Interviews
The Sudden Appearance of ‘The Vanishing of Ethan Carter’
Written by T. Blake Braddy, @blakebraddy
Adrian Chmielarz is most renowned for creating intense, frenetic shooters. While at People Can Fly, Chmielarz designed games like Bulletstorm, Gears of War: Judgment, and the Painkiller series, known more for their tight controls and shooting mechanics than their narrative arcs.
Which is perhaps one of the reasons he decided to depart the company. Along with Andrew Poznanski and Michal Kosieradzki, he founded The Astronauts, the studio behind the weird fiction horror title The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Set just after the turn of the century, this adventure game is about the bizarre circumstances surrounding a young boy’s kidnapping. The main character is an aging detective whose keen ability to visualize crime scenes makes him perhaps the only person who can save the boy from a horrific fate.
Mr. Chmielarz was kind enough to answer some questions about the mysterious, potentially unsettling world surrounding The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, which is set to be released later this year.
BD: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter seems to be a departure from your previous work with People Can Fly, like the Painkiller series and BulletStorm. Talk a little bit about what inspired you to make this game, specifically.
Two things inspired us. First, the wish to be a part of the evolution of games, specifically the branch focused on narrative experiences. We can either complain about the state of games – their stale, tired formulas and cardboard characters – or we can do or at least try to do something about it. Second, this is in a way a return for us to what we were doing before Painkiller.
My personal roots are in adventure games, and I was always very interested in games as a powerful storytelling medium. We had this fun and exciting ten year long episode with shooters, but we felt it’s time to call back our first love, games that dig a little deeper into the player’s psyche.
BD: You describe the story as inspired by weird fiction of the early 20th century. What are some of your favorite weird tales, and how do they inform your approach to The Vanishing of Ethan Carter?
Weird fiction is one of the hardest things to translate to a video game because the written word works much better for your imagination than any, well, image. To this day we don’t really have a great, spotless Lovecraftian movie, right? Dagon was good, and At the Mountains of Madness was good, but nothing was mind-blowing.
And have you ever seen a really convincing, madness-inducing painting of Cthulhu? Luckily for us, weird fiction is not limited to Lovecraft, and if you check the writers like Blackwood or Grabinski, suddenly all kinds of possibilities open up. Not that we do not reach for Lovecraft in our game, it’s just that weird fiction is much broader than underwater temples, blasphemous rituals and sleeping gods. And that’s exactly what I love about weird fiction, where nothing is what it seems, and yet nothing is surreal. I think it’s a great foundation for a video game.
BD: What made you choose Wisconsin for the game’s setting?
Proximity to New England, the land of the weird, and (cough) some silly practical reasons. We did not want the game to take place in any particular location, we wanted it to happen everywhere and nowhere in particular. But then we realized we have a boy named Ethan Carter in the title, so no, the game could not take place in Poland or Spain. And since we use real Polish locations as visual inspiration, we looked for an area in US that is similar to our country: full four seasons, similar vegetation, etc. And Wisconsin turned out to be just right.
BD: The world looks incredible. How big will the world be, and how much control will players have over where they can go? How linear or open is it?
I think our game offers unexpectedly open environment. We’re not forcing to go down just one path, you have a whole valley to explore. This comes at a cost – there are areas in the game where literally nothing happens – but from a different angle it’s actually a gain, as the world is much more believable this way. That non-linearity is not limited to just the environment. We ran a playtest the other day and were surprised by how many people were dropping one area in the middle of an activity only to go sample another one and come back later.
They had a lot of fun this way, they felt like they were the makers of their own destiny, and played on their own terms. Which is absolutely perfect, that’s what we’re aiming for. That freedom might be overwhelming to players used to objective markers and task checklists, but I think that at the end of the day this was the right way to go for this particular game. I don’t think you can really have a game about exploration and discovery if you’re guided and don’t really need to explore in order to discover.
BD: What gameplay mechanics are integrated into investigating crime scenes? o In what ways will players interact with the world? Will there be combat of any kind, or does the gameplay extend entirely from the investigative aspects of exploration?
