Editorials
‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’: The Most Disturbing, Nihilistic Video Game of All Time?
We shine a light on the highly controversial, deeply ambitious Harlan Ellison video game adaptation that was decades ahead of its time.
When was the last time that a video game really got in your head and made you question your every decision? Sure, there are plenty of survival horror games that succeed in frightening their audience with monsters and surprising jump scares, but how many horror games frighten the gamer because of the very decisions that they make and the sort of person that they’re becoming? Sure, zombies and ghosts are terrifying, but human nature and how twisted and evil people can become is even scarier and there are very few games that even attempt to examine that area in horror. Not only does Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream make a stake for that territory, but they succeed in a hugely ambitious way.
“I have a secret game that I’d like to play. It’s a very nice game. Oh, it’s a lovely game, a game of fun and a game of adventure. A game of rats and lice and the Black Death. A game of speared eyeballs and dripping guts and the smell of rotting gardenias.” Welcome to the subtle, restrained world of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
If that excerpt isn’t enough of a glimpse into this game’s bitter tone, the title has the privilege of featuring one of the most over the top, melodramatic introductions that I’ve ever seen in a point-and-click adventure game. This is all also heightened and made even better by Harlan Ellison’s huge voice acting performance as the rabid supercomputer AM. Ellison wanted I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream to wear its bleak nature on its sleeve, but listen to the joyful, flowery dialogue that kicks off this game:
“Hate. Let me tell you how much I’ve come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word ‘hate’ was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.”
That might be too nihilistic for even the most hardcore of Ellison junkies. The game basically spends close to ten minutes setting up its five main characters, who are all stuck in their own personal Hells and eager to finally escape. The pessimistic catch to all of this is that the only way to escape is for these individuals to finally be allowed the privilege to kill themselves after 109 years of torture. Furthermore, AM has extreme sentience, but it’s confined to its state and can’t move in the real world. That’s AM’s ultimate goal and the reason why it tortures these people. It longs to figure out a way to no longer be a “quadriplegic.”
This isn’t the worst premise for a horror game—it’s like an extreme version of the typical point-and-click fare. Picture a scenario where Jigsaw is essentially God and rather than putting his victims through ironic torture rooms he instead creates a whole alternate reality torture simulation to drive them insane. Each character gets transported to a new constructed world, whether it’s a Zeppelin, an Egyptian pyramid, a medieval castle, or a prehistoric cave, and then they must work out the puzzles. That’s a freaking awesome setup for a video game.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream focuses its gameplay around the ethical and moral decisions that the player makes through their experience. This is a concept that’s slowly made its way into video games like Fable through the years, but it’s still a relatively deep concept to try and work into a video game, especially back in the ‘90s. However, there’s also a pretty good chance that I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is probably the only video game that’s available to play in The Good Place.
This title also stands out because it’s a rare example where the relationship between the original author and the adaptation is actually quite deep. In fact, Ellison was so deeply involved in the production of this game that he even acts as the voice of the title’s vengeful God, AM. It makes for a wonderful example of art imitating life and the game takes on an ultra-real level of meta-commentary as a result, which is always appreciated in Ellison’s works.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream led to a lot of discussions ever since it was first announced. The game was a big deal due to being co-designed by Ellison and published by the company Cyberdreams. The game stood out for the fact that it was put together by a number of talents that weren’t from the world of video games. David Sears, who wrote the game with Ellison, came from Compute! Magazine as a writer and associate editor. Furthermore, many people in the industry considered Ellison’s stories impossible to adapt for video games, let alone a story like I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream that already contains scarce character details. It was this decision to flesh out the characters that led to the development decision to use a unique split narrative structure for the story. In that sense the game almost functions as a sequel or origin story of sorts for Ellison’s original text.
