Editorials
The Abstract and Quiet Horror of ‘Fallout: New Vegas’
The old world is dead and the wasteland is all that is left. Humanity ekes out a sorrowful existence full of dread, violence, betrayal, and mania. But humanity is not alone amongst the dry wastes of the Mojave desert in Obsidian’s Fallout: New Vegas. There are other things, too—beasts turned monstrous after centuries of radiation exposure, human bodies wrought unknowable and unfamiliar after many warped mutations that were brought on by radiation and who knows what else. Yet, while these monsters, beasts, and ghouls are scary and threatening in their own right, the real horror of Fallout: New Vegas lies in the world itself—the landscapes, death, the wind, and all of the ephemera that brings Obsidian’s rendition of a post-apocalyptic retro-futurist world to unsettlingly quiet and desperate life.
In the opening moments of New Vegas, the player-controlled courier is shot in the head and left for dead by a man whose face will become familiar, but whose motives remain abstract for a decent chunk of the main narrative’s runtime. This cold-open of random death at the machinations of a world you’ve yet to understand or even slightly comprehend is in itself a terrifying concept. As a courier, you were just doing your job. You had a platinum poker chip to deliver and, hell, it seemed easy enough. But, no. Death by way of a 9mm bullet to the head swept you off your feet and into the warm bone-dry dirt of the desert. No monster did this. You were not torn apart by feral ghouls, eaten alive by cannibal gangers or eviscerated by the talons of a Deathclaw—a man, a human being, shot you for something you had no control over. That is genuine horror born out of abstraction. Nothing popped out of the shadows and shrieked until you screamed. A jump-scare, this is not.
The motives of desperate facets humankind are a form of horror all their own. We all fear death—whether we want to admit it or not—and in the world of Fallout: New Vegas the Epicurean arguments can be left at the door. Death is always lapping at the courier’s heels. Death runs the wasteland; it is a punctual currency that can get one anything that they desire. Power? Kill a gang leader for it. Caps? Kill a roving merchant and loot their still corpse. Death is as much a verb in New Vegas as it is punctuation. But what of the horror of it? The abstract horror that permeates New Vegas is, in part, fueled by the looming, heavy presence of death. The game begins with sudden death and, if one chooses such an ending, ends in mass-death that has yet to be seen in any other Fallout title, and the game constantly poses the question “Are you okay with this?” If so, satiate your bloodlust. If not, succumb to the burden of choice and find a way around a light trigger-finger. Yet, when the horror of death chooses to lie low, the unsettling nature of the world itself comes to be felt, and it elicits a feeling that is hard to shake.
Fallout: New Vegas takes place in a fictionalized version of the Mojave desert in 2281—two hundred and four years after The Great War of 2077 that rendered the world into a nuclear wasteland. Compared to the gray and cramped wasteland of Fallout 3’s Washington D.C. and the dense-but-not-so-cramped Commonwealth of Fallout 4, the world of New Vegas is purposefully desolate, caked in hues of orange, and unsettlingly quiet. The wind hardly even makes a sound as there are no trees for the wind to rustle or pockets of tall grass for the wind to flow through. There is just sand, rocks, desert flora, and dangerous and warped fauna. But once again, it is not the monsters or the humans who roam the Mojave that make it necessarily horrific or scary—it is the land, itself.
The Georgia O’Keeffe-like environments give the player a sense of isolation that is oddly comforting, but like all things in Fallout, that comfort is only a veneer for the true horrors within. The quiet and solitude come not from a place of contemplative isolation, but from a place of forced desolation. The Mojave is quiet because it is dead. What it was before the apocalypse was an oddly bucolic stretch of desert where highways patrolled by younger lovers snaked across the west, from Las Vegas to California. Now, the Mojave is a stretch of land that is only patrolled by marauders who welcomed the death of the old world and the soldiers who fight to restore the world to what it was before; even if what it was before failed them.
There are no more lovers’ lanes and swing music cannot be heard blaring from car speakers. Instead, the ephemera of a life sundered by Nuclear bombardment is all that can be seen and the only sounds heard are distant gunshots and the silence one hears before their ears can even tell that the head that they are attached to has been split in two by a tire iron. The sands of New Vegas’s Mojave desert is packed tight with blood, and the sheer horror of living after global annihilation is felt in every rock, cacti, and dust storm that seeks to make the desert seem alive and, if not alive, at least animated in the throes before death.
The abstracted horror of Fallout: New Vegas works because it is indirect. The direct horrors of the title—the monsters, ghouls, and the like—pale in comparison to the crippling fear and horror that exudes from the very landscape itself, and the sheer normality of death as an all-consuming force. The only light found in Fallout: New Vegas is the bright neon light that emits from the still-functioning New Vegas strip. But do not let the light fool you because under those tall casinos, neon lights, and attempts at grandeur are the same forms of horror that permeate the quiet Mojave—uncontrollable death, previously decided fates and while the swing music of the strip helps to mask the startling silence of the post-apocalypse, the veneer of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby can only last so long.
Auteur Filmmaking is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days in reference to big name directors like Quentin Tarantino and even Wes Anderson, but the truth is that film is a collective medium, and no one person can be responsible for every single aspect of a particular production. However, the smaller a film’s budget, the bigger the individual impact of every creative decision behind it – and the easier it becomes to identify a genuine auteur.