You play as Paul Prospero, an occult detective, and you have this one advantage over any other detective that you can communicate with the dead and see through the veil of any dark forces’ lies. So even though there are elements of regular investigation in the game, stuff like finding and analyzing evidence, there are also supernatural elements like being able to mentally sync with the deceased and see their final moments. “Sync” or “evidence” sounds a bit cold and technical, but the game is nothing like that. There’s a slightly oneiric mood to it all, and I think we’ve managed to make every element of the investigation natural and organic. There’s zero combat in the game. The darkness is after your mind, not your flesh. There are some surprises when it comes to meeting evil entities, but I should probably keep quiet about those.
BD: How difficult is it to balance the importance of mood and environment as immersive narrative elements with the outside pressure of making a more traditional sort horror experience?
There was this pressure for a while, as the most successful horror games cater nicely to YouTube screamers. We thought about integrating jump scares and evil entities bent on killing you into our game, but it would corrupt the core idea, so after some consideration we have decided to risk it and make a different type of horror, well aware that it would probably cost us some points with people expecting heart attack inducing events. But I am also hoping that people will get that horror has many faces, and just as a bloodied chainsaw is horror, so can be a misty forest full of unsettling whispers.
BD: You released a prequel comic online. Are you planning on following up with any other tie-ins like that?
Probably not, as the game is a self-contained story with an actual ending. This is not a beginning of a franchise, and there are no side stories to tell. You buy a game, and it’s all there. Personally I love transmedia, I read all Dead Space books and comics, for example, but it’s just not something that would fit The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
BD: How long do you anticipate the game will be?
Three hours? Five hours? I have no idea, honestly. We have tested 25% of it and it took people one hour on average to finish it. But will the rest take them less time, or more time, I don’t know that yet. We have a lot of custom stuff in the game, and solving one murder may take you half an hour, and another is fifteen minutes. Other things you do in the game have varied playtime, too. But the truth is that after we realized and made sure that the game offered a good value for money we stopped caring about the gameplay length. We’re only focusing on the quality of the experience and remove everything that’s in the way. There are no filler activities in the game.
BD: The team has been very active on the site, openly providing extensive coverage of the game’s development, including insight into the variety of public opinions that accompany showing early versions and playtesting. How has this process of being so open affected your approach to developing the game? It seems like this kind of forthrightness and openness will be the standard in the future. Do you see it as a net positive for the process of making games?
I don’t know. I think we bit a bit more than we could chew. The marketing is important, but going all the way like we did is just too much work for a small team like ours. And I don’t think, for example, that my daily blogging on Tumblr gave us that much advantage compared to the cost of it. I like to finish what I start, so we’ll keep it this way until the day of release, but in the future we have to be a bit smarter about it.
Please note that the marketing is especially difficult for a game like ours. On one hand, there are thousand things I’d love to tell people about, and at the same time everything feels like a spoiler. And we don’t want to spoil the game in order to generate more hype before release. So it’s a really hard work to blog and tweet daily when you don’t really want to say too much about your game.
BD: Since it is a narrative-based game, do you plan on offering playable demos before the game’s actual release?
No, but that’s mainly because of the way the game is structured. I mean, how do you do a demo of GTA? Of course we’re not GTA, but the game is non-linear and with a fairly small, but open world. I guess time-limited demo is an option, something that To the Moon did: you get a full game but there’s a paywall after an hour or whatever. But not only that would be an immersion killer, but also it would not necessarily translate to a better experience, just larger reach.
It’s basic psychology, you don’t give any game you get for free the same amount of care and attention as to the one you paid for. It’s a controversial subject and probably too long for this interview, but, in short, not only is making a demo much harder than anyone suspects, but the demo as such is not necessarily a good thing for the players themselves. I think that in times of online reviews from both gamers and journalists and in times of YouTube you can really understand if you want to purchase a game or not without having a playable demo.
BD: Do you have anything to add or announce?
It’s a race against time for us, to release the game before the autumn insanity. Just today I got a document with every spoken line in the game and we’re ready to finally record all voice-overs. We will hit alpha in a few weeks. Fingers crossed then for Ethan’s release in the third quarter of this year.
Of all the places to find a coven of witches, the attic above a Christian youth camp is probably the last place you’d think to look. But that’s just what we find in Camp, a surrealist nightmare of feminist empowerment from Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast.
