Connect with us

Editorials

‘Fran Bow’s’ Black Humor Is Not Without Heart

Published

on

Written by T. Blake Braddy, @blakebraddy

The development for point-and-click adventure horror game Fran Bow began not with the first sketches of its main character or even back in August of 2012, when Natalia Figueroa and collaborator Isak Martinson – who is also her husband – came together to work on the game. It stretches back over a decade, to writer / artist Figueroa’s childhood in Chile. (She has lived in Sweden since she was 17.)

Although the game deals with weird and fantastical elements, Fran Bow is, at its center, an autobiographical experience. “It is a compilation of things that I have been through in my life, good and bad,” Figueroa said via Skype. “And it felt natural to mix it with all my fantasies from when I was a child.”

In the game, players take on the role of Fran Bow, an orphaned ten year old being held indefinitely, it seems, at a mental hospital. She has violent, recurring visions about the death of her parents, and her only wish is to get out and see both her aunt and her cat, Mr. Midnight.

The demo – available online at the KillMonday site – deals with the prologue of Fran’s pre-psychiatric ward life and her attempt to escape so that she may come to find her only living relative, an aunt named Grace.

Though the game is based loosely on Figueroa’s experiences, she admits freely that she experienced a lot of family problems and “many visits” to a mental hospital as a child. The game is a mixture of dark humor and just darkness. It is the sort of warped story – parentless child goes in search of meaning with an anthropomorphized animal – that could be the stuff of Disney, if it weren’t so caked with blood.

Indeed, one of Fran Bow’s more horrific elements are the delusions she suffers whenever she takes some form of anti-psychotic medication. They are ridiculously, unrepentantly gory, and it is in these visions that truth is revealed to Fran. The world is not a drab place filled with bored and frightened people, but a dark place, looming with spirits, monsters, and death. Violent death. The mental patients (who are the same age as Fran) are in denial, and the adults are boringly complicit in keeping them imprisoned.

But the game is not without a certain humor, either. Fran herself is acerbic and witty, which cuts the sharp edges of this otherwise depressing narrative. She is sarcastic but still avails herself of childlike indulgences, much like Figueroa herself. “That my humorous part didn’t die on the way [through childhood] is something for which I am thankful,” she said. “And also, with so much bad stuff happening, you kind of start liking laughing at dark stuff, black humor.”

To put a finer point on this, Figueroa sees Fran Bow not as a surrogate for herself but in large part how we all see our own lives. “She does really think like a 10 year old,” she says, “and one big thing for me when writing those dialogues is actually to realize when I was a child I never thought of myself as being a little girl. You are always the person you are.”

This philosophy on the ruggedness of youth is perhaps a great one, considering what is at stake for the character. Fran Bow is without parents, without direction, with only a talking cat and determination to guide her, so thinking of her in terms of being a fully-developed person is necessary, considering the utter horror of the world surrounding her. Without some combination of strength and ironic detachment, the character at the heart of the game would be overwhelmed literally and figuratively by the violence and blood surrounding her. She is the part of the world that makes sense, even when her surroundings do not, so it is important for her to be grounded.

Though the game is based on real life, interactivity is still one of the main focuses of the games. Fran Bow does not exist to further just a narrative. There are puzzles throughout the five-part experience, and Figueroa says that she and Martinson obsess over them, sometimes for days on end. “Sometimes we brainstorm and and come up with solutions, and sometimes it feels like, ‘Nah, this is rubbish,’” she said. “Until we get it and the lights go on in our heads. It’s hard to explain…Being really open to changes, [it’s] like living in a game.”

Figueroa and Martinson are lifelong creatives, but through writing plays and short films, Figueroa says that she saw something missing in her ventures: the element of interactivity. “I mainly do games because I think it is the most complex way of creating, and the gamer is the final touch,” she said. “And then also because it is super fun.”

This is the general sense that emerges from even a brief conversation with her. She is thankful to be making games, and utterly gracious for the attention the game is receiving. “We just want to hug everybody,” she said, punctuating the sentence with a smiley emoji.

In fact, to show their appreciation for all of the support for Fran Bow, KillMonday put together a game in under three days and released it for free, just in time for the holidays. Mr. Red’s Adventure in The Missing Balls is a “super hard” Christmas-themed platformer available on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It’s a lighthearted-but-bloody affair that features permadeath, and it appears to be part of the design and aesthetic choices indicative of KillMonday games.

“We also needed some fresh air,” she added.

The story of Fran Bow and its creators can be summed up best by Figueroa herself, from a blog post released back in July, well before the Indiegogo campaign was even over: “The only thing I can be sure about this game is that, Fran Bow is not only about the horror, [it] is about life, about how a little girl will confront a huge world, that is a painful one and also a funny one…that, in a way, is pretty close to all of us.”

