Editorials
[Best of 2018] Paratopic, SEPTEMBER 1999, and the Waiting Game
*Keep up with our ongoing end of the year coverage here*
You don’t have a gun.
And if you do happen to get your hands on a gun, good luck finding ammo for it.
And if you do find ammo for it, you will quickly run out as your enemy advances on you, undeterred by the slugs you plug in its inky black/oozy red/sickly green chest before your last spent shell clatters to the ground.
Horror games have often put the typical video game power fantasy —the player as a badass with ample artillery to kill anything that moves—squarely in their sights. In Outlast, Red Barrels excised combat like an overexposed stretch of film, swapping out guns in favor of a camcorder for a gory game of hide-and-seek. Until Dawn, P.T., and others have gone even further, offering the player nothing at all.
Even in more traditional survival horror games, like Prey and Resident Evil VII—games where you amass an arsenal of guns that would make a prepper blush—ammo is still scarce. Or, on the other hand, you may have access to a heaving pile of bullets, but no room in your inventory once you’ve made room for your potent assortment of stoplight-coded herbs.
While these games disempower the player to an extent, all of them ultimately allow you to control your forward progress. You don’t need to be good with a gun to make progress in Outlast, but you still need to develop basic skills. And if you do that— if you master the art of hide and sneak— you can control the rate at which you advance through the game.
But, two of 2018’s most talked about horror games rejected the notion that players should control their forward progress entirely. In SEPTEMBER 1999 and Paratopic, the ability to control the pacing is wrested from the player. Instead, a timer directs your fate.
Both Paratopic, from developer Arbitrary Metric, and SEPTEMBER 1999, from YouTuber/indie dev, 98DEMAKE, are “walking sims,” story-focused games that eschew combat or puzzles in favor of storytelling. While Paratopic’s narrative is as fuzzy as its 90s-inspired aesthetic, the game casts the player as three separate characters (not that you can tell from the first-person viewpoint) who are on the hunt for VHS tapes, that are very important for some reason. SEPTEMBER 1999 borrows the found footage graininess of horror films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, trapping the player in two small, boarded-up rooms for a progressively gory evening.
As the games tell their eerie stories, they up the unease by skipping forward at their own rate. SEPTEMBER 1999 takes the same amount of time for every player: 5 minutes and thirty seconds. At various intervals, the tape skips forward; at various intervals, the room changes, getting bloodier. After the first or second shift, you’ll understand where the game is headed, but you have no agency to move the story to its ultimate conclusion. You can move between the rooms, or stand still, but you just have to sit with the uneasy feeling until the game reaches its ending as scheduled.
Paratopic uses the same trick. Implementing cinematic jump cuts in the same way that 2016’s Virginia and 2013’s Thirty Flights of Loving did, Paratopic uses sudden shifts to bounce the player through a variety of locations. An eerie drive with a mysterious briefcase riding shotgun. A grimy apartment complex. A gas station in the middle of nowhere. Paratopic moves the player from location to location unceremoniously, and it does so without warning. Often it takes far longer to change scenes than you might expect. Those driving scenes go on for an uneasily long stretch of time; long enough that your mind begins to wander; that you begin to wonder if you’ll ever get off this hellish stretch of highway.
You begin to wonder if you have any agency in this world. You may even do a quick Google search to see if the drive is supposed to go on this long—the interactive equivalent of asking “Are we there yet?” from the backseat. No response comes from the driver’s seat, but maybe you know the reply by heart anyway:
We’ll get there when we get there.
It’s been 75 years since The Thing From Another World first warned us to “watch the skies”, and filmgoers have done just that by showing up to multiple instances of extraterrestrial contact on the big screen. This makes sense, as a recent CBS news poll estimated that 63% of Americans believe in intelligent life on other planets, and the ongoing disclosure movement aims to raise that number with each passing day.
