Editorials
Re-Opening ‘Illbleed’s’ Veins, the Sleeper Title that Made ‘Until Dawn’ Possible
The survival horror genre has been an increasingly growing one ever since the niche sect of gaming burst from the grave in the ’90s. While the past few years in particular have taken this fascination with the genre to a fever pitch, we haven’t just seen a surplus of survival horror titles, but also an evolution and growth in the form. The recent smash success Until Dawn, developed by Supermassive Games exclusively for the PlayStation 4, has garnered a lot of attention in particular for how it’s reinvented the genre and is such a tremendous step forward for survival horror. While looking at the title I couldn’t help but be reminded of the cult classic Dreamcast game, Illbleed, and how the current classic certainly owes a great deal to its predecessor. The two frightening titles share more than a few similarities, and in lieu of Until Dawn’s rabid success, digging into this relatively unknown gem and comparing the two only seemed appropriate.
2001 saw the Dreamcast singing its swan song, with the PlayStation 2’s dominance being well in effect at this point. In spite of the Dreamcast’s days being numbered, it still managed to churn out a number of influential titles during its eleventh hour, one of such being the deeply inventive survival horror game developed by Crazy Games, Inc., Illbleed. The game has you taking control of Eriko Christy, who must brave the horror-themed amusement park, Illbleed, in order to save her friends (who are all members of the Horror Movie Research Club with you, naturally). Each of Illbleed’s different rides/worlds/attractions essentially attack a different subgenre of horror, giving the game a healthy dose of freedom and ammunition beyond Until Dawn’s focused view on the woods trope. For instance one of the most bizarre offerings is the “Toyhunter” stage, which is pretty much a Toy Story mash-up where your Woody surrogate is saving his damsel in distress, Sexy Doll, from toy hell. Here he ultimately does battle with Zodick the Hellhog, getting as close as you can to taking down your system’s faithful mascot without bringing on a lawsuit (he even shoots out rings at you!)…
Alternatively, Supermassive’s Until Dawn sees seven friends going to the eerie Blackwood Pines, a secluded lodge up North, when they begin to be turned into prey by the vicious, hungry creatures that are loose in the area. While the plot might sound like all too many entries out of the survival horror genre, Until Dawn reinvigorates the genre in inspired ways. For starters, the title sees you having to play as multiple characters in order to get the full story, unlocking more and gaining access to additional people as you advance through the game rather than starting with everyone and then slowly wittling your way through the cast. Furthermore, which characters you manage to keep alive (or sacrifice accordingly) will drastically alter the route that your game goes down, reflecting an experience more like that out of a horror film—people are going to die, and it’s going to be unpredictable.
Until Dawn was heralded for this more nonlinear gameplay mechanic, yet the very same idea was being executed back in 2001 with Illbleed. In Illbleed, once you rescue your friends from the various attractions you then have the option to play as them with their survival dependent upon your performance in the game, which in turn informs your ending. That being said, both games still allow you to play solely as one character if that’s the experience that you choose to have. There’s no one way to work through these games. While both titles effectively ape the high body count trope out of horror films, Illbleed even takes this one step further that whenever one of your friends dies in the game, Eriko, will have her clothes become increasingly tattered. The damage will go all the way down to her being in the shreds of her bra and panties, mocking yet another all-too popular horror convention. You even need to have all of your friends die and be reduced to this near-naked state in Illbleed to access the game’s “true” ending, too!
A related feature to the survival rate of your characters in Until Dawn is the “Butterfly Effect” concept that the game implemented. Here, the decisions you make as characters will have crucial consequences later on in the game. This is true in the form of which of your characters are still alive, but also on a microcosmic scale. If one character takes a weapon out of a room in Scene A, another character is going to end up being unarmed when they get there in Scene D. This cause and effect relationship is still delved into in Illbleed, albeit in a much more simplistic way. Until Dawn even incorporated a harsh autosave policy into itself where you’re forced to start completely over if you ever want to redo any of the decisions that you’ve made in the game. This is kind of a bonkers level of rigidity going on here, but it’s taking the ideas that were introduced in Illbleed to the next natural level.