Sears and Ellison prepared a 130-page draft document that would work as the script and outline for the game. Then, producer David Mullich (who’s now most commonly known for his work in the Heroes of Might and Magic series) would take this document and transform it into a massive 800-page design document with over 2000 lines of additional dialogue. This was not typical for games of this time, which is another reason why I Have No Mouth is such an interesting anomaly. Mullich seemed like the right person to help with the controversial title as he had previously worked on a video game adaptation of the mind-bending television series, The Prisoner, which is an equally ambitious project for when it came out in 1980 (seriously, the game gets in players’ heads so thoroughly that the CIA even used it as a training tool). Both I Have No Mouth and The Prisoner also heavily pull from Franz Kafka’s mindfuck of a novel, The Castle. The Prisoner game also involves surreal storytelling techniques, an emphasis on philosophy, and puts stock in the moral values of the gamer.
In pre-release publicity for the title, Ellison went so far as to say that this was a game that “you cannot possibly win.” This stirred up a considerable amount of controversy and the final product eventually balked from this boast. The game can be won, but it’s difficult, and there are an abundance of negative endings. It also didn’t help that Ellison’s approach here was to basically attack the computer gaming industry and say that his game would be the first breath of fresh air in some time and finally something new for gamers.
Sears was eventually able to get through to Ellison and convince him that a game with purely bad endings wouldn’t be appreciated, but it’s a bold premise that jives with the author’s work. Even still, in 2013 Ellison stood by his actions and said, “I created it so you could not win it. The only way in which you could ‘win’ was to play it nobly. The more nobly you played it, the closer to succeeding you would come, but you could not actually beat it. And that annoyed the hell out of people too.” In that sense this indicates that Ellison’s perception of the “good ending” where AM is defeated and the cryogenically frozen humans wake up on Luna is still steeped in dread. Or maybe he just never knew they pushed through this happy ending angle.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is also innovative in the sense that each character’s narrative put to use a different art style that would better reflect that character’s themes. German expressionism, flowery high fantasy, and ultra-drab realities are all used to better illustrate the personal Hells that each of these people are trapped in, as well as highlight the immense, surreal powers of AM. The title also impresses with some really incredible voice acting, sound design, and a full score. Mullich hired film composer John Ottman (who would later do musical work on The Usual Suspects and X-Men) to write over 25 pieces of original MIDI music, and it really stands out.
The game was a critical success for the most part (GameSpot awarded it a 4.3 out of 5 and PC Gamer gave it an 87%) although it still fell flat for some audiences. It was described as “less a game than an ethical obstacle course,” which is actually a pretty perfect description of it (and also a review that Ellison probably would have loved). While the game was too deep for some, many praised its ambitious nature and even went as far as to say that this is what high art should do. If video games want to be taken seriously, then they need to offer the same level of reflection and analysis that the works of Kafka do, for example.
It’s factors like that that helped the title receive such accolades as “Best Game Adapted from Linear Media” at that year’s CGDC and Computer Gaming World even called it “Adventure Game of the Year.” Even now the game still carries on a strong legacy and as recently as 2014 Game Informer put it amongst its “Top 25 Horror Games of All Time.” Back in the summer of 1995, a PlayStation port of the title was planned, but ultimately canceled. Such a release surely would have helped widen the visibility of this cult title. Fortunately, the game has recently found a second life on Steam and GOG.com after it was released on the platforms back in 2013.
When it comes down to the actual gameplay, there are definitely pangs of System Shock here, but there’s ultimately a deeper story in place that actually plays into the moral decision making process that BioShock had such a ball with. The game also has a very Eternal Darkness feeling to it in terms of its “episodic” nature. The title is split up into five stories (which are referred to as psycho-dramas, which is great), that are all about 30 minutes or so in length. All of this amounts to an experience that feels like an anthology horror approach to an adventure game, which really should be done more! Even if this was a messy disaster, this would still be a concept that has merit, but I Have No Mouth knocks it out of the park. It’s a real surprise that this title’s structure didn’t inspire more horror-adventure games that follow a similar vein.
All of the moral quandaries and decision-making results in a total of seven different possible endings for the game that are based on the player’s performance. This is also a feature that was incredibly ahead of its time. A majority of the players had no idea how many different endings were out there, let alone the steep conditions necessary to arrive at the game’s infamous “good” ending.
Extreme topics like animal torture, human experimentation, genocide, rape, and mental illness all get explored here to surprising degrees. It’s also really wonderful that the game makes it so you don’t know who to trust in the storylines and basically everything is treated as suspect. The fact that there are multiple ways to get through everything also gives the title a ton of replay value and it’s rather ingenious that the game’s hint system expresses its ideas as actual riddles rather than holding your hand to success.
