Editorials
How ‘Love, Sam’ Put a Fresh Spin on the ‘P.T.’ Formula
In an interview with Slate Magazine, developer Kitty Horrorshow talked through her approach to producing low-budget horror titles that are uniquely disquieting, and how she manages to accomplish this without leaning on any in-your-face gore or sudden jolt tactics. According to the Itch.io sensation, jump-scares are inherently unsatisfying, akin to somebody raising their ‘’fist up to punch you’’. She rationalizes that she is obviously ‘’going to get startled’’ by them, yet ‘’there’s nothing interesting or edifying about that [experience]. It’s just a reflex’’.
Dread scares, on the other hand, are tools that she finds to be highly effective when it comes to putting her audience on edge. For context, if a jump scare is when you threaten to ‘’attack’’ somebody with a loud bang, then a ‘’dread scare’’ (which, incidentally, is a term coined by Horrorshow) is when you coerce them into doing something unpleasant to progress. Especially if that objectionable action happens to be a genre no-no, like investigating a strange noise, venturing into a darkened basement, or interfering with an occult artifact.
The genius of this is that – rather than bluntly confronting the player with an unexpected musical sting or a flash of shocking imagery (as though they are idol passengers on a ghost train) – you’re making them an active participant in their own fear. It’s like a sadistic game of chicken, one that would be absolutely impossible to pull off in any other medium. After all, where else but in video-games can you taunt your audience in such a provocative way? Daring them to press forward, as opposed to simply poking at them with a stick.
Indeed, a well-executed dread scare has the capacity to torment you in a way that mere jolts could only aspire towards. Of course, Horrorshow is not the only practitioner of this method, with titles like Amnesia, Eternal Darkness and P.T all delivering their own fun takes on the concept. The latter game in particular contains a quintessential example, wherein a radio broadcast goads you into turning around, so that you can identify the source of an ominous wheezing sound. It’s a phenomenally upsetting moment, one that reduces even the most seasoned horror-veteran to a quivering wreck, and it demonstrates just how powerful a dread scare can be in the right hands.
For another great showcase of this technique, look no further than Love, Sam. Developed by Korean Linguistics Lab, this unassuming gem was released in 2019 and sadly didn’t get half as much attention as it deserved. Exercising an uncommon amount of restraint for a first-person horror game, it’s deceptively creative, refreshingly understated, and artfully creepy in a way that will stick with you until long after the credits roll. Plus, it’s got an incredibly low asking price of just a couple bucks.
The premise ought to be instantly familiar to genre connoisseurs, recalling many of the desperate wannabes that emerged in the wake of P.T. Don’t let that fool you though, because there’s more to it than originally meets the eye.
As in Hideo Kojima’s mini-masterpiece, you control an unidentified avatar who is locked in a humdrum environment (seemingly a college dorm) with no escape route. In line with genre tradition, you must wander around this claustrophobic space – which includes a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom – whilst things subtly change around you. Notes materialize out of thin air, cryptic etchings appear on the wall, and objects move of their own volition, all hinting at a malevolent presence that is tyrannizing you from behind the scenes. It’s pretty standard stuff to be honest and might even cause involuntary eye rolls amongst those who regularly peruses the ‘’horror’’ tag on Steam.
Again, in the vein of that infamous Silent Hill teaser, your interactions with these fluctuating surroundings are ostensibly quite limited. You can flick the light switches on-and-off and maybe collect a few key items, however for the most part your role will consist of reading. And there is a lot of that to do here, as you’re basically tasked with thumbing through the entirety of someone’s diary for the duration of the game. Now that might sound unappealing at first, yet therein lies the crucial twist that differentiates Love, Sam from all the other P.T clones out there.
You see, overlooking the messy room – like a church pulpit – you will find an immaculately preserved desk, upon which sits a journal entitled: ‘’My Dirty Little Secrets’’. Your sole objective is to read this book from cover to cover, whilst simultaneously consulting it to solve puzzles and appease the vengeful spirit that is holding you prisoner. There’s no larger goal beyond that, although it does turn out to be considerably harder than you might assume.
For a start, the chronology of these diary entries is jumbled out of order, which (when combined with the author’s clunky expression) can be rather perplexing. Nevertheless, you’ll gradually come to familiarise yourself with the major players in this elliptical soap opera, and will piece together what transpired at Rosen Peek boarding school. In a nutshell, it’s a tale of adolescent drama, the Machiavellian backstabbings that occur in the classroom, and unrequited love turned sour. Related to you in dribs and drabs, it’s a compelling mystery that you will have to figure out on your own through inference, as the game refuses to spoon-feed you any of the answers.
