Her Story and Telling Lies are effective, thrilling stories told using video footage of real actors. Still, developer Sam Barlow chafes at the idea that his two previous games are interactive movies.

“I, as a movie fan, was like, ‘They’re not really movies.’ Movies are about editing, and cuts, and montage, and this very specific presentation of images by the director to tell you the story. We kind of went in a different direction,” Barlow says. “Yes, it’s filmed footage, but there is no cut. And certainly, in Telling Lies, we were trying to expand that and have images that were very uncinematic in terms of just sitting and watching people and thinking about them.”

Now, Barlow is leaning into the comparison. This time, he and his team at Half Mermaid are making an interactive movie about movies. Immortality is the story of Marissa Marcel, an actress who starred in three films, Ambrosio, Minsky and Two of Everything, between 1968 and 1999. Then she disappeared. None of the films were ever released. 

Barlow’s previous games have asked the player to solve mysteries using databases, fast-forwarding, rewinding, and searching keywords until they felt satisfied that they had thoroughly discovered the story’s twists and turns. In this game, Half Mermaid is eschewing the database for a mechanic that, Barlow teases, has “something to say about movies.”

“We’ve come up with a mechanic that I won’t super explain at this point but, we got rid of the text-searching idea and the idea of there being this database software and really wanted to come up with some mechanics that were cinematic, that were visual and were about the magic of being cut, and the various tools of cinema, and we’ve come up with something pretty neat,” Barlow says. “I still get excited by it when I play around with it.”

We’ll have to wait and see what exactly that means. For now though, Bloody Disgusting had the chance to dig deep on Barlow’s cinematic influences, his love of David Lynch films and the spiritual successor to Silent Hill: Shattered Memories that is currently in pre-production at Half Mermaid.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

BD: Until the E3 reveal, Immortality was known only as “Project Ambrosio” and had a heavily redacted Steam page. And going through the trailer, we can see that Ambrosio is one of the Marissa Marcel movies that’s lost to time. So I’m curious what does ‘Ambrosio’ signify to you as a working title, and what do you think it suggests about the game’s themes?

SB: We tried to come up with a codename that we could use externally that doesn’t ruin things. It’s not like “Codename This Is Exactly What the Game Is About.” One of the fun things about this project [as opposed to] Telling Lies and to some extent Her Story is that [those games were] really hard to talk about because giving any details of the plot, the characters, or setting was kind of ruining the gameplay. Her Story definitely benefits from, in this very high-level way, it’s just about, did this person murder her husband? And then you start to get more details. It was definitely hard for Telling Lies because the premise of the game, the genre we were subverting, how the characters were related to each other was kind of fun for people to figure out in the first hour of the game or something, and we were kind of reticent there. Here, there’s a lot to dig into, so we can be pretty explicit about what this is about, who these people are, and these movies they made. And with Ambrosio, it’s even easier because this movie Ambrosio is an adaptation of an existing book that was written in the late 1700s, The Monk, which was one of the great page-turning, pulpy, dark gothic novels. It just has everything you want out of that kind of book: satanic rituals, all sorts of violence, and gothic nonsense. So I think pinning ourselves onto that aspect, which was already out there, felt like a fun thing. And to some extent, when you dig into the three movies, Ambrosio is this movie that Marcel kind of debuts in and is cast very much from obscurity to be in this thing and so it’s kind of the making of her. And there’s definitely a way you can look at it where the other movies feel like iterations on that story or are kind of refinements of some of the elements of it. It’s a cool word as well.

BD: You’ve talked about Immortality being “10 times more ambitious” than your previous work. One of the clear markers of increasing ambition from Her Story to Telling Lies was the expansion of the cast. Her Story had one actress, Telling Lies had a core cast of four characters plus some bit parts. Does the ambition on this extend to a larger cast than what you’ve done before?

