage at one of his past shows. He makes a remark about its complexity, and how well done it is, before noting the caption at the bottom:

“A little Anti takeover from Jack’s show in Texas! Forgive the blurry edges, kinda new to this style. And tbh, I’m still not used to brown-haired Anti. Looks good, but I miss our green Glitch Boy. Wonder if we’ll get to see him again haha.“

Jack laughs, reflexively running a hand through the front of his messy hair that’s not tucked into his beanie.

“Yeah, I got that question a lot while I was on tour. And I’m not sure; I mean, never say never, but I’m pretty happy with my natural hair. It’s less of a pain in the ass to take care of, that’s for sure.”

His hand lingers in his fringe for just a second more before he thanks the artist and carries on.

This time it’s a Marvin picture; the Magician is skillfully shuffling a deck of playing cards, grinning. His neon green bangs hang messily over his signature cat mask.

Jack points out his love of the bold line use, though he pauses at the hair. His eyes narrow ever so slightly, but his smile is still as bright as ever.

Then there’s a sketch of Chase, who’s excitedly comparing a befuddled JJ to the box art of the Monopoly Man while they try to play said board game.

Jack chuckles, hand going to rub his throat absentmindedly.

A watercolour of Anti from the back, his dark hair a stark contrast silhouetted against the bright green background of a not-so-friendly looking Sam whose teeth glint with moisture.

Jack grips his mouse a bit tighter.

Schneeplestein happily writing a postcard on some tropical beach, lab coat and all, dark green roots visible under his hat.

Jack cracks his neck.

As the video carries on, there’s a distinct tension in the YouTuber: his body twitches imperceptibly; his hands clenching into fists before quickly loosening; he can’t stop touching his throat.

A newcomer to Jack’s channel might write this off as excitement, his energy getting the better of him. The more experienced members of his community, however, begin to feel nervous.

Still, Jack is as taken with his community’s artistic endeavours as always. The smile on his face proves that.

It’s wide, teeth bared for all to see.

The video is almost finished, with Jack coming to the last piece. He once again thanks everyone who participated, saying how he would be nothing without them.

The theorists release a breath. 

Everything was fine; just their typical overactive imaginations. Nothing to worry about.

With an eager grin, Jack pulls up the final entry. 

It’s a stunning digital drawing of a bathroom mirror taken from the YouTuber’s perspective as he stares at his reflection, clutching a porcelain sink.

It smirks back, smile unnaturally wide. He eyes Jack with a blackened gaze, eagerly assessing him for even a hint of weakness. Blood from several crude, deep cuts in his throat drips down into his shirt collar. The knife responsible lays in the sink, crimson coating the blade.

From the angle, you’d swear it was Anti looking back at himself, sickly pleased with his deranged handiwork. The tell is the gauges and Jack’s lack thereof; the man you’re seeing the perspective from is without them.

Jack stares at the drawing, his gaze transfixed. For a split-second, you think to refresh the video, believing it to have lagged. The music Robin added into the background is gone, and the webcam footage seems frozen...

And then he’s throwing his head back, laughing as he grips his sides.

“That’s a helluva drawing! God, do you see the detail?! Anti looks badass!”

He’s positively giddy, scanning every inch of the artwork with rapt enthusiasm. He begins to say something about the shading as he brings the picture out of fullscreen view. Then his laughter cuts off abruptly, smile tightening. He scrolls down to highlight the artist’s note:

“Those 20 hours were all worth it! Here’s my entry for Jack’s #SepticArt event; I call it “Two-Way Mirror”! I’m really happy with how it turned out, though I was a little worried about how I’d draw the differences for Anti’s reflection. With his brown hair, how can you even tell the two of them apart? 😆 Anyway, hope you guys like it!”

His expression becomes flat. He stares with an unwavering intensity that leaves goosebumps on your skin.

“...The same...?”

Jack mutters the phrase so quietly, it’s almost indecipherable.

“You really think... we’re the same?”

A hollow chuckle spews from his lips, and then it grows into a laugh; high-pitched and cold. In a blur, he slams his fist down onto his desk, and even off-screen, you can hear his keyboarding shattering. His lips are pulled back into a hideous snarl, a grotesque mask of fury.

“I’m nothing like him. N̞͔̤̤̺͖ͅOT̼̱̪̬̹͉H̗͝I̶̲̰̘̠̹N͉͚̖̤̳̻G͓͈̩̣͎̝͞.

The man’s eyes widen fearfully, seemingly at the sound of his own voice. His rage gives way to panic as he falls forward in his seat, clutching his head with a pained groan.

Jack’s body shudders, racked by waves of tremors as his knuckles strain white, nails digging into the arms of his chair. The camera feed is breaking apart, glitching between frames of Jack clawing at his forearms, his neck. His breathing is erratic, mumbles falling from his mouth - desperate, rambling pleas.

Then he’s still.

Too still.

Jack lets out a heavy breath, relieved - no, satisfied - before sitting up slowly. His beanie has been knocked off, his usual fluffy hair on full display.

All eyes are immediately on his neck and - oh... it’s untouched. For a moment, the viewers feel a spike of relief, hearts slamming into their throats. But then Jack opens his eyes, and their blood runs cold.

Black. Darker than any art or edit could even attempt to capture.

He sits back, almost lounging in Jack’s gaming chair, as he takes a deep breath in. Cracking his knuckles, he rolls his neck in a series of jerky moves before closing his eyes again. And in one smooth motion, he runs his hand through the front of Jack’s hair.

His fingers pass through the strands, adjusting the colour as it melts in. The brown lightens to blonde, then grows brighter. The green hue radiates with an unnatural sheen.

Stopping at the fringe, he lowers his hand to reveal the change; familiar, yet not. Wrong.

Anti opens his eyes, a wickedly pleased smirk playing across his lips as he leans toward the camera.

“Are͏ ya͝ ̡f́uck͞i̛n̛’ ̛ha͠p͞py͏ now̶?͝”

He giggles with twisted glee, hair falling into his eyes as he tips his head forward. Then he stops, and looks up through his bangs, glaring into the camera with a ferocity that dares anyone watching to defy him.

“Ỳou͡’̴ve͠ ͠had̷ yǫur ͢fun, bu̧t̢ d͡on’t fuc̕ki͞n̸’͟ ͝f̷orģet w̢ḩo ͠I ̷a͘m͢, w̢ḩat ͠I ̷a͘m͢. A̧n̸d thąt͠’s n̛oţ h̢im.͘”

The camera is shoved to the floor. The lens cracks, spider-webbing across the screen before it cuts to black. Echoing laughter grows distant as Anti walks away.

There is no second upload that day.

InStyle.

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Along with aid coming from characters off the account of Grand Burglary Auto V, players rise via the unlawful rankings by banding together with close friends to accomplish Jobs for money, investment homes, lorries and personality upgrades, contend in typical very competitive modes like Deathmatches or even Nationality by sea, land or air, or make your very own web content to share and play with the Grand Fraud Automotive neighborhood.

85 Questions

 Rules: Answer these 85 statements and tag twenty people WHAT ARE YOU, NUTS?!

tagged by: @littlemissgrimrose (DAMN YOU, THIS IS REVENGE FOR STARTING THE HEIGHT FIGHT AGAIN, ISN’T IT)

The last…

drink: Water

phone call: Robocall

text message: Petsitting client

song you listened to: “Sin from Genesis” by Shiro Sagisu

time you cried: Watching Princess Mononoke again

dated someone twice: High school

kissed someone and regretted it: Never

been cheated on: Never

lost someone special: Yes…

been depressed: About a week ago if not earlier

gotten drunk and thrown up: Never

Three Favorite Colors

Blue

Gold

Red

in the last year have you….

made new friends: Online friends, yes.

fallen out of love: Never

laughed until you cried: Listening to the Super Best Friendcast

found out someone was talking about you: No

met someone who changed you: Nope

found out who your friends are: ???

kissed someone on your Facebook list: HA HA NO

General

how many of your Facebook friends do you know in real life? Roughly 40%

do you have any pets? One very lazy dog

do you want to change your name? Ehh. Dunno.

what did you do for your last birthday? I packed up so I could stay in a somewhat furnished closet falsely described as a “guest house” while the walls of my room were fixed.

what time did you wake up? This morning? 7:30 AM

what were you doing at midnight last night? Browsing TV Tropes

name something you can’t wait for: The next Madoka movie

when was the last time you saw your mum: Less than two minutes ago

what are you listening to right now? The Rick and Morty theme song

have you ever talked to a person named tom? Um, yes?

