Editorials
‘Disco Elysium’ and the Horror of Not Knowing Your Past
Disco Elysium is a detective RPG where the central mystery — who killed this man? — is not nearly as interesting as the dilemma the game presents every player: what have you done?
As an alcoholic cop awakening from a substance-induced blackout so powerful it abra kadabra’d all of his memories away, you get to choose who you become. It is an excellent roleplaying game, after all, and your detective’s politics, personality, interests and approach to police work is up to you. But, you have no say in who you were before the game begins: a disaster of a human being running from personal pain and any semblance of responsibility.
In my review of the game, I wrote about how this background affects the tone of the roleplaying decisions you make as you move forward. You can decide to get your shit together, but you’ll never be a hero. You will always be living in the wreckage of the damage you wrought before you lost your memory.
This isn’t a new conceit, but it is a more interesting take on the bog-standard amnesiac protagonist.2018’s Unavowed — an excellent point-and-click adventure from Wadjet Eye Games — similarly begins in medias res. Your character is locked in combat with a pair of magic cops, Eli and Mandana, on a stormy New York City rooftop. This is your introduction to the game, but it’s also your character’s introduction to any of this. You soon find out that your character doesn’t remember anything about the past year of their life.
From there, Eli and Mandana take you downstairs, to a room filled with bloody, dismembered bodies. You killed them all and stuck them there. For a year, your body was under the control of a powerful demon and there’s no telling how much carnage it (you) left in its (your!) wake. Throughout the game (which you really should play at your earliest opportunity), you will uncover the facts of that lost year.
Disco Elysium broadens that sense of failure. Your detective is living in the wake of his mistakes, yes. But, he has also awakened to a city that can only vaguely recall the deep and lasting failure that shaped it. Revachol has never fully recovered from the failed communist revolution of 50 years prior; an act of political upheaval that left many people dead and left the living without confidence that they could affect change; that radical politics could work. The district of Martinaise is in decline; it and its people have stagnated for a long, long time. As you uncover the truth about your own mistakes, they are cast against the backdrop of a regional sense of failure that has impacted more than just your disastrous detective.
If horror is most powerful when it is revealing something to us about ourselves, Disco Elysium and Unavowed are tapping into something potent. The promise of a mystery being resolved is an enticing carrot, but there’s a sickly fear mingled with it. Who hasn’t woken up — hungover or otherwise — with the sinking feeling that you said or did something bad the night before? These games tap into that dread, and the act of playing them feels like the process of reaching back into the inky blackness of your subconscious, groping for half-remembered mistakes.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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