Editorials
The Chill of the Hunt: The Most Sinister Stalkers in Horror Video Games
Video game horror’s biggest trump card over horror in other mediums is that tactile immersion they can bring. The right game can put you in the moment, and in horror, that moment is usually about trying to prick your fear bubble as hard as possible.
One such method for this is having the player hunted by an intimidating entity. Horror movies have absolute mountains of examples of stalker/slasher types chasing (and usually decimating) wide-eyed victims, but video games can put you in the shoes of that victim, make you feel like there’s no hope of escape.
There are many (and some less so) memorable walking evils that have hounded players over the years, and the following selection is among the finest fiends to stalk gamers over the last few decades.
Scissorman (“Clock Tower” Series)
Scissorman is the poster boy for Clock Tower, a series inspired by the work of a horror icon. Series creator Hifumi Kono was inspired by the films of Dario Argento, Phenomena in particular.
The first Clock Tower to arrive on Western shores (1996’s Clock Tower 2) was a point n’ click adventure with a fairly novel 3D engine. Scissorman carries a huge pair of well…scissors (shears really) and you are always pretty much helpless to battle him. So there’s a lot of hiding and sneaking to be done.
This is the prototype that many other virtual boogeymen would follow, but there’s something almost nightmarish about having a pursuing force in the relatively slow-paced world of point n’ click. Not having full autonomy over your character as the blade-wielding madman closes the distance on you.
The series may have died and been usurped by the Resident Evils of this world, but there’s no denying its importance in its handling of virtual slashers.
The Nemesis (“Resident Evil 3: Nemesis”)
Capcom toyed with being hunted in previous Resident Evil titles, but it isn’t until Resident Evil 3 that you truly feel like you are somethings prey.
Set during the events of Resident Evil 2, Jill Valentine is escaping the doomed Raccoon City during the zombie outbreak. Unfortunately, she soon discovers Umbrella have sent a contingency plan to stop her and her S.T.A.R.S. teammates.
That plan is the Nemesis, a walking, talking bioweapon programmed to eliminate the S.T.A.R.S. team, and it just loves to chase poor Jill.
Nemesis sets the tone early on when Jill escapes the room the big tentacled bugger has just crashed into. Normally you’re safe from pursuing enemies if you move to another room, but an off-camera click of the handle and a dread-inducing blare of music tells you the Nemesis isn’t going to let a door stop its mission.
So begins a constant wheel of paranoia and dread, as you move into an area hoping, praying the bioweapon isn’t going to show up. Sometimes you can fend it off temporarily, but if you’re caught short, running is the only real option. It’s almost a relief when the Hunters show up, such is the impact Nemesis has.
Jill does eventually rid herself of the hulking menace, having effectively melted it into a misshapen lump of gristle and meat, but the trauma still resides.
The Xenomorph (“Alien: Isolation”)
It’s somewhat remarkable that the intimidating, horrifying xenomorph that had become nothing more than fancy cannon fodder in the decades since Alien released, would become relevant again in a video game.
Alien Isolation brought the horror back to the Alien name in a big way and provided an eerily accurate feeling of what it would be like to face off with the sleek and terrifying beast.
Developer Creative Assembly builds up to the alien reveal masterfully. Lots of talk and clues to its presence happens, but you’re kept waiting and waiting until eventually…there it is. The hunt now truly begins.
What follows is the player questioning every noise, every shape, every corner blanketed in shadow, and every ping of the motion tracker. You just know it’s never too far away, and you know that too much noise will bring its slick black form out into the open.
You dread having to pass through air ducts, despise long corridors, and curse the presence of paranoid survivors. The xenomorph means almost certain death, and the cat and mouse game you play with it is truly special. At least for the majority of the game’s runtime.
Jack Baker (“Resident Evil 7”)
By the time deranged invincible patriarch Jack Baker truly starts to hunt you in Resident Evil 7, you (and protagonist Ethan) have already endured a lot. Your missing wife is found seemingly possessed, your hand has been chopped off, and you attend a family dinner that was less than pleasant.
When Ethan escapes his captors (but crucially, not their dilapidated homestead) it’s a brief glimmer of hope, but then Jack comes and he has a grand old time of making your life absolute hell.
Jack Backer goads and toys with Ethan as he wanders about the Baker home, reveling in the hunt for his prey. Ethan is rarely close to being well armed, and it’s a waste anyway as ol’ Jack is, as mentioned, is pretty bloody unkillable. At best you can incapacitate him (an early encounter lets you ram him with a car and set him alight).
Old Jack returns several times, and the dynamic shifts each time in more grotesque and bloody ways, but nothing is quite as intimidating as the initial game of cat and mouse you play.