something that is getting on your nerves: [INSERT NAME OF REPUBLICAN ELECTED OFFICIAL HERE], [INSERT NAME OF MEMBER OF THE KHARDASHIAN FAMILY HERE], the Sonic fandom’s Sally hatedom that’s crawled out of the woodwork to bitch about Sallicole, the person who wrote these questions

most visited website: TV Tropes

hair color: Dark blonde

long or short hair: I am currently forced to have short hair under penalty of endless bitching about it

do you have a crush on someone? Nope, and never again.

what do you like about yourself? I like that I can channel my many, many frustrations with myself, my mental/physical health, my current living situation, and pretty much the world in general into my creative projects

piercings: None

blood type: B-

nickname: BHS online, none in real life

relationship status: Single and staying that way. Fuck that shit.

zodiac: Virgo

pronouns: He/Him

favourite tv show(s): Firefly, Buffy, Sailor Moon, Evangelion, Gurren Lagann, Madoka Magica, Steven Universe, Gravity Falls, Star Vs. the Forces of Evil, Rick and Morty, The Muppet Show, Star Trek: TNG, etc.

tattoos: HA HA NO.

right or left handed: Left-handed

surgery: Yes

sport: I have a crippling allergy to sports

vacation: My last real vacation was in 2015

pair of trainers: Fila

More General Questions

eating: I was gonna have Breyer’s Reese’s ice cream but then I started this shit and now I have to put my ice cream off. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW.

drinking: Milk

i’m about to: Contemplate the murder of whoever wrote these questions

waiting for: An announcement for Figuarts Cure Scarlet

want: Figuarts of the remaining Precures that don’t have them yet (HAPPINESS CHARGE, BANDAI. GET ON IT)

get married: Never.

career: I want to be able to make a living off my writing, and hopefully make enough money that I don’t need to interact with shitty people anymore

Which is better?

hugs or kisses: Hugs, I guess?

lips or eyes: Eyes.

shorter or taller: @littlemissgrimrose IS A TINY ADORABLE BABBY

older or younger: Eh, either. Personality is more important.

nice arms or nice stomach: Stomach

hookup or relationship: Assuming this means “romantic relationship”, fuck that, I’m going with hookups. Not that I have them. At all. Ever.

troublemaker or hesitant: A mix of both, but way more on the hesitant side.

Have You Ever…

kissed a stranger: Yes. At a con. On a dare.

drank hard liquor: Yes.

lose glasses/contact lenses: Yes.

turned someone down: No

sex on the first date: HA HA HA HA HA HA

had your heart broken: Yes. If this goes on much longer I’m going to start giving nonsense bullshit for my answers. I WANT MY ICE CREAM, DAMMIT.

been arrested: No.

cried when someone died: Yes

fallen for a friend: Platypus.

Do You believe in…

yourself: No, I believe in the me that believes in you!

miracles: Since you came alooooong, you sexy thang!

love at first sight: If this is a come-on, it’s not going to work.

santa claus: Christmas long ago ceased to have any meaning other than as a socially obligatory gift-exchanging holiday, and those who think otherwise are fooling themselves.

kiss on the first date: Better to start them off with a band that doesn’t suck and isn’t headed by a deranged cocaine addict who still prances around in black leather and platform boots at like sixty-plus years old.

angels: Forklift.

Other…

eye color: Blue

favorite movie: Princess Mononoke

I tag:@tracersgayass, @beloved-monsters, @power-rings-infinity, @markruffalo, @sonichedgeblog, @fuck you I’m not putting anyone else through this shit I have ice cream waiting

Whether you’re standing in the theater lobby or curled up in bed, deciding what to watch next is often the most difficult part of any pop-culture junkie’s day. And with dozens of films in theaters on any given weekend, plus virtually endless layers of streaming purgatory to sort through in search of your next binge-watch, there’s more out there—and tougher decisions to make—than ever.

Fortune’s here to help you navigate the week’s latest offerings, boiling all the entertainment out there down into three distinct recommendations: should you see it, stream it, or skip it? Find out below.

SEE IT: ‘Cats’ (In theaters)

What you have to understand about Cats is that it’s certifiably insane, from its Jellicle whiskers to the tip of its Jellice tail. I’m referring here to the beloved Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical, one of Broadway’s longest-running, as much as Tom Hooper’s gleefully demented movie adaptation. From day one, Cats has been one of the strangest megahits in any storytelling medium; it’s necessary to know this, and accept this, before reading any further.

Describing the plot of Cats makes you feel like you’re on bath salts (though not as much as does seeing it play out on screen), but the broad strokes are essentially this. Over the course of one night in an unnamed, eerily empty neighborhood, a group of cats take turns introducing one another—with names like Rum Tum Tugger and Mr. Mistoffeelees—as they debate which one of them will get to die, ascending to another plane of existence known as the Heaviside Layer, where they’ll be reborn into a new life. As a story, it’s pure fever dream, the kind of thing even Roald Dahl’s editor wouldn’t have let him get away with; but the strange non-plot of Cats functions, in a theatrical setting, as an ideal delivery system for visual splendor and powerhouse vocals.

Hooper’s tackled musicals before, notably in 2012’s Les Miserables, where he spent 158 minutes on extreme close-ups of France’s most impoverished, and he fully throws himself into the task of translating Cats, a much more experimental piece of work, to the screen. There’s a newly created audience surrogate, Victoria (newcomer Francesca Hayward), who’s tossed via burlap sack into the neighborhood of the Jellicles, a tribe of cats on the eve of making their “Jellicle choice.” Across the sung-through story, she meets a mewling menagerie of contenders for said choice, including bumbling Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson), stately Gus the Theatre Cat (Ian McKellen), and portly Bustopher Jones (James Corden), plus the aforementioned Mistoffeelees (a gawky Laurie Davidson), and Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo, who sings and simpers gamely but seems to be missing a little something). Presiding over all is Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench and, no, I don’t know who named these cats), who’ll enjoy the festivities then select the lucky (?) feline in question.

The real draw of Cats involves seeing the all-star cast, which also includes pop sovereign Taylor Swift and vocal legend Jennifer Hudson (who gets to belt out “Memory,” the production’s lone showstopper), made over with the help of CG effects, called “digital fur technology” (though it’s basically just expensive deepfakery), into cat-human hybrids. The effect is deeply upsetting; though the actors are covered in fur and sporting twitchy tails, their proportions are still human, so the actors appear discomfitingly sensual while dancing and serenading one another. They have cat ears, but also human teeth; whiskers, but also fingernails. Some wear jumpsuits, while others go for a more paw-naturel look; the movie directs attention to the strange sense of faux-nudity that results by having Idris Elba’s villainous Macavity wear a hat and fur coat (which begs questions we shouldn’t dare to ask) but later make a surprise scene entrance after disrobing, to which the other cats react with a fairly hypocritical degree of horror.

In watching this digital fur extravaganza at work, entranced by the sheer scale of its visual chaos, I found myself wondering what else Hooper and his team could have done. The tactic most employed by Disney, the imperial overlord Universal’s bravely going up against with this freaky little musical (note this week’s skip it), has been to pursue photorealism in its animated productions. Earlier this year, it turned The Lion King into an uncanny-valley catastrophe, sapping the story of all emotional and dramatic resonance in the process. People simply did not want to hear human voices coming out of the mouths of Planet Earth lions, which is very understandable. Hooper’s techniques with Cats, through which his furry creations sing and dance maniacally into their versions of heaven or hell, bring the whole affair closer to Gaspar Noe’s Climax by way of The Aristocats. While Cats is by no means going to be a guaranteed hit with the little ones, who may be terrified by it or confused by its sexuality, it’s an absolutely unhinged piece of blockbuster filmmaking, worth beholding in all its tawdry, queer, bombastic glory.

It’s the kind of risk studios just don’t take any more, perhaps much more of one than executives ever intended it to be. The film cost some $100 million to pull off, and the amount of uncertainty Cats brings with it into the multiplex—did those oh-my-god-they-actually-did-it trailers turn people off, or the opposite?—makes it the most exciting box-office curiosity left in the calendar year. Will it break records or bomb? The experience of watching Cats—howls of stunned laughter from many, with a few Swifties cheering her grand entrance and the majority of us struggling to even once pick our jaws up off the floor—is one of the most strange and mind-melting you’re likely to have in a theater when it comes to studio content of this size and scope. I’d recommend going for much for the same reason the play’s stuck around so long—whether it’s a masterpiece or one of the worst things you’ve ever seen, it’s resolutely its own thing, a deranged freak-fantasia worth falling into for a couple of hours, if just to say you did. That is to say, it’s Cats.

STREAM IT: ‘The Witcher’ (Netflix)

Netflix’s latest original-series gamble is aiming for Game of Thrones-level complexity in its sketching of a dark-fantasy realm where mythical creatures lie in wait but monarchal power struggles loom just as large.

