Spooktober Special

Halloween is my favourite holiday, and I have spent this entire month watching at least one horror movie a day, because - you know, it's actually a nice escape from reality to believe that awful things are happening constantly.

I love my horror movies. So this wasn't really a challenge.

You wanna know what I ended up watching? It just so happens I kept a list. I thought I would entertain you with it, before next month, wherein this blog will turn into politics and NaNoWriMo central.

Day 1: The Thing From Another World (1951)

Despite being a horror movie with lantern-jawed men and a clearly "evil" scientist, the dialogue in this is superb - feels very natural, really well written. I mean. Everything ELSE is a little ropey, but it did spawn a different movie that we will come to later...

Day 2: A Quiet Place (2018)

(Can't Believe I) Slept On This Part 1. Great movie. Stellar execution. Obviously, superb sound engineering. Wonderful performances all round. I am so mad that I saw Birdbox before I saw THIS. SO mad. So, SO mad.

Day 3: Leviathan (1989)

One of the many Abyss rip-offs, this one is actually not terrible, and the cast is fantastic. Like you watch this movie and you will recognise just about everyone in it. Honorable mention goes to Ernie Hudson, who gets done super dirty by the writing.

Day 4: Ginger Snaps (2000)

There are few movies that are more 2000 than Ginger Snaps. Instant and total cult classic. Superb soundtrack, great writing and cinematography, and - well, lets face it, everyone who ever went to high school of any kind is going to find something in this movie, right?

Day 5: Event Horizon (1997)

This was an absolute staple when I was in school. Another magnificent bit of casting, some genuine freaky spooks, and Sam Neill genuinely comes across as one of the most frightening men on the face of this earth.

Day 6: The Whisperer In Darkness (2011)

An indie production of a Lovecraft novella, this was pleasantly surprising; it was well put together, even filling out bits of the story that really deserved more of a look, and really well acted despite the clear lack of budget. I've seen worse movies rake $100 million at the box office.

Day 7: The Amityville Horror (1979)

When we talk about classics - this movie provided me with one of my first genuine childhood fears, as discussed in this blog here. Main lead here is James Brolin - Josh Brolin's dad - and is the absolute spitting image of Christian Bale, if you ask me. Genuine creepshow of a movie. 

Day 8: The Lighthouse (2019)

I stopped hating on Robert Pattinson long before this movie came out, but if anyone has doubts as to whether or not this man can act, watch this. AMAZING. An awfully creepy movie, and I DO mean awful. Amazingly well done. Superb.

Day 9: The Mist (2007)

One of... like... two Steven King adaptations that King actually liked. He enjoyed this, and said of the ending: "Why didn't I think of that?" And oh christ, that ending. This is not for the weak of heart. A really well put-together movie.

Day 10: Dark Star (1974)

I know. Not technically a horror - it's more Douglas Adams than Addams Family - but it led almost directly to Alien existing, and it does have an alien IN it. Though is anything scarier than teaching a sentient bomb Cartesian doubt? Herein is the first day that I watched two movies on the same day, because Dark Star was a technicality...

Day 10: The Predator (2018)

...and the real horror in this one is that it completely shit on my theory of the Alien, Predator and Blade Runner franchises all being totally linked. It's, like, the fourth best Predator movie. It's better than both AvPs though! Not that that's hard. I've taken shits better than AvP: Requiem. Is it a horror movie? I dunno, but it's a monster movie, so it counts.

Day 11: The Thing (1982)

And here we have literally the best horror movie ever made. Just in every way. The creeping unease, the visceral body horror, the interpersonal anxiety, the dread, the attention to detail, the absolutely killer performances from every actor on screen INCLUDING the dog. Also the first of the Carpenter Apocalypse Trilogy. More from them later.

Day 12: Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made (2018)

I'd not heard of this. Caught wind of it on social media, stuck it in my To Watch list for about a year, and then... oh christ. Oh CHRIST. OH CHRIST. Great movie. Terrifying. Fantastic. Just really well made. Worth it if you can find it.

Day 13: The Mothman Prophecies (2002)

There's a lot of movies in this list that look so, so stereotypical of the year they came out. This is one of them. One of only two actually good Richard Gere performances (the other is Chicago), and genuinely creepy audio engineering. Unsettling in a good way.

Day 14: It (2017)

Slept On This Part 2. And I am not sure why. I really enjoyed the book, and the mini-series featuring Tim Curry. It's really well done, genuinely scary in many places, and the relationship of the loser gang with each other is explored in such a believable fashion. Like Stand By Me, but with a demon clown.

Day 15: It Chapter 2 (2019)

Slept On This Part 3. Aside from a few jarring moments of levity and comedy where I really didn't think they should exist, this second part was also really well done. This is the second movie that Steven King liked. Usually I don't like Bill Hader much but he absolutely kills it in this.

