Interviews
[Interview] From ‘System Shock 2’ to ‘It Follows’ – What Helped Create Co-Op Horror ‘The Blackout Club’?
The Blackout Club is certainly an interesting concept for a co-op multiplayer horror. Left 4 Dead without the relentless gunplay. Friday the 13th, but less grisly. The Blackout Club borrows a little from the successes on multiplayer horror past, and shapes it into something new, with a bit of help from that most trendy sub-genre of the moment, the Spooky Amblin-inspired Adventure. How did developer Question go about creating this fascinating mash-up? We spoke to the game’s Lead Writer, Jordan Thomas about just that, and also found out about further influences, how the developer’s background with immersive sims came into play, and what the future might hold for The Blackout Club.
Bloody Disgusting: Members of the Question team have worked on revered immersive sims like Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dishonored and the BioShock series and that lineage is clearly visible in The Blackout Club’s gameplay. What immersive sims and co-op games did Question look to for inspiration during development?
Jordan Thomas (Lead Writer): The first immersive sim that took on the co-op problem was System Shock 2, in a release update well after the initial game hit shelves. It is referenced very rarely as a multiplayer game now, but for me (Jordan, sorta the lore guy at Question) it was formative, because suddenly we were exploring the abandoned space station and decoding the story together. Feeding off each others’ fear. I always wanted to bring that feeling to a modern audience, and there are elements of The Blackout Club that play with that.
BD: The Blackout Club also borrows heavily from the “suburban kids fighting monsters that adults are too oblivious to notice” subgenre of horror/adventure movies (Super 8, E.T., Stranger Things, The Goonies). What movies and TV shows inspired The Blackout Club’s setting and story?
JT: Well, you’ve certainly listed a few – also Twin Peaks, The X Files, Channel Zero, Supernatural to an extent. The ‘Strange Town’ and ‘Monster of the Week’ genres are exactly our jam regardless of our focus on teens. If you’re into movies, there’s Halloween, Hereditary and It Follows, The Blackout Club is an intersection of themes across all three of those – though it doesn’t spend much time talking at you, at least not directly.
BD: In the tutorial mission, players take on the role of Bells, a member of The Blackout Club who has gone missing. How important is it to the team to continue to tell Bells’ story as the game progresses? How important is story to the team as a whole, and how do you go about weaving narrative into a multiplayer game?
The Blackout Club is primarily built for replayability, so there aren’t a lot of traditional story missions. That said, we collaborated with the South Park folks on the intro because it was important to us to ground the world in a human story, and for a lot of folks – Bells is the thing that draws them in emotionally. In-fiction, the teenagers take terrifying risks. Some of them do so to expose the occult conspiracy, but some just want to find their friend. Most of our story is told via community interaction with the game during live events – check out our Discord for some examples, if you’re into mass-investigation. The hope is that like a lot of old cosmic horror, Lovecraft and his imitators, players feel like they’re uncovering little details and sharing it with international colleagues before they lose their minds and are devoured.BD: Some of the flavor text in this game —particularly the Sleepers’ ruminations— is really evocative. I love lore, and one of my favorite aspects of playing an immersive sim is the opportunity to pick up audiologs or diary entries that offer a look at the wider world. Do you plan to add more of that to the game?
JT: Thank you, I think I did okay with those! I love writing in the voice of the Sleepwalkers. Playing with that line between merely abnormal and truly paranormal was very important to us with The Blackout Club. We like to hang onto reasonable doubt about whether all of this is demonic, or just some change in mass consciousness.
BD: The Blackout Club’s map is clearly delineated into two tiers: the neighborhood and the network of caves below. Is it challenging, exciting or both to design two levels that are so visually different?
JT: It’s always both – the sleepwalkers move to an eldritch song, played by the great instrument that spans the town of Redacre. So when you hear the horror theme that plays when The Angel, our boogeyman, comes after the kids – it’s actually playing in-world. Stephen Alexander, our lead artist and co-owner, worked tirelessly with our contractor CJ Green to flesh out our fictional town of Redacre. They collaborated with me on the concept of the place, and of the maze-like instrument beneath. I think Stephen made them both feel charming and unnerving at the same time – there’s a small town sweetness to the suburban neighborhood which turns menacing at night. Meanwhile, the maze below is like nothing else. Our time on the Bioshock series might prepare you a little for the ambition of the place, but the period is harder to nail down, purposefully. We wanted it to feel timeless, like the vision of a mind that is far from human. The hope is that it feels like it transcends technology from a particular time, but relies more on the blood and sweat of the humans who occupy it.BD: The maze is basically one giant instrument. What structures, in the world of architecture or music, did the team look to as they designed this space? From Patrick Balthrop, our sound designer, and engineer:
BD: I always use the grappling hook, and to me at least, it seems like the grappling hook is substantially better and more versatile than the stun gun or the crossbow. Should players expect more tools in the future and/or buffs or nerfs to existing tools?
JT: Oho, that’s the 200 IQ pick. A lot of players miss the power of the hook because it’s not offensive. The fact that the debate over that is so fierce suggested to us that we were on the right track, though your mileage may vary. We’d love to add more tools, but we’re a tiny team and every one of them affects balance in pretty dramatic ways. So it’ll be about demand versus our resources. We believe in the game and we’re not done iterating on it – the 1.0 release is teaching us a lot about the leveling grind, the live event engagement that works best, the most optimal play-styles, and so on.BD: The Shape system, in which a mysterious being called the Shape invades the map and hunts players that commit to many “sins,” like kicking doors in or leaving bodies lying around, is pretty fascinating, and reminds me of the police in a Grand Theft Auto game. What inspired this system?
JT: In Cabin in The Woods, they go a little into the formula behind a lot of horror, right – you have to transgress in order to justify the audience taking cathartic pleasure in your death. To an extent, the Sin system is like that, the kids are breaking the rules, and slowly that draws the ire of our boogeyman, who the locals also call The Angel – kind of a twisted notion of a moral guardian. (The Shape is what the kids nicknamed it.) The limited visibility (you have to close your in-game eyes to see it), and the relentless pursuit of only the worst kid at the time, loosely inspired by It Follows. There’s also a lot of mythology about having a parasitical spirit or Nemesis-like figure attached to you, and we wanted to try actually simulating the needs behind such a creature.
BD: I’ve just started messing around in Old Growth, but I’m already excited to see what gets added to the map next. Do you have any news on when players can expect the next map expansion?
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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