And based on its first season, The Witcher (adapted from the beloved book series by Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski) is well on its way. Comprising eight episodes, a smaller number which clearly allowed showrunner Lauren Schmidt Hissrich to focus on thoughtfully tracing an ambitious array of story arcs, the series hangs around the impossibly broad shoulders of Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill, great at veining these strong-and-silent types with a gallows humor).

A stone-faced loner who roams the dangerous Continent in search of monsters to slay, Geralt is no hero, and he’s often perilously close to going over the edge in his bloodletting. The character’s most distinguished by his unwillingness to diverge from his own moral compass by getting involved in court politics. In this, he’s reminiscent of Clint Eastwood’s tumbleweed-drifting Man with No Name or Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe, a sword in hand rather than a revolver. But Geralt’s on a path toward destiny, as protagonists in high-fantasy fare such as this often are, and he’s soon to become entwined in the fates of two distinctly powerful women. There’s Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), in training to become a powerful sorceress at a mysterious academy, and Ciri (Freya Allen), a young princess in hiding after her kingdom was ransacked and her parents slain. All three characters are afforded their own storylines, weaving their way across the Continent and finding themselves transformed in a myriad of ways by its darkest, magical elements.

Further detailing the epic, sweeping nature of The Witcher‘s story would be to deprive audiences of unexpected, rather graceful reveals that the scripts tease out in due time. What there is to say about The Witcher is that it represents one of Netflix’s most fully formed forays into genre territory yet. The fights, especially in a cinematic and sprawling pilot, are of a kinetic and impressively top-shelf variety, Cavill’s Geralt moving like a man possessed as he rends flesh from bone and engages in some surprisingly balletic bouts of swordplay. And the production design is similarly well-executed, quickly establishing the Continent as a grungy, bloody landscape for these characters to navigate. But it’s the strength of the storytelling that bodes most well for The Witcher as a new destination for those done licking their wounds after that fateful final run in Westeros.

SKIP IT: ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ (In theaters)

… even though you’ll see it

“If this mission fails, it was all for nothing,” characters tell one another throughout Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. That’s popcorn-prose concentrate, the kind of dramatic hyperbole that Star Wars has been coasting on since the very beginning. And while it’s traditionally been a fake-out—there’s always another mission, another battle to be won, even after ones that end with your hero encased in carbonite—such sentiment has never felt as profoundly hollowed out as it does by the end of Rise of Skywalker, a graceless franchise finale about nothing more than missions succeeding that itself feels like a staggering failure of vision, conceptually as well as on basic storytelling fronts.

Director J.J. Abrams’ anxiety in making Rise of Skywalker surely fell along those same all-or-nothing lines. By his own admission, he’s bad at endings, and there was tremendous pressure riding on Abrams to bring home the story of the Skywalker clan, a nine-movie saga that’s never loomed larger in the pop cultural imagination. The Rise of Skywalker may well be the last Star Wars movie to feature the heroes Abrams helped forge in his nostalgic The Force Awakens—Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe (Oscar Isaac)—and it’s almost certain to be the final outing for original cast members the series is now starting to outlive. Carrie Fisher died after shooting her scenes for The Last Jedi, and this entry (once intended to be Leia’s movie in the sense that The Force Awakens was Han’s and The Last Jedi was Luke’s) is to be her last screen credit. This just makes the magnitude of Abrams’s failure all the more devastating. One last adventure? Hardly. In a pivotal entry for the franchise, he chooses not to tell a story, instead drowning the developments this trilogy’s second film put forward in a soupy mess of fan service and stilted, unoriginal plotting.

When The Last Jedi hit theaters two years ago, it offered a thematic depth hitherto unseen in Star Wars movies; in the hands of writer-director Rian Johnson, it tangled head-on with questions of hero worship and inheritance that have always been intrinsic to the galaxy far, far away. But the answers it provided—that one must relinquish the past to chart a future, that our heroes will disappoint us, that the Force is not the lineage of a select but a spiritual energy belonging to all of us—were bold and unexpected. In this, it was a shocking follow-up to The Force Awakens, Abrams’ play-the-hits remake of A New Hope, and ruffled feathers with a small but loud contingent of fans, who disliked the film’s treatment of Luke and focus on supporting characters (the most hated of whom, perhaps not coincidentally given the way these Internet mobs tend to go, were women and minorities).

This is worth mentioning because The Rise of Skywalker feels, more than a film, like a feature-length capitulation to those who disliked what The Last Jedi did with the Star Wars mythos (which was, at the end of the day, to make a real movie with it). Where The Last Jedi zagged, Rise of Skywalker zigs, choppily, back inside the pre-existing template to which Disney and Lucasfilm clearly now believes these movies must adhere. It is in fact comical how frantically it rushes to undo Johnson’s progression of these characters, crowding them unnaturally into the same space to combat criticisms everyone spent too much time apart in the last film and entirely sidelining Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran, the series’ first Asian-American lead who was brutally harassed online after The Last Jedi) with so little explanation it feels just as racist and sexist as the chatroom vitriol she was subjected to. The Rise of Skywalker also works overtime to retcon The Last Jedi‘s biggest twists. One deformed bad guy with Force powers is down for the count? Let’s introduce another. The question of Rey’s parentage got answered, unexpectedly, with the revelation her family name didn’t have to matter so much? Well, let’s revisit that actually.

From the first words in its opening crawl (“The dead speak!”) to its final frame, The Rise of Skywalker spends its whole runtime chasing ghosts. As teased by the trailers, Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is back, for reasons the script scarcely attempts to rationalize, and he brings with him a fleet of Star Destroyers capable of wiping out entire planets in one blast. You thought the First Order was bad? Get ready for the “Final Order.”

That’s truly the order of business in The Rise of Skywalker. It’s a movie slavishly devoted to hitting beats from previous films without basic narrative sense, to the point where it feels less like a natural ending to this franchise and more like bad fanfiction. The only way the characters progress is through ill-advised romantic pairings. One interminable (and ultimately pointless) lightsaber battle takes place amid in the wreckage of a destroyed Death Star. The finale involves outgunned resistance fighters making one last stand to blow up a massive bad-guy space base. Beloved characters are imperiled constantly, but there are no real stakes when even the already-dead ones are back for sizable roles. Familiar desert planets pop up, along with Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams), for maximum fan pandering.

There’s a real difference between a director and an artist, and nothing demonstrates this better than the massive step down The Rise of Skywalker takes both thematically and visually after The Last Jedi. There’s little by way of distinctive or striking visuals; the entire film is hued a murky blue, with an ill-advised focus on strobe lighting. Furthermore, it’s a Star Wars movie with absolutely nothing under its surface, which is a damning trait for a movie in this franchise. Abrams is a great producer, but his weaknesses as a filmmaker have never been this exposed. In attempting to give a noxious portion of the Star Wars fanbase what they asked for, his finale feels like a cheap and derivative product, the ultimate end-result of Disney’s written-by-committee modus operandi, so craven about resurrecting Star Wars that it comes off like grave-robbing. This is Star Wars broken under the weight of its own importance, eating its own tail for lack of any original voices to better nourish it. It’s nothing short of a tragedy.

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—Why these high-profile book adaptations bombed at the box office in 2019 —’Tis the season for holiday movies—and Hallmark and Lifetime aren’t afraid of Netflix —Whistleblower cinema is back in a big way —How some artists are building their careers through Spotify playlists —As 2019 draws to a close, does the movie star still have a pulse? Follow Fortune on Flipboard to stay up-to-date on the latest news and analysis.

