Editorials
The Timing is Right for a ‘Scream’ Video Game
That’s a headline I never thought I’d write. I usually don’t push for more adaptations when anyone who watches movies or plays video games knows that’s never been something we need more of. Scream is an exception to that rule and now that everything has lined up just right, it’s time we start talking about why it’s time for it and what we would like to see from a possible adaptation.
The reason why I’m bringing this up now is because of that excellent timing I mentioned earlier. Horror games are hot right now, and if you read Bloody Disgusting with any kind of regularity, you know that Scream is, too. Then there’s the growing number of slasher games we have on the way with Until Dawn, Last Year, Summer Camp and that mysterious Friday the 13th game, and in the next 6-12 months we’ll have a promising new subgenre of horror on our hands.
In other words, the road is being paved for a Scream game as you read this.
It will only take the success of a few of these games to prove this isn’t just a passing trend and that there’s a future — and more importantly, an audience — for slasher video games. Thankfully, as their numbers grow, so do our chances of seeing a few that get it right.
As for a Scream game, there’s a myriad forms it might take, and until we some of these games release so we know what works and what doesn’t, they’re all worth exploring. I can see it taking the Heavy Rain approach with a story comprised of several characters with interconnected stories. Until Dawn is going in a similar direction.
Asymmetrical multiplayer is the approach the makers of Summer Camp, Last Year and whoever it is that’s working on the Friday the 13th game took. It’s popular because that twist on multiplayer means one player can assume the role of the murderous villain while everyone else becomes their victims. I say we wait and see how an asymmetrical multiplayer agrees with them before we add another game to that list.
We went from having zero slasher games on the way to having several in such a small amount of time that I don’t think many people stopped to consider how confusing it might get. With the similarly titled Summer Camp and Splatter Camp, the former of which stars Kane Hodder, Jason Voorhees himself, even though there’s also a Friday the 13th game, and that game recently clashed with Last Year which featured a killer that looked like Jason… see what I mean?
Starting now, any developers that are itching to take a stab at making a game about a psychopath who hunts down horny teenagers needs to prioritize coming up with a way to make that game stand out. Even the small crowd we have now is taking on an amorphous shape already. It wouldn’t take much to make it nigh-impossible to distinguish one murder game from the next.
Scream can accomplish through two easy steps. The first is by not becoming the fourth multiplayer slasher game, because any more would be excessive, and the second involves its going episodic.
Granted, the upcoming television series should give us an idea of what an episodic Scream game might feel like, so it would be a good idea to wait and see how that goes, but even if it fails, I can’t see the fault resting with its new easier-to-digest format.
Episodic games got a significant amount of attention in 2012 with the impressive debut of Telltale’s The Walking Dead. Several other studios have since joined in with their own series — including Capcom with Resident Evil Revelations 2 — but the force behind this episodic renaissance we’re seeing is still mostly being led by Telltale and their desire to become the HBO of the games industry. With series based on Game of Thrones, Borderlands, Minecraft and Fables, among others, they’re also the most invested in its future.
Telltale might be the best candidate to handle the development of an episodic Scream game. They’re very good at adapting TV shows into video games and they have some experience with the horror genre. The studio also comes with a stellar writing team, and that’s mandatory if the game is going to continue the Scream tradition of being self-aware and making full use of its medium.
It’s why I have some hope for the TV show, even if it is on MTV. There’s untapped potential there, just as there is in video games. The films have mined that vein for meta humor long enough that it took the fourth film all of ten minutes to run dry. It was a glorious opening ten minutes, sure, but then you’re left with the other 80 or so that can do little else but disappoint.
To recap: today we discussed how scary video games are hot, slasher games may be hot a year from now, and if Scream wants to reclaim its title as one of the “cool” and innovative brands in horror, it should look to the sometimes cool and always innovative medium that is video games.
If you’re still on the fence, just picture a Stab game you can play in a Scream game that’s being played by teens in the Scream TV show that’s playing on a television in a Scream movie.
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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