Day 16: Night Of The Living Dead (1968)

The original. The classic. A legendary film from a legendary film maker. It clarified and sanctified a lot of the tropes of an entire genre, even perhaps responsible for creating that entire genre wholesale. Even if the word Zombie is never used in the movie.

Day 17: DeepStar Six (1989)

Ohhhh this was bad. But not like... awful. Just bad. Another one from the Abyss rip-offs, this one basically a re-run of Leviathan but with a worst cast, a less believable monster, and the exact same ending. It was fun enough, I suppose.

Day 18: The Void (2016)

This was crowdfunded, and had some absolutely superb practical effects, and genuinely horrible moments. The odd bit of the performance felt a little hollow but the final product is a really solid movie, that goes sideways very quickly from the beginning.

Day 19: The Abyss (1989)

James Cameron might be an asshole, but he makes a good movie. The production of this was one of the most difficult movies that the cast ever worked on; apparently Ed Harris would have nightmares about it years afterwards. The sheer single-minded dedication to the production of the ting made a truly incredible movie, mind. Is it a horror? You swim through a pressure-cracked nuclear submarine and you tell me.

Day 20: Friday The 13th (1980)

Another classic and my favourite out of the Big Three slasher franchises. I almost love all the lore and mythology around this movie more than the movie itself. I also always forget that Kevin Bacon is in it, despite the absolutely brutal way in which he - ah ah ah spoilers!

Day 21: Annihilation (2018)

Now this is just.. fantastic. Eerie. Even when something genuinely horrible is going on, it is more eerie and full of dread than it is outright disturbing... until you meet the bear. Natalie Portman absolutely smashes it in this. There isn't a single bad performance in it. And that ending!

Day 22: Sputnik (2020)

A Russian-made Cold War-era horror that is a lot like if Species was 1) actually a horror movie and 2) actually well-made. Creature effects that are genuinely upsetting, a concept that left me going "oh wow", and some great score work made this a thoroughly enjoyable watch.

Day 23: Color Out Of Space (2019)

Take another Lovecraft story and blend it with Nicholas Cage just being himself. The visual effects in this movie are freeeeaky, and how various parts of the original story are transposed into a modern setting. Also - I had a dirty little laugh at how the Lovecraft insert character was black. Spin in your grave, you old racist.

Day 24: Train To Busan (2016)

Slept On It Part 4. HOLY SHIT. THis movie just kicks it up to eleven REAL FAST and at that point doesn't really slow down. HOLY shit. The entir etime I could have shit through the eye of a needle. What a movie. What a MOVIE. I usually prefer the Romero-style shambling undead but if we're gonna have screeching runners? This is it. Forget World War Z.

Day 25: The Fourth Kind (2009)

yaaaaaawn. This was crap. Absolutely crap. And it makes light of the abductions of dozens of Native folks from Alaska for purpose of trying to pretend it's a "based on a true story" movie. Alien abduction film without showing any actual aliens? Boo. Boo sucks. So we had another movie to make up for just how sucky it was.

Day 25: Virus (1999)

And I picked an absolute stinker. Jamie Lee Curtis, one of the Baldwins, Donald Sutherland, and most of them agree that this was the worst movie they had ever been in. Even if I really like the concept - a space radio signal that gets caught by the Mir space station and beamed down into a Russian research ship - it really was a very, VERY 1999 movie. The practical effects were nice, though.

Day 26: Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

Another classic. So many good details, so much weirdness surrounding it. Like the fact that the extras would go to the bar in the mall and get trashed while dressed as zombies. Like, how can you argue with it? You can't. It's a stunner. It's one of the best.

Day 27: Brotherhood Of The Wolf (2001)

A martial arts horror movie from France? What the hell? And yet it's amazing. Mark Dacascos and Vincent Cassel are superb. The creature effects are magnificent. Based as it is on an actual historical event with actual historical characters - only Mani (played by Mark Dacascos) is totally fictional - it feels very legit throughout.

Day 28: The Mandela Effect (2019)

I mean this was like if the Matrix was less martial arts and philosophy and was more "what if I coded a game that brought my dead daughter back". But it's not bad? And the second half is genuinely horror movie material. Really not bad at all.

Day 29: Us (2019)

Slept On This Part 5 and the worst sin of sleeping-on-it because this was AMAZING. It kicked my chunky ass. Fantastic film. Genuinely creepy. Superb attention to detail. Laugh-out-loud funny in a couple places that didn't distract from the film itself. Juuuust watch it.

Day 30: Prince Of Darkness (1987)

The second of the Carpenter Apocalypse Trilogy. What if satan, but science, and also stuck in a big glass tube? Find out. It's a great watch, if you can get past two of the main characters being assholes. Donald Pleasance is in it and actually plays a really believable part. I know, right?