The Gatherers (“Amnesia: The Dark Descent”)
Amnesia has many a nasty ready to hunt you down and tear you to shreds. This is a game that shifted the dynamic somewhat and is responsible for pushing forward the idea of a helpless protagonist having to run and hide from those who wish to devour and destroy them. Not only are you unable to attack Amnesia’s horrific Gatherers, but escaping them is pretty harrowing as well.
You quickly learn that the protagonist, Daniel, can’t so much as look at the Gatherers without it sending him into a terror-induced panic. The next thing you learn is that these slack-jawed monstrosities will hunt poor Daniel down with murderous glee.
The first time you discover your hiding spot is not as safe as you’d hoped is a genuinely terrifying experience. A Gatherer obliterates your temporary shelter with a raging fury. All the while you’re thinking ‘If it’s that frenzied just trying to reach me, what the hell is it gonna do when it has me?’.
Many horror titles since Amnesia have tried to capture the terror and panic that made it a hit, but very few have been as successful in their execution.
The great Ernest Dickerson turns seventy-five years old this month, so we’re looking back at his most memorable contribution to the horror genre – 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight!
The film hit screens while the Tales from the Crypt series was winding down its run on television, and it stands apart with a story that feels a step or two removed from the franchise norm. That was the smart play, though, as the show’s stories – and those from the original EC comics – work best in short bites. The result is a film that holds up beautifully as a gory good time.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)
Commentator: Ernest Dickerson (director), Michael Felsher (moderator)
1. Dickerson was in post-production on Surviving the Game when he got a call from his agent saying that producer Gil Adler wanted to meet about a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It went well, so Dickerson met with Joel Silver next and secured the job.
2. The original screenplay for the film came to the producers as a spec script wholly detached from the Tales from the Crypt brand. They added the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) bookends to make it fit.
3. Dickerson was more familiar with the original EC comic books having read them as a kid, but he had watched a few episodes of the HBO series, so he knew what the current vibe was for the project.
4. Adler directed the film’s wraparound segments, meaning Dickerson never actually got to work with the creepy puppet. “Gil and the Crypt Keeper had a great relationship,” he adds, “they worked together for years.”
5. While he was new to the Tales from the Crypt family, Dickerson had previously worked as a director of photography on the Tales from the Darkside anthology series. That show is underappreciated in my humble opinion, and I will go to bat for both it and the equally underloved Monsters.
6. A big appeal of the horror genre for Dickerson is the idea of dark mysteries that challenge our imagination. For this film, that came down to the mythology being created between the characters.
7. Five executive producers are listed in the opening credits, but Dickerson says the only two he had dealings with were Silver and Richard Donner. The other three were Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler.
8. Dickerson had only ever seen Billy Zane in movies with a full head of hair, so he was surprised when Zane showed up on the first day with a bald head. “He had this case, and he opened up the case that he had all these hair pieces in, and he says, ‘So which one of these do you think I should use?’” Dickerson looked at him and suggested he just go bald for the character.
9. While the bulk of the opening exteriors were filmed in a desert just outside Los Angeles, the shot of the old church at 11:26 was created on a warehouse hangar soundstage where the film’s interiors were shot.
10. When he had read the script, Dickerson pictured the character of Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith) “as a little, tough lady.” He had recently seen Smith in Menace II Society, and while the producers had someone else in mind for the role, he fought to get her instead.
11. Just as Zane surprised Dickerson with his hair (or lack thereof), Smith arrived on the first day with her hair dyed platinum white. He “liked the idea” but asked her to please get it tweaked so it looked more yellowish blond. “It’s definitely a statement.”
12. He had seen Brenda Bakke in the 1989 sci-fi/action film from Japan, Gunhed, and thought she’d be great here as Cordelia. The rest of us might recognize her from Death Spa or Trucks.
13. Felsher comments that the film’s setup does a good job not telegraphing who’s going to live or die, and he uses the “nice guy” (Charles Fleischer) and “the kid” (Ryan O’Donohue) as examples. “You don’t play by those rules here,” he says, and Dickerson replies that he wanted to subvert those rules. That extends to Smith as well because she’s Black, “and usually in movies like this they’re the first folks to die.”
14. Dickerson says they had forty days of filming, “which, the way I’m used to working, was a very generous schedule.” It was budgeted at around $10 million.
15. This probably won’t surprise you, but Zane improvised the bit at 26:25 after he jumps out the window and says, “Fuck this cowboy shit! You fuckin’, hodunk Podunk, well, then, motherfuckers!”
16. In the original script, the demons that The Collector (Zane) raises from the dirt actually looked more like the people they used to be. “They were more human,” but the very smart decision was made in pre-production to make them look far more unique instead.
17. The demons are killed by shooting their eyes, but Dickerson felt there should be one more element to it. “Shoot out their eyes, you gotta duck because the souls come shooting out, and if it hits ya, boom, it can kill ya.” This is a fun touch.
