Interviews
‘Ghost Theory’ is Happening and it Definitely Won’t Have Guns
Stefan Durmek is a producer and designer on Ghost Theory, an upcoming supernatural horror game from developer Dreadlocks that became the latest crowdfunding success this week when its Kickstarter reached its £50,000 ($71,178 USD) goal. He also gets me. It normally takes a few conversations for someone to figure me out, but for Durmek, it took one longwinded late-night email from me asking if his game is anything like Ghostbusters.
It’s not, obviously. So please, enjoy this brief Q&A in which a crazy goon harasses a game developer about an incredibly promising indie horror game that needs to hurry up and get here already.
BD: How would you quickly describe Ghost Theory to someone who’s unfamiliar with the game in a way that’d get them excited about it?
Ghost Theory is a single-player, first-person horror game. A university opens up a secret program of modern paranormal research and they put you in charge of the investigations. You travel to the most haunted places on Earth to gather evidence about hauntings. Each of the locations is a sandbox rather than a ‘corridor’.
BD: Continuing that thought — I might’ve once said your game is about “living the life of a clairvoyant, globetrotting Ghostbuster.” How accurate is that?
When you say ‘Ghostbuster,’ people tend to imagine someone with a proton pack and ghost traps. And that’s not what Ghost Theory is about. That’s why we call Barbara, our heroine, a ‘ghost hunter’ (actually, some paranormal experts actually get upset with the term ghost hunter, so ‘Paranormal Investigator’ would be even more accurate).
In Ghost Theory, you don’t have any guns to fire at apparitions. Even though this is a horror game, don’t expect ghosts to be jumping out at you from the shadows for no reason. In fact, most of them won’t respond to your presence at all unless you make them. It’s your job to find out how to draw them out – it’s the only way you will meet your mission objectives.
BD: Have you or your team experienced any activity of the paranormal persuasion while making this game?
We have experienced some really strange happenings since we started to work on the concept. But I wouldn’t call them paranormal. More like strange coincidences. We don’t all agree on their significance – I’d rather just leave it at that.
BD: Where does Dreadlocks stand on ghosts? Do you believe? Do you want to believe?
Speaking for Dreadlocks – some of us truly do; others are sceptics. But we all have one thing in common: we are genuinely fascinated by the unknown, by unexplained mysteries, by spooky stories, by horror movies and games, and we’re determined to make this project the most authentic ghost hunting experience ever!
Speaking just for myself – I am more of a sceptic, which I think is a good thing for the design of this game. I will need to do my best to make the gameplay believable and enjoyable to other sceptics, not just believers. I am not saying I’m convinced the paranormal doesn’t exist. The paranormal is a phenomenon, and that only means we (as in science) don’t know much about it. It’s kind of like playing games. A game is a phenomenon too and I absolutely love the idea that I will spend my life trying to understand its nature.
BD: Have any of the haunted places you’ve researched for Ghost Theory stood out for being more unnerving or terrifying than the rest? Do you have a favorite location?
There is a large ghost hunting community all over the world. We are dedicating a member of the studio to get in touch with experienced ghost hunters who can help us with the location scannings. Soon we’ll be able to just send a piece of equipment to a hunter located near a site we want and then just wait for the results. This whole process is still in its early stage of development. But it looks like it should work.
The last place we visited ourselves was a haunted castle, Houska, here in Czech Republic. It is a pretty creepy place. The castle’s administrators allowed us to crawl around it from the basements up to its attic. If we licence this place, it’ll definitely be one of our favourites. Personally, I can’t wait to start working on Poveglia Island.
Editor’s Note: We featured Poveglia Island in the very first entry in our ongoing “Creepy Places” series. You can find the latest batch of spooky locales over here.
BD: Quick! A thirsty specter is about to drink your life essence – what do you do? Fight, or flight? And if it’s the former, what weapon would you use to vanquish the foul spirit? There’s no wrong answer here (I mean, there definite is, but I’m sure your answer will rock), like Fatal Frame’s Camera Obscura, or maybe you’d prefer a Proton Pack? A priest and a dash of salt, perhaps?
Editor’s Note II: The Notening: I meant what Durmek would do in this situation, but it sounds like I just really want there to be guns in this game. I don’t, I promise, and I could’ve edited this question out of the interview, but that I would’ve meant getting rid of his response, and that’s my favorite part of this whole interview.
There are no weapons, you crazy goon – there’s no shooting or fighting involved in the core concept of Ghost Theory. Your goal will be to collect samples and evidence of paranormal phenomena and then bring it back to university, where your scientists can study it. You’ll have a lot of equipment common to today’s paranormal investigators: an EMF meter, Full-spectrum camera, UV Lamp, Pendulum etc.
There are a ton of ghost hunting gadgets on the market today. The list of those we’re going to use in Ghost Theory is still not finalized. We’re also going to come up with some new, hi-tech gadget inventions that your scientist will craft for you in the later stages of the game. This way you will be able to dig deeper than today’s real gadgets would allow.
BD: No pressure, but this last one’s important. What’s the best ghost in all of video games?
Each member of Dreadlocks have a different favorite spook. There’s Slimer, Aiden from Beyond: Two Souls…. a long list, really. But in the end, we’ve collectively settled on… the PacMan ghosts, “Blinky”, “Pinky”, “Inky” and “Clyde.” Haha!