Day 30: The Crow (1994)

Because it was Devil's Night, and it's tradition. Always watch The Crow. Probably not a horror movie, who cares, it goes in the list.

Day 31: Manos: The Hands Of Fate (1966)

Scientifically one of the worst movies ever made, truly abysmal in every single way, shot in thirty-two second long reels because that was the only camera the guy could get, and lit with a zippo on a windy night, just execrable. I love it. It's fantastic. It did justify me watching at least one more today, though.

Day 31: In The Mouth Of Madness (1995)

The third of the Carpenter Apocalypse Trilogy. A horror writer vanishes before delivering his latest manuscript. Is he dead? Is he a ghost? Who cares, we need that sweet money, so off goes Sam Neill to go get it. True cosmic horror ensues. By the way - the guy isn't meant to be Steven King, he's meant to be HP Lovecraft. Also, Hayden Christensen is in this. His best movie, as far as I can tell.

And... well, that was it. 31 days, 35 movies of variable quality. If I had to pick a best and worst - I'd be hard pressed to find worse than Manos, because, well, it's fucking awful. But is Us better than The Thing? ...I'm not sure, but I'm definitely glad I've seen it now.

It was fun! And I think I will do it every year, because honestly, it made me pick up some movies I had previously considered but passed over - and for the most part, I don't regret that at all.

Tune in next time, wherein we talk about something completely different.

Thank you for reading. Support your humble author via Patreon or Kofi, or follow social media on the right. See you next week.

Frankenception

So for the book club at work (yeah we have a book club, my work is better than yours) we were tasked with reading things that are more than a century old. My immediate first thought was War Of The Worlds, but I read that regularly anyway, so why not something I haven't read in a while?

So I decided to refresh the cobwebs in my head, and broke open Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Note the scene above. This doesn't actually happen.

See, it's been adapted so often, riffed on so often, that several parts of the story have become presumed canon without ever appearing in the novel. That happens in adaptation, obviously, but still.

The last time I read this book I was about 19 or 20. I wasn't super-good at reading books then. I mean yes, I could read, obviously - I read voraciously from an early age - but I wasn't good about thinking about what I was reading. That skill came later. That was when I really started to consider what the author was trying to tell me, what a particular perspective might imply, so on, so forth.

If you are thinking of the Kenneth Branagh movie of 1994 you aren't necessarily far off the mark, but ultimately - no. See, I don't think they could make a movie strictly out of the book, and I will tell you why.

Victor Frankenstein is fucking insufferable.

I get ahead of myself.

The book is an epistolary, told through letters. Specifically it is told via a letter from a guy called Captain Robert Walton, who opens up the novel by writing back to his sister in London, reassuring her that this adventuring sciency life on the sea is perfectly safe because he literally isn't intending on killing an albatross. Invariably his ship gets stuck in the ice and things get worse.

Walton sees a big-ass dude go by on a dog sled. Days later another dude shows up on another dog sled with only one dog left alive, and this dude is brought aboard his ship and generally cared for until he can get his shit together, and THIS dude is Victor Frankenstein.

Frankenstein starts telling Walton about how he came to be out on the ice, who the big dude was, and so on. He literally lays out his entire life story, repeating it verbatim, just dictating to Walton as he writes it all down. So here we have a story nestled inside a story. Excellent.

Kenneth Branagh was an excellent pick to play Frankenstein.

Look at him. Look at him, smug bastard.

So we get his full life story. How joyful his childhood was. The circumstances behind his adoptive cousin. How everything was just, fucking, great.

Then he catches science and makes a corpse-person.

No, that's literally it. He reads a bunch of natural philosophy books and then he makes a corpse-person in his room at university and then he falls asleep and then it runs away. The actual process of creation is never gone into - and for good reason, Victor here doesn't want anyone else to be able to repeat the process, so he doesn't tell Walton - but it results in this big old boy who casts off into the night and leaves Victor all sorts of upset.

There's an awful lot of anguish, throughout. Like. This really is a story all about how miserable Victor Frankenstein is, after having made Captain Corpse and taken zero precautions from preventing his new creation from just wandering off into the night to do, well, whatever.

Then there's the deep sorrow that Victor feels when he finds out his youngest brother has been killed, and how awful that makes him feel. But then he realises it was his Body Boy that did it, so that makes him feel EVEN WORSE, especially because there's a girl that his cousin palled around with a lot that is being accused of the murder. So SHE gets to die as well. IMAGINE how bad Victor feels!

Yes, there's a common thread here.

So Victor is so Sad(tm) that his dad suggests they go for a little holiday. So off they go. Casually fucking off for a day's mountain climbing (in between long agonising soliloquys about how awful he feels) Victor bumps into Tall Dark And Dead, and - after exchanging some really rather curt and savage insults - decides to listen to his tale... which he relates to Walton... which Walton writes down in his letter. FRANKENCEPTION.