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The 13 Scariest Horror Games You Should Play For Halloween Terrors of the SeasonHalloween fast approaches, which means you're likely in the mood to play some spooky games. Luckily for you, there are a wealth of horror games to play that are well worth your time. The genre had humble beginnings in the late '80s, with a wave of fantastic games coming out in the three subsequent decades. And thanks to the rise of indie games, there are more horror games out now than ever before.To help you discover some of the most terrifying horror experiences available, we've compiled 13 games that we find to be the most frightening. Genre classics like Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil Remake, and Dead Space are represented here, but you'll also find more surprising choices interspersed throughout. Regardless of their notoriety, the games we highlight are all ones we that left us with lasting memories.There's a lot of horror-related media out right now that isn't just games. The latest entry of the cult favorite horror film franchise Halloween just released, and it's quite good, so be sure to read our review. There are also some pretty cool Easter eggs in the film that are likely to please hardcore fans. In other news, the second season of Castlevania is set to premiere via Netflix on October 26, and we've got a review of the first six episodes.Which horror games do you think are the scariest? Shout out your favorites in the comments below. Silent Hill 2A lot has been said about Silent Hill 2, so I'll spare you any overt critical analysis I have on this much beloved survival-horror sequel and instead share with you why this game still rocks. The premise alone should be enough to captivate you. As the widowed James Sutherland, you travel to the foggy town of Silent Hill in search of your dead wife, who has somehow managed to send you a letter. As a middle schooler (yes, I played this game in 8th grade), Silent Hill 2's story was like nothing else I had encountered. There were no action heroes, explosions, or convoluted government conspiracies. Just a crippling sense of dread, an eerie atmosphere, and intriguing characters that kept my hands glued to my PS2 controller.Silent Hill 2 expertly handles its myriad horrors, pulling you in with disturbing creatures, clever puzzles, and haunting sound design. I can't help but be in awe of how well it stands up whenever I revisit the game every few years. Its Historical Society area remains one of its crowning achievements and one of horror gaming's most expertly designed environments, brilliantly handling tense foreboding with unexpected pathways and puzzles. There are some slow moments interspersed between its most terrifying ones, but they're never enough to detract from the chilling horror and thought-provoking storytelling on display.If you haven't played Silent Hill 2, you're in for quite a spooky adventure. It's one of the genre greats for a reason, and it only continues to stand the test of time. -- Matt Espineli OutlastRed Barrels' Outlast has always stood out to me for how the game presents its world. Mount Massive Asylum is blanketed in absolute darkness, so the only way to see where you're going most of the time is by using the night vision function on protagonist Miles Upshur's video camera.Because I'm terrified of the dark, I use the camera all the time, and this transforms everything I see into a murky green where faraway environmental details aren't clear and enemies' eyes shine with a ghoulish glow. Also, this mechanic forces me to explore--batteries need to be found to keep the night vision function on the camera working--and Outlast's chilling soundtrack make those unscripted moments of searching very tense.Looking for batteries isn't even the scariest part of Outlast, though. It's the inhuman Variants that create most of the game's scares. Desperately running through an insane asylum while cannibalistic twins, a scissor-wielding mad scientist, and a seemingly unkillable monster chase after Upshur is terrifying. The worst of these Variants, Eddie Gluskin, appears in Outlast's Whistleblower expansion. Gluskin, aka The Groom, is a deranged serial killer who mutilates his male victims' genitalia in order to create the "perfect wife." Watching what he does--in first-person I might add--to the DLC's protagonist, Waylon Park, haunted me for days, and is still nauseating to even think about. -- Jordan Ramee Dead SpaceThree years after Resident Evil 4 squeezed new scares from one of gaming's best horror series, Visceral Games might have perfected the third-person survival horror formula with Dead Space. Players control engineer Isaac Clarke as he and a rescue team land on a city-sized spaceship to find out why it's not responding to communications. They quickly discover the reason is that the ship has been overrun by monsters that used to be its crew, which are nearly impossible to kill unless players use various sci-fi mining tools to hack off the creatures' limbs.Dead Space is a perfect confluence of modern sensibility and old-school survival horror, pairing fantastic graphics and gameplay, specifically its limb-cutting mechanics, with slightly uncooperative controls and the desperate hunt for items to keep Isaac healthy. The game uses everything at its disposal to scare you. Its industrial setting pairs with sound design that makes you constantly feel like you're not alone, and every surface is covered in air vents perfect for delivering popcorn-tossing moments as lethal mutated creatures come squirming out, straight at your face. Visceral tops it off with a spooky story that combines Alien, Children of the Corn, and Evil Dead. -- Phil Hornshaw Devil DaggersDevil Daggers may not be a traditional horror game by any means, but that makes it no less scary every time I play it. It throws you into a dark arena and tasks you with eliminating waves of flying skulls, disgusting, multi-legged beasts, and other demonic monstrosities.There is no winning in Devil Daggers; death is inevitable, whether that comes after 10 seconds or 100 (if you're good). It's minimal in terms of visuals and sound; there's no music to accompany the onslaught of enemies. Instead, enemies produce terrifying but distinct noises. This serves to assist you by letting you know where enemies are, but it also creates an inescapable sense of dread as these horrifying monsters box you in. I find it hard not to jump out of my seat when I turn and see that I'm face to face with a flying horned monster.It's unusual that a game designed around high score runs is scary, and the threat of failure is undoubtedly part of what makes Devil Daggers so tense. But it's the combination of this tension with the haunting imagery and sounds that create a legitimately terrifying experience. -- Chris Pereira Slender: The ArrivalI'll admit to being the perfect mark for Slender: The Eight Pages when it was released for free in 2012. The tiny, minimalist Unity experiment by developer Mark Hadley capitalized on peak Slender Man interest, expounding on the Internet-born folklore creature that was already doing a phenomenal job of absolutely creeping me out. Hadley's little game was a tightly made little nightmare: you're exploring a small, darkened park from a first-person perspective, and you're being hunted by a supernatural creature that you can't even look at without dying. Players try to gather eight pages from around a park, which detail some other poor victim's descent into madness, while the thing keeps appearing in front of you, ever closer. It was a perfect storm of jump scares, ambient dread, and a spooky creation of the zeitgeist at the height of its power.Slender: The Arrival expanded the game with multiple levels, a full story and prettier graphics to fully realize Hadley's original concept. It didn't change the core principle of being hunted, with nothing to help you except fleeing in desperate terror, and hoping that looking away from what stalks you might be enough to save you a few moments more. -- Phil Hornshaw Resident Evil 7: BiohazardTo play Resident Evil 7 is to willingly put yourself in an inhospitable environment. The decrepit mansion where the game begins is filthy, with peeling, yellowed wallpaper, broken drywall, and garbage littering the scarred wooden floor. Wind blows through the cracks in drafts, emitting a low, constant howl. The kitchen, scattered with moldy food and unidentifiable skeletal remains, is unspeakable. You can almost smell the rot.This is not a place you want to be--and that's before you meet the family that lives there. There's the dad, who stalks after you even after you've killed him numerous times. Mom doesn't bat an eye when he severs junior's hand at the dinner table. Somehow even worse is grandma, a catatonic woman in a wheelchair who can appear and vanish any time and anywhere when you're not looking.The game improves on the best aspects of the series, while throwing out everything that had grown stale in recent installments. Playing Resident Evil 7 is a thrilling, crazy, scary-as-hell experience. And if you think it's terrifying on a TV screen, you gotta try it in VR. -- Chris Reed Condemned: Criminal OriginsThe Xbox 360 had a generally strong launch lineup, despite lacking a killer app like Halo. There was a Majora's Mask-lite in Kameo: Elements of Power; sports games like Amped 3 and Madden, and for those who passed on the heavily flawed, but creative Perfect Dark Zero, Call of Duty 2 was there to satisfy action fans when WWII shooters were in their prime. With other titles with mass appeal like Tony Hawk's American Wasteland or Gun, who had time for a psychological horror game?That juxtaposition between Condemned: Criminal Origins and the rest of the launch lineup was perfectly clear in the music of the title screen. Half Se7en, half Shutter Island, you played as detective Ethan Thomas, who has to track down a serial killer to prove his innocence after his partner is murdered. Along the way, you're attacked by rattled-up drug addicts and hallucinations of demons who strategically flee, hide behind corners, and fight back in the game's surprisingly effective first-person melee combat.What made Condemned such a memorable horror experience was the feeling of being alone in the grittiest, most desolate parts of town, with intimate combat against people who hated you. You could hear them seething around corners, flanking you in the darkness, and that was all before the game throws demonic hallucinations at you. Sprinkle in a memorable final boss, a couple of solid jump-scares, one of the best uses of Xbox achievements in requiring you to forgo using guns, and a level set in a mall with walking mannequins that culminated in one of my favorite video game moments, and you've got a horror classic. Not bad for a launch-title. -- Nick Sherman Doki Doki Literature ClubDon't judge a visual novel by its cover. Doki Doki Literature Club looks like a simple anime-inspired visual novel packed with tropes; you have a love triangle (or quadrilateral?), the tsundere, the shy one, and the childhood friend as a potential love interest all thrown into a high school club. While the game is front-loaded with your typical story progression, it's expected that you make it past a certain point where things really pick up.Take note of the content warning presented up front as Doki Doki Literature Club uses sensitive subjects and graphic visuals throughout its narrative. It'll subvert expectations in clever and terrifying ways that can be either subtle and in-your-face. Since this is a PC game, it has the unique ability to be meta; breaking the fourth wall is used to great effect and a few secrets get tucked away within the game's text files. There are a few moments that allow the player to impact progression, such as dialogue options or choosing which of the club members to interact with at certain moments. But that's all in service of building you up for when the game reveals its true nature. Even the wonderfully catchy soundtrack gets twisted to create an unsettling atmosphere.It's hard to communicate exactly why Doki Doki Literature Club is one of the most horrifying games because it relies heavily on specific story beats and meta-narrative events, and we wouldn't want to spoil the things that make it so special. You'll just have to experience it for yourself. -- Michael Higham P.T.First revealed during Gamescom 2014, we struggled to make sense of the peculiar game known as P.T.. Presented as an indie horror game coming from an obscure developer, it stealth-launched onto the Playstation Store with little fanfare. But in the hours after its release, fans began to piece together what this horror title truly was. Coming from Hideo Kojima and a dream team of horror talent including the likes of Guillermo del Toro and Junji Ito, P.T. was actually a teaser for Silent Hills, the next planned entry in Konami's revered horror series. The short demo made a lasting impression on those who dared to experience its simple, yet incredibly effective scares--myself included.While the concept is simple--only asking you to make it to the end of the hallway and through a door--the execution was anything but, often presenting players some mind-bending puzzles and terrifying obstacles to overcome. Like many, I grossly underestimated just how overwhelmingly tense and off-putting P.T. can be. What it offered was a hellish descent into madness and dread, featuring fourth wall breaking scares, gore, and the relentless stalking from a ghostly figure known as Lisa. After its completion, I felt that I had a greater appreciation for what horror games are capable of, and P.T. showed immense potential. Unfortunately, we would never see it fully realized in a game. Silent Hills would eventually be cancelled after Kojima's very public departure from Konami, and all we're left with is a demo for game that will never exist, which adds a posthumous allure to P.T. While the game's failure to launch is tragic, the sheer craft that P.T. showed in its short sampling is something that's still powerful to this day.But as it stands, the playable teaser is an eerie reminder of what could have been, which is ironically summed up with the demo's ending. As the main character--played by Norman Reedus--finally makes his way out of the strange house into the streets of a deserted town, he then wanders off into the fog, disappearing from sight soon after. -- Alessandro Fillari Alien: Isolation2014's Alien: Isolation was a bit of tough sell as a horror game. After spending many years as disposable cannon fodder in other Alien games, most notably in Aliens VS Predator and Aliens: Colonial Marines, the Xenomorph was elevated to boss status in Creative Assembly's survival horror FPS. Serving as a sequel to the original film, it moved away from the shooting galleries and action-horror from previous games, and honed its focus on dread, anxiety, and fearing the lone alien creature that stalks the halls of Sevastopol Station.As a deep admirer of the original Alien, more so than the sequel Aliens, I longed for the day where we could get a game more influenced by the first film--with its quiet moments of dread and low-fi sci-fi aesthetic in full swing. What I appreciated most about Alien: Isolation was that it not only respected the original film, but it also fully understood what it made it so scary. As you're desperately scavenging for supplies throughout the corridors, those brief moments of calm would almost inevitably lead to situations where you'll come face to face with the Alien, who is all-powerful and cunning in its approach to slay any human that comes across its path.For more of my thoughts on Alien Isolation, check out my retrospective feature discussing why the game is still an unmatched horror experience. -- Alessandro Fillari Resident Evil RemakeWhen Resident Evil first hit the Playstation back in 1996, it revolutionized video game horror, and created a new sub-genre in the process--survival horror. Its GameCube remake in2002, and subsequent remaster for the PS4, XBox One, and PC, utilized improved graphics and lighting to greatly enhance the haunting atmosphere of the first game.You have the option to play as one of two STARS members (elite police officers), who have come to a mansion investigating a number of strange murders. Unbeknownst to them, this mansion is home to a number of illegal experiments operated by the Umbrella Corporation, leading to zombified humans and creatures attacking the STARS.The entire game takes place from fixed camera angles, and you never know what's on the other side of the door, or around each corner, meaning you're just moments away from walking into a scare. You're given limited ammo and even a limited number of opportunities to save your progress, and this formula works perfectly in tandem with the foreboding atmosphere.In one particular moment, I hadn't saved in hours and was running through a room I'd revisited multiple times in the past with 0 health left--when suddenly zombie dogs decided to jump through the windows scaring the crap out of me. A room I thought was safe had betrayed me at the worst time.This moment alone is easily one of the most impactful scares I've ever had playing a game, and cements Resident Evil as a mastercraft in horror video games. -- Dave Klein Eternal Darkness: Sanity's RequiemEternal Darkness took the concept of Survival Horror--already well-established by games like Resident Evil, Clock Tower, and Silent Hill--and added a brand new element designed exclusively to screw with the player: the sanity meter.Alexandra Roivas returns to her family's estate after discovering her grandfather has been murdered. The police have found nothing, so she decides to look for herself, and finds a secret room with a book… the “Tome of Eternal Darkness.” The game then takes place in multiple timelines and locations, with players choosing who they want to follow as characters battle with, or are corrupted by, ancient artifacts and the Eternal Darkness.This allows the game to utilize a vast array of settings for its horrors, as well having every character affected by a sanity meter, which slowly drains if players are spotted by enemies. Sanity effects range from statue heads following you, to weird noises and strange camera angles. In one particular instance, I went to save my game, only to find the game telling me it was deleting my save. I jumped off of my couch, ran over to my GameCube to turn off the game, only to realize the game was screwing with me, and my save wasn't being deleted. You win that round, Eternal Darkness… you win that round. -- Dave Klein Five Nights At Freddy'sIn the years since the release of the first game, the Five Nights At Freddy's series has gone from popular YouTube let's play game to massive phenomenon. As gaming's Friday The 13th, the horror series manages to get another sequel, even when people are just experiencing the previous game. While the franchise has spiraled out in a big way, the original game still manages to turn a mundane job into nerve wracking nightmare scenario. As the late-night security guard for Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, your job is to make sure no one breaks into the place, and to ensure that the walking animatronic puppets don't murder anyone--namely you. That second part is important.With no means of self-defense, your only hope is to survive until early morning by blocking doors and obstructing the paths of the roaming animatronics puppets, who desperately seek any humans after hours. My expectations for the game were low, mostly due to how played-out it seemed in the months after its release. However, once I got to play it for myself, I was surprised at how quickly it ramped up in intensity, despite its ridiculous premise.Even though it manages to revel in jump-scares, almost comically so, the tension and moments leading up to those genuinely chilling encounters make for some rather memorable frights. Just when you think you're safe and only minutes away from sunrise, Freddy Fazbear waltzes into your safe room and gets the jump on you. I'll never forget the moment that this game, which I grossly underestimated, got the best of me. -- Alessandro Fillari Source by [author_name] #games #gamer #gaming #game #play #koragame #freegames #onlinegames

