Editorials
Dreaming of Another Undead Nightmare For ‘Red Dead Redemption 2’
Rockstar’s long-gestating epic Western Red Dead Redemption 2 is finally here this week, likely to set records and gain plaudits by the metric ton.
You can understand why. Rockstar may be known predominantly for Grand Theft Auto, but Red Dead Redemption became one of its greatest triumphs when it released eight years ago. That ride to Mexico! That sucker punch! That Redemption! More moments like these in Red Dead Redemption 2 will be most welcome, but personally, I’m dreaming of a different kind of Red Dead sequel. Namely a return to Undead Nightmare.
Released eight years ago on the very date Red Dead Redemption 2 is set to launch, Undead Nightmare is an expansion to Red Dead Redemption, but it takes a rather unexpected turn from John Marston’s cowboy adventure and drags the realm of horror firmly into the Old West. So much so it ended up being a standalone game in its own right. It was Rockstar toying with the zombie game they wanted to make whilst shifting a familiar landscape.
Undead Nightmare is set in an alternate timeline, where the dead have risen and all manner of nasties prowl the wilds. John Marston seeks to cure the zombie plague and rid his ailing wife and son of it in the process. Zombies were already being overused in games at this point, but credit to Rockstar, it really went somewhere different with them.
Being set in the Old West is obviously chief among the reasons Undead Nightmare stands out, but it adds other fun elements too. For instance, John’s arsenal is bolstered by Holy Water and a Blunderbuss that actually shoots bits of undead out of it. Then there are touches like having undead horses to tame and being able to hunt down mythical creatures such as the Chupacabra and Bigfoot. It’s all so wonderfully bizarre and incredibly loving the horror genre, and is Rockstar’s only other stab at it outside Manhunt.
It even had its own multiplayer modes, include a 4 player co-op horde mode that was an absolute blast. Truly, Undead Nightmare remains one of the greatest expansions to a game ever made and damn if I didn’t want to see it come back for Red Dead Redemption 2.
I’d doubt we’d see something exactly like it this time though (though I wouldn’t be surprised to see a mission take inspiration from the film Bone Tomahawk). GTA V came and went without ever delivering single-player DLC after GTA Online kept that game in the Top 10 of most charts for most of the last five years, that became the sole focus. If Red Dead Redemption 2‘s Red Dead Online follows suit, I can’t see a traditional Undead Nightmare return, but I could see it appear in Red Dead Online to some degree.
See, GTA Online has evolved beyond mere deathmatches and heists on the streets of Los Santos, and now boasts things like sky track racing and Manhunt-inspired murder matches alongside the traditional fare. For Red Dead Online to have longevity in a modern gaming environment full of viable choices (from Fortnite to Overwatch to Rocket League) for swallowing up free time, it needs to have the kind of variety its stablemate’s online portion has built up, and that should allow, eventually, for things outside the conventional cowboy box.
That should include some trace of Undead Nightmare‘s D.N.A. be it a zombie horde co-op, seasonal event or even Legendary weapons and items (that blunderbuss would be a welcome, if macabre, addition!). Of course, it’d be even better if Rockstar surprised us all and sought to emulate the great feat they pulled off eight years ago.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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