Robert DeNiro did an amazing job at playing the creation in the Branagh movie, it bears mention.

So it turns out, being newly sewn together and reanimated by alchemical genius isn't great. Especially when your creator takes zero time to make sure you function, won't kill anyone, can think, or are happy. The first sensation the poor bastard experiences in his life is his dad going "EW WHAT THE FUCK" so I mean you can imagine how he feels. (Bet it isn't as Sad(tm) as Victor.)

As he learns how to be alive, then sentient, he starts to crave socialisation - which he can't have, cos he's ugly. He hides in a shack behind a cottage and learns all about humanity, and craves the care and general positive interactions that the people who live in that cottage experience every day. So he decides to risk it and say hi to the blind old man that lives there when nobody else is home. It goes great, cos he's learned how to talk at this point, and everything is fantastic until everyone with working eyes comes home and sees how ugly he is. All bets are off.

Yeah, now he's all pissed off.

So he finds his way to where Frankenstein lives (Geneva) and totally by accident comes across Victor's younger brother and casually MDKs him.

Okay so yeah uh straight up there goes your redemption arc.

Big Body here makes a request, at this point. He puts it simply. Look, Vicky-Boy. I want a bride. I want a lady me that will like me. And if you give me that I'll stop unaliving your family.

Victor says yes.

Victor... says yes. Victor, who was about to smash this guy into bits because he THOUGHT that maybe the beastie boy had killed his little brother, now has testimony stating that yeah he DID kill his little brother (AND frame the girl for mudering him), and is like - yeah okay homie I'll hook you up no issue.

Angry Lad wanders off. Victor goes back home, agrees to marry his cousin (not his actual cousin, it's complicated) after he gets back from England, where he needs to go to learn some stuff about how to make a corpselady for the corpselad. She's chuffed to bits about this. She loves him, despite him being a twat.

He sets up shop on Orkney or some shit. MC Stitch-A-Lot shows up and is like, ay, where's my boo. And Victor, suddenly deciding this is a bad idea, literally shreds what he has made already by hand in the ultimate Yeah About That Nah move.

What follows is basically Victor being sad a lot, the Ungrateful Dead bumping off both his best friend and his wife, then him swearing bloody vengeance, and chasing Big Boi (you know from Outkast) across the ice floe, and here is where I came in.

Now we get back into the story from Walton's perspective. He has a wobble as he really wants to continue his expedition north, but the crew want to not do that cos they are all gonna die. Victor demonstrates that if he can convince himself that he's the real victim of this story he can convince anyone of anything, and makes the crew be okay with maybe going north.

Now here's the bit I really like.

Victor dies of whatever. The ice breaks. And Walton goes home, because fuck this, science isn't worth getting your ass deep-sixed over personally, let alone killing off a bunch of innocents that had literally nothing to do with it.

GROWTH!!!

Because Victor Frankenstein is an ASSHOLE.

Like, Lab-Slab-Thank-You-Mab is literally a monster, but that's because he is LITERALLY A MONSTER. Like he was made in pain and anguish and made to socialise like people but couldn't because people are assholes. Of course it was going to end badly for all concerned. He shouldn't have been made in the first place. Yeah, he gains reason, and then chooses to subtract a whole bunch of people. A WHOLE bunch. And that is wrong, obviously.

But Victor? AN ASSHOLE.

Because he's RESPONSIBLE for all this. And at several stages he has a chance to fix it, and what does he do? Fuck all. Feels sad. Mopes. Acts like a dickhead. Broods. Christ this guy could give Bruce Wayne brooding lessons.

The only dude in this book I actually respect is Walton, because he goes from a devil-may-care "The Ice May Claim Me But At Least I Am A MAN!!!" choad (chode?) to a "Fuck My Sister Gives A Damn I Shouldn't Get The Rest Of These Stout Sailors Killed For My Own Personal Gain" kind of guy.

HE is the lesson, here. Yes, don't make a corpse creature without sufficient containment procedures and a strict moralistic education, but more importantly: Recognise that other people getting iced is worse than you feeling a bit sad.

And I think that Mary Shelley could bring a lot of knowledge to this because as I understand it she spent most of her life surrounded by absolutely fucking insufferable men.

I apologise, anyone from the book group that is reading this - you're gonna hear some of this when we get together next...

But hey, that's what we're in it for, right?

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Eye Contact

Halloween is almost here, one of my favourite times of year, and that means horror movies. So there's a lot of horror tropes which have been done so much that they just aren't scary any more. Right?

One of the examples that comes up a lot is "It's Behind You". Now the moment that you are presented with a panning shot or a shot of someone or something blocking out a chunk of the background, you are almost certain there's gonna be something icky back there.

It's such a common trope that Scream troped it while troping it.