18. He’s been asked more than once if these demons are where Peter Jackson got the idea for how the orcs would look in his Lord of the Rings movies. “They do look like orcs.”
19. He recalls having seen Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair shortly before going to work on Demon Knight, and he hoped to bring some of that staged style into his own film. An example of that in practice is Brayker’s (William Sadler) brief flashbacks to Christ on the cross.
20. Character deaths were mostly based on the idea that “each person’s downfall was going to be predicated by their weakness.” The Collector discovers someone’s weakness and then uses it against them. Cordelia wants to be loved, Jeryline wants to travel, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller) is a horndog for both liquor and ladies, Danny loves horror comics, etc.
21. Dickerson says that plenty of genre classics were in the back of his head while making the film, including Assault on Precinct 13, Alien, Aliens, and more.
22. Cordelia is possessed into a demonic form, and Dickerson’s idea for how she’d look was originally a bit different. “Since Cordelia was a prostitute, I thought that her mouth should actually be a vertical slit that was in her stomach… which would open up with teeth and a tongue.” It was nixed, he says, when “the wife of one of the producers read that and said ‘no way you’re putting that in the movie.’”
23. The key makes an appearance in the followup, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, but it wasn’t originally meant to. Apparently, early test audiences expected it to be a more connected sequel to Demon Knight, so the filmmakers added it in to appease them. This is where I go on record saying that Bordello of Blood is a fun time. Can’t touch Demon Knight, obviously, but it’s more entertaining than its reputation suggests.
24. They had to film Uncle Willy’s bar scene “dream” twice, once with the women topless and once with them in bikinis, to have versions for both theaters and television broadcast. “Dick’s a pro.” (To be fair, Dickerson says this in regard to Miller having to endure the makeup application, but the sentiment fits both situations, so…)
25. Dickerson says he’s “always amazed at the love that people show this film,” and adds that fans bring it up to him incredibly often. This is great to hear, as we should always be telling artists how much their work means to us while they’re still alive and able to hear it.
26. Zane also suggested the gag at 1:08:21 with the sponge coming out of his mouth. The beat reminds Dickerson to praise the actor even more, adding that he was an “ally” to the director when “bad ideas” came down from the studio suits.
27. He didn’t get any pushback on killing little Danny. He did insist on one added element, though, as he wanted to immediately follow the boy exploding in the air with a shot of his bloody and torn sneaker hitting the ground below. “And the sneaker had to be a hightop.”
28. Dickerson says there’s “something kinky sexy about” Smith being covered in blood, and then the two commentators go quiet for almost two minutes out of respect for the scene. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how Dickerson had previously mentioned Alien and Aliens as films being in the back of his head during filming, and how two scenes here reflect that – Jeryline stripping down to her underwear for the final confrontation feels like a nod to Ridley Scott’s film, while an earlier scene with Irene (CCH Pounder) and Dep. Bob (Gary Farmer) realizing they’re surrounded and choosing to blow themselves up alongside some of the demons is something of a callback to the air vent sacrifice in James Cameron’s film.
29. Asked about the film’s critical reception at the time of release, Dickerson says it received good reviews from horror-loving critics and then talks about the importance of horror in general. “Horror has always been a great way of putting out ideas, of talking about some of the things that affect us as people. Some of the best horror, like the best science fiction, talks about what it’s like to be human. Some of the best horror gets very political.”
30. The original ending would have featured The Collector showing “his true self, which is a demon made of fire.” They spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it was “extremely difficult… back in the day of analog effects.” It was rewritten into the faceoff between him and Jeryline featuring the dancing, the crotch fire, Zane’s attempts at saying “love,” and his eventual demise from her bloody spit.
31. They both agree that a direct sequel to Demon Knight could be a lot of fun, but Dickerson says he’s unaware of any talk on the possibility.
32. Dickerson was super excited about this new Scream Factory Blu-ray in 2015, and he mentions that before its release, he had imported a Blu-ray from Germany presumably to enjoy the film in HD. He’s just like us! (Or am I the only one here who’s imported a German Blu-ray of the much maligned werewolf flick Big Bad Wolf…)
Quotes Without Context
“I was so happy to get Dick Miller for this movie.”
“There was a time when guys used to put ketchup on everything.”
“I’m a big student of Hitchcock, and the best way to make a moment of horror work is to lull the audience into a false sense of security.”
“A villain should always be the most interesting person in a movie.”
“They were a really great bunch of performers who were performing on these little leg-extension stilts wearing a diaper that had a radio-controlled tail that was being manipulated by a special effects tech right out of the frame.”
“It’s hard to direct air; it doesn’t do what you want.”
“The only censorship problem came from the producer’s wife, who didn’t want the vagina dentalis [sic] in the movie.”
“One of the executives wanted to know why the devil didn’t try to have sex with Jada.”
“It always starts with the script.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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