Their hope is to release the full version of the game July 25, 2014, which coincides with their anniversary.

Gamer, writer, terrible dancer, longtime toast enthusiast. Legend has it Adam was born with a controller in one hand and the Kraken's left eye in the other. Legends are often wrong.

Editorials

‘Phantasm’ – Why the Horror Classic’s Exploration of Death Still Resonates 45 Years Later

Published

on

As Benjamin Franklin famously wrote, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

The horror genre offers a controlled environment in which viewers can reflect on their own morality, whether it be via catharsis or escapism, but a personal loss can complicate one’s relationship with horror. Even the most hardened of fans may struggle to find comfort in the genre after experiencing the death of a loved one.

45 years ago today, Phantasm helped viewers confront death head-on while subtly exploring the grief that accompanies it. In the film, 13-year-old Mike (A. Michael Baldwin) convinces his older brother-turned-guardian Jody (Bill Thornbury) and their affable neighborhood ice cream man, Reggie (Reggie Bannister), to investigate a mysterious mortician dubbed The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm).

Phantasm was the third feature from writer-director Don Coscarelli (The Beastmaster, Bubba Ho-Tep). The seed was planted upon witnessing the audience react to a small jump scare at a preview screening for his previous effort, the 1976 coming-of-age tale Kenny and Company. Chasing that jolt of adrenaline, he challenged himself to make a movie that delivers scares regularly throughout.

The independent production was shot in 1977 on weekends over the course of nearly a year in and around southern California’s San Fernando Valley. The 23-year-old Coscarelli shrewdly rented the film gear on Fridays and returned it Monday morning, getting three days of work out of a single day’s rental fee. When all was said and done, the film cost an estimated $300,000.

Unable to afford a full crew, Coscarelli also took on director of photography and editing duties. His father, Dac Coscarelli, receives a producer credit for providing a large chunk of the film’s funding. Additional financing was invested by doctors and lawyers, accruing a total estimated budget of $300,000. His mother, Kate Coscarelli, served as production designer, wardrobe stylist, and makeup artist under different pseudonyms, and she later wrote the novelization.

Hot off the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween, AVCO Embassy Pictures purchased Phantasm for distribution. It was released on March 28, 1979 in California and Texas before expanding to other territories and becoming a box office success. It spawned four sequels, with Coscarelli and the core cast on board throughout, along with a cult following that counts Quentin Tarantino, Rob Zombie, Snoop Dogg, and JJ Abrams (who named Star Wars: The Force Awakens‘ Captain Phasma in its honor) among its ranks.

PHANTASM Remastered

The film embraces nightmare logic – in part by design, as Coscarelli drew influence from Suspiria; partly the result of extensively editing down an overlong first cut to a tight 89 minutes. The it-was-all-a-dream ending is a rare one that doesn’t undermine the entire movie that preceded it. Not every plot point is spelled out for the viewer, and some dots may not completely connect, but the narrative is conveyed in such an engrossing manner that it hardly matters.

A particularly striking pair of back-to-back sequences occur at the conclusion of the first act. Following a late-night graveyard excursion, the camera pulls out on a shot of a sleeping Mike to reveal his bed in the cemetery with The Tall Man poised over him while ghouls attack from their graves. The next day, Mike witnesses The Tall Man affected by the chill of Reggie’s ice cream truck via a spine-tingling slow-motion zoom.

The special effects also shine, from flying metallic spheres that suck the blood out of victims’ heads to lifelike severed fingers that bleed viscous yellow gore. The visuals are supplemented by progressive music composed by Fred Myrow and Malcolm Seagrave, to whom Coscarelli recommended electronica maestro Vangelis and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Despite its repetition throughout the film, the power of their haunting musical theme is never diluted.

The cast was populated by amateurs, but occasionally hammy performances are far outweighed by naturalistic character moments, best exemplified by the scene in which Jody and Reggie jam on their guitars together. In addition to serving the plot by introducing the tuning fork that plays an integral role in the finale, it allows the viewer to better connect with the characters, thereby making their peril all the more frightening.

It’s character building like this that makes Phantasm‘s exploration of death so effective. The film is ultimately about Mike coming to terms with the passing of Jody, portrayed as the cool older sibling every adolescent wishes they had. Mike confronts his fear by dreaming up a final adventure with his dearly departed brother in which they manage to defeat death itself, represented by The Tall Man. Upon doing so, he’s awakened to the harsh reality that Jody died in a car accident, allowing Mike to reach the final stage of grief: acceptance.

Continue Reading