Then there's the "Medicine Cabinet" shot. A combination of the "It's In The Mirror" shot and the "Check The Door" shot. You know full well in a movie like this that if you have a close shot of someone opening a medicine cabinet, when it closes, there's gonna be the beastie or whatever stood there in the reflection.

Another trope is the "It's Right There" trope, which I think Alien and Aliens uses real well - wherein the monster is placed in the shot in such a way that you don't quite understand what it is until it moves.

Like here.

"Maybe they don't show up on infrared at all." Yeah, maybe.

You know the one trope that stuck with me, though? The one trope that I have never, ever managed to shake as something that genuinely kind of freaks me out?

The beastie looking at the camera.

And this is mostly because of the Amityville Horror.

This is one of the horror movies that I watched when I was a kid. I doubt my parents knew about it at the time. I know I know, badness. But hey, it didn't do ME any - wait what am I talking about, of course it did me harm, I'm talking about the harm it did me.

Anyway.

There's this one scene wherein the kid is talking to their imaginary friend, Jody. They're playing int he kid's room. And the mom is like - oh, what're you talking to Jody about? And the kid is talking about how Jody just fled from the room because the mom scared her. Mom's like, oh well, okay, guess I will just close this window -

Looks out and sees THIS.

The whole scene is here.

That. FUCKED. Me. UP.

I don't even know why. It's just two lights. Just two lights out of a window. Except that is all you see, and yet you know that thing was looking inside, at you. You were observed. You are not safe.

That's always stuck with me, it's always a thing I like to see in a horror movie because even if it is a trope that has been done a lot, it breaks the barrier of the screen and the worlds on either side. Literally, the beast is looking out of your movie and into your soul.

Like this motherfucker here.

Or in this short by Mike Diva, called Thresher.

Anyway. Just my thoughts on something horrible.

Sweet dreams.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

A Whole New World (Of Hurt)

As I mentioned a couple blogs ago: I love the process of planning a game.

Just taking the world as it is presented to you - reading through the core book (or whatever other setting books you have to hand) and extricating the stuff that speaks to you, the stuff that you can do something with - I take a significant pleasure from that. A joy, almost.

Like, I am sure this is a similar thing that people get when the series of books they are reading or TV series they are watching breaks new ground, or shows them an interesting place or set of characters. When the clues start falling into place about who runs things, why it looks the way it does, what moves behind the scenes.

It is at this stage that I start having to ask myself questions.

Where should my characters be? Is it a place they actually want to be? What cool things can happen there? Why does this place work as a setting? How does this locale make their lives easier, or harder? What kind of people inhabit this place? What facets of society do I need to emphasise?

Usually by this point I have started to put together NPCs - I'll already have one or two based on what people have told me about their character. Now's the time to double down on that. They are in Place A, so I need a bunch of people that work with Group B, and a whole bunch of folks with Criminal Organisation C.

Now, the physical locale is important - but it's the people that make it. It's the people that your players are going to interact with, and remember. Antagonists and allies (and bemused bystanders) alike. That's why it is important that you should, not only have a whole bunch - but also kind of like them. Memories of certain NPCs will linger. NPCs like Golden Knife, the brutal Triad boss, and Cole-626, a psychic nutcase who took a liking to the bodies that one of my PCs was trying to acquire.

I mean, there was also this guy, who wasn't an NPC at all. But look at that face. Cadence, you absolute shit. (Yes he looked like Jinnai from El Hazard, the only bit of art in this or the past blog that ISN'T from the Eclipse Phase team.)

Names are important, for NPCs. I knew I was going to need a lot - so I recently put out a call asking for names, and sure, some of those names were dumb. This is the internet, after all. Some of them, however, were solid gold. A bunch of them will get used.

The names can tell people about the NPC in question, or about the setting, or about the prevalent culture. The names can have stories behind them. This being a future in which you kind of get to dictate who you are rather than having it dictated to you by external forces, a lot of folks go by nicknames.

There's BluePink for example. BluePink is an uplifted octopus - an octopus with the intelligence of an above-average human, sentience, sapience, and full rights of existence across the more civilised (less corporate) bits of the solar system. BluePink has a different full name but it is expressed using the chromatic skin that octopi have, so he has to shorten it for you poor normies that can't speak octo-chroma.

Stories start happening, right there, as you put your people together. As you draw in personalities with different agendas, different ways of seeing the world, different power levels, you will find conflicts and alliances forming naturally.

That's before you start asking yourself the big questions about plot.

The game itself offers you a big metaplot to dig into. It asks questions. It sets up significant conflicts, that your characters may well fall on one side or the other of without your input. It gives you all the tools you might need to spin out a story of political intrigue, violent revolution, total war, alien horror, creeping dread or criminal enterprise. It's a brilliantly in-depth setting like that.

