Editorials
10 Games That Showed Horror Works on Handhelds
When players think of horror games their minds usually don’t go anywhere near portable systems. Limited buttons and hardware have often left successful horror series off of the platforms, and it’s mainly been a genre primarily seen on consoles. Despite these disadvantages, some developers have had success in creating handheld horror games, and with the recent success of the more powerful Nintendo Switch, it’s quite possible that we’ll see a resurgence in scares that can be had on the go as many of the historical problems are no longer relevant.
Until then let’s take a look at 10 games that showed how successful the genre can be when done right on a handheld.
Clock Tower (Wonderswan)
While the grayscale visuals might lessen the impact that Clock Tower’s fantastic atmosphere had on players, there’s no denying that the faithful Wonderswan port was an impressive technical feat. The point and click gameplay of the Super Famicom original is entirely intact, and the menacing Scissorman still manages to instill fear in players. Even in 2018, players can easily find themselves engrossed in the tale of the Barrows family.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (PlayStation Portable)
Despite lacking the motion controls that made the original Wii version so unique, the PSP version of Shattered Memories showed that the handheld could handle console experiences well. The visual downgrades are obvious, but the game’s biggest strength remains its fantastic reimagining of Harry Mason’s story. Shattered Memories’ inventive psychotherapy sessions proved just as powerful on the go.
Corpse Party: Book of Shadows (PlayStation Portable)
All three of the mainline Corpse Party titles have found portable success, but Book of Shadows manages to be the scariest of the bunch. This is due to the evocative imagery that is conjured up both on-screen and through text in the visual novel. It’s a great example of a horror game playing to the system’s strengths as it abandoned the adventure game template of the original.
Resident Evil: Revelations (Nintendo 3DS)
Resident Evil largely went back to its roots with Revelations, as it embraced the survival horror gameplay that brought the series to prominence rather than the straightforward action it had embraced over time. The result was a resounding success, and it’s one of the most visually impressive 3DS games to this day. As the console ports later proved, the 3DS’ smaller screen and lower resolution helped hide some of the rough spots, and the bite-sized horror was perfect for portable play.
Year Walk (iOS)
Swedish developer Simogo embraced their heritage with 2013’s Year Walk and managed to create one of the most unique mobile games in recent history. The adventure game is absolutely haunting and takes advantage of a companion app to help players unravel the game’s many mysteries. It’s a brilliant example of a title taking advantage of its platform and shows that mobile gaming can be a strength, not a weakness if designed from the ground up.
Silent Hill Play Novel (Game Boy Advance)
Not many know that the original Silent Hill found its way to Game Boy Advance thanks to a unique version of Konami’s horror hit. Rather than trying to cram the adventure onto a system it wasn’t designed for, it instead presented the story as an interactive visual novel. It was only released in Japan, but fans have translated this cool piece of history into English.
Dead Space (iOS)
Despite serving as a side story to the main game, Electronic Arts pulled out all of the stops in creating a mobile version of the third-person shooter. It featured incredible production values at the time, and the gameplay was just as tense as ever thanks to a redesigned control scheme that alleviated the need for a controller. Unfortunately, despite how well it transitioned the iOS version of Dead Space is no longer available on the App Store. Perhaps proving that the perils of digital distribution are the greatest horror of all.
Resident Evil Gaiden (Game Boy Color)
While not without its fair share of problems, Capcom’s initial attempt at taking Resident Evil portable should be applauded. The game stars Barry Burton and Leon Kennedy as they explore a bio-organic weapon filled ship. It has a shockingly great storyline filled with twists, and a new top-down perspective works generally well. Combat is somewhat clunky, as first-person shooting is handled via a constantly moving reticle, but it’s a smartly designed title that manages to rely on the survival aspect of survival-horror.
Five Nights At Freddy’s (iOS)
By far the biggest success from a sales perspective on this list, the iOS version of Five Nights at Freddy’s manages to translate all of its jump scares to the small screen without fail. Like the PC version, players have to manage their electrical power while they check camera feeds in order to avoid the monstrous animatronic animals that roam the pizza parlor. It’s a remarkably well-designed horror game, and its simplicity helps it shine brightly on mobile.
Lone Survivor (PlayStation Vita)
Lone Survivor underscores one important lesson that is seen throughout this list: handheld horror games often can’t rely on technical achievements for scares. While the genre has often been at the forefront of game tech (even as recent as Resident Evil VII’s embrace of virtual reality), even a pixel-based game can keep players on edge if the writing is good and an atmosphere is properly built. Lone Survivor manages to achieve both of those goals, and it’s a great game on any platform because of it.
Bonus: The Pinball of the Dead (Game Boy Advance)
While not the purest of horror games, SEGA’s pinball adaptation of The House of the Dead is too good not to mention on this list. Each of the game’s three tables has players mowing through zombies by strategically shooting the ball, and there are six great boss battles that give the game a traditional sense of progression. It’s proof that even when the tech isn’t quite there, a good developer can find a way to make a horror series work on handhelds with some tweaks.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
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