Editorials
The Craft of Fourth Wall Breaking Anxiety in ‘Doki Doki Literature Club!’
SPOILERS FOR DOKI DOKI LITERATURE CLUB! FOLLOW.
Doki Doki Literature Club! opens on a warning. Not only does the game express that the experience is not suitable for children, but it also stresses caution for those suffering from anxiety and depression. The game asks you if you are old enough to play and consent to disturbing imagery; upon agreeing to this, you are brought to Doki Doki Literature Club!’s title screen. Four animesque girls stare at you as joyful music plays in the background.
On the surface Doki Doki Literature Club! comes across as a typical, anime-like romance visual novel. You play as a young schoolboy who is pushed by his friend Sayori to join their school’s literature club. Sayori, introduces you to Natsuki, Yuri, and Monika. The game has you reading numerous lines of text, including the thoughts of your character and how he interacts with the girls. Among small instances where you choose a dialogue option or the order of who you speak to, the player will also construct poems. In these segments, a variety of words will be laid out to pick from; each word you choose pleases a different girl, and depending on your choices, will open up additional scenes in the game.
The girls themselves come off like cookie cutter anime stereotypes; Natsuki is pushy and obnoxious, while Monika is the charming club president, and Yuri is the quiet one. The overall tone of Doki Doki is also very reminiscent of a cutesy anime; the animation style is buoyant, and the music caters to pleasant and uplifting vibes.
All of this, however, is meant to mislead the player, for in all actuality, Doki Doki is a fourth wall breaking nightmare.
After some time Sayori reveals to your character that she suffers from depression; the conversation makes for a sad moment, while also providing additional depth to the narrative. Later on, she also confesses her love to you; this is a very intimate moment with a plethora of emotions, given that you’ve learned of what Sayori is struggling with and how your character strives to be there for her.
The next day when you go to her house, you enter her bedroom to see that she has hung herself.
Nothing prepares you for the imagery of Sayori’s lifeless body and empty eyes as she hangs from her ceiling. The game then proceeds to “end,” sending you back to the title screen. Everything appears normal except where Sayori once stood; her character image is now scrambled.
At the beginning of the game Sayori was the first character introduced to you; when you “restart” the game, the beginning plays out in a similar manner, but with a big difference. This time, as our character talks about Sayori, her name and dialogue appear in abstract text characters. Things get weirder when she appears as a black box that rapidly shifts between images of the other girls, all before the screen blacks out and our character states it is just an ordinary school day.
The oddities don’t stop there, for Doki Doki continues to sporadically “glitch.” You may be talking with one of the girls when all of a sudden their text appears as random characters, or maybe their eyes have turned to blackened squares or their face has completely disappeared. There are conversations where Monika will begin to fade over the text as you’re talking to one of the other girls, blocking you from being able to read.
The experience of reading this story becomes more bizarre as Doki Doki juggles its dual tones; even after Sayori’s suicide and the moments of odd glitches, the game continues to play out to upbeat music, playful imagery, and carry on with the conversations of the literature club. You may spend a good amount of time with the game’s perky nature, to all of a sudden have a haunting image pop up before you (to then have things return to “normal”). Because of this back and forth, Doki Doki keeps the player in a constant state of anxiety.
After more time has passed the game finally reveals its major twist. Upon Yuri committing suicide, Monika “deletes” her and Natsuki’s files and the setting shifts; after an odd transition, you find yourself sitting across from Monika in the classroom, except this time the room has an amber hue to it, the windows looking out to an infinite cosmic space. Monika begins to share how she is self-aware of her existence in the game and how she wants to be with “you,” the player. From there she speaks to you about a variety of existential ideas concerning the game and other aspects of life.
Doki Doki then enters a unique fourth wall segment where you are just “sitting with Monika,” making for a bizarre interaction that stretches from the digital to the physical space. Sitting and listening to Monika presents this existential anxiety where the game is not only aware of you, but making an effort to be close to you.
If you attempt to quit the game, Monika will speak up, asking you not to leave, keeping you in the room with her. Eventually she does allow you to quit, giving you the opportunity to proceed towards the ending. The only way to end Monika’s many existential musings is to exit out and locate the game’s files; once you find Monika’s character file, you then have to delete it. Upon deleting the file, you see that she is beginning to disappear, the scene returning back to you with the other girls in the regular classroom setting. Sayori approaches you, and as the screen’s visuals start to glitch, she states she knows everything that Monika did, and she’s happy to have you all to herself forever. Monika intervenes, however, and as the credits begin rolling, she deletes the files of the game, sending you one last chilling goodbye before vanishing.
The inspiration behind Doki Doki Literature Club! for its writer and lead developer Dan Salvato came from his love/hate relationship with anime; in particular, he has felt at odds with the trope of how “cute girls do cute things,” and how this impacts the narrative for so many anime. And within Doki Doki Literature Club!, even before the big reveal with Monika, each girl is likable for these reasons; using cute tropes engages players with their understandings of these kinds of stories, all while preparing to subvert their expectations.
All of these elements are what allows the game to be an excellent work of deception. Doki Doki Literature Club! has the feeling of walking down a hallway cloaked in shadows and threatening danger, all while dressed in rainbows and flowing to delightful tunes. Under the facade of bright and whimsical characters lies a reality of despair and heartache; through the disturbing nature of the story, interacting with each character is as intimate as it is unsettling. Doki Doki Literature Club! is psychological horror that messes with players, forcing them to question the reality of its narrative and their role in it.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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