“SOUNDS GREAT on paper.” That’s a phrase I heard a lot as a kid in the late ’70s, usually when my parents and their friends were talking about communism. Certainly an earthly paradise as depicted in the writings of Trotsky or Lenin, but — shame, isn’t it? — communism did not seem to actually work in real life.

The notion that something could sound smart in theory and not work out in practice applies just as well to another product of early 20th-century Russian thought: the individual-over-the-masses, market-worshipping libertarianism philosophy that comes from Ayn Rand. It’s been carried on, after Rand’s 1982 passing, by American acolytes including Alan Greenspan, Ron Paul, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and, probably, someone you went to high school with.

The fact that the libertarian wonderland of absolute sexual and economic freedom only ever worked in Rand’s melodramatic novels and helium-voiced Rush songs — that her philosophy of “Objectivism” has never been successfully applied to actual governance — does not seem to cross the minds of libertarian true-believers. And to many of them, it seems not to matter: a fealty to Rand, to heroic ideas of intellectual superiority and capitalism’s grandeur, is more important than what puny mortals consider political or intellectual reality. If you try arguing sense with them, you’ll quickly wish you hadn’t.

Why should we care, then, about a discredited goofball ideology from deep within the last century? Because Ayn Rand–style libertarianism has probably never been more assertive in American politics than it is today.

What once seemed like the golden age of Rand turned out only to be a warm-up. In the 1950s, you could go to Objectivist salons in New York, where sycophants like Greenspan and future self-esteem guru Nathaniel Branden would gather round the goddess to luxuriate in every word (in some cases, the connection was more than purely intellectual: Branden was one of the polyamorous Rand’s numerous younger boyfriends). In the ’60s and ’70s, you could attend vaguely countercultural conventions across the nation where men would shout conspiracy theories and women would emulate their heroine by wearing broaches shaped like dollar signs. For a while, the Christianity-and-Cold-War strand of the American right headed by William F. Buckley Jr. marginalized the libertarians for their atheism and noninterventionist stance. From the evidence of 1971’s inside-the-whale memoir, Jerome Tuccille’s It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, this movement was hardly built on solid intellectual ground. The abundance of selfish children driving the ship, part–Veruca Salt, part–Mike Teavee, made this seem like the kind of cult sure to wither of its own ridiculousness.

