Editorials
Eight Terrifying Places Horror Games Should Visit, Part 3
If the thought of leaving your house to get groceries, go to work, check the mail, etc. doesn’t instill a deep sense of fear that’s on par with the fear someone experiences before they die horribly and very painfully, then I really haven’t done my job. I want you to be terrified to go anywhere, and I’m talking about a level of fear you experience when you look into the wide crazy eyes of that guy or girl you just brought back to your place after a swell first date and you realize they’re a total psycho who’s about to fucking eat you alive.
There’s a myriad reasons you shouldn’t leave the safety of your home — I’ve even broken them up into couple easy-to-read lists, which you can find here and here. We’ve traveled all over the world, looking at some of the most shit-out-your-spine terrifying places this world has to offer. Just when you thought it was safe, here are eight more.
8. Hellingly Asylum
If there was ever a list of words that don’t belong before asylum hell really should be at the top of that list. Hellingly sounds like a term you’d use to describe a night of snorting rails off dead hookers, or “we had a hellingly good time last night abducting the homeless so we could use them for sex before we slit their throats and tossed their bodies into the lake,” or something like that. It’s common knowledge that every asylum in existence is an awful place, even if it has a far less creepy moniker like the Happy Asylum or the Fluffy Bunny Sanatorium and Coffee Shop, but it’s the abandoned asylums you really have to worry about. This one’s been empty – assuming you don’t count the demonic spirits that roam its dark halls searching for a living person to impregnate with evil — for close to two decades, so it’s had a decent amount of time to reach the level of terrifying all run down asylums strive for these days.
Perfect for: Fatal Frame. I’d very much like to fight my way through its empty halls with nothing but a flashlight and a camera.
7. Helltown
If you thought Helltown sounded like a place Satanists went to unwind after a busy night of virgin sacrifices and bathing in the blood of children, you weren’t actually that far off. As its name implies, crazy shit *supposedly* happens in Helltown. In fact, it’s tagline is What happens in Helltown, stays in Helltown, mostly because you and your friends have been brutally raped, murdered, and had your corpses defiled multiple times leaving no one to speak about what happened in Helltown.
The tagline is a work in progress.
In the 70’s the government bought the site and evicted all its residents so they could turn the land into a national park. Obviously, those plans never came to fruition, and the result is an eerie ghost town where the buildings that haven’t been burnt to a crisp — did I mention the local fire department used the town as practice? – have since been boarded up.
There are also several legends about Helltown that take all this to another level of creepy. The road that originally led to the town has been closed off and has since been given the ominous title The End of the World. Linger here for too long and there’s a very good chance you’ll find yourself at the mercy of the Satanists, Ku Klux Klan members, escaped mental patients, a massive snake, mutants, ghosts, a moving tree, and other miscellaneous freaks that are rumored to inhabit the surrounding woods.
Perfect for: Alan Wake. Maybe Mr. Wake needs some inspiration for his next horror book so he decides to take a trip to Helltown, only when he arrives all those urban legends start coming to life – as they do in the Alan Wake series.
6. Matsuo Ghost Mine
The Matsuo Ghost Mine is a long abandoned mining town that looks like Silent Hill if it were real and exponentially creepier. The mine closed in 1972, and for the last four decades the surrounding area has been hard at work on becoming one of the eeriest places in the world. The only remaining structures are 11 apartment buildings used by the 1,500 people who used to live there, including the mine’s workers and their families. Now it’s all empty and more often than not the area is hidden in a thick mist that hangs over the place pretty much all of the time.
Perfect for: Siren. The original game took place in a mountain village in Japan, and this mine can be found secluded atop a mountain in Japan. It’s perfect. Just throw in a xenophobic village and some creepy-as-fuck villagers to fight.
5. Mines of Paris
In the first batch of terrifying locales we visited were the Paris Catacombs, a series of underground tunnels filled with the bones of the dead. You want to know what’s more terrifying than that? How about a separate series of labyrinthine tunnels, roughly 400 miles long that snake hundreds of feet below Paris and are also filled with the dead people. They were created to collect the large deposits of minerals housed beneath the city, and once a majority of the minerals had been taken what was left was a complex of mostly unmapped tunnels. Take a wrong turn and you could find yourself in a flooded tunnel, or better yet, a tunnel where the ground is covered in the bones of hundreds, or even thousands of dead people.