Big thanks to Durmek and Dreadlocks for taking the time to A some of my Q’s. Ghost Theory doesn’t have a release date yet, but when it does arrive, it’ll come to PC, Mac, Linux, PS4 and Xbox One. You can follow the game on Kickstarter.
Nothing is the same when two crewmates return to shore in Rose of Nevada, the latest by Enys Men filmmaker Mark Jenkin.
Time and reality blur for stars George Mackay (Wolf, 1917) and Callum Turner (Green Room, “Neuromancer”) in the hallucinatory time travel mystery releasing in New York and Los Angeles theaters on June 19, 2026.
But this isn’t your standard time travel movie.
Rose of Nevada bends time and genre in its exploration of Cornish identity and community, upending the lives of Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner). There’s a listless, dreamy quality to the time travel, and for inspired reason: Jenkin approaches it like a haunting.
While time travel was on his mind early in the writing process, Jenkin’s partner and collaborator asked a question that unlocked Rose of Nevada and inspired the filmmaker.
Jenkin explains, “I remember saying to Mary [Woodvine], my partner, who’s in the film, I said to her, ‘God, it really seems like I’ve fallen into this thing of either making films about ghosts or films about time travel,’ and then she said to me, ‘Yeah, but aren’t all ghost stories just time travel films, and aren’t all time travel films just ghost stories?’ And then I thought, ‘Oh, great. So I’m not making two types of films. I’m actually always making one type of film.’ But that was ultimately liberating because I thought there’s a nice gap or a crossover in the perception of genres, there’s a lot of room to play and to be free within that.”
“Once I’d abandoned the idea that I was going to master quantum physics in any academic sense,” the filmmaker continues, “It was incredibly freeing because I thought, ‘Well, I can just set my own rules here,’ and it really doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you stick to them. You can’t bend them for the sake of the plot or for the sake of a character arc or something. You have to establish those rules upfront and stick to them, which made me really think I’ve got to limit the time travel element. This film can’t be about time travel.“
Bearing the brunt of the time travel disruption is Mackay’s Nick, a man struggling to support his family before the ill-fated voyage upends his entire world. It’s the type of role that was an easy yes for the actor, simply because of the filmmaker behind it.
“I saw Bait at the cinema when it was first out a few years ago and was so struck by it,” Mackay tells BD. “I just hadn’t seen a film like it. I want to work with the best directors. I want to work with the best directors and people who have a singular vision. As an actor, the process of work is almost my biggest draw, as well as what a story’s saying, but I think you learn by doing, and if I can do my bit in as many different ways as possible. The physicality and the discipline of Mark’s filmmaking, how that is so entwined in the DNA of the film, and therefore in the way that I work within it, that was the biggest draw. I’m just a fan of Mark’s. I was just very pleased to be involved.”
That reflects in Rose of Nevada‘s unique casting; Mackay initially was eyed for Liam.
“When I first got the call to meet Mark at the audition stage,” Mackay said, “We didn’t wind up reading scenes, but they said, ‘There’s a project. There are two roles in it that you could be right for, and Mark is leaning towards you for Liam.’ So, I had a look at Liam, Callum’s role, and had my interpretation of the script ready to talk about it and what I thought that character was, who he was, and how I’m thinking about how I might inhabit that or what I saw in him. And when we met, we didn’t talk about the film at all. We spoke about everything else. But following that meeting, I got the message, said, ‘Mark would like you to be part of the film, but he thinks you’re definitely more of a Nick,’ which I think I just may be a complete sheep because I went, ‘Of course I’m Nick.’
Mackay continued, “But it’s funny, I do have in my own life, I just started a family, and so much of my last few years of being has been trying to figure that balance and what that means and how you navigate that. So with family being at its core and all the kind of conundrums that come with staying level with that, that rang true. So I felt like I understood objectively, I have my interpretations of what both men mean to each other and within the story, but then once I was playing Nick, I just became about a very present focus on who he was and what his situation was. What I liked about him is that he’s a very straightforward bloke. In the best possible way, he’s quite a simple man. It’s just he’s in an extraordinary situation.”
Jenkin wrote Rose of Nevada during the pandemic lockdown that had forced a halt in production on Enys Men. He’d return to rewrite once Enys Men had been completed, creating overlap between films. “They are even more in conversation than you’d think because the first draft of Rose of Nevada was before I’d made Enys Men, and then everything I learned through the making of Enys Men, I fed into Rose of Nevada. But also the reaction to Enys Men, all the critics and writers and audience members who are telling me what Enys Men was about. I’m always the last to realize what I’ve done, I think like most filmmakers. You don’t really know what you’ve made a film about until the audience tells you. I was able to feed that into Rose of Nevada and also scale it up a little bit. So, yeah, in some ways it predates Enys Men, and in some ways it follows on from it,” he said.
Jenkin’s latest caps what’s unofficially been dubbed his Cornish trilogy, a moniker that initially surprised the filmmaker, but he’s come to embrace it. A recent revisit of Bait made it even clearer. “I can now understand why people are linking the three films together. I’d forgotten how linked they are, which is amazing, really, considering the first draft of Bait was written in 1999. So, most of my adult life has been one way or another making this trilogy. I am quite looking forward to starting the next chapter.”
You must be logged in to post a comment.