This isn’t necessarily a judgement of value, as blockbuster filmmaking comes with its own challenges and a good movie remains a miracle regardless of how big the crew is, but I’ve always been more interested in soulful b-movies produced by handfuls of passionate artists than blockbusters backed by creative armies.
That’s why I love exploring low-budget franchises that never left the hands of their original creators, as you really get to know the artists involved with these flicks and can accompany their evolution over a period of time. With that in mind, I’d like to invite readers to join me in this multi-part series as we look into a vampire saga helmed by one of the most fascinating auteurs of the 1990s. Naturally, I’m referring to Ted Nicolaou’s criminally underrated Subspecies!
The Birth of an Unlikely Horror Franchise
A proud graduate of the University of Texas’ Film program, Nicolaou got his start in the industry as a sound technician working on Tobe Hooper’s original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. From there, the filmmaker would go on to work for notorious indie producer Charles Band, the founder of both Empire Pictures and Full Moon Productions. According to Nicolaou, Band would usually contact him with an offer to direct a feature after more prominent filmmakers, such as the late, great Stuart Gordon, had already refused, meaning that his projects tended to have lower budgets and more inexperienced crew members.
The plans for Subspecies began almost immediately after the fall of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, with screenwriter David Pabian turning in an initial draft of the film after a Romanian producer contacted Band and explained that Romanian tax incentives could cover the cost of film production there so long as Full Moon took care of the post-production process. Since Stuart Gordon was unwilling to travel to Romania, Ted Nicolaou ended up taking over the picture.
However, while the financial incentives meant that this Romanian-American co-production could look and feel much more expensive than it really was, with Nicolaou scouting for locations in advance and selecting real castle ruins to be featured in the movie, the director was soon faced with an incredibly difficult shooting process. In interviews, Nicolaou would later describe the experience as something of a nightmare, with language barriers and the generalized distrust of capitalist outsiders sabotaging many of the team’s plans for the film.
In fact, the script, which had already been altered by Band, ultimately had portions of it rewritten by both Jack Canson and Nicolaou himself in an attempt to adapt the story to their unique limitations.
Radu Is One of Horror’s Greatest Underrated Villains
In the finished film, which was released directly to video in 1991, we follow a pair of American anthropology students, Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and Lillian (Michelle McBride), as they reunite with their Romanian colleague Mara (Irina Movila) in her native land. The group intends to study the folklore surrounding the secluded town of Prejmer, but their research is cut short by the return of Radu Vladislas (Anders Hove) – the evil son of a vampire king (Angus Scrimm) who had previously established a truce with the region’s human residents. It’s now up to Radu’s human-loving half-brother Stefan (Michael Watson) to protect the girls from a fate worse than death as the power-hungry vampire seeks to control a magical artifact known as the Bloodstone.
Right off the bat, you may have noticed that the film’s premise sounds decidedly old-fashioned when compared to other vampire movies from around the same time. While the 1990s saw the rise of cool-looking bloodsuckers with badass elements borrowed from Westerns, as well as the sexy aristocrats of Anne Rice’s stories, Subspecies has a lot more in common with Nosferatu and the Hammer Horror series than any of its contemporaries.
This is both a blessing and a curse, as the film falls victim to overly familiar genre tropes while also standing out as a rare example of a ’90s vampire flick that isn’t afraid to flex its muscles as a Creature Feature. In fact, I’d argue that the presence of age-old clichés is a small price to pay when confronted with one of the most compelling vampire antagonists in all of cinema.
Named after Vlad the Impaler’s real-life brother, Anders Hove’s Radu is such a fascinating character and the main reason why Subspecies is still worth watching 35 years later. From his animalistic mannerisms to the joy he feels in simply existing as a chaotic creature of the night, and that’s not even mentioning the iconic makeup that almost certainly inspired the undead from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Radu is a hypnotic presence harkening back to a time when audiences didn’t mind purely evil villains that couldn’t be redeemed through tragic backstories or sex appeal.
Gothic Atmosphere on an Indie Budget
Of course, the film’s Romanian setting and authentic art direction do a lot of the heavy lifting whenever Radu isn’t around. From the masked festivals of the village to the visually interesting selection of local extras, Subspecies’ multicultural elements help it to stand out when compared to similar flicks from the ’90s.
That being said, Nicolaou’s unique eye for special effects and exciting action sequences – as well as Vlad Paunescu’s excellent cinematography – make the movie a delight for fans of expressionist cinema and old-timey gothic horror. While the crew is obviously dealing with limited resources, many of the flick’s blemishes (such as the odd stop-motion demons that serve Radu) end up feeling more like charming idiosyncrasies than actual flaws.
I’d argue that the only real issue here is pacing, as there are long stretches of film where the protagonists are simply bumbling around without realizing what’s really going on around them. Thankfully, the gorgeous visuals and surprisingly effective soundtrack usually make up for this. Besides, how can you dislike a movie where shotgun shells are loaded with rosary beads and our lead vampires duke it out in a dramatic swordfight that would feel out of place during the golden age of Hollywood?
Your overall enjoyment of Subspecies will mostly depend on whether or not you find low-budget corner-cutting and janky practical effects charming rather than distracting, but I know I’ll keep coming back to this Full Moon feature again and again in the future.
That being said, while this first movie is worth revisiting by its own merits as the birth of an indie horror icon, I’d like to invite you to join us as we look into the cult sequel Bloodstone: Subspecies II soon.
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