Emily (Zola Grimmer) is still reckoning with her involvement in a horrific tragedy when she accidentally contributes to the death of her best friend, Charlie (Giselle Morison). Unable to move on, the traumatized teen takes a job at a rural summer camp, hoping to forget her own sorrows by looking after at-risk kids. She quickly connects with a counselor named Clara (Alice Wordsworth) and finds comfort in her close-knit group of female friends. But a mysterious whisper from deep in the woods warns that they may be leading her down a darker path.
Fast burst onto the scene in 2022 with Honeycomb, a psychological horror film that follows a burgeoning matriarchy. Known for their focus on “Girl Horror” stories, the talented young filmmaker tackles similar themes in Camp as Emily leaves the modern world behind to embrace a dark vision of self-discovery through magic.
Ahead of the film’s U.S. release on June 26, Bloody Disgusting sat down with Fast to chat about the nebulous nature of good vs. evil and the intoxicating power of female-driven horror.
Bloody Disgusting: What inspired this unique story? Did you go to religious summer camps when you were young?
Avalon Fast: I did. I went to lots of different summer camps, but all of them were primarily Bible camps. The memory I have of camp is kind of strange. I was very homesick as a kid, and I didn’t necessarily enjoy all my time there. I definitely remember meeting some interesting girls at camp and having that presence of religion hovering around the whole experience.
BD: I really love the film’s gorgeous natural setting. Camp is the kind of surrealist nightmare that you don’t just watch. You feel it too. How did you approach creating this world?
AF: Well, a huge part of it was working with my cinematographer Eily Sprungman, who’s a very close friend. We spent years prepping, shot listing, storyboarding, and mood boarding. She’d had a similar experience to mine. We grew up around the same place, and so we understood each other’s visions from the get-go. But there are so many other pieces that came together. The costuming, the art, and the animated sequences were done by Sofiya Iurkevych. One of our producers, Taylor Nodrick, was obsessed with shooting on Super 8 film. I’ve always wanted to as well, so all the memory sequences were shot on Super 8. It was just a lot of people with an understanding and a vision for what this project was. I’m really happy with the way it turned out.
To the extent that you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your relationship to witchcraft, and what does Camp have to say about modern witches?
Well, that’s the question of Camp. It’s not that I don’t resonate with any of these things, but I specifically wanted Camp to be a little bit ambiguous around what witchcraft looks like. Is this witchcraft? Are these girls witches? Emily explicitly asks if that’s what’s happening here, and the answer isn’t yes. The film isn’t going to answer that question for you. My relationship to magic and witchcraft? It’s tough. I feel like there’s so much magic, connection, and spirituality that comes from these friendships, the closeness of these women, and what’s happening around them. A lot of what Camp is trying to say or show is just that magic can come out of friendship.
I loved watching these female friendships develop. And you’re right. No one ever says the word “coven,” but you can feel that connection, and you can see a change in Emily as those relationships grow. I’m also really fascinated with the way Camp plays with the idea of good and evil. At one point, Clara says, “Maybe God drew us to the devil,” which stopped me in my tracks. How do you view witchcraft or the magic these girls are experiencing in regard to good and evil?
That was such a huge part of the script’s construction. The story is really trying to keep a balance between those two things. I like asking people if they think these girls are good or bad, because I feel like a lot of people come out of the film thinking one or the other. They’ll say things like “thank God Emily found her people” or “God, I really wish she’d gone home.” I just don’t think there’s ever an answer. I wanted to explore the idea of going down the wrong path, especially coming out of grief. What makes you a bad person, and does healing mean you’re looking to become a better person? I don’t have an answer, but I do feel like that’s a huge part of what Camp is asking. What is good? What is bad? Why did God bring me to the devil?
Yes, because this is all happening at “God camp” in Emily’s words. So how can both of those things exist at the same time? Along those lines, I’m also fascinated by the voice Emily hears in the woods. Without spoiling too much, what is this voice asking, and what is required in return?
Emily comes to camp with a shout into the void, asking can anyone hear me? Does anyone want to? And it’s answered so clearly by these girls, specifically responding only with love, care, support, and trust. It’s like her prayers were answered. It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be alright, but Emily is looking for peace. She’s looking for a moment where she feels pure good. And I think, even at its surface level, she does get that experience.