That comes down to your characters, too. What do they care about? What do the players playing them care about? Does it seem like your mob of characters are primarily criminals that pay only lip service to the law? Are they mostly fun-loving anarchists that get their kicks ruining authority figures? Are they all gloomy ex-military types that drink too much? Do they have a shared love for alien artifacts and xenoarchaeology?

Now, I have my characters, or at least I have their basics. Unless any of them have last-minute changes of heart, I vaguely know the circles I think they will want to move in, and I can totally use that. None of them seem terribly opposed to each other, which is always good - you don't want to have to deal with PC conflict unless you really have to.

So now I get to immerse myself in this world, mostly crafted by the folks at Posthuman Studios, put through the lens of my own mind, flavoured with my characters and a dash of what the players at my table are bringing me. That gets to be where my brain goes for however long this game runs, and it is gonna run for a while.

This is my happy place.

And if you're not on board for this, you may wanna give me a clear berth, because guess what I am writing about for National Novel Writing Month?

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

10 Years After The Fall

So the last one was a downer - lets take things back into the realm of positive.

I love me some roleplaying games. You know this to be true, if you are a long-time reader or know me personally. What do I love about them? All sorts - but one of the things I love the most is planning the next thing. The next character, session, plot arc, campaign.

Currently I am engaged in two such campaigns.

The first is a very much back-to-basics Pathfinder game. Starting at level 1 and doing a standard dungeon run. I almost always do the more character-based or gimmicky stuff, so it's unusual for me to just roll with "you kick in the door, there's four goblins and a chest, what do". It's kind of fun though. Liberating almost.

The second one is my favourite, hands down - and it's called Eclipse Phase.

Now some of you know about this. Some of you have played it, heard me yap about it - a handful of you have played it with me before, or with other people.

I ran it for a long time - over a year, easy. Two different games involving two different groups of characters, though the player base remained essentially the same, even if one player insinuated themselves in halfway through the first run.

There's some games that you can play without really knowing the setting very well. Like, Dungeons and Dragons? As long as you know your dwarves from your elves you can muddle through - unless the campaign is specifically very political, social or character-based, you can probably get away with a bluffer's guide and what you have learned from the thousands of derivative settings you've seen bits of already.

Then there's games wherein you really, really do have to know the setting - because so much of the game depends on it.

Eclipse Phase is the second one, which is okay, because I love the setting so damn much.

Welcome to the post-apocalyptic transhuman future, wherein the near-extinction of the human race and the obliteration of life on earth has left us in a position to actually change things - sometimes, even, for the better.

It asks and answers political questions. Like: what is it that ends up killing the world? Where do we go afterwards? What do corporations do when there's no government telling them what to do? What do people do when scarcity stops existing? How does democracy work when in space? Where is humanity's home if humanity can't go back to Earth?

That's before you get onto the bigger questions, like: what threats are big enough that they actually threaten humanity's entire existence? And what do we do to stop them wiping us out?

The thing about having a setting so in-depth - the thing about having a large world that has fleshed-out politics and situations and a distinctive feel - is that when people are putting their characters together, it's easy to find them a place in the world, and thus, in the narrative.

This is the part I love, see. Putting the NPCs together. Building the bits of the world that don't already exist. Looking at the backstory of the characters I have and boosting what I am doing in those sectors, taking plot points aboard to use for my own.

The stories that can come out of it stick with you.

Okay, maybe it is because out of a lot of the folks I game with now, their first game was Eclipse Phase - but there are others who I have played it with who have been veterans at the time who have also enjoyed it. I've covered those stories before, specifically in blogs like this one about RPGs in general.

It remains, though - I think good times were had. I don't want to blow my own trumpet but I like to think that I contributed a little to that. Like, sure, it is a sci-fi horror setting, but that doesn't mean that everything that comes out of it has to be horrible.

For every moment wherein a near-immortal adrenaline junkie comes face-to-kind-of-face with an inscrutable creature that may have been his former travel companions, there's a near-farcical hallucinogenic quest from one end of Extropia to the other, resulting in nude bas-reliefs being left on the outside of the asteroid for the universe to see.

For all the awful destruction wrought by the severing of the space elevator on Mars, and the millions of casualties that resulted of it, there was the moment wherein Captain Persephone of the Lethe decided that - rather than deliberately forget - she would remember, and went back home to Mars to find out what it was she had left behind.

And for the awful horror of discovering that the planet whose ashes we are stood in up to our ankles is Earth - not in a game I ran, but in the same timeline - there is the moment wherein you turn aside the freighter moving at a sizeable percentage of the speed of light, and you miss the habitat housing millions by mere inches. Close enough that you could reach out a hand and touch it... close enough that the people on that habitat can look out, and see you, and love you with all their hearts for almost losing your nigh-immortal life to try and save their own.