Another progressive step that was made with Until Dawn was in the case of how the title deals with the moral and ethical choices that your characters make. This might seem like the perfect idea for a genre that’s so morality focused, but Illbleed happened to take this concept and push it to an even more intricate place. Illbleed managed to incorporate your characters’ adrenaline, courage, fear, and other emotion-based factors into your experience, having all of this resemble more of a film or a real survival horror environment. It’s shocking that so few games after the fact have followed suit by working these psychological aspects into their gaming. It only makes sense that your proximity to scares would progressively wear you down and take its toll on you. Illbleed’s protagonist, Eriko, is also someone who has been subjected to every horror film that’s been created, desensitizing her into losing her sense of fear accordingly, in what’s some perfectly batshit crazy plotting.
Illbleed illustrates this idea via a sixth sense in the form of a “horror monitor” that allows you to detect traps and defuse fear, keeping your vitals intact. This power of deflating the scares that await you almost feels like the hindsight of watching a horror film for a second time and knowing when the scares are going to come and feeling less vulnerable as a result. If you’re not as savvy with your trap detection as you should be, you open yourself up to a number of problems, such as bleeding to death or becoming frightened to death if you don’t soon tend to your ailments. This adds yet another appreciated sense of reality and a glimpse of the growing stakes that are often felt in horror films once the consequences and body count begin to mount.
Until Dawn easily could have incorporated these aspects to some degree to create a more enriching experience, as opposed to say the presence of a lengthier dialogue script. That being said, the game’s frequent clue collecting often feels like its own variety of detecting traps.
A lot has been said for the ways in which these survival horror titles have pushed their genre forward and made these games feel closer to the experience of movies, but beyond all of that they both capture the tone of horror effortlessly. Both games manage to actually be scary, a detail that’s paramount through all of this. It’s great to be nudging the genre forward, but if it’s not scary in the process then what’s the point? Jump scares, intentionally bad voice acting, trope characters, and countless staples of the genre are thrown at you to the point where these don’t just feel like video games, but like great horror films at times, too. Illbleed is certainly the campier of the two titles (Illbleed, the park’s, slogan is, “You will shit with fear!” for example) with the game being legitimately funny at times. You’ll find yourself laughing much like how you might at a bad horror movie. Until Dawn leans into these hammy sensibilities as well, but is much more interested in scaring the fuck out of you.
While the blueprint that Illbleed helped establish has been serviced up in some respects in titles like Eternal Darkness, the Fatal Frame series, the underrated Michigan: Report From Hell, and most recently, Until Dawn, it still largely remains an innovator with many concepts that are ripe for potential in current survival horror gaming. Talk of a sequel to Illbleed was contemplated, and like many of the Dreamcast’s later-in-life gems, there were plans to port the title to the original XBOX, but they eventually fell to the wayside. That being said, with news of an Until Dawn sequel seeming ever more likely, perhaps the follow-up will flesh out even more of the physics that Illbleed introduced over a decade ago.
Ultimately while Until Dawn might be the more polished game that is technically more complicated, arguably Illbleed captures the survivor horror genre a little better—or at least tackles more aspects of it. Regardless of which one does it better though, they’re both tremendous successes in the form and their DNA is certainly intertwined with each other. Whether Illbleed was directly responsible for Until Dawn in any sense, it’s a nice example of how the genre has progressed in a relatively short amount of time and what it’s learned from itself through the years.
Now stop reading this think piece or two of your friends are going to die. Or continue reading and one might die and another is revealed to be the killer. Or go and delete your browser history and three might die, but two…
Five decades ago, Stephen King published the story of a bullied girl with telekinetic powers and forever changed the world of horror.
Carrie follows a high school misfit who seeks revenge for a hideous prank by psychically destroying her senior prom. The name Carrie White has become synonymous with the concept of a formal dance thanks to a flawless adaptation from Brian De Palma. Now fifty years after the film’s release, Mike Flanagan is putting his own stamp on the troubling story.