But with the Reagan Revolution, libertarianism was brought indoors, and the direct-mail New Right that accompanied the movement relied heavily on anti-government dogma. In many parts of the United States — the Sun Belt, the boys’ club of billionaires who fancy themselves self-made heroes, and various enclaves in the capital — Rand’s vision established its second beachhead.

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And gradually, the discredited movement that tended to attract nerds and know-it-alls became part of the political mainstream.

“I give out Atlas Shrugged as Christmas presents,” outgoing House Speaker Paul Ryan told the Weekly Standard, “and I make all my interns read it.” He only backed away from Rand when her atheism caused him image problems with God-fearing Republicans, who, if they looked closely, would see that Objectivism is almost exactly the opposite of what’s preached by the Biblical Jesus.

In fact, several of the key Republican young guns are Fountainhead-adjacent. Senator Rand Paul is not only the son of longtime libertarian crank and Texas Congressman Ron Paul (he of the racist newsletters). The younger Paul is such an Atlas Shrugged–pounder that a rumor flourished for years that his first name came from the family’s favorite author.

In Silicon Valley, billionaires are working to put the “liberal” back into libertarian — at least, the 18th-century “classical liberalism” cooked up before industrialization, widespread racial tension, and modern finance capitalism. For all their quoting of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, it makes their retro version of Objectivism about as useful for 21st-century life as an 18th-century telescope. The Randed-out Peter Thiel, whose commitment to free speech did not keep him from suing a major media company into oblivion, is perhaps the most prominent Valley libertarian. But he’s hardly alone: if you wondered why Elon Musk was selling flamethrowers, just remember he’s another guy who loves freedom.

Besides the true-believers, reactionary wackjobs often stop over at Galt’s Gulch on their way to even scarier neighborhoods. Mike Enoch — born Mike Peinovich — is a racist and anti-Semite beloved on the alt-right for his The Right Stuff blog and the popular podcast The Daily Shoah. On his journey from leftist extremism to far-right derangement, he was energized by the work of Rand, Murray Rothbard, and economist Ludwig von Mises; his libertarian blog sported posts like “Socialist is Selfish” and “Taxation is Theft.”

Similarly, the polite Midwestern Nazi profiled by The New York Times, Tony Hovater, was a vaguely leftish heavy-metal drummer until he discovered libertarianism. He was, in fact, radicalized by what he considers the Republican Party’s perfidious treatment of libertarian hero Ron Paul; today he reads numerous Rand-y academics for intellectual guidance.

Then there’s Robert Mercer, one of the invisible rich people who has more influence on world affairs than just about everyone you know put together. Mercer, who helped fund Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential race, and, for years, Breitbart News, is also the father of Rebekah Mercer. A toxic rich girl par excellence, Rebekah is known to Politico as “the most powerful woman in GOP politics” and to others as the first lady of the alt-right. (She recently sowed a rift on the right by cutting off Steve Bannon’s paychecks following his tussle with President Trump.)

Even in this charmless crowd, Robert Mercer’s obnoxiousness stands out. The Citizens United decision has unleashed people like Mercer — secretive gazillionaires whose expenditures are often untraceable despite the way they remake our shared reality. “In my view, Trump wouldn’t be President if not for Bob,” an old colleague of Mercer’s told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

Oh, and then there are Charles and David Koch. “Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy,” election watchdog and registered Republican Trevor Potter told Mayer, “to sweep everything else off the table — even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.” And, as of this fall, the Kochs now effectively own Time magazine as well as a bunch of other publications ranging from Sports Illustrated to the retro British rock magazine Uncut.

And Charles Koch’s foundation has given something like $200 million to colleges and universities, in many cases to appoint pro-business, anti-government scholars to institutions like Chapman University.

The Kochs’ defenders talk about libertarians as some kind of oppressed minority. But unlike most other right-of-center subcultures, libertarians are woven into the nation’s intellectual and cultural mainstream. If you went to a liberal arts college, live in a big city and read The New York Times or Washington Post, follow indie-rock bands and watch trendy shows on HBO, you probably don’t know many evangelical Christians. You could very well spend your days with very little contact with war-mongering neoconservatives. The rural/working-class/NRA side of Caucasian conservatism is likely something you experience mostly through Hillbilly Elegy or reruns of the now-cancelled Roseanne. Libertarians, by contrast, are everywhere. Go on Facebook, and some former friend from childhood is lecturing you about the free market.

We are now, many decades after the germination of Rand’s cult of personality, in a world where a Library of Congress survey deems Atlas Shrugged the most influential book next to the Bible. As the GOP, Wall Street, the intellectual plutocracy of think tanks and foundations, and Silicon Valley grow in coming years, expect to see the influence of this group and its ideas grow and stretch.

Despite numerous parallels with Scientology, Objectivism is not just sitting still, getting weirder while remaining confined to a few thousand worshippers. We have not yet reached Peak Libertarian. So where do these goofy ideas come from, and what effect might they have?

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A partial answer — both rigorously told and incomplete — comes from a recent book, How Bad Writing Destroyed the World, by Wellesley College comp-lit professor Adam Weiner.

Weiner’s key insight is connecting Rand’s ideas — and the Russian literary intellectual lineage she emerged from — with the 2008 financial collapse. “By programming Alan Greenspan with objectivism and, literally, walking him into the highest circles of government, Rand had effectively chucked a ticking time bomb into the boiler room of the US economy,” he writes in the book’s introduction. “I am choosing my metaphor deliberately: as I will show, infiltration and bomb-throwing were revolutionary methods that shaped the tradition on which Rand was consciously or unconsciously drawing.”

Most historical changes have some kind of intellectual root, for better and worse; kudos to Weiner for tracing how a series of bad ideas and clumsy prose led the nation to the Great Recession. But Weiner, a scholar of Russian literature, appears to be far more interested in one of Rand’s antecedents than Rand herself. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the revolutionary socialist best known for his 1863 novel What Is To Be Done?, written while its author was imprisoned in a St. Petersburg fortress, is his true subject. The book famously inspired Lenin’s world-shaking pamphlet of the same name.

There’s one small problem with this premise, and one large one. Weiner shrewdly anticipates the first: how could a man of the extreme left — who helped inspire the terrorists who coalesced around the Russian Revolution — simultaneously provide the intellectual foundation for the godmother of the market-worshipping right? He finds the common denominator in Chernyshevsky’s notion of “rational egoism,” which Weiner describes as the idea that “the rational pursuit of selfish gain on the part of each individual must give rise to the ideal form of society.”

Sound familiar? This chimes almost exactly with Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” — the bedrock of her pseudo-philosophy of unchecked capitalism, minimalist government, and rugged individualism pursued by übermensch heroes. “The main heirs of Chernyshevsky’s bumbling, illogical aesthetic,” Weiner writes, “were the Soviet-mandated novels of socialist realism and the ‘capitalist realism’ of Ayn Rand.”

Weiner deftly handled the contradiction here: a bad novel could not only become ideologically potent, but it could also inspire people who would not recognize each other as fellow travelers.

Yet Weiner’s book lives up to neither its title nor its subtitle, “Ayn Rand and the Literary Origins of the Financial Crisis.” Weiner’s final chapter, “In the graveyard of bad ideas,” returns to Rand’s biography — she grew up in St. Petersburg and watched as the Bolsheviks looted her family’s possessions — and intellectual roots. But it feels like an addendum, however skillfully told, to a reasonably lucid and well-researched book about an influential but not very good 19th-century Russian novelist.

In connecting Rand — and contemporary American libertarianism — to an extremist strain of pre-revolutionary Russian thought, Weiner does help clarify this bizarre lineage, its combination of heartland America Firstism with something clearly alien to our Constitution and its mostly British political origins. Ayn Rand is not just Adam Smith in a screenwriter’s bungalow — she’s coming from somewhere different from classical liberalism.

The book Weiner seemed to be delivering — offering the intellectual history of either kook libertarianism, or the 2008 crash, or both — still needs to be written. Until then, the second edition of Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind — released in November, this time under the subtitle “Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump” — does a skillful job connecting philosophers, historians, and economists of the past with our recent rightward turn. His chapter on Ayn Rand and libertarianism, in specific, offers much of what Weiner’s volume promises and fails to provide.

“Saint Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabobov, Isaiah Berlin, and Ayn Rand,” Robin begins. “The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both.” Robin, a political professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, starts with pre-revolutionary Russia, but considers Rand’s real birthplace to be Hollywood, where she landed in 1926 and was quickly recruited by Cecil B. DeMille. “For where else but in the dream factory could Rand have learned how to make dreams — about America, capitalism, and herself?”