On that note, the game’s puzzles are very obtuse and difficult (one infamous examples involves needing to flush a toilet three times to unlock a hidden room, with no explanation behind the action), but even more so than the typical ‘90s point-and-click adventure game kind of way. This makes the experience even more frustrating at times, but it feels like that’s what Ellison wants to happen. To be fair, the game is far from perfect, there are plenty of programming bugs, and it’s not exactly a smooth adventure game experience, but this title just gets so many points for atmosphere and style that it’s easy to look past these things. There are all sorts of buggy games from the ‘90s, what’s important here is that this is one of the few that gets psychological with its audience and taps into some true horror with lasting ramifications.
All of the storylines in the title offer a glimpse of a different uncomfortable area that Ellison wishes to rub in the audience’s face. There are pretty clear-cut goals that are in place for each character, but it’s the effort put into the details that really make all of this stand out. In Gorrister’s story, he deals with jukeboxes in his purgatory that only play pained audio tracks of his loved ones and past mistakes, which is a brilliantly twisted idea. At another point, a character is forced to reunite and confront their loved ones as they hang in a meat locker. Each of these little morality plays force your character to confront their past in some disturbing way.
Ellen’s story is particularly painful as it attempts to portray mental illness to questionable, albeit admirable, results, especially for a ‘90s point-and-click adventure game. The scenario goes through Ellen’s sad life and her struggle with postpartum depression. The most shocking part of all of this occurs when Ellen is forced to face her traumatic rape head-on and re-live an aggressive attack in an elevator that explains why she’s become so frail. It’s incredibly dark, especially with how it glosses over Ellen’s entire life and the downward spiral that it takes, but it makes for fairly challenging material for a video game.
Benny sees himself transformed into a handicapped ape creature, which is particularly morbid. What’s worse is that his mission deals with having to choose a villager to sacrifice to AM on the altar. At the same time, Benny also helps raise a mutant child, who inevitably loses their mother to the lottery sacrifice. In a 2012 Game Informer interview, it was revealed that there were regrets that Benny’s story wasn’t more of a parable for someone trying to come to terms with their homosexuality (which was apparently in the game’s original script), which would have seen the game hit on yet another controversial, yet important, area.
Nimdok’s scenario is especially depressing as he’s a Nazi scientist who happens to work with Dr. Joseph Mengele. Things get real dark with Nimdok and he’s stuck in a position where AM wants to retrieve the doctor’s impressive torture techniques for his own gain. It’s one thing for a storyline to simply talk about the atrocities of Nazis, but Nimdok’s task here is to take spinal fluid from children to help build a secret Nazi serum. Meanwhile, the character gets to spout optimistic lines of dialogue like, “I smell burnt flesh, but this definitely isn’t a kitchen. Nimdok even gets smaller moments to marvel at the corpses that were able to smuggle possessions so far in life. There’s literally a scene in this where a bunch of Jewish children scream at Nimdok for the human experiments that he and Mengele do. One child has even had his eyes surgically removed! Curiously, this material goes so far that Nimdok’s story is removed entirely from the French and German versions of the game for understandably delicate purposes. However, it also means that players can’t get the best ending in those versions of the game either!
Finally, the character Ted is meant to be the “normal” narrator and the audience surrogate. I Have No Mouth pushes the premise that normal, regular people are just as messed up and disturbed as the rest of AM’s prisoners. Ted needs to navigate through a fairytale-like narrative and rescue a damsel in distress with Ted playing the Prince Charming role. There are witches, a literal devil, and Cinderella allusions galore here, all of which add a very surreal quality to the tale.
Once the title has made gamers work through each of these twisted examples of psychological torture porn, it adopts a very Harlan Ellison-esque finale. The characters all get digitized into computer viruses and the supercomputer gets to utter something as jokingly poignant as, “I THINK THEREFORE I AM NOT.” All of this also involves the player going into a giant brain and disabling its ego, lest “your subprogram get purged.” Pure Ellison porn, plain and simple.
