Editorials
How the Gothic Horror-Themed ‘Bloodborne’ Revitalized the ‘Dark Souls’ Formula
From Software had been around for over two decades creating hit series like Armored Core and King’s Field before releasing Demon Souls, the first of several games that defined the “Souls-like” subgenre. These games are known for precise and challenging combat, elaborately laid out levels and finely-tuned boss fights. While it may be easy to look at Dark Souls and Demon Souls side by side and see the lineage, when it came to making the jump to the PS4 From decided to change things up stylistically with Bloodborne. What makes this transition most interesting is their ability to keep the core of the game the same while creating an experience that feels wholly unique.
Even though the setting has been transplanted from dark fantasy castles to Gothic horror streets, you can still see some through lines in the way the worlds are built. The levels are still impeccably laid out, featuring nooks and crannies that need to be explored to be able to find items and weapons that will be useful on your journey.
These items and weapons are still the way the main story is doled out throughout the game, giving you a double incentive to explore the twisty streets. Bloodborne also continues the tradition of building in several shortcuts that reward you for your progress, creating satisfying moments where you discover how different areas loop back on themselves to connect. One particularly inspiring example of this comes when you find an area in a midgame area that loops all the way back to the very beginning of the game.
While exploration may feel similar, Bloodborne immediately sets itself apart from Dark Souls through its combat. It still emphasizes precision and timing in its execution, but the pace of it is completely different. There’s a much talked about moment early in the game where you find a corpse with a wooden shield, and the description of the shield includes “Shields are nice, but not if they engender passivity.”
This communicates the ethos of Bloodborne‘s combat perfectly: passivity will get you killed. You can no longer hide behind a shield to wait for the right moment to strike, but rather need to be actively dodging attacks while moving in for the perfectly timed kill. The game includes a health regeneration mechanic that heals you if you hit the enemy within a certain window, encouraging aggression by rewarding you for not backing off in a fight.
One controversial change in the transition from Dark Souls to Bloodborne was the lack of “character builds.” in the latter. Despite having some magic that is introduced in the back half of the game, Bloodborne doesn’t really have much in the way of a viable range build; even the guns don’t deal significant damage. Rather than explicit character classes, the game instead has you pick from an incredibly diverse set of ‘trick weapons’ that all feel meaningfully different. These trick weapons each of an alternate mode, allowing you to perform devastating combos while mixing it up in combat.
It’s interesting to look at Bloodborne as a midway point between Dark Souls and Sekiro, which did not have a wide variety of character options, despite featuring several other Souls-like mechanics. They took the wider build variety of Dark Souls and filed it down a bit, giving Bloodborne players a fewer number of weapons that had a greater amount of depth to them. In the move to Sekiro, FromSoftware narrowed it down more by essentially creating the character build for the player, then gave them some upgrade options to fine-tune it while still forcing the player to play how the developers intended.
Themes of cycles and renewal permeate Dark Souls and Bloodborne games, which is appropriate given the way the series has been evolving. Each game they take lessons they’ve learned and iterate on them, keeping familiar concepts and making them feel fresh again. Fans of Dark Souls could jump into Bloodborne and simultaneously feel comfortable with the similarities and challenged by the differences. While they have been narrowing their focus recently with Sekiro, it will be interesting to see what lessons they take into the forthcoming and highly anticipated Elden Ring.
From child-eating witches to village-burning dragons, fairy tales have always had a foot in the horror genre. That’s why it makes sense that, for every The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia, there are also darker and more adult-oriented stories about magical worlds inhabited by ravenous monsters and cruel villains.
Funnily enough, these sinister tales were precisely the ones that I gravitated towards back when I was a kid, and I was reminded of this while watching Netflix’s recently released I Am Frankelda, Mexico’s first ever feature-length stop-motion animation and one hell of an entertaining parable about the intersection between fiction and reality.
In honor of this special kind of horror-adjacent fairy tale, today I’d like to share this list recommending six Dark Fantasy films that horror fans might enjoy.
