Editorials
[Retro Collection] Must Play PlayStation 2 Horror Games
Retro Collection showcases must play horror game experiences on older consoles. This time its the essential PlayStation 2 horror games.
Horror may have kicked off big time on the original PlayStation, but the scope of it really grew by the time Sony’s second console entered the fray.
Sequels to the classics of the previous generation were joined by new takes on those winning concepts, resulting in one of the best generations for horror video games, and many of them found a home on the PlayStation 2.
We’ve put together a list of the most essential PlayStation 2 horror games. They aren’t always the best in technical terms, but they are the most interesting, inventive examples from a console that had plenty.
Manhunt
Rockstar courted controversy fairly often during this time period. Manhunt perhaps pushed buttons just that little bit harder than any of its previous work. It’s also the most thoughtful examination of violence to come from the company.
Convicted murderer James Earl Cash is supposedly executed in the game’s opening but awakes to find himself the reluctant star of Lionel Starkweather’s sordid snuff film project. If Cash is to survive, then he’ll have to murder the roaming psychos on the streets of Carcer City in order to satisfy Starkweather.
There’s more than a touch of John Carpenter to Manhunt (the soundtrack and the atmosphere mainly), mixed with 80’s gore-fests and just a smidgen of The Warriors (which Rockstar would go on to make into a game).
The focus on Cash’s hunt-or-be-hunted struggle presents a world where violence is one of two choices. The other is to simply give up. Cash isn’t killing because he wants to or is paid to, he’s doing it as the only realistic means of escape and defense. The sequel misses that point entirely and instead becomes the shock-seeking, soulless poison its predecessor was accused of being.
The mechanics haven’t aged well, but they’re just tolerable enough to push past and enjoy that grim atmosphere.
Silent Hill 2
What list of PlayStation 2 horror games would be complete without a trip to Silent Hill?
You’d find little argument against Silent Hill 2 being considered among the greatest horror games of all time. Where Resident Evil went for jump scares, gore, and melodrama (which worked beautifully for that series), Silent Hill began as the more cerebral brand of survival horror, and Silent Hill 2 represents the very best of that.
James Sunderland heads to the town of Silent Hill after a letter from his wife shows up in his mail and asks him to come there. His wife, however, is supposed to be three years dead. James soon discovers Silent Hill is no ordinary town and some seriously messed up things occur.
Silent Hill 2’s writing and environmental storytelling are among the best examples in all of video games, let alone horror. This psychological horror tale is brimming with metaphor (even now, to say what those metaphors are feels like spoilers) and features some of the most magnificently hideous monster design you’ll see.
The PlayStation 2 version is definitely the place to go if you want to experience Silent Hill 2, as lost game code means the PS3/Xbox 360 remaster is a sad mess. If you have a PS2 copy, treasure it.
Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly
The Fatal Frame series deserves far more attention than it’s got (Meagan Navarro had a retrospective look at it earlier this year). While the gaming world obsessed with monsters, Tecmo’s series focused on the paranormal, in particular, the capture of spirits.
Fatal Frame II sees twin sisters Mio and Mayu Amakura as they wander around the abandoned Minakami Village. Whilst there they encounter spirits who decide the pair will make fine vessels for ritual sacrifice.
Lucky for the girls they have an enchanted camera that damages ghosts. The Camera Obscura is the big hook to Fatal Frame series. It can be used to vanquish apparitions and find clues (both denoted by a glowing filament in the top corner of the screen) as well as find helpful items.
In Fatal Frame II the damage you do to ghosts varies depending on position, timing, and proximity. It’s a stupendously well-implemented system that is a major part of what makes Fatal Frame II such a unique experience when compared to other titles on this list.
Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2
Soul Reaver and its protagonist Raziel get the most love where the Legacy of Kain series is concerned, but Blood Omen 2 deserves more exposure.
This alternate history sequel ignores the events of Soul Reaver and begins a new timeline where Kain is on the brink of building his vampiric empire, but he must take down the Hylden vampire hunters (the Sarafan) that oppress the land of Nosgoth.
He does this by murdering the elite soldiers who betrayed him, effectively drinking their power to gain new abilities. This is done to help him gain vengeance against the Sarafan Lord who bested him in combat.
There’s melodrama and Gothic vampire chic laid on so thick here you could use it for the foundations of a house, and that fits Kain so perfectly as a character. A vile, cruel bastard of a vampire who is far from the hero he believes himself to be.
