Interviews
[Interview] 98DEMAKE Discusses His Found Footage Horror Game ‘SEPTEMBER 1999’
For five minutes and thirty seconds, SEPTEMBER 1999 invites you to give up agency and surrender to the swiftly escalating horror.
In the found footage-style game from OK/NORMAL developer 98DEMAKE, players watch as the scene in the two hyperrealistic rooms around them become increasingly macabre. The whole game is presented in the aesthetic of a fuzzy VHS tape.
While exploring 98DEMAKE’s work, it quickly becomes clear that the developer has an affinity for the 1990s. In addition to the retro-inspired games, 98DEMAKE regularly uploads videos of modern games redone with PS1 aesthetics to his eponymous YouTube channel.
We spoke briefly with Toni Kortelahti, the man behind the moniker, about the process of creating those videos, the development of his games, and why the 1990s is a particularly haunting decade.
BD: On your YouTube channel, you upload ’90s-inspired re-imaginings of modern games like Minecraft, GTA V and The Last of Us. Your work as a developer, on SEPTEMBER 1999 and OK/NORMAL, similarly, has the feeling of watching a VHS or playing a PS1 game on an old CRT. What is it about the 1990s that inspires you? Is it nostalgia or something more?
Toni Kortelahti: I guess a lot of it is just pure nostalgia, but I also feel like the fuzzy low res look of a VHS tape, or the pixelated PlayStation look of OK/NORMAL, does wonders to adding a certain atmosphere.
Both styles obviously reduce the clarity of the image, which leaves more to the player’s imagination, since before you get close to objects, you’re not quite sure what you’re looking at.
In September 1999, the VHS look also brings an extra layer of realism to the already realistic graphics. It looks familiar (if you’ve ever watched a VHS tape that is), which makes it feel more real.
OK/NORMAL is 98DEMAKE’s previous retro-styled horror adventure.
BD: Building on that, OK/NORMAL and SEPTEMBER 1999 are both horror games. This year’s Paratopic also drew on the aesthetic of the 1990s to create an unsettling experience. What is it about that era that works so well with horror? Does it work especially well with indie horror, where players are less likely to expect realistic graphics?
TK: As far as the PS1 look goes, it’s obviously far less demanding for the developer. If you build say, a house, in the PS1 graphics style, it’s going to be a few days of work to have a nice base up and running. If you build said house in a photorealistic fashion, it’s going to be at least a few weeks of work before you have anything resembling a realistic house.
It’s also just what I said above, nostalgia and that feeling of “what am I looking at here”. Gamers who played on the original PlayStation or N64, are a big crowd these days, and can appreciate the lo-fi graphics, in addition to feeling a special sense of dread — the kind of dread you felt playing horror games as a kid/youngster.
BD: Speaking of photorealism, as AAA games get closer and closer to bridging the uncanny valley, do you think something is lost? What do the fuzzy, polygonal character models of 1998 have to offer players today?
TK: Again, I’m gonna go with the feeling of “what am I looking at here?” The amazing visuals we have today leave a lot less work for the players imagination. You see a monster in high-definition, you see every nook and cranny, every little detail of the monsters horrifying deformations, and that’s it.
For example, when you saw the Licker in Resident Evil 2 for the first time, you went “What the hell was that thing?” You only saw that it’s this red, fleshly thing, and your imagination would start racing.
That’s some powerful stuff.
BD: Your first 98DEMAKE video—an evocative panoramic version of a scene from The Last of Us— went up about a year ago. Had you begun development on OK/NORMAL or SEPTEMBER 1999 yet at that point? Which came first, the 98REMAKE chicken or the OK/NORMAL egg?
TK: The videos came first. I never really intended to do as many videos as I did, and actual game development is more of what I really love doing.
The amount of attention the videos received was staggering, and really telling that there’s still a lot of love out there for graphics like that. Then at some point, when doing just the videos was starting to get a bit stale, I started development on OK/NORMAL.
BD: What’s the process of video creation like? Your videos often look like Lets Plays of old games. Are you building small playable demos each time you make a video or is it purely animation work?
TK: Most of the videos are just pure animation, either done in Blender or Adobe Animate. A few of the later videos — Mirror’s Edge, P.T. and Big Rigs — are all running in Unity, so they’re small playable demos that I’m playing while recording.
BD: The process of playing through SEPTEMBER 1999 is mostly wandering around a couple of rooms until the game moves you on to the next scene. What’s the desired effect from removing the ability to drive forward progress from the player?
TK: The initial idea I wanted to do with September 1999, was to create a found footage styled game. I looked at other games done in the same aesthetic for inspiration, but felt like they were far too “gamey” and that the VHS look was more of a gimmick, rather than an actual part of the gameplay.
Now if you’re watching a tape, do you have control over what’s happening on that tape? Obviously not.
