Editorials
The Existential Horror of ‘Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy’
Sisyphus was sentenced by the Greek gods to roll a boulder up a hill, endlessly, for all of eternity. When he reached the top—gasping for breath, hands numb, pouring sweat— the giant stone rolled back down, and our damned hero returned to the valley below to resume his toil.
We don’t know why Sisyphus received this particular punishment, although scholars speculate. However, we do know that players accept a similar fate when they download Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.
In the climbing sim developed by the titular New York Game Center professor, players are not tasked with pushing a boulder up a hill. The setup here is far more absurd: you are a naked bald man trapped inside a pot, attempting to summit a mountain of found objects—umbrellas, plastic pool slides, loose oranges—using only a sledgehammer.
That may sound funny. But, make no mistake, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy is a horror game. Not the kind that will keep you lying awake in bed at night; rather the kind that will keep you lying awake in bed in the cold light of the morning, gathering all the courage you can muster to face the day. Getting Over It is an existential horror game; its terror is the cold sweat of knowing your life has been empty; the goosebumps of knowing you have accomplished nothing of merit, and never will; the clammy hands of knowing that even if you did manage to achieve something of note, it would have no meaning in the context of a cold and unfeeling universe where your life’s work will amount to little more than a dash in granite between the years which mark your birth and death.
Scared now?
Games have always offered escapism. They’re good for plenty besides—telling meaningful stories, bonding with friends, hand-eye coordination, etc.—but by virtue of the fact that games are entirely created (meaning they don’t borrow people or places from the real world, like film), and that they require the player assume the role of a character, the medium has always been especially well-suited for providing virtual worlds where players can escape the shittiness of our own.
But, more significantly, games also offer progress. In life, we may realize that we have grown after the passage of time. We may suddenly realize that we are more comfortable in our own skin than we used to be; more skilled at a hobby. We may encounter people from our past who make us say with Anny, the ex-lover of Antoine Roquentin, the protagonist of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist novel, Nausea, “I change, you naturally stay motionless and I measure my changes in relation to you.” Growth, in life, we notice irregularly and tangentially.
But progress, in video games, is measurable. When Sonic collects 100 rings, he gains an extra life. When Samus unlocks the High Jump Boots, she can reach new areas. When Link defeats a boss, he can move onto the next dungeon. In RPGs, progress is not just measurable, but numerical. Attacks deal numerical damage. Experience is awarded after fights in lower or high numbers depending on how impressive the feat. Rare armor reduces the numbers on the damage a character takes. We play games for fun, sure, but RPGs provide the illusion that our play is also productive. It’s not a coincidence that every genre has morphed to include elements of RPGs; leveling up allows us to feel as though we’ve accomplished something without actually requiring that we make any changes or improvements to our lives.
These numbers, then, are a bulwark against the abyss. Every stat bump, every level gained, every rare piece of loot found is a reminder from the benevolent rulers of our virtual universes that we exist and that our existence has a purpose. We are the hero of our story. The challenging things that happen to us make us stronger. See! The numbers are going up! Bennett Foddy strips all of that away and makes us peer into the emptiness.
There are no checkpoints on our journey to the top of the mountain. One wrong move as we approach the summit may send us plummeting back to the foothills. There are no collectibles to discover. The closest thing Getting Over It offers are brief moments when Foddy will talk to the player, ruminating on and reading quotes about failure. These don’t help us climb any better. And, anyway, for long stretches of the journey, he is silent. We don’t find chests with better hammers that help us climb faster. We may gain skill, but that is all. And, with these comforts stripped away, we realize, if we’re paying attention, that they were illusions all along.
Getting Over It is unlike the story of Sisyphus in this: it has an endpoint. Success is possible for the naked bald man in the pot. The game doesn’t conclude with players tumbling back down the hill to start again. Success is genuine.
But, it’s a long time coming and much of our journey will be spent in the valley below. As we struggle in the foothills, we must find the meaning in the struggle for ourselves. Foddy has not provided it for us. Maybe it isn’t there at all.
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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