Furthermore, whilst it ostensibly relies on overused clichés and stereotypical teen archetypes (e.g: the arrogant jock; the popular mean girl; and the reclusive bookworm), there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface. You’ll presume to be ahead of the curve on numerous occasions but, if you bear with it, you’ll be rewarded with some genuinely unpredictable turns that will upend your expectations. There are even confusing passages that you’ll want to chalk up to awkward English translation – with sentences that are phrased clumsily or entries that feel oddly inconsistent with what’s come before – only for you to later realize that they have been deliberately constructed in this way to hoodwink you. It’s very smartly written in that respect, filled with sly misdirects and red herrings that will keep you guessing.
What’s more, the engrossing narrative isn’t the only aspect of Love, Sam that plays its cards close to the chest, as the gameplay intermittently reveals exciting new layers as well. At the offset, it might appear to be another run-of-the-mill ‘’walking simulator’’, one that has you trudging through a linear procession of frights and digesting an unusual amount of literature, however, you wind up having far more autonomy than you’d think.
Once the supernatural forces start to blur the line between what’s scrawled down in the pages of the journal and your present-day-environs, you’ll have to perform a variety of strange interactions with the memoir itself. This could entail anything from assembling a collage of voyeuristic photographs, to filling out a brutal personality quiz, to doodling macabre images that foreshadow threats on the horizon.
Before long, you will graduate to carrying out tasks in the wider dormitory and will even be transported to other menacing locations, wherein you will have to hide from pursuing monsters. Some of the things that Korean Linguistics Lab gets you to complete are remarkably inventive and it would be a disservice to spoil them. That being said, one notable highlight demands that you carefully trace over some lovelorn graffiti, whilst your view is obscured by an onslaught of torrential rainfall. The minutest slipup in your penmanship here will be enough to infuriate the revenant, leading to an extremely stressful situation that you will be reluctant to go through with. In other words, a fantastic example of a dread scare!
Speaking of which, the developers exhibit a real panache for orchestrating agonizing scenarios of this caliber. Whether you’re psyching yourself up to fish out a letter from beneath a bed, or tentatively sneaking through a pitch-black room – relying on a camera flash for momentary illumination- you’ll be muttering ‘’nope’’ under your breath more often than you’d like. Indeed, the game is suffused with unbearable tension, which is an impressive feat given that it never conditions you to expect any obnoxious ‘’Boo!’’ moments or shrieking violins.
On the contrary, it’s uncharacteristically quiet for a horror release and depends more on sister suggestion than it does blatant shock tactics. What does pass for a jump scare here is often totally inaudible, like when you discover that a shadowy figure has unceremoniously plonked itself down on a nearby chair without any fuss. The effect is that you don’t so much leap out of your seat in terror, as you do shudder with discomfort (and maybe do a quick double-take, just to confirm what you think you saw).
Not only does Love, Sam deliver on the heebie-jeebies quota – packing more into a brisk 90 minutes than most titles manage with hours upon hours of gameplay – but some of its gags are fiendishly clever to boot. For instance, there’s a bit where you hang up on a demonic phone call and the eventual pay-off is utterly bone-chilling, evoking classic urban legends like the Licked Hand or the Babysitter. It’s an inspired moment that will bring a massive grin to your face.
Of course, none of this is to say that Love, Sam is without fault. The controls are a tad unresponsive, the strobe lighting is needlessly incessant, and it does stumble at the final hurdle. Oddly enough, it’s when the conventionally ‘’gamey’’ elements are introduced (like fail states and pseudo stealth mechanics) that things really start to fall apart, as the meticulous atmosphere that distinguished the rest of the game is traded in for finicky encounters. Ones that will have you have scouring YouTube walkthroughs, just so that you can get them over with as quickly as possible.
Prior to these momentum-killing sequences, you were treated to fresh ideas and new plot details at every juncture. Then, suddenly, it’s as if another developer took over and all that deliberate pacing was thrown out the window, replaced instead with a bunch of half-baked stalker chases. Owing to unclear instruction and harsh timer requirements, they never adequately telegraph what you’re meant to be doing either. So you’ll find yourself caught in a Groundhog Day–style loop of defeat, being exposed to the same crappy enemy over and over again, until you’re sick to the back teeth of them.
To be fair, this is a trap that’s befallen many other horror releases in the past, including Outlast 2 and The Evil Within. Nevertheless, by forcing you to repeat sections ad nauseam in this way, the game inadvertently reduces once-intimidating set-pieces into nothing but grating chores. It doesn’t help either that, after all the build-up, the climactic wraith ends up having a lackluster visual design.