However, given that this is still a game, the player had to have some role in the process, hence the ability to move around. If you choose to stand still for the 5 minutes and 30 seconds, it’s just a tape of someone filming at walls. If you move around, it’s something entirely different. This idea is something I want to expand on — giving the player a larger role, yet taking away the ability to consciously move the events in a certain direction.
BD: Building on that, you’ve tweeted about Steam reviewers complaining that your game is not, in fact, a game. Where do you think this impulse—to call something “not a game” if it deviates from certain norms—comes from?
TK: I, of course, knew this conversation would come up, just like it does with every “walking simulator” out there, but it’s still a stupid conversation we probably shouldn’t need to be having any more.
People are accustomed to games working in a certain way, being interactive and, most importantly, fun. To classify as a game, there, of course, needs to be a certain degree of interactivity, but that doesn’t mean having a gun, objectives, or collecting whatever it is you’re collecting. Games also don’t need to be fun at all.
If a movie isn’t fun, nobody’s screaming “This isn’t a movie!”, yet it’s a conversation that pops up all the time in video games.
If experimental games aren’t your cup of tea, that’s completely fine, but you shouldn’t try to cast them out for that. My game is just as much a game as the next AAA title — it’s just a different kind of a game.
BD: You released OK/NORMAL and SEPTEMBER 1999 in fairly quick succession, with the first coming in April and the second releasing in September. Were you working on them concurrently or are you just a quick worker?
TK: Both are fairly short games, and simple as far as the game mechanics go, so I guess I’m just a fast worker!
BD: Do you have any plans for your next project? Should players expect more 1990s-style horror or do you plan to go in a different direction?
TK: Players should expect something very similar to September 1999, but bigger, better and more fleshed out!
So stay tuned and stuff!
SEPTEMBER 1999 and OK/NORMAL are available now on PC via itch.io and Steam
Eli Roth is a formative name in the “Splat Pack” of ultraviolent filmmakers who first came to fame during the 2000s.
Roth’s Cabin Fever was a great statement piece, but he’s managed to continually top himself with gory gems like Hostel, The Green Inferno, and Thanksgiving. Roth has always been a filmmaker who strives to push boundaries and embrace a passion for genre cinema.
His latest movie, Ice Cream Man, is a project that’s been 20 years in the making. It’s a twisted take on the Pied Piper parable that’s arguably the most gruesome film from Roth’s career and an exciting turning point.
To celebrate the gory film’s summer release, Eli Roth opens up about the luxury of shooting a horror film with hundreds of enthusiastic kids, bypassing the MPAA to deliver the most outrageous kills of his career, and why he intentionally avoided Weapons before filming.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: You’ve described Ice Cream Man as “The Birds but with children” and cited Who Can Kill a Child? as a reference point. Were there other “killer kid” movies that you’re pulling from for inspiration like Children of the Corn, the French film Them, or even Weapons?
ELI ROTH: Well, Weapons I purposely didn’t watch until after I was done with my cut because I had people on the crew that went to see it because I wanted to make sure that there was no crossover. I didn’t watch it until after I was done with the film, but The Children from 1980 was a big influence. That trailer scared me as a kid, watching the kids on the bus go through the gas and then turn into killer kids. When the girl killed her mom in the original Night of the Living Dead was a big reference point. But definitely The Birds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but also other movies like Bad News Bears and those early Amblin movies. Those coming-of-age films. There’s also a lot of references to Bird with the Crystal Plumage in there, too. It’s kind of a Pied Piper story, so that was really the starting point for it.
There must have been serious hurdles to not just filming a movie that involves so many children, but also in terms of its rating and censorship. Was there anything you shot that had to be cut or toned down?
ER: The whole reason I started The Horror Section was to completely bypass that system and go directly to the theaters. Now that Terrifier 3 kicked the door open for the rest of us and you can have an unrated movie go out in 2000 theaters, you know that fans want to go see those movies in theaters. Before, you could never release an unrated movie like this, but now after what Damien Leone did, you can. So I set up an independent studio, I went right to the theaters, I’m self-releasing it, and I didn’t even deal with the MPAA. I just made the movie the way I wanted to make it. We shot it, cut it, and we’re putting it out in the theaters raw and unfiltered.
Every movie I’ve ever made, at some point someone has said, “You have to take this out, or we’re not releasing the movie.” I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore. I’m just tired of it. I think they’re wrong. I think Terrifier 3 proved that they are all strong. In the past, I’ve been like, “I shouldn’t have taken that out. I shouldn’t have cut that down,” but you’re dealing with a corporation in a studio. That’s what they do. They’re so afraid, and it’s an abstract argument. There’s no proof that they’re right or that you’re right, but that’s where I know great horror lives. It’s got that bit of danger to it. You go, “You’re not supposed to do that,” “Should I be watching this?”
Even Evil Dead II, Faces of Death, or whatever it was when you get a tape. Whenever you’re going, “I shouldn’t watch this,” it becomes the most exciting kind of horror. Even The Ring. It’s got to be great. It’s got to be original. There has to be an incredible story that people have never seen before, but I faced no issues whatsoever other than my own budget. The whole purpose of starting my own studio is that I could take an idea like Ice Cream Man, that I’ve always wanted to do and that everyone told me I couldn’t, and just go for it.