That's the moments you get for a game like this. That's what makes the work worthwhile, the planning, the plotting, the inspiration for a hundred different personalities in a dozen different locales. Crafting combat scenarios like Yuen Woo-ping, assembling conspiracies like Richard Condon and nightmare sci-fi scenarios like Philip K Dick. It's what makes it worthwhile, when eleven years later, you can still talk about that time that you found an AI living in an abandoned factory in Martian orbit and realised your pilot was the one that coded it.

This isn't a sponsored blog. I just wanted to splurge my love for the game, as I await the arrival of the hard copy of the 2nd edition core rulebook - and as I plot like a crazed madman to drag my hapless players into the transhuman future of 10 years after the fall, once again.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Carpenter's Trilogy

Everyone knows The Thing.

It's one of the best horror movies that has ever been made - widely acclaimed for its practical special effects, the tension in its pacing and writing, and generally brilliant performances all round. A remake of a seminal sci fi B-movie The Thing From Another World released in 1951, which in and of itself was pretty fantastic in its own way.

John Carpenter's 1982 masterstroke is one of my personal favourites, for a lot of reasons. It's a level of creepy that you can't really get out of most movies. The personal paranoia, the body horror, everything about it just makes your skin crawl. The ending, too. The ending is just... oh god. The ending.

See, it's the ending that this blog will be touching on.

Spoilers - at the end, we have our boys Childs and MacReady (played by Keith David and Kurt Russel respectively, I know, that CAST) facing each other over a stick of dynamite and a blowtorch, waiting to see if one or the other (or both of them) is actually the alien creature in disguise.

There's some theories that go round - about the fact that MacReady may have offered Childs a bottle of something undrinkable, which Childs then drinks, proving that Childs is actually the Thing - but I digress.

The fact is, we can't be sure that the Thing is dead - that one of the men froze to death and the Thing remained until discovered by another human being, and was conveyed back to civilisation. And that, as is covered in the movie, is the end of humanity in... months.

Which is why this is the first in John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy.

Carpenter is a master of the genre - even if his output somewhat dropped off toward the end of the nineties. He still directed two and a half decades worth of exceptional cinema, not all of it horror - including The Fog, Assault On Precinct 13, Escape From New York, Halloween (yes the original), Village Of The Damned, Big Trouble In Little China and They Live.

My favourites of his, though, are - as mentioned - The Thing... and the two other parts of the Apocalypse Trilogy, in which we are presented with end-of-the-world scenarios that lead us all the way up to the tipping point. The moment in which the world begins the process of ending. Beyond the last frame of which lies nothing but our own destruction.

The second of the trilogy, and held to somewhat less acclaim, is 1987's Prince Of Darkness.

This time, we take a little Satan, and we add a dash of science. In short: there's a lot of talk of particles, of tachyons, of having to prove things. And what the protagonists - a dozen college students and their teacher, and various hangers-on including Donald Pleasance as a British priest - need to prove, is that evil is real. And it is contained in... this.

Of course, things don't go swimmingly.

This movie features Alice Cooper - yes, that Alice Cooper - amongst other regulars in the Carpenter stable of actors. Dennis Dun and Victor Wong make second appearances after Big Trouble In Little China the year before.

The entire thing is shot in such a way that it starts to build tension before anything even goes wrong, before the plot starts to even coagulate. Unsettling, upsetting imagery dropped into otherwise mundane scenes. The relationships and social interactions of these normal people, thrown into stark relief, made to appear almost inconsequential compared to the task set before them.

And that task becomes increasingly sinister, not just through the weird and supernatural, but from the gathering of scientific information throughout. Carpenter uses the actual study of the phenomenon as a way to draw us into the plot, to make the devil real, before the first tragedies even start to happen.

And then the first person falls asleep, and everything goes up a notch.

The ending is a twist that I don't really want to give away, but suffice to say - it puts the idea of the plot being resolved firmly into doubt, once more creating that borderline between "the world is fine" and "the world is literally and imminently doomed". A second Apocalypse, then. This time, not alien at all, but brought about by the titular Prince of Darkness.

It didn't do too well in the box office, but then, neither did Blade Runner. It DOES have a large cult following. It is deserved. It's a great movie, and has some exceptional cinematography and sound engineering. Great from a technical perspective.

So we have had alien horror from beyond the stars, devilish horror from the pits of hell - what makes the suitable third part of this trilogy?

Let me introduce you to the Lovecraft movie you have probably never heard of - In The Mouth Of Madness, 1994. Starring Sam Neill.

A horror writer named Sutter Cane - whose work is widely held up as disturbing the reader, as capturing something truly horrible and otherworldly - has gone missing, with the manuscript of his last book. Sam Neill plays John Trent, an insurance fraud investigator, who is hired by Cane's literary agency to find that manuscript and return it, and ascertain if Sutter Cane is dead or just a weirdo shut-in.

It's easy to believe that Cane is meant to be Steven King. He's not.