And Rand’s us-versus-them formulation of the stalwart genius against the “moochers” and “looters” — revived by Mitt Romney in his “makers” versus “takers” speech — is textbook vulgar Nietzscheanism. It also helps explain the appeal of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead to misunderstood adolescents who dream themselves the übermensch.

Rand’s novels heroize — in the same campy way she learned from Russian operettas and Hollywood movies — defiant, comically masculine builders like architect Howard Roark and engineer/inventor John Galt. It feels somehow inevitable that the recent libertarian, anti-government, pro-business strain on the American right would lead us to a man who seems right out of her pages: the defiant, comically masculine real estate developer Donald Trump.

The real history of Ayn Rand’s bad ideas — their roots, their trajectory, their collateral damage — can’t be contained in any book, however good or bad. It’s all unfolding around us, as her zombie devours the Republican Party and soon, the rest of us, with no sign of abating.

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Scott Timberg is the editor of The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles and author of Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class.

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Banner image by Erik Fitzpatrick.

The post The Bad Idea That Keeps on Giving appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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The 13 Scariest Horror Games You Should Play For Halloween Terrors of the SeasonHalloween fast approaches, which means you're likely in the mood to play some spooky games. Luckily for you, there are a wealth of horror games to play that are well worth your time. The genre had humble beginnings in the late '80s, with a wave of fantastic games coming out in the three subsequent decades. And thanks to the rise of indie games, there are more horror games out now than ever before.To help you discover some of the most terrifying horror experiences available, we've compiled 13 games that we find to be the most frightening. Genre classics like Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil Remake, and Dead Space are represented here, but you'll also find more surprising choices interspersed throughout. Regardless of their notoriety, the games we highlight are all ones we that left us with lasting memories.There's a lot of horror-related media out right now that isn't just games. The latest entry of the cult favorite horror film franchise Halloween just released, and it's quite good, so be sure to read our review. There are also some pretty cool Easter eggs in the film that are likely to please hardcore fans. In other news, the second season of Castlevania is set to premiere via Netflix on October 26, and we've got a review of the first six episodes.Which horror games do you think are the scariest? Shout out your favorites in the comments below. Silent Hill 2A lot has been said about Silent Hill 2, so I'll spare you any overt critical analysis I have on this much beloved survival-horror sequel and instead share with you why this game still rocks. The premise alone should be enough to captivate you. As the widowed James Sutherland, you travel to the foggy town of Silent Hill in search of your dead wife, who has somehow managed to send you a letter. As a middle schooler (yes, I played this game in 8th grade), Silent Hill 2's story was like nothing else I had encountered. There were no action heroes, explosions, or convoluted government conspiracies. Just a crippling sense of dread, an eerie atmosphere, and intriguing characters that kept my hands glued to my PS2 controller.Silent Hill 2 expertly handles its myriad horrors, pulling you in with disturbing creatures, clever puzzles, and haunting sound design. I can't help but be in awe of how well it stands up whenever I revisit the game every few years. Its Historical Society area remains one of its crowning achievements and one of horror gaming's most expertly designed environments, brilliantly handling tense foreboding with unexpected pathways and puzzles. There are some slow moments interspersed between its most terrifying ones, but they're never enough to detract from the chilling horror and thought-provoking storytelling on display.If you haven't played Silent Hill 2, you're in for quite a spooky adventure. It's one of the genre greats for a reason, and it only continues to stand the test of time. -- Matt Espineli OutlastRed Barrels' Outlast has always stood out to me for how the game presents its world. Mount Massive Asylum is blanketed in absolute darkness, so the only way to see where you're going most of the time is by using the night vision function on protagonist Miles Upshur's video camera.Because I'm terrified of the dark, I use the camera all the time, and this transforms everything I see into a murky green where faraway environmental details aren't clear and enemies' eyes shine with a ghoulish glow. Also, this mechanic forces me to explore--batteries need to be found to keep the night vision function on the camera working--and Outlast's chilling soundtrack make those unscripted moments of searching very tense.Looking for batteries isn't even the scariest part of Outlast, though. It's the inhuman Variants that create most of the game's scares. Desperately running through an insane asylum while cannibalistic twins, a scissor-wielding mad scientist, and a seemingly unkillable monster chase after Upshur is terrifying. The worst of these Variants, Eddie Gluskin, appears in Outlast's Whistleblower expansion. Gluskin, aka The Groom, is a deranged serial killer who mutilates his male victims' genitalia in order to create the "perfect wife." Watching what he does--in first-person I might add--to the DLC's protagonist, Waylon Park, haunted me for days, and is still nauseating to even think about. -- Jordan Ramee Dead SpaceThree years after Resident Evil 4 squeezed new scares from one of gaming's best horror series, Visceral Games might have perfected the third-person survival horror formula with Dead Space. Players control engineer Isaac Clarke as he and a rescue team land on a city-sized spaceship to find out why it's not responding to communications. They quickly discover the reason is that the ship has been overrun by monsters that used to be its crew, which are nearly impossible to kill unless players use various sci-fi mining tools to hack off the creatures' limbs.Dead Space is a perfect confluence of modern sensibility and old-school survival horror, pairing fantastic graphics and gameplay, specifically its limb-cutting mechanics, with slightly uncooperative controls and the desperate hunt for items to keep Isaac healthy. The game uses everything at its disposal to scare you. Its industrial setting pairs with sound design that makes you constantly feel like you're not alone, and every surface is covered in air vents perfect for delivering popcorn-tossing moments as lethal mutated creatures come squirming out, straight at your face. Visceral tops it off with a spooky story that combines Alien, Children of the Corn, and Evil Dead. -- Phil Hornshaw Devil DaggersDevil Daggers may not be a traditional horror game by any means, but that makes it no less scary every time I play it. It throws you into a dark arena and tasks you with eliminating waves of flying skulls, disgusting, multi-legged beasts, and other demonic monstrosities.There is no winning in Devil Daggers; death is inevitable, whether that comes after 10 seconds or 100 (if you're good). It's minimal in terms of visuals and sound; there's no music to accompany the onslaught of enemies. Instead, enemies produce terrifying but distinct noises. This serves to assist you by letting you know where enemies are, but it also creates an inescapable sense of dread as these horrifying monsters box you in. I find it hard not to jump out of my seat when I turn and see that I'm face to face with a flying horned monster.It's unusual that a game designed around high score runs is scary, and the threat of failure is undoubtedly part of what makes Devil Daggers so tense. But it's the combination of this tension with the haunting imagery and sounds that create a legitimately terrifying experience. -- Chris Pereira Slender: The ArrivalI'll admit to being the perfect mark for Slender: The Eight Pages when it was released for free in 2012. The tiny, minimalist Unity experiment by developer Mark Hadley capitalized on peak Slender Man interest, expounding on the Internet-born folklore creature that was already doing a phenomenal job of absolutely creeping me out. Hadley's little game was a tightly made little nightmare: you're exploring a small, darkened park from a first-person perspective, and you're being hunted by a supernatural creature that you can't even look at without dying. Players try to gather eight pages from around a park, which detail some other poor victim's descent into madness, while the thing keeps appearing in front of you, ever closer. It was a perfect storm of jump scares, ambient dread, and a spooky creation of the zeitgeist at the height of its power.Slender: The Arrival expanded the game with multiple levels, a full story and prettier graphics to fully realize Hadley's original concept. It didn't change the core principle of being hunted, with nothing to help you except fleeing in desperate terror, and hoping that looking away from what stalks you might be enough to save you a few moments more. -- Phil Hornshaw Resident Evil 7: BiohazardTo play Resident Evil 7 is to willingly put yourself in an inhospitable environment. The decrepit mansion where the game begins is filthy, with peeling, yellowed wallpaper, broken drywall, and garbage littering the scarred wooden floor. Wind blows through the cracks in drafts, emitting a low, constant howl. The kitchen, scattered with moldy food and unidentifiable skeletal remains, is unspeakable. You can almost smell the rot.This is not a place you want to be--and that's before you meet the family that lives there. There's the dad, who stalks after you even after you've killed him numerous times. Mom doesn't bat an eye when he severs junior's hand at the dinner table. Somehow even worse is grandma, a catatonic woman in a wheelchair who can appear and vanish any time and anywhere when you're not looking.The game improves on the best aspects of the series, while throwing out everything that had grown stale in recent installments. Playing Resident Evil 7 is a thrilling, crazy, scary-as-hell experience. And if you think it's terrifying on a TV screen, you gotta try it in VR. -- Chris Reed Condemned: Criminal OriginsThe Xbox 360 had a generally strong launch lineup, despite lacking a killer app like Halo. There was a Majora's Mask-lite in Kameo: Elements of Power; sports games like Amped 3 and Madden, and for those who passed on the