Devil May Cry
One of the most beautiful mistakes in video game history. What started as a Resident Evil game instead shifted into a hack n’ slash action title that was both cool as a cucumber and dumb as a bag of hammers.
Devil May Cry and its protagonist Dante oozes charisma like his foes do blood. His silky-smooth combat (combos with twin pistols and a ruddy great sword tend to help) and a dorkiness that gives off an air of a schlocky 80’s action horror are key components of his scuzzy charm. That Dante can pull off the cocky badass facade whilst delivering lines like ‘’Flock off feather face, or stick around and find out the hard way’’ to a giant demon bird says all you need to know about how special a treat Devil May Cry is, even now.
The monster design is a major highlight. From a huge lava-infused scorpion to the creepy marionette puppets carrying blades, there’s an eerie Gothic vibe to the world of Devil May Cry, and even when it is outlandish, it remains consistent.
Shame about that sequel though.
Forbidden Siren 2
Japanese developers really had a stranglehold on quality horror on PlayStation 2. To the point that something as creepy and menacing as Forbidden Siren 2 gets forgotten a little too easily. The Siren series is about survival horror via stealth. You take various protagonists through their own scenario where they must avoid the monsters that stalk the cursed Yamijima Island during a blackout.
They achieve this with a rather unique ability called ‘sightjacking’ that allows you to see through the eyes of the monsters (who are actually possessed humans) and use that to determine when they can best skedaddle from their hiding spot.
Forbidden Siren 2 is the best example of the series on PS2 (the episodic Siren on PS3 probably edges it overall). It fixes the key issues of the first (namely the fiddly nature of sightjacking) and feels like an evolution of the vulnerable side to survival horror Clock Tower made work before it.
Resident Evil 4
As with Silent Hill 2, it would be simply absurd not to include Resident Evil 4 on a list of PlayStation 2 horror games. It’s one of the best in its own series and easily the best on PS2.
A near-total overhaul of the popular survival horror template Resident Evil 4 re-lit the fire under the franchise (which wasn’t exactly doing all that bad at that point) and spawned a whole new raft of titles inspired by its changes.
Whether it’s the set-pieces (Boulder-chase! Chainsaw! Knife Fight! House Siege!) or the memorable characters both human and inhuman (or y’know…giant statue), Resident Evil 4 is a tour-de-force action horror filled with invention.
Though a bit less of the babysitting would be nice.
The Suffering
While many games from this era tried to go grimdark as possible to cater for an audience more than willing to lap it up, it was very often poorly-conceived and/or ill-fitting (even the Prince of Persia couldn’t escape).
Not so for The Suffering. This was a game that didn’t hold back its depravity and gore, and it was all quite cohesive too!
You play as death row prisoner Torque, trapped in Abbott State Penitentiary after an earthquake somehow unleashes supernatural forces. Torque has to fight off not only the new horrors created by this incident but struggle with his own personal demons.
The Suffering was an early proponent of the morality system. Torque’s actions affected the ending you got, essentially determining the true story of the murders he’s supposed to have committed.
In a world saturated in plodding survival horror, The Suffering’s faster-paced combat and gung-ho shooting felt at odds with the trends of the day, but if anything, it was a refreshing change.
The monster design was inspired too. Enemies were inspired by different forms of execution, from hanging to firing squad (and perhaps best with the lethal injection avatars known as mainliners).
It doesn’t quite gel as well as you’d hope, but this slice of gritty, gory and adult horror is still worth investigating as part of the history of PlayStation 2 horror games.
Gregory Horror Show
What’s this? A sort-of-family-friendly horror game? By Capcom? That is indeed what Gregory Horror Show is and it is a macabre delight.
Based on the CGI anime of the same name, Gregory Horror Show focuses on a hotel called Gregory House where the player character must retrieve the bottled lost souls of guests through a variety of inventive means. Do that and Death will help you escape the hotel. Yeah, it’s that kind of game.
What really sells Gregory Horror Show is its characters and the dark stories behind them. Among the character highlights are bedraggled hotel manager Gregory (who is a mouse) and the stitched-together punk cat Neko Zombie.
As for the stories? The blocky, colorful aesthetic hides a wickedly dark side. The ending alone is pretty damn bleak, yet still manages to find an odd warmth in it.
Gregory Horror Show really something worth seeking out if you want something different from your PlayStation 2 horror games. Just keep in mind it never got a North American release (Japan and Europe only in fact), so it may be a little tougher to experience than the others on this list.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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