Perfect for: Doom. The fourth game is already rumored to take place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, so why not have part of it in the Paris Mines? There are actual rumors the mines lead to the gates of Hell, so I say we take that urban myth and run with it. Imagine fighting off hordes of those creepy flying baby bastards inside those claustrophobic tunnels, and to make matters worse, id Software decides against attaching flashlights to every gun, forcing you to use the pistol the whole time.
4. The Icelandic Phallological Museum
What’s worse than a maze of underground tunnels that are almost definitely brimming with the restless souls of the dead? How about a building full of animal cocks? Since it was established in 2004 this Icelandic museum has collected an impressive arsenal of close to 300 penises and penile parts, taken from the (hopefully) dead carcasses of over 46 different species of animals. Oh, and they got their first human penis last year, so if you’re in Iceland and have never seen one of those, now’s your chance. It doesn’t sound that bad, that is, until you enter its homely interior and you realize just how terrifying and rapey most animals’ members really are. You could poke an eye out on a majority of them and impale yourself on the rest.
I should also mention the blue whale penis they have measures 67 inches long. However, this is just the tip, as the full thing would measure a terrifying 16 feet. I dare you to try and shake the thought that a severed blue whale penis is hiding under your bed when you go to sleep at night.
Perfect for: Condemned. Bloodshot took us on a fairly creepy excursion into a museum to investigate a murder, so in the threequel I’m thinking we could go to this museum to investigate another crime scene where someone was impaled on one of those massive beastly members.
3. Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park
Imagine a dense forest filled with countless creatures that live in harmony, protected from the outside world by a thick wall of trees. Beautiful, right? That sounds like a place you’d like to spend a day or two.
Now replace all those trees with massive limestone spikes armed with serrated edges that are perfect for impaling you should you slip on the rough terrain. I’d also like you to replace those harmonious inhabitants with countless unidentified species, all potentially harmful to any humans that are stupid enough to wander into their home. There could be a flying scorpion hawk that injects bear mace into your unsuspecting ass after it sneaks up on you using its Predator-like camouflage, then it drags you kicking and screaming into its home where it feeds you to its thousands of hungry babies. That could be a real thing.
Also, “tsingy” is a word taken from the Malagasy language that when translated to English means ”where one cannot walk barefoot.” This national park is 666 square kilometers – no joke – of rocky needles. If the Earth had a mouth, this would be its teeth.
Perfect for: Dino Crisis. The only reason a place like this exists is to hide dinosaurs that without the protective wall of massive spikes would immediately escape and eat us all alive.
2. Unit 731
I’m of the opinion that inside of all of us is pure, undiluted evil. We all have a capacity to be total psychopaths, and if you doubt that opinion I’ll ask you to do two things for me. First, I want you to jump on Xbox Live and play any game online. Once you’re done with that, I’d like you to check this out:
Unit 731 is a place in Pingfang, China where terrible things happened. It was a biological and chemical warfare research facility that made the Umbrella Corporation sound like the Red Cross. Behind its doors some of the worst war crimes in history took place, including lethal human experimentation where people from the surrounding areas were taken against their will and used in some truly horrifying experiments. The prisoners were subject to vivisection without anesthesia, and that was after they had been infected with Anthrax, Cholera, Smallpox, Botulism, or the Bubonic fucking Plague.
Other fun activities a Unit 731 prisoner could look forward to included having a flamethrower used on you, grenade testing from multiple angles and positions, and having horse urine injected into your kidneys.
Perfect for: The Suffering. In that short-lived series the monsters you fought were twisted manifestations of the way they were executed when they were prisoners, so taking that concept to a place where thousands of people died in some of the most horrific ways imaginable could make for an intensely scary game.
1. Detroit
All that’s pretty bad, but you know what’s worse? Fucking Detroit. The Motorless City is the most dangerous city in the country, with 1,220 violent crimes for every 100,000 people. Every second you spend in this city increases your chances of being raped, mugged, murdered, or some sort of combination of the three. Package this with a high foreclosure rate, a bunch of miserable people, and roughly 13.7% of the city’s 700k+ citizens being unemployed, and now you have unemployed homeless people who are more than willing to kill you so they can take your iPhone and sell it to fuel their black tar heroin habit.
Perfect for: Manhunt. Say the third game takes place in the near future where the crime got so out of hand the government had to close off the city and let its inhabitants fend for themselves. I say we’re about six to eight months away from that really happening anyway.
If you aren’t currently curled up in the fetal position nose-deep in a puddle of the urine you fear-peed while reading this list, than you are a much braver soul than I am. Let me know if I missed anything in the comments below, and feel free to let us know what you’re bringing with you when we take an official Bloody Disgusting road trip to each of these locations.
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The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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