Editorials
Ari Aster’s ‘Midsommar’ Could Help Open Up a Bright New Frontier For Video Game Horror
From the dimly lit, shadow draped corridors of Layers of Fear, to the unrelenting and oppressive darkness that so many other horror offerings seem content to ply their fearsome trade from, it’s way past time that the gaming horror genre realizes that ample terror and foreboding lay beyond such typical realms of gloom.
Rather than looking inwardly to their peers, developers should instead look to the silver screen where Hereditary director Ari Aster is making progressive moves in this regard. For his part, Aster has been violently wrenching the horror genre nakedly back into the blazing light of day, providing a highly underutilized direction for others to follow with his latest film, Midsommar, a Sweden-set daytime cult thriller with a psychological horror bent
At its root, both video game and cinematic horror efforts alike have embraced the gloom in the belief that such scenarios ran parallel with the tales we were told as children, that some unseen horror lay in the dark corners and under the beds of the world where their powers were perceived to be at the zenith.
Of course, horror games on the small screen have also long worked their trade from the shadowy peripheries, not just to elicit moody atmospherics, but also because it allows them to fall back on that most common, shopworn and most nervously reflexive trope – the classic jump scare.
In Aster’s Midsommar however, horror and terror find themselves not withered by the exposure to the blazing sun, but rather emboldened by it – a notion that is arguably more terrifying than that base fear of shadows that movies and games have sought to instill in us for so long.
Much of that newfound fear revolves around the long-held concept of safe places. The idea that if some unspeakable grotesque born from the shadows is hellbent on our destruction, that we can somehow banish it by escaping into the bright day – a physical manifestation of the notion that light overcomes darkness; another long-held belief that holds solace for many of us.
And that is arguably where the strongest horrors do their best work – in stripping away those safe places and layers of respite until we realize, ultimately, that nowhere is safe and that as much as good can be wrought in the darkness, so is the opposite true for evil as well.
As Aster’s Midsommar has done then, so too must games follow. Effectively etching out a new frontier of boundless possibilities for the genre, the creative latitude for engineering new scenarios of fear, horror, and terror is generously vast.
Unfortunately, though Aster’s caliber as an auteur and the quality of his output his hardly in question, it remains to be seen just how quickly the mainstream will adjust to the idea of moving horror out of the darkness. Being as slow and reticent to swift change as the mainstream machine is, it will likely be a good while until the great masses accept such new ideas about horror to be embedded in their collective consciousness.
As such, we can probably look to the likes of smaller studios, such as the Bloober Teams and the Red Candle Games of the world to make those first bold steps, rather than the likes of Capcom and EA for whom fresh ideas and concepts often find themselves hoisted upon the altar of mass market sacrifice.
Unlike the silver screen, the games industry has many more avenues with which to embark on this change too. In addition to the long established and fairly static PC and home console platforms, more immersive technology such as VR, AR, and mixed reality headsets all provide unique opportunities to engineer compelling takes on this new direction that the cinema simply cannot match.
Given its position as an influential medium then, gaming needs to do its part and follow in Aster’s footsteps in order to keep the horror genre fresh. As much as cinemagoers used to cling to the light as a respite from the dark, so too must creators now leave the ironically comfortable embrace of the dark behind and seek out the fresh opportunities for fear and horror in the blazing sun that lay beyond.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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