On that note, there are so many amazing kills in this movie. What’s your favorite and which was the most challenging to pull off?
ER: There are a few, yeah. My original idea was the mother waking up and seeing her daughter just standing over her; she picks up a hacksaw and just cuts her head off. The dad wakes up, looks over, and the daughter is just smiling and cutting the head off and like, “Hi, Daddy.” Then the kid bashes his face in. So actually doing all that was extremely satisfying. There were a couple other ones that I don’t want to give away that really turned out great. I was just really lucky. I sat down with Steve Newburn at Applied Arts FX Studio. They’re incredible. I told them, “I want to do more kills. I want to basically beat every kill I’ve ever done and do more kills in this movie than all my other movies combined.” Adrian Moreau was incredibly genius. We did Thanksgiving together, and she did some very specific effects for me on this one. She won the Oscar for The Whale, so we had an incredibly talented team and just went for it. The kids in the movie, their parents are all horror movie fans, so we talked to them about everything.
Once you put the kids in the gore and in the makeup, they go right into it. They get it. They understand that this is like Halloween and pretend. There’s the bit where they’re pulling apart a body — they call it a “taffy pull” — we did this fake trailer, “The Piano Killer,” with Hailey Kittle. I also worked with her in Trick VR Treat, and she was in Thanksgiving. I said, “I’m going to drop a piano on you,” so we had her fake body and thought, “Let’s kill Hailey, and then we can use the body from “The Piano Killer” and pull it apart in Ice Cream Man. I recycled the same body parts.
It was unreal doing it all with the kids, though. You can’t believe what you’re watching, and the kids were having a great time. It was Christmas morning for them. Justin Harding, who was my Second Unit Director, his son Bowen is a baseball player. So it made sense to give Bowen the axe so that he could really give a good swing to cut Hailey in half. He is so good and so athletic, so he could really go for it. He’s just gleefully swinging the bat, and we’re just on the ground pumping blood at him. The kids were just laughing and having the time of their lives.
The main actors are so good, too. I really didn’t want “kid acting.” I wanted the same acting as when you’re watching Stranger Things or the ’70s Bad News Bears. These kids are real kids, and I didn’t want it to feel like movie dialogue. I wanted the kids to swear and talk the way that real 12-year-olds talk to each other and the way that bullies talked to me in the ’80s. I verified it with all the kids to know that this is exactly what the bullying in schools sounds like. This is how they’d talk and what they say when the adults, parents, and teachers aren’t around. I wanted it to feel naturalistic, and like you’ve just been dropped into this small town that has all this drama. Then you’re just with these kids, trying to survive this “kidpocalypse,” and trying to figure out why this is happening and how to get out of it.
I’m a huge fan of the Clint Howard Ice Cream Man from 1995. There’s also a great Tales from the Crypt episode with Bill Pullman and Brad Dourif that plays in this space. Why do you think there’s this ongoing connection between ice cream men and horror?
ER: It’s interesting; I’ve never seen the Clint Howard film. I’m certainly aware of it. But this all came about from just watching this ice cream man handing out ice cream. It was during the Cabin Fever press tour in 2003. I was just watching this ice cream man and thinking, “We just trust them.” It could be a serial killer, you know? What if they just rolled into town and poisoned the kids? I thought that might be too fucked up, but then I thought of it as if it’s the Pied Piper. There’s something with the music. Kids just want to run out into the street and buy ice cream when they hear that ice cream man music. It’s such deep programming. So what if that was used to turn the kids against their parents?
Having a new daughter myself — having a baby — all you want to do is protect them. And you know that no matter what you do, you can’t. The outside world is going to get to them somehow. You can prepare them, but you can’t fully protect them. Some evil force will get into their head, and so what if that was turned against you? This thing that you loved and put everything into now wants to kill you. It’s the most horrible thought as a parent. After 20 years, it was kind of great to go in and re-approach it from that direction.
But I think ice cream men just have this inherent trust behind them. You see them, and you trust them. They come into the neighborhood, feed the kids, and then they leave, and you have no idea who they really were. Sure, they were an ice cream man, but what were they like? They were wearing a white hat, and they drove an ice cream truck, but anyone can do that. It was such a perverse, sick thought. Like, “What if you turn Thanksgiving into something awful?”, “What if backpacking in Europe became a nightmare?”
That’s where great horror lives. It’s when you take something that’s seemingly innocent and then make it dark. “What if the kids are playing jump rope, but then they get turned, and they’re playing jump rope with guts?” At the beginning of the film, they’re playing “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” but then it’s “Pin the Knife in the Teacher.” Or you’re playing little league baseball, but now you’re bashing your dad’s head in with the bat. It’s taking all the fun, innocent things from childhood and then twisting them with a horror spin.
Ice Cream Man is in theaters on August 7.
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