Editorials
Why ‘Man of Medan’ Doesn’t Understand the Genre It’s Playing In
Supermassive’s 2015 release, Until Dawn, was a massive success because it was able to translate the feeling of a subversive and silly horror film like Cabin in the Woods into a video game. When the Dark Pictures Anthology was announced, it looked as though they were setting themselves up to bring another media style over to games: the short story collection. However, the care and attention to detail to genre that was present in Until Dawn is nowhere to be found in the first of the Dark Pictures’ installments, Man of Medan.
Man of Medan is meant to be a spooky nautical short story that introduces players to the mechanics that will permeate this new anthology. Instead, it’s a plot that’s clearly trying to replicate the depth of Until Dawn, all while smashing it into a much shorter playtime.
Anyone even vaguely familiar with the form knows that short stories have a specific structure that allows them to convey their plots with a limited amount of time, and while there’s no one set way to approach how this structure is tackled, prolific writer Kurt Vonnegut did lay out some points he found essential to the form in Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction. He laid out eight tenets he felt were essential for writing short fiction: use the time of a total stranger in a way that doesn’t feel wasted; give the reader at least one character they can root for; every character should want something; every sentence must do one of two things-reveal character or advance the action; start as close to the end as possible; be a sadist: no matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters make awful things happen to them in order that the reader may see what they’re made of; write just to please one person; and give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible.
Of course, writing a short story doesn’t map exactly to writing for a game, but when a game is so clearly based on another form, it’s hard not to judge it based on those same metrics. Now to give credit where credit is due, Man of Medan does check off some of these. The “be a sadist” one, for example, as a litany of terrible things do in fact happen to all of the game’s characters. And while many of the main cast are selfish and insufferable, there are enough redeeming, or at least interesting, characteristics in the crew that it becomes feasible to root for Fliss or Brad or Conrad.
But there are four key items on this checklist that Man of Medan drops the ball on, and these whiffs make the work suffer as a whole. The old adage states “last but not least” so let’s start with number eight: give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. This, combined with the idea that you should start as close to the end as possible really embodies the pacing issues Man of Medan suffers from.
The game wants to give you a bunch of background information about the titular warship and the chemical weapon it houses, but does so by forcing you to play through an extended prologue sequence. What short story have you ever read that has a prologue? The whole point is to jump into the main action and reveal the stakes as you go. This is especially baffling given the fact that the game still relies heavily on documents and files you can find around the ship to fill in what happened that fateful night. Considering this, it’s confusing that they still made the choice to have a prologue sequence, when those same gaps could have been filled using those collectibles and would have honestly added more suspense and an air of mystery, while still providing information fairly quickly.
This creates too much to keep track of and be invested in for a story that’s only supposed to last at most a few hours. Which brings us to our third unheeded guideline: use the time of a total stranger in such a way that they will not feel the time was wasted. Because Man of Medan asks the player to digest so much information in such a short amount of time, the pieces feel disjointed, and the overall experience becomes less compelling. Video games have to be much more mindful of how they use their time, especially in something like Man of Medan where the player is responsible for most of the movement and traversal in real-time. This game’s format is begging to be given the room to breathe that Until Dawn had, but in its finished state, it’s mostly just frustrating to see so much potential wasted.
And that’s honestly the biggest sin this game commits: it ignores our final Vonnegut point by disregarding who this game should be written for. Until Dawn was such a success because it understood the audience it was trying to engage, and did the work to not only cater to these fans, but to genuinely play in the genre while still creating something new. Man of Medan, on the other hand, seems to want to replicate its predecessor more than it actually wants to continue the heritage of creating well-crafted, subversive horror in a specific format.
There’s an interesting story here that could have really done the work to set up future installments, but because it’s so messy, and not in a fun or interesting way, it falls completely flat. Certainly, playing with a friend adds a much-needed layer of fun to an otherwise lackluster experience, but for those who were eagerly awaiting a new horror home run, this is nothing but a disappointment. If Supermassive doesn’t want to see the rest of its anthology sink like the abandoned ship they’ve depicted, they’ll need to take the form they’re working with more seriously, and adapt their games to it, instead of just chasing the highs of Until Dawn.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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