With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day leaving many genre fans hungry for more alien footage (preferably of the spooky variety), today I’d like to share a list recommending six underrated alien invasion thrillers for your viewing pleasure. After all, regardless of whether or not you believe that we’re alone in the universe, it can be fun to dream about the worst-case scenario if our cosmic neighbors ever decide to visit.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be focusing on lesser-known invasion stories rather than the popular extraterrestrials of franchises like Alien and Close Encounters of the Third (or even Fourth) Kind. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own alien favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling movie.
While it won’t be featured in this article, I’d highly recommend checking out Dean Alioto’s UFO Abduction/The McPherson Tape if you’re up for some ufology-inspired found footage thrills.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. The Arrival (1996)
Not to be confused with Denis Villeneuve’s Academy Award-winning Amy Adams vehicle about learning to communicate peacefully with extraterrestrial life, David Twohy’s The Arrival is a much more straightforward (but no less entertaining) genre romp where Charlie Sheen faces a global conspiracy involving hostile alien invaders.
It’s not exactly up there with Close Encounters or even Independence Day, but Twohy’s conspiratorial thriller plays out like an exceptionally fun episode of The X-Files that I’d recommend to sci-fi/horror fans who don’t mind a little bit of wonky CGI and 90s excess alongside their alien thrills.
5. Extraterrestrial (2014)
The Vicious Brothers made a name for themselves with the success of 2011’s Grave Encounters, but that was far from the Canadian duo’s only collaboration. And while it’s not exactly a fan favorite, I always point out 2014’s Extraterrestrial as one of their most underrated projects simply because I agree with the filmmakers’ opinion that there aren’t enough ‘cool alien abduction movies’ out there.
Admittedly, the majority of the picture functions like a run-of-the-mill creature feature with paper-thin characters and familiar horror tropes, but I’d argue that the cosmically-terrifying final act elevates the experience to new and memorable heights. The movie also boasts great performances by both Michael Ironside and Emily Perkins – a combination that more than makes up for the occasionally janky CGI.
4. Alien Raiders (2008)
Director Ben Rock has gone on record lamenting how his John-Carpenter-inspired creature feature was forcefully renamed from Supermarket to the painfully obvious Alien Raiders (a change which likely resulted in many potential viewers skipping out on the experience), but the new title doesn’t change the fact that this single-location thriller is something of a hidden gem.
Taking place entirely within a supermarket, Alien Raiders tells the story of an ensemble of customers and employees who are taken hostage by a group of armed men looking for something far more dangerous than an easy payout. I won’t get into details in order to avoid spoiling the experience, but I’d highly recommend this criminally underseen flick to fans of John Carpenter and the Resident Evil games.
3. Phoenix Forgotten (2017)
You’d think that a Ridley-Scott-produced retelling of one of the most infamous real-life UFO sightings of all time would have a bigger following, but I rarely see Justin Barber’s Found Footage period piece brought up during discussions about extraterrestrial-focused horror movies.
This is a huge shame, as Phoenix Forgotten is just as spooky as it is convincing, with this well-researched dive into the Phoenix Lights incident benefiting from surprisingly believable special effects as well as an appropriately horrific finale.
2. Communion (1989)
I wouldn’t blame you for disregarding Whitley Strieber’s controversial book about his alleged close encounter as sensationalist slop, but I’d argue that Phillipe Mora’s 1989 adaptation of these events is much better than the source material. After all, the movie works as a standalone piece of speculative fiction while also benefiting from an incredible performance by the one and only Christopher Walken!
Mora’s take on Communion may not be particularly scary, but the film is still an unforgettable character study regardless of whether or not the abduction really happened. Not only that, but the flick also paved the way for plenty of future sci-fi stories where the extraterrestrial invaders aren’t as evil as they initially appear.
1. Altered (2006)
Originally envisioned as a Sam Raimi-style horror-comedy titled Probed, Eduardo Sánchez (of The Blair Witch Project fame) eventually realized that it would be much more interesting to turn the film into a serious exploration of the emotional aftermath of a traumatic abduction incident.
That’s how we got Altered, a clever inversion of the standard abduction narrative that follows a group of troubled friends as they capture and experiment on an alien in order to enact revenge for their own abduction years prior.
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