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream made a strong name for itself upon release, but unfortunately, The Dreamers Guild wouldn’t really garner much of a reputation after the title’s release. The team followed up I Have No Mouth with a middling DinoTopia title and then went on to fade into obscurity. It’s a shame that the company couldn’t pull together one final collaboration with Ellison, or at least use the structure of this game to act as the basis for a new series of literary horror titles. In spite of the game not seeing any sequels, it’s surprising that almost 25 years after its release it’s still one of the most unique, thoughtful takes on the horror genre.
Ellison’s glory days may now be behind him, but there’s absolutely no reason why this basic game design and structure couldn’t be used to create an incredible Black Mirror video game. Let Telltale Games even take a swing at things. It’s shocking how easily Ellison’s bleak reality would cater itself to the techno-morality plays of Black Mirror. Then again, there’s something all-too-appropriate about the omnipotent supercomputer of AM only getting one title to prove his worth. A sequel or spiritual successor would only prove that the megalomaniacal machine has won and that humanity is doomed.
College kids, strippers and vampires—those were Donald P. Borchers’ only requirements when he approached Richard Wenk about writing and directing a movie for New World Pictures. As requested, Wenk cooked up Vamp (1986), a tailor-made blend of the decade’s teen movie craze as well as its horror boom.
Grim and earnest stories were still very much a part of the ’80s horror landscape, yet Vamp is something of a comedy. One difference between it and, say, Saturday the 14th, though, is the former avoids using schtick. Wenk’s movie proves that horror comedies also don’t have to subtract thrills from their recipes. Of course, it takes a minute before reaching that point; college antics and culture shocks preface this one macabre misadventure.
Vamp‘s initial setup is apt for a typical college-set, sex-driven comedy; to bribe their way into a fraternity house, two pledges (Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler) go looking for some adult entertainment. Without wasting time on any further exposition, the characters embark on an all-in-one-night trip that quickly detours into terror.
To procure their elusive MacGuffin—a stripper willing to gyrate for some frat boys—Keith (Makepeace) and AJ (Rusler), plus a third wheel named Duncan (Gedee Watanabe), trade the safety of their remote college campus for the seediness of some unnamed city. The setting is recognizably L.A. by day, but as soon as night falls, downtown, along with the characters, slips into a kind of surreal universe. Director of photography Elliot Davis gave this early entry on his prolific résumé an unusual yet distinctive look; that Mario Bava-esque, magenta-green lighting is omnipresent, so much so that it’s almost its own character.
Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler in Vamp
The faint comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours are merited, although not just because of Vamp’s distinguishing nighttime aesthetic. Save for the primary characters, the supporting roles in Wenk’s movie are also quite colorful and transactional in their behavior. The difference here, though, is the additional urge to ruin Keith and his friends at every turn. Some of that harm is humorous and tolerable enough, whereas the moment Vamp dishes out its first fatality, it’s abundantly clear how this movie qualifies as horror.
Vamp falls into that category of horror movie that reveals its genre with a scream rather than a series of whispers. The opening scene can function as a hint of what lies ahead—things are not at all what they appear to be—but otherwise, Wenk is more than happy to hold off on the horror. When that time does come, though, it catches the viewer off guard. In addition to the pure shock value is that sudden decision to upend the movie’s foremost feature. Or so it would seem.
If afraid of major spoilage, those new to Vamp would be wise to stop reading here. There’s just no skirting around the fact that the central fellowship in this buddy movie hits a serious snag when AJ is killed. That development causes the story to become more of a “long, bad night” journey for Keith and his romantic interest. So while Wenk scores points for subverting expectations, there is also a touch of sadness in his decision. Because if Vamp does anything well, it’s making the characters likable.
Something that comes easily to Vamp—and other teen horror movies from this same era—is its ability to invent young characters worth caring about, or at the very least, are interesting and not so immediately off-putting. More impressive is how Wenk did all this without actually fleshing out those characters. Still and all, Keith and his kind are a grade above cookie-cutter, and in some cases, aren’t completely devoid of growth.
