Editorials
‘Inside Out’: Shannon Strucci’s New Zine Is Setting the Table for Body Horror RPGs
Shannon Strucci (of StrucciMovies) is a person of many hustles. She’s probably best known for her work on the video essay series FAKE FRIENDS and Scanline. She’s also a cast member on Critical Bits, the queer teen antifascist superhero horror actual-play podcast, and works as a film correspondent for Struggle Session.
A throughline in Shannon’s work, though, is that she’s one of the most consistently progressive voices in horror crit, examining uncomfortable realities and extreme subject matter in a style by turns empathetic and analytical. Knowing this, I was excited to talk to her about her new project, Inside Out.
Are you a DM? Do you — like me — dream of subjecting your players to strange mutations, gruesome diseases, and involuntary bodily transformations? Well, Inside Out is the zine for you. Part of ZineQuest 2, it aims to be a system-agnostic guide to safely and effectively incorporating body horror into tabletop roleplaying games. It’ll be in the form of a folded, black and white zine, lushly illustrated by artist Nick Tofani.
“I want to crowdfund for FAKE FRIENDS 3 at some point,” Shannon explained to me, “but I didn’t want my first crowdfunding campaign to be something in the realm of tens of thousands of dollars. Kickstarter’s ZineQuest initiative seemed like a good opportunity to start smaller. Of course, then I got very ambitious, and kept aiming higher for how much I felt we could raise, and how many people I should get involved, so the project is no longer small, especially for a zine!”
In fact, Inside Out seems more like a sourcebook at this point. It’s slated to feature a bioaccumulation of genre history, safety tools, and playable modules from five authors and two artists.
“The whole idea behind it is, instead of you, telling your players exactly what’s there, like, you ask your players, like, ‘You start to feel this sense of dread. What’s waiting for you on the other side?’,” said Critical Bits creator Joel Ruiz, of his module, Corners.
Inspired by the collaborative, improvisatory storytelling of Powered by the Apocalypse, he plans to build Corners on freeform questions and unknowns. “You can make it real, or not,” he went on. “But it’s the idea of asking someone what’s waiting behind this corner, and then taking their answer and running with it. I’ve used this reference before, but it’s like, letting your players draw out rope until they’ve tied a noose for themselves.”
Meanwhile, Paul “Ettin” Matijevic, co-author of Hard Wired Island, is working on a Marxist-tinged space-horror adventure, and Sean Oxspring (of video game developer Deep Silver Dambuster and OMEN Investigations) is drawing on his own experience as a zookeeper to build a zoological garden of horrors. Variety, perhaps, is the blood in this zine’s veins.
For her part, Shannon plans to provide a nuanced theoretical look at the genre, and the arrhythmias it might encounter during a TTRPG session. “It’s important to stress player comfort and safety,” she said, “and to avoid inadvertently Othering people with disabilities, and disfigurements, and trans people, like a lot of horror has.” To this end, Shannon’s building on elements like player consent sheets, lines and veils, and X and O cards — forms of tiered consent tailored to tabletop play. Part of the fun of horror, after all, is pretending you aren’t okay with it.
As a trans person, I’ve always felt like my love of body horror (and horror in general) had an aspect of queerness to it. I’m not alone in this either — according to Joel Ruiz, “the Venn diagram of weird fucked up horror shit and the gay community, it isn’t even two circles.”
“Noël Carroll’s work on interstitiality is some of my favorite horror theory writing,” Shannon said to this. “He basically talks about how, in horror media, beings who exhibit categorical contradictoriness, or defy cultural boundaries — beings that are neither living nor dead, neither human nor animal — are seen as disgusting in many horror works. It goes a long way to explain bigotry towards people who are neither straight nor gay, neither male nor female, or mixed race. More progressive works explore these liminal beings — which, in my opinion, include queer people! — in a more sympathetic light.”
“I do think body horror can be used to explore gender and sexuality in a more sympathetic light,” she said, to another question, “but I don’t see it as a happy or healing genre.” This is one point where I disagree with Shannon.
To me — especially in terms of transitioning — body horror is part of the process of healing, and, in that way, I find this genre somewhat comforting. The beauty of the tabletop format, though, is that I can use Inside Out to build that angle myself. Per Shannon, “it all depends on what someone’s looking to get out of it.”
Inside Out is set to be finished in August.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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