Editorials
5 Games You Should Play This Halloween!
With All Hallows Eve less than a week away, this is the perfect time to get caught up on any horror games you haven’t finished before more get added to the list. 2014 has been an especially good year to be a fan of horror games, so it’d be understandable if you’ve missed a few. Heck, it’s my job to play horror games, and even I missed a couple games. We’ve reached a point where it’s genuinely difficult keeping up with the latest and greatest games in our favorite genre.
To make catching up a slightly less daunting task, I’ve come up with five games — released this year — that are fitting of the Halloween season. I hope you’ll let this list gently guide you toward creating the ultimate Halloween game playlist.
Five Nights at Freddy’s
What I enjoyed the most about Five Nights at Freddy’s, aside from its deeply unnerving premise, is how refreshing its design is. There isn’t another horror game that’s quite like it. It’s a life-saving buoy floating in a sea of first person horror games. Don’t get me wrong, I love games like Outlast and Amnesia, but it’s nice to see developers experimenting a bit in this genre.
Five Nights prays on an primitive fear of animatronic creations, which I assume most sane human beings are born with. The dead-eyed band of robotic woodland creatures that occupy the stage of any Chuck E. Cheese’s is something I learned to fear early on, and it’s a phobia this innovative indie game exploits brilliantly.
In related news, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is happening.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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