Editorials
Metro Exodus’ Spider Bunker Shows the Importance of Level Design
SPOILERS FOR METRO EXODUS FOLLOW.
The chaotic streets of Racoon City, fog-drenched Silent Hill, and derelict USG Ishimura are among some of the best settings in horror game history. They instill us with feelings of dread and help make the terror feel real. Great level design can craft a unique sense of unease and act as a foundation for all of the player’s fears to be built on.
Enter Metro Exodus, the latest entry in this fan-favorite series from developer 4A Games. Set in nuclear ravaged Russia, players assume the role of an elite commando called Artyom. While his journey sees him visit a number of unique locations, Exodus doesn’t really ramp up the terror until they reach The Caspian Sea. Now a barren desert, Arytom is tasked with retrieving a map from an abandoned bunker hidden filled with mutated spiders. What follows is a potent cocktail of tight level design mixed with absolute terror.
For the unfamiliar, the mutated spiders in the Metro franchise are fast, volatile, travel in packs, and heavily armored. This makes them a nightmare to deal with in any scenario – especially when ammo is such a finite resource. Thankfully, living in the dark has made these bothersome bugs vulnerable to any kind of light. So all one has to do is shine their flashlight on a spider for around 15 seconds until they burn up and die. Simple, right?
Things get complicated thanks to the former bunker turned nest of man-eating arachnids’ claustrophobic corridors. Filled with narrow passages and rooms cluttered with debris, 4A Games gives the player just enough room to navigate through the base. The spiders don’t have this issue since they can climb on the walls and traverse through log-sized holes littered throughout the environment. Normally, this would signal areas where the bugs would crawl out from an attack, but the developer’s show an impressive amount of restraint.
Instead, these spider-holes just tease the player, acting as a visual reminder that these monsters could attack from anywhere. You can constantly hear the bugs moving behind the walls or in other rooms, threatening to pounce on Artyom at any moment. Sometimes you’ll chase one of the arachnids into a hole, only to learn that they can emerge from any of them throughout the level. You never feel safe in the bunker and even if you kill every bug that crosses your path, Exodus constantly reminds the player that there are more.
There are also dozens of spider cobwebs strewn throughout the bunker. Since the start Exodus has been conditioning players to set these ablaze, but doing so may cause a bunch of smaller bugs to crawl across Artyom. It’s a minor visual flourish that doesn’t cause any harm, but their movements over his arms and face can easily fool a player into thinking they’re being attacked. I’ve lost track of how many times I reflexively meleed the air when one of those baby spiders crawled across my screen.
4A Games escalates the tension by laying out the level in a very linear fashion. There’s only one way in and out of the bunker, meaning the player will need to backtrack if they want to escape. Your first trek through is quite simple and there are a ton of lights on. This not only helps users understand the general geography of each room but eases new players into combating the spiders. Then the lights go out and the realization of backtracking completely in the dark sets in.
Even with a flashlight, your safety isn’t guaranteed since your back is always exposed to the spiders. This causes a sense of panic, as you’ll constantly whip around only to see nothing is there – most of the time. Those holes in the wall you blissfully walked by are now potential death traps and the cobwebs you forgot to burn up will only slow you down. Most of the time you’ll find yourself huddling in a corner, frantically moving your flashlight around to scare off the mutants. All of this culminates in a mad rush for an elevator as dozens of arachnids chase you down.
Then Metro Exodus winds up and throws a curve ball at players. Much later in the game, you’ll have to traverse a building that full of spiders. But you can handle it, right? Just do the same thing as before! That plan falls apart almost instantly when Artyom’s equipment malfunctions and that all-powerful flashlight dies on him. Now, with only a lighter in hand, players have to fight off swarms of spiders. It’s a unique feeling of vulnerability that tears away everything you learned in that dark bunker.
Despite how much of a horror cliche the giant spider is, Metro Exodus manages to make them the scariest monsters in the game. This is not only thanks to their terrific design but the way that 4A Games utilizes their environment. Instead of just making them another foe roaming the world, these nests are used scarcely and punctuate moments where the player feels like they finally have control. We’d take the man-eating catfish over a bunker of spiders any day of the week.
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.