For the purposes of this list, we’ll be defining Dark Fantasy as fantastical stories that don’t shy away from the more macabre elements that fuel classic fairy tales. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own grim favorites if you think we missed a particularly thrilling one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
6. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013)
I’m fascinated by bizarre attempts at blockbuster filmmaking – especially when the resulting movies are somehow still fun despite their corporate-mandated origins. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is precisely one of these strangely compelling studio projects, as this surprisingly successful action-thriller boasts a lot of heart (and tongue-in-cheek humor) for a CGI-heavy creature feature.
Directed by Dead Snow’s Tommy Wirkola, Witch Hunters re-frames the classic fairy tale as an origin story for a duo of badass monster-slayers. Of course, it’s the flick’s anachronistic aesthetic and overall visual flair that make it stand out from other action-horror endeavors from around the same time.
5. The Wolf House (2018)
Made in the tradition of faux cursed films in the same vein as Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made, the eerie backstory to 2018’s Chilean animated flick The Wolf House (La Casa Lobo in the original Spanish) already makes it a nightmarish experience before the flick even really begins.
After all, the movie is presented to us as a faux propaganda film produced by the leader of a death cult (heavily inspired by the real life Colonia Dignidad), with this hybrid animated feature using complex movie magic to simulate a single uninterrupted shot as it tells the story of a lazy young girl who runs away from an isolated colony and encounters a creepy old house in the woods.
4. The Brothers Grimm (2005)
Out of all the Monty Python alumni, Terry Gilliam has had the most interesting career outside of the original comedy group. From fascinating canceled projects (such as his scrapped adaptation of Watchmen) to dystopian parodies that feel more relevant by the minute (1985’s Brazil), even his “lesser” films are still intriguing in their own way.
2005’s The Brothers Grimm is one such project, with this peculiar movie attempting to combine the comedian-turned-filmmaker’s unique visual style with a more blockbuster-oriented plot reimagining the titular brothers as con-artists rather than mere writers. The end result isn’t exactly a masterpiece, but it’s still a legitimately fun ride with plenty of memorable monsters and wonderful performances by both the late, great Heath Ledger and Matt Damon.
3. Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic (2010)
2010’s Dante’s Inferno game may have a reputation as something of an unapologetic God of War clone, but I’d argue that the now-obscure game was aesthetically unique enough to deserve a bigger fanbase. However, while the title remains trapped on the seventh console generation, its highly underrated anime adaptation is a lot easier to get a hold of!
Animated by 6 different studios in order to make the 9 circles of hell feel unique from each other, this may not be a completely faithful adaptation of Dante Alighieri’s poem, but it’s still one heck of a great (not to mention gory) time that I’d highly recommend to fans of Netflix’s take on Castlevania.
2. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (2009)
My personal favorite entry in the Underworld franchise, Rise of the Lycans, is a highly ambitious prequel that actually works better if you haven’t had the story spoiled to you by the previous Underworld films.
While the rest of the series features plenty of urban fantasy elements as the movies combine machine guns and modern environments with gothic storytelling, Patrick Tatopoulos’ prequel fully embraces its fantastical origins and tells a classic tale about a doomed romance between a werewolf and a vampire amid a medieval uprising.
And the best part is that we get a lot more Michael Sheen as the fan-favorite Lucian.
1. Solomon Kane (2011)
One of my personal favorite movies on this list, MJ Basset’s criminally underseen adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s other iconic warrior is thoroughly steeped in horror ambience and features plenty of memorable monsters. However, it’s also a classic origin story for a swashbuckling hero that wouldn’t feel out of place in a tabletop RPG.
While I’ve already written about how the film deftly combines both horror and fantasy elements without breaking the bank, I’ll never pass up an opportunity to recommend the bizarre movie where James Purefoy expertly plays a puritan John Wick.
It’s just too bad that we never got the other films in this intended trilogy.
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