Rather than a feature film, the writer/director will expand King’s relatively slim debut novel into an eight-episode miniseries for Amazon Prime set to premiere on October 7.
Flanagan is no stranger to the world of Stephen King. A long-time Constant Reader, he first made waves with his daring adaptation of Gerald’s Game (2017), a novel many fans considered un-filmable. His underrated Doctor Sleep merges the disparate plot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with King’s original source material, and his 2024 genre-bending tearjerker The Life of Chuck faithfully executes one of the author’s most metaphysical novellas.
He’s currently mired in pre-production for an expansive adaptation of The Dark Tower series, keystone to King’s connected universe, and Warner Bros. recently announced that Flanagan will helm a new version of The Mist, King’s 1980 novella which sees a small Maine town overrun by otherworldly monsters.
Considering the vast array of the author’s previously unadapted material, an obvious question arises. Why reimagine Carrie in 2026? Noting the timeless nature of the content, Flanagan expressed his desire to bring the story of a bullied girl into modern times, mirroring his approach to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He explained, “The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.”
His miniseries will maintain the novel’s bloody bookends while delivering “big surprises” along the way.
A New Prom Night Nightmare
The roughly 60-second teaser introduces Summer H. Howell as Carrie White just before the moment of catastrophe. Standing in a prom dress, she smiles at her applauding classmates with an ominous crown perched upon her head. Moments later, Carrie unleashes a rage-filled scream into the night air while promgoers rush for the exit doors. But careful examination of this scene shows Carrie wearing a different, albeit dirty dress as she seems to telekinetically punish her peers.
In an exclusive first look with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan explains that in his version of the story, “the events of that prom are going to be completely different.” An open trunk emitting a crimson glow does hint at the pig’s blood dumped on Carrie’s head, but it’s likely Flanagan’s formal dance will be a different kind of horror altogether. Despite these changes, the series may end with the widespread destruction outlined in the source material. Unlike any previous adaptations, King’s novel ends with the near-total destruction of Chamberlain, Maine. A flaming street in Flanagan’s trailer promises similar carnage no matter what prank sparks Carrie’s deadly revenge.
The Monstrous Addition of Social Media
On the opposite end of this fiery conclusion is an extreme act of bullying that brings together the story’s main cast. King’s novel begins as Carrie gets her first period while showering in the girls’ locker room. Completely unaware of the concept of menstruation, the sheltered girl thinks she’s bleeding to death. Her classmates respond with vitriolic rage. Led by ultra-mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), they mock the terrified teen while pelting her with tampons. Glimpses of this disturbing event reveal that Flanagan has excised the scene’s nudity while adding a seismic update. As Carrie sobs in the shower stall, Chris and her friends film the breakdown with their phones.
Other scenes note the presence of social media, bringing King’s fifty-year-old story into the digital age.
Flanagan’s adaptation promises to explore the destructive power of social media, an often invisible entity with a potential for harm rivaling Carrie’s own powers. While King’s tormented heroine suffers in front of a small group of girls, Flanagan’s version of the incident will likely become a viral video, potentially circling the globe on social media. Similar to Katt Shea’s criminally underrated The Rage: Carrie 2, which includes elements of revenge porn exploitation, Flanagan’s modern retelling will distinguish itself by exploring the nebulous cruelty of online bullying, a force ten times more powerful than the irl pranks King first envisioned.
A Completely Reimagined White Family
In addition to modernizing these canon events, Flanagan hints at updates to Carrie’s oppressive upbringing at the hands of her mother, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan). Dead before the novel begins, we never meet Carrie’s domineering father Ralph, known to carry a bible alongside his gun. Flanagan’s White household will be an altogether different beast. In his version of the story, Carrie and her mother have been hidden away in the unassuming home, forced out of hiding by Ralph’s unexpected death. Perhaps we will finally meet this elusive man whose shadow hangs over his wife and child. Considering the White family’s fundamentalist lifestyle, this reimagining hints at tradwife culture and a home ruled by staunch patriarchal control.
