Editorials
Experiencing Horror From a Child’s Viewpoint in ‘Among the Sleep’ [What We Play in the Shadows]
For all their heinousness, most horror villains know there’s an unwritten rule that should always be observed: don’t kill the kid. Adults, sure. Horny teens? Ripe for the slaughter. The family pet? Not a crowd-pleaser, but not unprecedented. The young child though, the wee baby, that’s a line crossed. Even Michael Myers walked past the sobbing infant in Halloween (2018). So when a game not only puts a baby in danger but makes the player that defenseless little tyke, that’s a power move. Does Among the Sleep deliver a bloodcurdling pre-K experience, or will you just want to stop playing and take a nap? Let’s draw a picture…
David is a toddler who loves his mom and his teddy bear. He’s celebrating turning two, and all is right with the world. Or it was, until a stranger knocked on the door and upset mommy. After the cake, after the nap, things don’t feel right anymore. The house is too dark, the nursery is too big. Also, Teddy is alive and telling David that bad things are happening, so that’s a clue right there. He may only be two, but David is determined to keep mommy safe from the monsters. So with Teddy’s help, he escapes the crib, the nursery, the house, and eventually, reality itself.
Among the Sleep nails two things right at the start: the scale of the world, and the frustration of moving like a toddler. Everything feels big, imposing, and potentially dangerous, while David moves pretty much how you’d expect. He shambles slowly, can run for just a little while before falling down, and is best at crawling, which is crucial for navigating some tight spots later on. Teddy is by your side for most of the game, though he will occasionally get lost when you go down a slide or enter a new level. Teddy can be hugged to emit a calming and powerful light in darker areas. Norwegian developer Krillbite Studio put a lot of effort into twisting familiar locations like a parent’s bedroom or the local park into ominous, Tim Burton-esque obstacle courses. David’s small steps and miniscule height require pulling dresser drawers and moving chairs to get around some of the time.
Beyond the furniture fumbling, you’ll be searching for safe spaces to avoid the big bads. There are two unique monsters in the game, and specific levels where they’ll be searching for David. If the player is caught, they’ll be picked up, receive a chilling face-to-face scream, and then given the option to restart from the most recent checkpoint. This also occurs if David falls into a chasm or is otherwise hurt, although Krillbite wisely did not include any animations or sound effects of an injured baby. A “bad ending” that was ultimately scrapped but is included in the definitive edition reveals very bad fortunes for the player indeed, on par with the children in a Grimm fairy tale.
The sore point here is that the game is never very frightening. Whether that’s due to the concept of playing as an infant or because the developers are going for horror of a quieter sort, the scares are minimal here. The monsters are easy enough to steer clear of and the puzzles never get all that difficult. Krillbite wanted to hit harder with their story. Did they succeed? That’s a question everyone has to answer for themselves. I appreciated the tale they were telling and I know many people that have lived through a similar experience. It may be especially affecting for some.
There’s fun to be had in thinking up one-to-one philosophical ratios for all the things represented in the game -is this a deadly game of cat and mouse, or just hide-and-seek?- but ultimately, Among the Sleep excels with its environmental design more than anything else. The game itself is too easy, the scares too light. This doesn’t erase the power of its story and the inventiveness of its design, but others may want more from their horror titles. A definitive edition adds the previously mentioned alternate “bad ending” as well as a prologue DLC, with a wintry setting and a new monster. There’s also a free demo available to see what you think of David’s adventures.
Among the Sleep is available on XBOX One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and Steam.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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