heavily flawed, but creative Perfect Dark Zero, Call of Duty 2 was there to satisfy action fans when WWII shooters were in their prime. With other titles with mass appeal like Tony Hawk's American Wasteland or Gun, who had time for a psychological horror game?That juxtaposition between Condemned: Criminal Origins and the rest of the launch lineup was perfectly clear in the music of the title screen. Half Se7en, half Shutter Island, you played as detective Ethan Thomas, who has to track down a serial killer to prove his innocence after his partner is murdered. Along the way, you're attacked by rattled-up drug addicts and hallucinations of demons who strategically flee, hide behind corners, and fight back in the game's surprisingly effective first-person melee combat.What made Condemned such a memorable horror experience was the feeling of being alone in the grittiest, most desolate parts of town, with intimate combat against people who hated you. You could hear them seething around corners, flanking you in the darkness, and that was all before the game throws demonic hallucinations at you. Sprinkle in a memorable final boss, a couple of solid jump-scares, one of the best uses of Xbox achievements in requiring you to forgo using guns, and a level set in a mall with walking mannequins that culminated in one of my favorite video game moments, and you've got a horror classic. Not bad for a launch-title. -- Nick Sherman Doki Doki Literature ClubDon't judge a visual novel by its cover. Doki Doki Literature Club looks like a simple anime-inspired visual novel packed with tropes; you have a love triangle (or quadrilateral?), the tsundere, the shy one, and the childhood friend as a potential love interest all thrown into a high school club. While the game is front-loaded with your typical story progression, it's expected that you make it past a certain point where things really pick up.Take note of the content warning presented up front as Doki Doki Literature Club uses sensitive subjects and graphic visuals throughout its narrative. It'll subvert expectations in clever and terrifying ways that can be either subtle and in-your-face. Since this is a PC game, it has the unique ability to be meta; breaking the fourth wall is used to great effect and a few secrets get tucked away within the game's text files. There are a few moments that allow the player to impact progression, such as dialogue options or choosing which of the club members to interact with at certain moments. But that's all in service of building you up for when the game reveals its true nature. Even the wonderfully catchy soundtrack gets twisted to create an unsettling atmosphere.It's hard to communicate exactly why Doki Doki Literature Club is one of the most horrifying games because it relies heavily on specific story beats and meta-narrative events, and we wouldn't want to spoil the things that make it so special. You'll just have to experience it for yourself. -- Michael Higham P.T.First revealed during Gamescom 2014, we struggled to make sense of the peculiar game known as P.T.. Presented as an indie horror game coming from an obscure developer, it stealth-launched onto the Playstation Store with little fanfare. But in the hours after its release, fans began to piece together what this horror title truly was. Coming from Hideo Kojima and a dream team of horror talent including the likes of Guillermo del Toro and Junji Ito, P.T. was actually a teaser for Silent Hills, the next planned entry in Konami's revered horror series. The short demo made a lasting impression on those who dared to experience its simple, yet incredibly effective scares--myself included.While the concept is simple--only asking you to make it to the end of the hallway and through a door--the execution was anything but, often presenting players some mind-bending puzzles and terrifying obstacles to overcome. Like many, I grossly underestimated just how overwhelmingly tense and off-putting P.T. can be. What it offered was a hellish descent into madness and dread, featuring fourth wall breaking scares, gore, and the relentless stalking from a ghostly figure known as Lisa. After its completion, I felt that I had a greater appreciation for what horror games are capable of, and P.T. showed immense potential. Unfortunately, we would never see it fully realized in a game. Silent Hills would eventually be cancelled after Kojima's very public departure from Konami, and all we're left with is a demo for game that will never exist, which adds a posthumous allure to P.T. While the game's failure to launch is tragic, the sheer craft that P.T. showed in its short sampling is something that's still powerful to this day.But as it stands, the playable teaser is an eerie reminder of what could have been, which is ironically summed up with the demo's ending. As the main character--played by Norman Reedus--finally makes his way out of the strange house into the streets of a deserted town, he then wanders off into the fog, disappearing from sight soon after. -- Alessandro Fillari Alien: Isolation2014's Alien: Isolation was a bit of tough sell as a horror game. After spending many years as disposable cannon fodder in other Alien games, most notably in Aliens VS Predator and Aliens: Colonial Marines, the Xenomorph was elevated to boss status in Creative Assembly's survival horror FPS. Serving as a sequel to the original film, it moved away from the shooting galleries and action-horror from previous games, and honed its focus on dread, anxiety, and fearing the lone alien creature that stalks the halls of Sevastopol Station.As a deep admirer of the original Alien, more so than the sequel Aliens, I longed for the day where we could get a game more influenced by the first film--with its quiet moments of dread and low-fi sci-fi aesthetic in full swing. What I appreciated most about Alien: Isolation was that it not only respected the original film, but it also fully understood what it made it so scary. As you're desperately scavenging for supplies throughout the corridors, those brief moments of calm would almost inevitably lead to situations where you'll come face to face with the Alien, who is all-powerful and cunning in its approach to slay any human that comes across its path.For more of my thoughts on Alien Isolation, check out my retrospective feature discussing why the game is still an unmatched horror experience. -- Alessandro Fillari Resident Evil RemakeWhen Resident Evil first hit the Playstation back in 1996, it revolutionized video game horror, and created a new sub-genre in the process--survival horror. Its GameCube remake in2002, and subsequent remaster for the PS4, XBox One, and PC, utilized improved graphics and lighting to greatly enhance the haunting atmosphere of the first game.You have the option to play as one of two STARS members (elite police officers), who have come to a mansion investigating a number of strange murders. Unbeknownst to them, this mansion is home to a number of illegal experiments operated by the Umbrella Corporation, leading to zombified humans and creatures attacking the STARS.The entire game takes place from fixed camera angles, and you never know what's on the other side of the door, or around each corner, meaning you're just moments away from walking into a scare. You're given limited ammo and even a limited number of opportunities to save your progress, and this formula works perfectly in tandem with the foreboding atmosphere.In one particular moment, I hadn't saved in hours and was running through a room I'd revisited multiple times in the past with 0 health left--when suddenly zombie dogs decided to jump through the windows scaring the crap out of me. A room I thought was safe had betrayed me at the worst time.This moment alone is easily one of the most impactful scares I've ever had playing a game, and cements Resident Evil as a mastercraft in horror video games. -- Dave Klein Eternal Darkness: Sanity's RequiemEternal Darkness took the concept of Survival Horror--already well-established by games like Resident Evil, Clock Tower, and Silent Hill--and added a brand new element designed exclusively to screw with the player: the sanity meter.Alexandra Roivas returns to her family's estate after discovering her grandfather has been murdered. The police have found nothing, so she decides to look for herself, and finds a secret room with a book… the “Tome of Eternal Darkness.” The game then takes place in multiple timelines and locations, with players choosing who they want to follow as characters battle with, or are corrupted by, ancient artifacts and the Eternal Darkness.This allows the game to utilize a vast array of settings for its horrors, as well having every character affected by a sanity meter, which slowly drains if players are spotted by enemies. Sanity effects range from statue heads following you, to weird noises and strange camera angles. In one particular instance, I went to save my game, only to find the game telling me it was deleting my save. I jumped off of my couch, ran over to my GameCube to turn off the game, only to realize the game was screwing with me, and my save wasn't being deleted. You win that round, Eternal Darkness… you win that round. -- Dave Klein Five Nights At Freddy'sIn the years since the release of the first game, the Five Nights At Freddy's series has gone from popular YouTube let's play game to massive phenomenon. As gaming's Friday The 13th, the horror series manages to get another sequel, even when people are just experiencing the previous game. While the franchise has spiraled out in a big way, the original game still manages to turn a mundane job into nerve wracking nightmare scenario. As the late-night security guard for Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria, your job is to make sure no one breaks into the place, and to ensure that the walking animatronic puppets don't murder anyone--namely you. That second part is important.With no means of self-defense, your only hope is to survive until early morning by blocking doors and obstructing the paths of the roaming animatronics puppets, who desperately seek any humans after hours. My expectations for the game were low, mostly due to how played-out it seemed in the months after its release. However, once I got to play it for myself, I was surprised at how quickly it ramped up in intensity, despite its ridiculous premise.Even though it manages to revel in jump-scares, almost comically so, the tension and moments leading up to those genuinely chilling encounters make for some rather memorable frights. Just when you think you're safe and only minutes away from sunrise, Freddy Fazbear waltzes into your safe room and gets the jump on you. I'll never forget the moment that this game, which I grossly underestimated, got the best of me. -- Alessandro Fillari Source by [author_name] #games #gamer #gaming #game #play #koragame #freegames #onlinegames