Here we see more of the creeping, unsettling imagery being slipped into the scenery. Situations that are perfectly normal, appearing to be suddenly strange, for no apparent reason. Another steady build of tension, as Trent finds the apparently-fictional town of Hobb's End, a quaint New Hampshire town with a huge, dark church on its outskirts.

It is hard enough to find the town - in the end Trent and his companion Linda Styles (played by Julie Carmen) stumble across it seemingly by accident. Or by some darker design. Because once they arrive, Trent finds it very, very hard to leave. He enters the town determined that he knows what is fiction and what is reality, and the horrors and strangeness that he sees within the town makes him not so sure.

Trent finally comes face to face with Sutter Cane himself, a man now possessed of a strange, dark power. It seems that the writer's previous horror writing was unwittingly accurate, and now, his new work - his new title - is the truth. The truth about the things, waiting on the other side of reality, waiting to creep back into our world and make it their own again.

That is how you do cosmic horror.

I don't want to give away the ending, again. Suffice to say, though, it is also the beginning of the end. The top of the downward slope toward humanity's destruction.

Sam Neill's performance is stellar. I'm a big fan of face acting and we get a lot of that. The practical special effects are once more absolutely on point - a lot of creepy squamous rugous horrible things to look at and hide from. Even if the soundtrack has started to slide into hard-rocky kind of stuff that isn't necessarily totally fitting with the material, a lot of it still hits the mark.

So, class. My homework to you is this. Catch up on any or all of these movies. Preferably in the order of their release - The Thing, Prince Of Darkness, In The Mouth Of Madness. You will probably be pleasantly surprised. Or as surprised as you can, when watching a trilogy of movies that are literally about how the world ends.

And honestly the 2011 prequel to The Thing is a pretty good watch, too. Even if it isn't John Carpenter. Just please, for the love of god...

...don't watch Ghosts Of Mars.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Strangling Fruit

I had no idea who Jeff Vandermeer was when I first saw the Annihilation trailer.

It had been suggested to me because, hey, I like my sf and my weirdness. I might see some value in it. So I watch the very first trailer that came out, then I googled the name, and then I immediately bought and devoured the book - first in the Southern Reach trilogy.

Then I had to wait the interminable gap between that point and payday to get the next TWO books, because not reading them at this point wasn't an option. They thoroughly grasped me - the writing style, the flow of the story, the mythology spun out of it, everything formed an experience that I didn't even realise I had been waiting for.

Getting to the end of that third book left me so hungry for the movie that the wait for it reminded me of when I was seven and Christmas was still two weeks ago.

And now it's here, and I have to report that the movie - which is on Netflix right now for a lot of folks but got a cinematic release in the US - is excellent.

The acting is understated, the performances all very believable - which, given the content of the movie, only adds to the feel of it - and the casting is exceptional. The five women fronting the movie all put in excellent work, including Natalie Portman, who I am not terribly fond of usually. They all have depth - they feel like real people. How they deal with each other feels real, too - and how they change, as the situation around them falls apart.

And it does fall apart. Unlike every other horror movie, though - this one isn't their fault.

That's a very common trope, amongst horror movies - in movies in general, in fact. That the thing that goes wrong, the bad situation that has to be resolved by the characters in the piece, happens because someone fucked up. Either it is incompetence, or a literal flaw in character. Slasher flicks often happen because the victims dare to exhibit lust. The xenomorph wouldn't have ever become an issue for humanity were it not for pride and greed, in that order.

None of that happens, in Annihilation - because we don't know why this happened. The setup is very similar to The Thing. The why is so much less important than the result. It's also not very important that we understand every part of it, because - oh hey, get this - the problem isn't a human one. It's very much a black swan.

What follows is a journey into a part of the world in which everything is going wrong. Actually, not wrong - just different - but to us...very wrong. It's rare that I see cinematography, prop work, sound engineering, all come together to achieve this in such a complete way. Passing into Area X, it is incontrovertible that the five women of the expedition have entered a place that is unnatural and irregular. There's some very obvious visual cues but some not-so-obvious ones too. Little things, subtle things that play on your mind after the fact.

Portman's character is a biologist, so she can explain why some of the flora and fauna they find is wrong as hell - but you feel it, just looking at this stuff. Plants that have multiple different flowers, different types of flowers, different styles of growth. It should leave you with a degree of unease - and you may not even know why. Just that what you are looking at isn't right, isn't the way it should work.

And that's before you ever meet the deer, or the bear.

I'm not going into why they are wrong. You'll find out.

I like unanswered questions. I like open endings. I like not necessarily knowing why a thing has just happened, just that this is how the characters in the movie are dealing with it. I like gorgeous shots that show you things that upset you but you don't quite know why. I like diegetic and non-diegetic sound engineering that leaves you thinking.

I like all of those things, and that's why I liked Annihilation, an awful lot.

You might, too.