Personally, I don’t really think people are good or bad. I think we all exist somewhere in the middle. Camp centers traditionally villainized characters, but that’s where Emily seems to find her peace, however you choose to define it.
I also wanted to show the experience of having decided that you are a bad person, you’ve made mistakes, and you feel cursed. Then when you meet other people who have done things that you would consider worse, you can actually feel good in their presence. You feel like less of a bad person. I think that’s a huge part of the story as well. Emily’s finding her version of other fucked up people, and she feels less fucked up around them. I’ve found that in my own life. It’s a cool thing. I don’t think it’s bad.
I don’t think it’s bad either. It’s finding your home, your people. We meet Emily in the aftermath of unthinkable trauma. Is this a story about mental health and healing?
Witnessing it myself. witnessing other people experience tragedy and then move through grief, you hear a lot of talk about healing or coming out the other side. There’s so much conversation around what that looks like, with self-care and showing up for yourself. I always felt really averse to it. It annoyed me. I think the beginning of the film speaks to that. The therapeutic version of what getting help looks like is obviously very different from what Camp is showing. And again, I don’t have an answer for what you’re supposed to do. But I think that’s another question I was asking: how do you heal? Do you heal at all? Is that the end goal, or are we just trying to get better? It’s something I experienced in my own grief. And the answer, for me, at least now, is just that I’m not looking to get better. So I felt like I hadn’t. I found it hard to find people to have those conversations with. And I think that’s what I ultimately wanted to make a film about.
I love that unanswered question. In my own experience, I’ve had to reframe what healing actually looks like. There’s not really an endpoint. It’s just finding a way to keep going. There’s also an element of sacrifice in this story, particularly regarding another counselor named Jo (Sophie Bawks-Smith). What role does she play in Emily’s journey?
For me, Jo is this human embodiment of Charlie, Emily’s friend. As Jo, she had a life at this camp before meeting Emily, and then was kind of taken over by Charlie’s spirit. I think a lot of people view Emily’s final choice as horrendous and tragic. In a way it is, but for me, if Jo becomes her angel, it’s almost like a self-sacrifice. Jo knows that by sacrificing herself, she’ll be giving Emily power to move forward. In the original script, the girls were supposed to bring out another counselor, JB (Aidan Laudersmith), and burn his body. But I just thought, there’s no way sacrificing this guy could give the girls enough power. There’s just no way, right? Logically, that just didn’t line up for me.
I’m glad you mentioned JB, because he has his own tragic arc. How do men factor into the world of Camp?
The way men factor into my world is so bizarre. I have such little respect for them in my films, which is something I’ve been called on. I think I have to challenge myself in the future to make a movie about a boy because, these boys … It’s not that the men in my films aren’t redeemable, but there’s no depth to these characters. They’re just treated with such disrespect. I don’t know why I do that, actually. That’s something for me to look into. It was the same with Honeycomb. They’re just such peripheral characters. I’ve had people ask about Kayne (Henri Gillespi), the scary guy at the fire, what happens to him? I just think, I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s not the point of the story.
Well, I can say after a lifetime of watching women on the periphery of the story, the course correction feels nice. In a similar vein, I’m in love with your homepage, avalonfast.com. There’s an image of girls on a film set and then a still from Honeycomb in which a blood-covered girl is screaming at the sky. And in the middle, it just says Girl Horror. It’s a really powerful statement that gives me chills. How do you define Girl Horror, and what draws you to these types of stories?
I was obsessed with the term when I started making my movies. It was something I’d come up with to kind of brand myself and describe what I was doing. Then I went through a period where I felt like it was a bit gender exclusive and didn’t interest me as much. But now I’ve come full circle on the term. I think it’s a bit of a commentary on youth and the horror of growing up female. But I think everybody can relate to that experience. I don’t want it to feel like this exclusive thing, that I make movies exclusively for girls, because I don’t think I do. I’m interested in exploring what Girl Horror means. Originally, it was just a title, something I came up with, and now it’s become something that resonates with people. You said it gave you chills. That’s cool for me to hear because there’s obviously some depth there.
Are you working on anything new?
Yes. I am actually making a movie about a boy. That’s the next thing.
That’s exciting! The more I think about feminism, the more I end up coming back to men and boys, because they have a place in the world of Girl Horror too.
Absolutely. It’s all just part of being human.
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