Grace Jones in Vamp
Vamp appeals with an assorted cast of characters. No two are the same, nor are they operating on the same wavelength. The cinematically extroverted AJ, whose actor conveyed charm and vulnerability in near equal amounts, comes alive when he’s at his most undead. Makepeace then makes the chronically cautious Keith a sympathetic fellow, even as he’s more and more affected by the night’s bizarre events. Meanwhile, Duncan is indeed the designated loser of the whole bunch, but Watanabe still manages to humanize him. As a bonus, the role didn’t require him to pull a Long Duk Dong.
As for Dedee Pfeiffer, she is plain adorable as the mysterious After Dark server nicknamed “Amaretto”. She spends all night fixing her dress strap while at the same time trying to get Keith to remember how he knows her. As their offbeat romance grows, it becomes another highlight of this movie. Whether or not Pfeiffer’s character is really a vampire also creates some welcome tension in the story.
Like a lot of its contemporaries, Vamp went on to become a bit of a cult classic. That current status is determined by several factors, but without a doubt, the casting of Grace Jones is the most considerable. The image of her writhing on that unique-looking chair, a Keith Haring original, springs to mind whenever this movie is brought up.
Chris Makepeace, Billy Drago and Paunita Nichols in Vamp
Prior to that first display of unequivocal horror, local vampire queen Katrina (Jones) took to the stage and delivered a strip show like no other. One would expect nothing less from that renowned model and performance artist. By now reports of Jones’ tardiness on set are no secret, yet it’s also hard to deny her commitment to the part of Katrina. It was, in fact, Jones who took charge of her character’s appearance—on top of Haring painting her body and that now-iconic chair, she had Andy Warhol handle her costuming. And not too many actors could seize a room’s attention without saying a single line of dialogue.
In 2022, Vamp received a retrospective novelization from Encyclopocalypse. This literary union of preexisting source material—Wenk’s original screenplay—and new ideas from author Christian Francis amounts to a more comprehensive visit to the After Dark Club. The basic story there is no different than what’s shown on screen; however, Francis gets creative with the characters’ origins and designs, and he enhances a number of key scenes.
The novelization expands on the urban and social decay of the main setting, and supplies a background for the After Dark Club. Sandy Baron’s character, Katrina’s emcee and familiar, is given ample motivation for sticking around; up until the fiery end, he is loyal to his friend and former business partner “Squeak”, who looks like he was “fed through a combine harvester, and left as nothing more than a heap of mangled remains”. Then there is Billy Drago’s character Snow, the leader of a street gang called The Dragons. His reason for menacing Keith and AJ is more altruistic than in the movie; he and his peers act tough to scare off any potential food for the vampires.
Lisa Lyon in Vamp
If not for all the backstories, Francis’ Vamp would be a hell of a lot shorter. Instead, this tie-in read dives into how AJ met Keith—the orphaned Anthony Joseph hailed from a broken home back in Brooklyn—and how their friendship flourished over the years. Keith’s archership is no longer just an assumed part of his entire being; it’s a confidence-building extracurricular for a boy who got picked on before coming into the protection of the new kid in town. These supplemental, in-depth looks at the protagonists, plus their close connection, are maybe unnecessary. The movie already did a fair and concise job of addressing their platonic intimacy without the need for flashbacks and insights, specifically in that scene where AJ lays it all out as he sacrifices himself.
Where the novelization gets off course is its approach to the minor characters. Intermittently backstorying the likes of Katrina’s indentured servants, Seko (Leila Hee Olsen) and Vlad (Brad Logan), ends up disturbing the flow of the writing. Was it absolutely essential that readers know Vlad was the Grand Duke of the House of Romanov, or how Snow’s accomplice Maven (Paunita Nichols) became so dentally challenged? No, not really. However, one’s mileage with these random biographies may vary.
The novelization is a more substantial experience, but for a movie like Vamp, less is more. And as plentiful as they are, it never simply coasts on its campy charms, either. The character work sits comfortably in that realm between cursory and meticulous, the script is sharper than first realized, and Greg Cannom’s vampire makeup is straightforward yet effective. Most of all, the movie didn’t squander its out-of-the-box concept. Richard Wenk made his vision of a “comic nightmare in which just about anything that can go wrong does” come true, and it is very enjoyable.
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