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.
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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