Editorials
[Editorial] Remembering Horror Flash Games!
If you ask any survival horror fan about the glory days of the genre, they’ll almost inevitably point to the sixth generation of console gaming. Back then, coming up with decent graphics and clever mechanics wasn’t as prohibitively expensive as it is now, so developers took more risks. This resulted in the PlayStation 2, GameCube and original Xbox becoming home to some of the greatest horror titles of all time, with hits like Silent Hill 2, Fatal Frame and even hidden gems like the Forbidden Siren series.
However, as technology evolved and gaming became more complex, smaller developers simply weren’t able to compete with big publishers, quickly losing their hold in the industry. Don’t get me wrong, the seventh generation of consoles did bring a few memorable horror titles to the table (most notably Dead Space and Alan Wake), but AAA titles dominated the market, leaving the creative spirit from the previous generation behind. It was around this time that many of us turned to an alternative source of interactive scares… browser-based flash games!
Browser games had already been around for years at this point (I know I’ll never forget the infamous maze game that surprised players with the screaming image of a possessed Regan MacNeil) but there was a content explosion toward the mid-2000s that turned the flash game scene into a thriving community. While early horror games were mostly simplistic adventures booby-trapped with cheap jump scares, we were soon bombarded with clever twists on established formulas and even homages to some of our favorite scary movies. With the rise of online ads, it was even possible to make real money off these fun little projects.
Fan-games also began to pop up left and right, reviving then-dormant icons like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger in unlicensed labors of love, many of which were more creative and fun to play than the official games that preceded them. I lost countless hours clicking around Afro Ninja’s flash recreations of Elm Street and even Camp Crystal Lake, wishing that AAA developers would take some inspiration from these passionate programmers instead of turning everything into a generic shooter.
The low-quality graphics somehow made it scarier.
Many of these horror titles were inspired by popular Escape Room games like the infamous Crimson Room, which, while not exactly horrific, managed to transform flash games into a nearly Hitchcockian exercise of mystery and suspense. Nevertheless, the Escape Room genre itself owes a lot to classic point-and-click adventure titles, with some programmers using games like Clock Tower and Myst as a template in order to experiment with their own ideas on a smaller scale.
Of course, there were some more action-heavy titles as well, primarily focusing on zombies and different methods of exterminating them. Games like the Last Stand trilogy managed to juggle shooting, resource management and strategic survival mechanics better than nearly all big-budget games at the time, making it one of the best zombie apocalypse simulators in an absurdly overcrowded genre.
One of my personal favorite flash games, Free Icecream, created by a group of HKU students, is a perfect example of using classic gaming conventions as a jumping-off point in a new medium, simplifying the point-and-click format to tell the brief but terrifying story of a young girl attempting to escape the home of a deranged child killer. While you probably won’t take more than half an hour to reach the end, the experience is a fun and self-contained little romp that lasts just as long as it needs to, and all this for the low, low price of absolutely nothing.
Naturally, this freedom didn’t last forever, as several flash games garnered cult followings and even spawned their own franchises. Sequels became more complex as time went on, rivaling even larger gaming projects, so it came as no surprise when some of these developers eventually transitioned to online gaming services like Xbox Live and PSN, where their smaller games became a cheap alternative to the standard console fare.
What could possibly go wrong?
With the rise of independent markets like Steam, not to mention the ever-expanding world of mobile games, it seemed that the days of free browser-based gaming were all but numbered. Unexpected hits like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and the freeware title Slender: The Eight Pages announced a new age of low-budget horror games that could compete with AAA productions as they became infamous through let’s plays and word-of-mouth.
These projects ushered in a revival of horror in video games, one which we are still currently enjoying. Games like Outlast, Friday the 13th and even the new Call of Cthulhu are slowly making up for the previous generation’s apparent disdain for the genre. Unfortunately, this also means that the once thriving world of flash games has all but been abandoned.
That’s not to say that these juggernauts of the old internet have simply evaporated, as many of these once-famous gaming websites still exist, but a large part of the original fan-base has moved on, just like developers continue to migrate to mobile gaming and other more lucrative projects. Additionally, advancing technology has resulted in many of these internet relics becoming unplayable, with several gaming platforms being shut down. Adobe itself has announced that it’ll be retiring Flash entirely by 2020, so it’s safe to say that most of these games will soon, quite literally, disappear.
While it’s a shame to see such a big part of gaming history go to waste, I don’t think browser games will ever completely go away. There are still some hardcore fans out there, making and playing new games as we speak, and I think we all enjoyed that short but sweet Escape Michael Myers game, proving that this format is still effective. That being said, why not go back and enjoy some of your favorite scary flash games while you still can? At the very least, you’ll be reminded of a time when spooky gaming was available to almost anyone, and I think that’s worth remembering.
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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