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.
Horror was thriving so well in the 1980s that movies like Pen Densham’s The Kiss (1988) would understandably get lost in the shuffle, only to then gain their fans later on in life. Even still, this one Canadian-American curio has had a more challenging time than others, as far as contemporary reevaluations go, which is very likely due to the movie’s limited availability—at least as of this write-up.
However, the scarceness of The Kiss, while a bit annoying, makes it like catnip for ‘80s horror completists everywhere. Hopefully, a lot of them will walk away satisfied after watching this hidden gem.
Even though The Kiss was intended as the first of several horror collaborations between Astral Pictures and TriStar, as well as the first feature produced by Densham, Richard B. Lewis and John Watson’s Trilogy Entertainment Group, it ended up being the only one produced from that former union. Once the movie was released, TriStar’s distribution jitters—they opted for a regional rollout—did the $6-million flick no favors. TriStar’s cold feet toward horror releases have been well noted, but The Kiss still did a tad better than Night of the Creeps (1986), another genre outing that flopped due to its regional opening.
Shot in Montreal, but set in Albany, New York, The Kiss—which was still called The Host just a few months before its October premiere—concerns an average middle-class family and their forthcoming situation. The uncanny problem in store for them was, in fact, set in motion some years earlier. As that hot and dusty flashback to the Belgian Congo shows, a familial curse was set upon the two Dunbar sisters well before Meredith Salenger’s teenage character was born.
Meredith Salenger, Nicholas Kilbertus and Mimi Kuzyk in The Kiss
The Kiss, which was based on a story by co-writer Stephen Volk (Ghostwatch) and penned by both Volk and Tom Ropelewski, has the outward appearance of The Stepfather (1987). This movie, though, is anything but a gender-flipped retread of that classic domestic disturber. For starters, The Kiss is far less grounded in reality—that much is clear from its unsettling opening scene. There, a trusting girl (Priscilla Mouzakiotis) is the victim of her own deceptive aunt (Céline Lomez); the movie’s titular act, and the story’s first shock, becomes the means of transferring an ancient evil from one host to another.
In the present day, Salenger’s role of Amy Halloran, a religious schoolgirl, is dealt a harsh blow in life once her mother, Hilary Halloran née Dunbar (Pamela Collyer), suddenly dies in a freak accident. But rather than a complete stranger sweeping the Halloran widower (Nicholas Kilbertus) off his feet some months later, Joanna Pacula’s character is that chosen temptress. Here, Pacula plays the grown-up version of the afflicted girl last seen in the movie’s opener. Since Amy’s mother is insistent about there being no reunion between estranged sisters, and she even contemplates buying a gun shortly before her tragic demise, it’s presumable that Aunt Felice poses a threat to her family.
The Kiss isn’t a movie ever too concerned about its own predictability. The audience is indeed often one step ahead of the story here, but also keep in mind how every one of those steps is loud. Take, for instance, the death of Amy’s mother; the Halloran matriarch goes out in garish, gruesome fashion, as a supernaturally commandeered truck sends Collyer’s character through a store window first, then leaves her one leg short. The directorial enthusiasm truly comes out in horrific moments such as these.
The Kiss is always sure to revel in its characters’ ills and misfortunes. So if the plot doesn’t impress, then its lurid parts should. Amy’s mother’s exit scene was proof of an eager, first-time horror director proving his worth. Then, bestie Heather (Sabrina Boudot) survives to tell the tale of a bizarre escalator mishap that, despite showing relatively less gore, spikes viewers’ empathy meter. The wilder bits of this movie, however, commence with that inevitable hookup between Felice and Amy’s bewitched father; their kitchen coitus is paralleled by Amy’s feverish classroom terror. The outcome there is a disquieting cross-cut of sex magic and a young woman’s menstrual onset plus hallucinations.
Sabrina Boudot in The Kiss
From foam appliances to bladders, that parade of special effects in The Kiss casts its own spell on the audience. Felice’s familiar, a visibly malevolent cat, was realized here with several models, some more articulate than others. Admittedly, the demon cat’s not as convincing as most of the effects here, but accepting that artifice, as opposed to fighting it, will make the whole experience way more enjoyable. As for the makeup used to manifest Felice’s inner villainy, it is more minimal and subtle than one might like; yet the work done to turn Pacula into an antithesis of herself is nonetheless compelling.
The otherworldly perils and dreadful goings-on wouldn’t work half as well as they do in The Kiss without the story’s contrast effect. Finding frights in picturesque, extremely ordinary settings was something that took off in the ‘80s, thanks to that sweeping shift to locales like the suburbs. And Amy’s home, a replica of a real Montreal suburban house, is the ideal battleground for any proper good-versus-evil story. It’s also prime real estate for this movie’s satanic panic-inspired horrors.
Because of their ostensibly similar plots, The Kiss has been compared to The Exorcist (1973). Except in Densham’s movie, the sinister, non-Christian entity targeting a teen girl lies within something less apparent and, perhaps, more devastating upon its exposure. To an outsider, Pacula’s Aunt Felice is too beautiful and unobjectionable to ever suspect of being a monster. More suspicious is how quickly she rips into the fabric of the Halloran home. Felice’s mere presence upsets the “texture of family life,” according to the director.
The demon cat in The Kiss
Taking out Amy’s mother and best friend, and distracting her father, would suggest The Kiss is playing by a different set of rules. It is initially leaving its adolescent target unsupported in a rather grim scenario. In contrast, though, this story offers up a surrogate parent who does her best to fill in the holes of Amy’s eroding home life. Mimi Kuzyk does good work as that family friend and doctor, Brenda, who guides the lost child without also steering her in any one direction; she is naturally skeptical of Amy’s accusations until it’s almost too late to do anything about them. So although The Kiss does an admirable job of undoing the main character’s support system, it never leaves her without a lifeline. This dark movie, in spite of everything that’s transpired, doesn’t deprive itself of light and hope.
The Kiss is a potent mélange of familiar ideas. If not for the director’s surprise flair for horror, though, the movie would have been less effective. What a shame that Pen Densham didn’t continue with the genre. As for Joanna Pacula, she is, too, owed credit as the wicked vixen opposite Meredith Salenger’s pitiable Amy; she never fails to be unsettling in her role. Pacula makes Aunt Felice a sexy yet intimidating character.
For horror that steadily doles out madness and menace, while also delivering a flashy and ghastly conclusion, The Kiss is certain to please. Yes, it’s cheesy all the way, but most favorably, everyone involved plays everything straight. That kind of commitment goes a long way with this movie.
The Kiss
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