Music

The Voice Of Horror Issue 3: The 7th Guest And Phantasmagoria II

Published

13 years ago

October 29, 2010

With Halloween being so close, I have to keep this Voice Of Horror thing going, so enjoy it while it’s going on, because once Halloween is past, these will be more spaced out. But for now, I’m excited to bring up two more games that scared the bejeezus out of me as a youngling: The 7th Guest and Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle Of Flesh. These were two games that I played through several times on the PC and still remember very fondly to this day.

The 7th Guest

Around the age of 8 or 9, my family got our first real PC. It ran Windows 3.1 (how many of you remember THAT?) and almost every game had to be run via DOS. This was during the height of point-and-click adventure games such as Myst, Grim Fandango, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Loom, and others. However, to us horror fans, the game that stood out at the time was now defunct Trilobyte’s The 7th Guest. A point-and-click puzzle game that took place inside a haunted house where the player had to solve twisted riddles and games in order to figure out the truth, The 7th Guest was a game built around gorgeous, albeit MIDI, music and haunting, creepy sounds that truly breathed life into the Stauf mansion. The soundtrack, composed by The Fat Man, ranged from twisted jazz to eerie lullabies to lounge music, all of which always felt slightly…off.

As this was a game that was put out on CD-ROM, the audio was of much higher quality than NES and offered more depth and variety of sounds. The sound bites of plants rustling, doors squeaking, the house moaning and groaning all added to the gaming experience that made The 7th Guest a difficult game to play in the dark.

Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle of Flesh

Several years later, when I was about 14, I managed to get my hands on a used copy of Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle of Flesh at a local EB Games. I only got the first Phantasmagoria years later and always had trouble running it on my Windows XP PC, so I never fully got the opportunity to enjoy it. However, A Puzzle of the Flesh worked almost perfectly (a hang up here, a crash there, nothing serious) and I was able to delve yet again into the world of survival point-and-click. In this game, players are put into the role of Curtis, a seemingly mild, everyday guy who begins to experience terrifying hallucinations and events, all while gruesome and grisly murders are being committed.

This was yet another game where each successful click would activate a movie, complete with actors and sets, to show the resulting action. Because of this approach to gaming, the audio had to feel just as real, even if the cut scenes might have felt a little forced here and there. What resulted was a game where the background noise became truly unsettling and made one feel as though there was something crawling underneath one’s skin. As Curtis descends deeper and deeper into the madness of his visions, the music becomes more and more unsettling and the sounds become more and more acute. This was one of the first games where I needed to take a break every once in a while to get the jitters out of my spine.

Fun fact: Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle Of Flesh is considered to be one of the first games to feature not only an openly gay man in a positive light (by the LGBT community standards), but also Curtis is revealed to be a bi-sexual man.

‘The Voice Of Horror’ banner was designed by Dead Pixel’s Adam Dodd

Related Topics:Original Phantasmagoria II: A Puzzle Of Flesh The 7th Guest The Voice Of Horror

JonathanBarkan

Managing editor/music guy/social media fella of Bloody-Disgusting

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Music

“He Walks By Night” – Listen to a Brand New John Carpenter Song NOW!

Published

2 weeks ago

April 9, 2024

John Squires

It’s a new day, and you’ve got new John Carpenter to listen to. John Carpenter, Daniel Davies and Cody Carpenter have released the new track He Walks By Night this morning, the second single off their upcoming album Lost Themes IV: Noir, out May 3 on Sacred Bones Records.

Lost Themes IV: Noir is the latest installment in a series that sees Carpenter releasing new music for John Carpenter movies that don’t actually exist. The first Lost Themes was released in 2015, followed by Lost Themes II in 2016 and Lost Themes III: Alive After Death in 2021.

Sacred Bones previews, “It’s been a decade since John Carpenter recorded the material that would become Lost Themes, his debut album of non-film music and the opening salvo in one of Hollywood’s great second acts. Those vibrant, synth-driven songs, made in collaboration with his son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies, kickstarted a musical renaissance for the pioneering composer and director. With Lost Themes IV: Noir, they’ve struck gold again, this time mining the rich history of the film noir genre for inspiration.

“Since the first Lost Themes, John has referred to these compositions as “soundtracks for the movies in your mind.” On the fourth installment in the series, those movies are noirs. Like the film genre they were influenced by, what makes these songs “noirish” is sometimes slippery and hard to define, and not merely reducible to a collection of tropes. The scores for the great American noir pictures were largely orchestral, while the Carpenters and Davies work off a sturdy synth-and-guitar backbone.

“The trio’s free-flowing chemistry means Lost Themes IV: Noir runs like a well-oiled machine—the 1951 Jaguar XK120 Roadster from Kiss Me Deadly, perhaps, or the 1958 Plymouth Fury from John’s own Christine. It’s a chemistry that’s helped power one of the most productive stretches of John’s creative life, and Noir proves that it’s nowhere near done yielding brilliant results.”

You can pre-save Lost Themes IV: Noir right now! And listen to the new track below…