Whereas King’s Carrie has been tormented by her classmates since Kindergarten, Flanagan’s Carrie will be a wide-eyed newcomer to public school, eager to make friends and engage with her peers. We glimpse Carrie cozying up to Chris and the equally popular Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) as she navigates a new social scene. Of course, we know this kindness is part of an elaborate plot designed to lull Carrie into a false sense of camaraderie, setting up an atrocious act of public humiliation. These brief moments of feigned compassion put Sue’s own complicity into question. Will Flanagan’s version of the character find the courage to defend Carrie from vicious bullies or will she succumb to peer pressure and join in the mob mentality?
Perhaps the biggest deviation from King’s original text is the relationship between Carrie and her mother. King’s Margaret White is a horrifically abusive religious zealot whose worldview has been hardened by internalized misogyny. She shames Carrie for menstruating, locks her in a closet to “pray,” and regrets not killing her child in infancy. She’s also responsible for Carrie’s social ostracization. Known to berate her neighbors for their “sins,” Margaret forces her daughter to live by an extreme code of conduct and disallows any potential friends lest they corrupt the girl with their worldly ways.
Flanagan’s version of the character is perhaps just as much a victim as Carrie herself. Also trapped inside her home, his Margaret is overly vigilant, her own trauma manifesting as strict control. Describing a more sympathetic depiction of the iconic villain, Flanagan explains, “Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world … [She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia.”
Despite this potential softening, Sloyan’s Margaret may still have a sharp edge. Though she has appeared in many Flanagan projects, from Hush (2016) to The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), she is best known for her role as the abhorrent Bev Keane in the poignant saga Midnight Mass (2021). Perhaps inspired by King’s Margaret White, Bev is pious and sadistic, willing to punish anyone who does not adhere to her warped approximation of Catholicism.
Flanagan specifically wrote Margaret with Sloyan in mind, likely remembering the actress’s eerie ability to create deceptive empathy and shift our allegiances on a dime.
Expanding Stephen King’s Telekinetic Universe
While most of King’s story deals with an unthinkable prom night in Chamberlain, Maine, large sections of the semi-epistolary novel see experts debating the nature of telekinesis. Do Carrie’s frightening abilities represent a new phase in human evolution or is the prom night carnage merely a fluke? King settles the debate with a shocking denouement in which a young mother recounts her infant daughter’s ability to dangle her crib toys in midair. We’re left to wonder if she will become another tormented girl who surprises the world with metaphysical strength.
Flanagan plans to build out this brief scene while amplifying themes of female empowerment. After introducing our main cast of characters, episode two will open with an unrelated story in which we meet another girl with the TK gene. Each subsequent chapter will expand this world, building out a roster of telekinetic young women. Considering King’s fondness for stories about powerful kids, often described as possessing “the shining,” Constant Readers will no doubt have their eyes peeled for various Easter Eggs nodding to the author’s vast catalogue.
Giving Carrie Her Own Voice
Perhaps the most striking distinction in Flanagan’s new trailer is the extent to which we hear Carrie’s voice. The sneak peek is fully narrated by the titular prom queen as she demands accountability. “I want to know why,” she explains while detailing Chris’ elaborate plan. Aside from the aforementioned coda, King’s book essentially ends with the aftermath of the prom night tragedy, leaving little time for Carrie to reflect. His shifting narrative does bring the reader into her fragile mind, though not before she’s been cowed by relentless cruelty. We watch Carrie sink into bloodthirsty revenge, but never hear a considered desire for justice or repair.
Flanagan’s original monologue allows Carrie to voice her pain and mourn the life she could have had. We’re also treated to a mug shot-style photo of Chris with a bruised and bandaged face, implying that the mean girl will have to answer for her senseless sadism.
Flanagan is known for filling his series adaptations with heartwrenching speeches that cut to the heart of his thematic intentions, and this teaser seems to follow suit. After years of fans, critics, and scholars analyzing Carrie’s pain, perhaps his modern retelling will offer the titular anti-hero a chance to finally speak for herself.
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