Frustrations aside, Love, Sam remains a superior outing that meaningfully evolves upon the groundwork laid by P.T. The ‘’trapped in a looping environment’’ formula (that Visage and Layers of Fear tried to emulate) is augmented with an enthralling narrative, unorthodox puzzles, and truly innovative mechanics. Not to mention, some of the best ‘’dread scares’’ in the business. If you’ve got a couple of hours to spare, and are craving psychological horror that will get under your skin, then you should definitely give this one a whirl.
Five decades ago, Stephen King published the story of a bullied girl with telekinetic powers and forever changed the world of horror.
Carrie follows a high school misfit who seeks revenge for a hideous prank by psychically destroying her senior prom. The name Carrie White has become synonymous with the concept of a formal dance thanks to a flawless adaptation from Brian De Palma. Now fifty years after the film’s release, Mike Flanagan is putting his own stamp on the troubling story.
Rather than a feature film, the writer/director will expand King’s relatively slim debut novel into an eight-episode miniseries for Amazon Prime set to premiere on October 7.
Flanagan is no stranger to the world of Stephen King. A long-time Constant Reader, he first made waves with his daring adaptation of Gerald’s Game (2017), a novel many fans considered un-filmable. His underrated Doctor Sleep merges the disparate plot of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with King’s original source material, and his 2024 genre-bending tearjerker The Life of Chuck faithfully executes one of the author’s most metaphysical novellas.
He’s currently mired in pre-production for an expansive adaptation of The Dark Tower series, keystone to King’s connected universe, and Warner Bros. recently announced that Flanagan will helm a new version of The Mist, King’s 1980 novella which sees a small Maine town overrun by otherworldly monsters.
Considering the vast array of the author’s previously unadapted material, an obvious question arises. Why reimagine Carrie in 2026? Noting the timeless nature of the content, Flanagan expressed his desire to bring the story of a bullied girl into modern times, mirroring his approach to Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. He explained, “The only way to approach it was to build something new out of the ingredients of Carrie. Otherwise, there’s really no purpose in trying to retread ground that’s been so beautifully walked before.”
His miniseries will maintain the novel’s bloody bookends while delivering “big surprises” along the way.
A New Prom Night Nightmare
The roughly 60-second teaser introduces Summer H. Howell as Carrie White just before the moment of catastrophe. Standing in a prom dress, she smiles at her applauding classmates with an ominous crown perched upon her head. Moments later, Carrie unleashes a rage-filled scream into the night air while promgoers rush for the exit doors. But careful examination of this scene shows Carrie wearing a different, albeit dirty dress as she seems to telekinetically punish her peers.
In an exclusive first look with Entertainment Weekly, Flanagan explains that in his version of the story, “the events of that prom are going to be completely different.” An open trunk emitting a crimson glow does hint at the pig’s blood dumped on Carrie’s head, but it’s likely Flanagan’s formal dance will be a different kind of horror altogether. Despite these changes, the series may end with the widespread destruction outlined in the source material. Unlike any previous adaptations, King’s novel ends with the near-total destruction of Chamberlain, Maine. A flaming street in Flanagan’s trailer promises similar carnage no matter what prank sparks Carrie’s deadly revenge.
The Monstrous Addition of Social Media
On the opposite end of this fiery conclusion is an extreme act of bullying that brings together the story’s main cast. King’s novel begins as Carrie gets her first period while showering in the girls’ locker room. Completely unaware of the concept of menstruation, the sheltered girl thinks she’s bleeding to death. Her classmates respond with vitriolic rage. Led by ultra-mean girl Chris Hargensen (Alison Thornton), they mock the terrified teen while pelting her with tampons. Glimpses of this disturbing event reveal that Flanagan has excised the scene’s nudity while adding a seismic update. As Carrie sobs in the shower stall, Chris and her friends film the breakdown with their phones.
Other scenes note the presence of social media, bringing King’s fifty-year-old story into the digital age.
Flanagan’s adaptation promises to explore the destructive power of social media, an often invisible entity with a potential for harm rivaling Carrie’s own powers. While King’s tormented heroine suffers in front of a small group of girls, Flanagan’s version of the incident will likely become a viral video, potentially circling the globe on social media. Similar to Katt Shea’s criminally underrated The Rage: Carrie 2, which includes elements of revenge porn exploitation, Flanagan’s modern retelling will distinguish itself by exploring the nebulous cruelty of online bullying, a force ten times more powerful than the irl pranks King first envisioned.
