Editorials
Looking Back on the Childhood Horrors of ‘The Binding of Isaac’ 10 Years Later
Growing up in an overly religious household can really mess you up. It’s the kind of living situation that creates specific anxieties that can still have consequences years down the line, especially when mental illness is involved. After all, a childhood ruled by fear of sin can make a lot of seemingly innocuous things appear to be terrifying, and that’s why this hellish scenario is a perfect fit for horror fiction.
From Carrie to The Witch, religious horror is an established sub-genre in film, but it’s a lot less common in video games. However, there are a few exceptions, and one of the best just so happens to be Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl’s indie classic, The Binding of Isaac. With the game celebrating its 10th-anniversary last year, I’d like to take this opportunity to look back on how this infinitely replayable cutesy horror title is still so much fun even a decade later.
Originally developed during a week-long game-jam and inspired by faith-based conflict between the Evangelical and Catholic sides of McMillen’s family, The Binding of Isaac is a roguelike dungeon crawler with procedurally generated levels that sees the titular Isaac attempt to escape the horrors of his mother’s basement. Along the way, players use their tears to fight back against disgusting creatures as they upgrade Isaac with a bizarre arsenal of power-ups.
Appropriately enough, the game’s title is actually a reference to the biblical story of the same name, where Abraham was called upon by God to sacrifice his own son as a test of a faith. That being said, Mcmillen and Himsl’s eerie experiment isn’t exactly an adaptation, with the game using the religious setup as an excuse to explore the horrors of child abuse as Isaac attempts to survive his mother’s delusional beliefs.
Something tells me this basement hasn’t been cleaned in a while.
Despite dealing with extremely grim subject matter, the influences here range from Gauntlet to The Legend of Zelda, with the addicting top-down shooter gameplay keeping things from getting too depressing. Simple controls and arcade-like thrills mean that The Binding of Isaac is easy to pick and play, but the insane amount of randomly generated variables make it difficult to master. This results in an extremely rewarding experience that has players repeatedly muttering “just one more run” as they head back inside the basement for more punishment.
The developing duo initially intended for the title to be a simple flash game, quickly programming the original release as a risky passion project after the success of Super Meat Boy, McMillen’s previous endeavor. When The Binding of Isaac was finally released on Steam in late 2011, no one really expected it to match the success of its predecessor. However, it wasn’t long before a legion of let’s players and passionate fans began to sing the title’s praises, with the game quickly becoming a hit through online word-of-mouth.
Not only was the game a massive success, but it also opened the door for other indie titles to experiment with randomly generated elements as a cost-saving measure. By establishing rules for games to generate unique experiences without the need to manually plan every level, programmers could craft more content without having to curate each and every bit of their creations. While the popularity of RNG elements in indie games is a contentious issue these days, there’s no denying the impact that The Binding of Isaac had on the industry.
While the game would see an expansion with 2012’s Wrath of the Lamb, the limitations of Adobe Flash would result in McMillen partnering with Nicalis to completely remake the title in a more advanced engine. This led to the release of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, a complete reworking of the game with a boatload of new content. The gameplay itself remained mostly untouched, but the graphics received a much-needed overhaul and the extra content guaranteed surprises when revisiting the basement.
Evil grows in the dark (and in DLC).
The game would see additional expansions in the following years, with the most recent one releasing in March of 2021, but these fresh coats of digital paint aren’t the only reason that the title has managed to maintain its popularity for so long. It’s really the highly addictive core of the experience that keeps fans coming back for more, with Isaac perpetually finding new and bizarre ways to survive his predicament in a perfect marriage of gameplay and story elements.
From the game’s many esoteric references to its disgusting monster designs based on real-life body horror (not to mention the genius addition of having Isaac defend himself using literal tears), there’s no shortage of clever little details that make The Binding of Isaac so much more than the sum of its parts. Regardless of how it ends, each run tells a unique story of players attempting to fight back against what lies in the dark, and there’s something oddly poetic about Isaac transforming himself into a monster through random pills, injections, and occult shenanigans.
It may not be a traditional horror game, but there’s no denying that the game’s mechanics are all about coping with trauma and facing fears. The title successfully manages to gamify the horrors of child abuse by presenting them from the exaggerated perspective of a terrified little boy, and that’s why I think it’s a shining example of videogames as an artform.
Tackling serious issues without getting preachy and paving the way for other procedurally generated experiences, there’s a lot to love about The Binding of Isaac. In fact, I originally meant to dive back into the basement for a single brief run in preparation for this article, but I soon found myself completely absorbed by the game’s ever-changing battle for survival as minutes soon turned into hours. That’s why I think the game is an indie gift that keeps on giving, with spooky thrills that are still worth revisiting even over a decade later.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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