Editorials
‘Resident Evil’ and ‘Until Dawn: Rush of Blood’: PSVR Immersion Takes Horror to New Levels
Immersion is possibly one of the most important and intangible aspects of gaming. A first cousin to suspension of disbelief, immersion is what allows you to dissolve fully into a game, forgetting for minutes or hours that you’re just pressing buttons in order to manipulate shapes on a flat screen. It’s what bridges the gap between interactive code and genuine human experiences. Tension. Joy. Horror.
I put a lot of stock into immersion so the second coming of virtual reality really intrigued me. I’m old enough to remember Nineties VR. It was not good. The headsets were too heavy. The graphics were lifted from Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’ video. These things – plus the prohibitive cost – reduced VR to a novelty best semi-enjoyed for a few minutes at Dave and Buster’s, not for hours at home.
The second coming of VR – the Oculus, the HTC Vive, and the PSVR – promised to change all that. The new hardware was supposed to be more affordable, more comfortable, and capable of supporting graphics on par with what we already play on our consoles and PC’s. Modern VR was reported early on as converting people into believers immediately upon contact.
After being gifted a PSVR last year, I’m certainly a believer. And if you’re a horror fan who can clear the still-not-insignificant price barrier, you should be too. Two horror games have been released for the PSVR in the past year that in my opinion more than justify the current price of entry.
Resident Evil 7
I’m not a Resident Evil die-hard. I always enjoyed the games when they stuck closer to creepy locales and monsters, my eyes glazing over once they reached the inevitable climax of sci-fi superlabs and bio-engineering. I also wasn’t a fan of the third-person POV. So Resident Evil 7, which seemed to deliberately minimize the Umbrella shenanigans in favor of a consistent backwater bayou Texas Chainsaw vibe and went full first-person, checked all the right boxes for me. It’s a fantastic game on its own merits, with a meaty campaign and plenty of reason to replay it once completed.
But I feel a terrible pity for people who weren’t able to play it in VR.
When I recall my time with a given video game, I remember the controller I used. I remember what apartment I was in, and what wall the TV was against. I remember if I was alone or if people were with me. I remember any feelings particularly engaging moments may have evoked, but I also clearly remember playing the game and the environment I was in at the time.
When I recall my time with Resident Evil 7… It’s harder to describe. The lines are blurred. I almost remember the Baker family plantation in Dulvey, Lousiana as an actual location I visited once, as though some part of my brain was tricked by my ability to look in any direction and see the virtual space I occupied. For certain, it’s a location I remember as a game world; graphics have not yet reached real-world fidelity. But still, there’s something to said for its ability to deceive the brain.
There’s an early boss fight I’m going to semi-spoil for anyone who hasn’t played the game, but it illustrates what I’m trying to describe.
You’re in a garage when the patriarch of the Baker family introduces himself in the ghastliest way possible. It’s gruesome and in-your-face, which is where these horror-themed VR experiences for better or worse find their bread and butter. But after that it transcends cheap shock. Quickly determining your attacks do nothing to this guy, you jump into a car, which obviously you can look around in great grimy detail. You can then drive over Pa Baker… until you can’t. He disappears.
I clearly remember this moment when, for a brief second, I was pulled out of the game long enough to realize that I was lifting up in my chair and craning my neck to look over the front of the car for the missing Pa Baker. It was the kind of horror moment you’ve seen in a dozen movies, but I was physically acting it out, heart racing, eyes narrowed.
And when Pa Baker ripped the roof off the car and leaned down into my face, I screamed. Out loud. When he yelled something about taking me for a ride, slammed on the gas pedal, and drove the car full speed towards several steel beams – one of which appeared to come within inches of my face – I reeled back in my seat, consciously aware what was happening wasn’t real, but sub-consciously… It was immersion on a level I’d never experienced before.
That’s probably why my one complaint with Resident Evil 7 was that it ended too quickly. Nine hours is alright for a single-player experience, and there’s plenty of hidden collectibles and DLC to keep you going longer, but I wasn’t ready for my first foray into virtual reality end. I immediately went back to the main menu and started a new game. That’s as high a recommendation as I can offer for any game, because I have backlog issues.
Until Dawn: Rush of Blood
The second horror gem I experienced on the PSVR was actually the first released, but I had initially passed on it because I didn’t have a tremendous amount of faith in the Playstation Move controls. It so happens that was a valid concern in general, just not with Until Dawn: Rush of Bood. It’s true, Rush of Blood can be played with the standard DualShock 4 controller, but I recommend going the extra mile to play it a pair of Move controllers, which work great with this particular game.
Rush of Blood is an on-rails shooter, in every sense. The gameplay has you in something akin to a carnival ride, moving along a fixed track while shooting at the various and increasingly horrifying things that pop out at you. It’s not a complex premise and, with only seven short levels and a couple of alternate paths, it can be completed in about two hours. But all this can be forgiven in exchange for the sensation of unloading dual-wielded pistols into the face of a screaming wendigo four feet away from you.
Fans of Until Dawn – of which this is a prequel – will get a little extra out of Rush of Blood because without knowledge of the original title’s story, the images in this game have all the context of a professional haunted house. Things are jumping out at you and yelling ‘boo,’ but the uninitiated won’t have any understanding as to why any of it is happening or what it all ultimately means. That’s not a dealbreaker by any means. Also like a professional haunted house, the narrative isn’t nearly as important as the adrenaline rush that accompanies your eyes telling your brain that you’re in a position of imminent peril, despite what it knows to be contrary.
Whether you prefer atmosphere with a dash of jump-scares or vice versa will determine which of these two games you prefer, but they’re both solid and indicative of the same conclusion; VR gaming lends itself to horror particularly well. But as exceptionally good as I think these two games are, I can’t responsibly recommend paying the price of admission without mentioning the scariest thing about the platform – its uncertain future.
Despite the quality of these games and quite a few other non-horror titles, developers have yet to flock to the platform in droves. Outside of Doom VFR and another Until Dawn, there’s not a ton of horror on the PSVR’s horizon, which is discouraging. There’s a reasonable hope that what we’ve gotten thus far is the tip of the iceberg and high-profile titles like Skyrim VR will continue to drive demand, but given Sony’s past history of abandoning hardware when it’s not immediately successful, getting people to put faith in that may be a hard ask.
Still, if you can get past the price point, which is currently considerably lower than usual for the holidays (Rush of Blood is even free to PS Plus subscribers through January), and the idea that it may be an investment with limited future return, the PSVR paired with these games is an immersive horror experience unlike anything else in the whole of gaming and definitely worth checking out if at all possible.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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