Editorials
Remembering “Clock Tower 3”!
Survival Horror has been making a comeback these past few years. With terrifying games like Outlast, Alien: Isolation and the unexpectedly brilliant Resident Evil 7, horror fans can rejoice once more with the largest selection of fright-inducing video games since the late nineties. However, with the increasing influx of interactive horror media, a few hugely influential franchises have unfortunately been forgotten. One of my personal favorite game series, Clock Tower, is sadly among them.
Clock Tower began as a 1995 Japan-exclusive Super Famicon cartridge, which was later ported to the PC and PlayStation. This innovative game was similar to classic point and click adventure titles, but with a horrific twist. As you progressed through the levels, collecting items and solving puzzles, you’d be chased around by a terrifying murderer wielding a giant pair of scissors (not unlike Cropsy and his garden shears from the 1981 slasher film The Burning).
With no real combat system to speak of, the player would be forced to flee from the iconic Scissorman, resulting in some of the most intense chase sequences in video game history. Naturally, the game was successful, resulting in a number of sequels, mostly for the PlayStation. The first of these sequels, also called Clock Tower, is fondly remembered as a gaming classic and considered by some to be the best game in the series, with a clever branching story and fear-inducing gameplay.
Familiar, isn’t it?
The next sequel, Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within initially seemed like more of the same, and was heavily criticized for not updating the archaic controls and interface, not to mention the disconnected plot. The game had its moments, with the same intense chases and brain-melting puzzles, but it’s still widely regarded as the worst in the series.
That brings us to what might very well be the strangest and possibly most creative game in this already peculiar franchise, 2002’s Clock Tower 3. Directed by the renowned Japanese filmmaker Kinji Fukasaku, of Battle Royale fame, this game is more of an original entity that borrows and adds to the Clock Tower formula rather than a proper sequel to the previous titles.
Set in modern day London, Clock Tower 3 follows the terrifying misadventures of Alyssa Hamilton, a fourteen-year-old girl who returns home from boarding school after receiving an alarming letter from her mother. From there, the story sprouts into nearly incomprehensible madness as Alyssa gets involved with serial-killer-possessing spirits, time-travel, and piano-playing ghosts, all the while searching for her mysterious mother and grandfather.
Breaking Clock Tower tradition, the gameplay here is more reminiscent of traditional survival horror titles like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, with suspenseful fixed camera positions and 3D controls and no trace of the original point and click interface. Although the game still lacks a traditional combat system (for the most part), enemy encounters are frequent, forcing you to find unconventional hiding places.
Boo!
The meat of the game consists in time-travelling to certain periods of history to solve puzzles, allowing the spirits of murder victims to head into the afterlife. As this is going on, you’ll naturally be pursued by a varied selection of possessed serial killers depending on the time and place. Unlike previous games, however, Alyssa is equipped with limited amounts of holy water to stun her enemies long enough for her to make a break for it.
These memorable (if somewhat exaggerated) antagonists are easily the best part of the game. Most of them are actually based on real life murderers, adding a supernatural twist that makes them even more menacing. The chase sequences here are honestly the best in the franchise, as the soundtrack and virtual camera placement make these scenes legitimately thrilling. This quintessential slasher movie experience of hiding in a closet or under a bed and helplessly observing as a masked maniac stalks you through the night is downright exhilarating. It’s really no surprise that so many modern games have borrowed this terrifying formula.
Clock Tower 3 is undoubtedly full of frights and clever design choices, but it’s still far from perfect. Hell, despite loving the hell out of this game, I’m not sure if I can even say that it’s “good”. I can get past the repetitive gameplay and occasional quirks, but then, there are several moments of mood-shattering absurdity that come close to breaking the game.
Once you’ve finished a level, Alyssa will be forced to confront these serial killers in one of the most bizarre examples of a boss fight in gaming history, as she undergoes a Sailor-Moon-esque transformation sequence and equips an ancient bow that fires magical arrows. These boss fights may be intense, but they’re undeniably stupid and destroy the haunting atmosphere of the rest of the game. That being said, I particularly love how the enemy health bar in these sequences is determined by their number of victims and the length of their prison sentence.
I wish I was making this up.
Nevertheless, when Clock Tower 3 works, it’s amazing, and many of these concepts demand revisiting in future games. When it’s not falling prey to its own ridiculousness, the game actually does a great job at emulating the thrills and atmosphere of a good slasher movie, which is why I love it so much.
Sadly, this game also marked the end of the official Clock Tower series, and survival horror as a whole eventually fell out of favor as well. There were a few spiritual sequels after this (with a new one called Remothered: Tormented Fathers still in development), namely Haunting Ground (which is amazing) and Nightcry (which isn’t), but the Clock Tower franchise is basically dead at this point. This is a damned shame as modern horror games owe so much to these games, but they still aren’t as revered as some other horror series.
Either way, despite some insane moments, Clock Tower 3 has a special place in my heart. Even if there’s never another game in the series, I’m glad that I can still pop this one into my dusty old PlayStation 2 and remind myself of a bygone era of survival horror.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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