A Completely Reimagined White Family
In addition to modernizing these canon events, Flanagan hints at updates to Carrie’s oppressive upbringing at the hands of her mother, Margaret White (Samantha Sloyan). Dead before the novel begins, we never meet Carrie’s domineering father Ralph, known to carry a bible alongside his gun. Flanagan’s White household will be an altogether different beast. In his version of the story, Carrie and her mother have been hidden away in the unassuming home, forced out of hiding by Ralph’s unexpected death. Perhaps we will finally meet this elusive man whose shadow hangs over his wife and child. Considering the White family’s fundamentalist lifestyle, this reimagining hints at tradwife culture and a home ruled by staunch patriarchal control.
Whereas King’s Carrie has been tormented by her classmates since Kindergarten, Flanagan’s Carrie will be a wide-eyed newcomer to public school, eager to make friends and engage with her peers. We glimpse Carrie cozying up to Chris and the equally popular Sue Snell (Siena Agudong) as she navigates a new social scene. Of course, we know this kindness is part of an elaborate plot designed to lull Carrie into a false sense of camaraderie, setting up an atrocious act of public humiliation. These brief moments of feigned compassion put Sue’s own complicity into question. Will Flanagan’s version of the character find the courage to defend Carrie from vicious bullies or will she succumb to peer pressure and join in the mob mentality?
Perhaps the biggest deviation from King’s original text is the relationship between Carrie and her mother. King’s Margaret White is a horrifically abusive religious zealot whose worldview has been hardened by internalized misogyny. She shames Carrie for menstruating, locks her in a closet to “pray,” and regrets not killing her child in infancy. She’s also responsible for Carrie’s social ostracization. Known to berate her neighbors for their “sins,” Margaret forces her daughter to live by an extreme code of conduct and disallows any potential friends lest they corrupt the girl with their worldly ways.
Flanagan’s version of the character is perhaps just as much a victim as Carrie herself. Also trapped inside her home, his Margaret is overly vigilant, her own trauma manifesting as strict control. Describing a more sympathetic depiction of the iconic villain, Flanagan explains, “Our Margaret White is a woman who fiercely loves her daughter and wants to protect her from this world … [She] doesn’t know how to do that and thinks the way to protect her is to close her off; not punitively, but to create this private utopia.”
Despite this potential softening, Sloyan’s Margaret may still have a sharp edge. Though she has appeared in many Flanagan projects, from Hush (2016) to The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), she is best known for her role as the abhorrent Bev Keane in the poignant saga Midnight Mass (2021). Perhaps inspired by King’s Margaret White, Bev is pious and sadistic, willing to punish anyone who does not adhere to her warped approximation of Catholicism.
Flanagan specifically wrote Margaret with Sloyan in mind, likely remembering the actress’s eerie ability to create deceptive empathy and shift our allegiances on a dime.
Expanding Stephen King’s Telekinetic Universe
While most of King’s story deals with an unthinkable prom night in Chamberlain, Maine, large sections of the semi-epistolary novel see experts debating the nature of telekinesis. Do Carrie’s frightening abilities represent a new phase in human evolution or is the prom night carnage merely a fluke? King settles the debate with a shocking denouement in which a young mother recounts her infant daughter’s ability to dangle her crib toys in midair. We’re left to wonder if she will become another tormented girl who surprises the world with metaphysical strength.
Flanagan plans to build out this brief scene while amplifying themes of female empowerment. After introducing our main cast of characters, episode two will open with an unrelated story in which we meet another girl with the TK gene. Each subsequent chapter will expand this world, building out a roster of telekinetic young women. Considering King’s fondness for stories about powerful kids, often described as possessing “the shining,” Constant Readers will no doubt have their eyes peeled for various Easter Eggs nodding to the author’s vast catalogue.
Giving Carrie Her Own Voice
Perhaps the most striking distinction in Flanagan’s new trailer is the extent to which we hear Carrie’s voice. The sneak peek is fully narrated by the titular prom queen as she demands accountability. “I want to know why,” she explains while detailing Chris’ elaborate plan. Aside from the aforementioned coda, King’s book essentially ends with the aftermath of the prom night tragedy, leaving little time for Carrie to reflect. His shifting narrative does bring the reader into her fragile mind, though not before she’s been cowed by relentless cruelty. We watch Carrie sink into bloodthirsty revenge, but never hear a considered desire for justice or repair.
Flanagan’s original monologue allows Carrie to voice her pain and mourn the life she could have had. We’re also treated to a mug shot-style photo of Chris with a bruised and bandaged face, implying that the mean girl will have to answer for her senseless sadism.
Flanagan is known for filling his series adaptations with heartwrenching speeches that cut to the heart of his thematic intentions, and this teaser seems to follow suit. After years of fans, critics, and scholars analyzing Carrie’s pain, perhaps his modern retelling will offer the titular anti-hero a chance to finally speak for herself.
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