SB: Yeah, I think the ambition is two-fold. We have dug up these three movies, so that’s three movies’ worth of story and cast and characters and locations and everything, and there’s a lot of stuff in there. But the ambition is also the scale of the questions we’re asking. “Let’s do something with movies” ended up being “Let’s use this as a means to questionwhat even are movies, why do we make movies, how does one make a movie?” And then it becomes about looking at these decades. That’s almost the second half-century of cinema. What does that progression look like? And you find between Ambrosio in ‘68, and what they’re doing on Minsky [in ‘72] it’s this leap from kind of the studio system and the remnants of that, to New Hollywood and these very different movies where suddenly you have the directors leading things, these movies become more organic and personal, and the way they’re shot is very different. Suddenly they’re shooting on location, and everything is much more natural and the types of stories that get told. Then, tracking to the end of the ‘90s where, like 1999 was, for obvious reasons, a fascinating year for movies. You’re at the end of the millennium, and everyone was just sort of getting their stuff out. Coming out of the decadence of the ‘80s, in the ‘90s, there was a correction where you had these directors coming up who revered the ‘70s and were looking back and attempting to create… everything had to have a bit more cleverness to it or a little bit of a twist, and it was a lot of referential stuff. Basic Instinct is heavily quoting Vertigo, and Lost Highway is doubly applicable here because it’s living in this weird Lynchian timelessness where it’s definitely the ‘90s but a lot of it has this noir feel… but then you have Trent Reznor on the soundtrack. So there’s a very interesting fusion at that point. That definitely plugs into the ambitions of the questions that we’re trying to use this material to explore, get quite big and ambitious and chunky.

BD: It’s interesting that you bring up the New Hollywood because I just finished reading Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls a few weeks ago. I’m very interested to see how you dig into those differences, from the end of the studio system, as such, into the directors’ pictures of the ‘70s.

SB: That book was quite a trip because I think when I first read it I kind of assumed that, “Oh I get the studio system was bad and the way they created and sculpted their stars. Some of the power dynamics.” And in my head, it was, “And then you get to the ‘70s, and you’re making these wonderful works of art, and everything’s cool.” And then when you dig into it, you’re like, “Actually, you just kind of shifted the power to the director, and a lot of those power dynamics were still in play.” There are definitely some darker stories dredged up in that book.

BD: Right, and it seems like having that power may have had some scarring effects on some of those people. Like you look at, in that book, they say multiple times that Coppola, after he went to shoot Apocalypse Now, was never the same. You look at where the directors are in 1980 when that era is coming to a close, and most of them are not doing so hot. Except for the golden boys, like Spielberg, who learned to work within the studio system.

SB: I think even Spielberg had the quote in that book that was like, by 1972, the ‘70s were over. [laughs] There’s this kind of inertia to it all. There’s this trajectory to it all, and then everything falls off.

BD: You mentioned Lynch earlier, and I know that you’re a fan of Inland Empire. It’s the Lynch film that I find the most frustrating because I love the premise so much: that Jeremy Irons, Justin Theroux, and Laura Dern are working on a movie that is supposed to have been cursed as the previous leads were killed while they were working on it. Immortality, similarly, is about movies that were never released. What do you think is captivating about that idea of the unreleased film?

SB: I could talk about lost movies for a long time… There’s definitely the excitement of having a work, especially if it touches on genius or something, that is not lessened by reality. You don’t have to sit and watch them and see if they actually work; you can just imagine. I was a huge fan of the novel Dead Calm. They eventually made the movie with Nicole Kidman. But Orson Welles was obsessed with this book, and he was directing a version of it that he never finished. That whole kind of, Orson Welles, at a certain point, is just trying hard to make movies, and he’s just pulling scraps together. I think even just beyond lost movies, something that we were able to explore on this project is just the process and the fluidity of things. Everyone loves to read those Buzzfeed articles that are like, “Famous Roles that Were Almost Cast Differently.” Oh, Tom Selleck was almost Indiana Jones. The one that blows my mind from the art house end is that Andie MacDowell was going to be the star of The Double Life of Veronique and Kieślowski was really, really into that idea. And all these things that could have gone differently, all these choices that could have been made. People love to talk about Jodorowsky’s Dune and be like ‘Oh look at the concept art, I can imagine it.’ And obviously, the movie you are imagining when you look at that art and think about it, I’m almost guaranteeing, is better than the movie would have been if it had actually gone through, right? Your imagination can really go places. 

And then I think there’s also a charge to the idea of all that effort to put something on camera to create a performance to conjure up these stories that, when left in the darkroom, festers to some extent. It gains a slightly sinister charm. It’s something that is endlessly fascinating to me, which is weird because there are enough movies that do exist that I have not watched that I could go watch right now. But the idea of the road not taken… Maybe it’s that as well. It plugs into your awareness of the many alternate realities that are floating around. 

I think when you dig into the careers of artists, you realize the extent to which these random little decisions are instrumental. You take Lynch. I think probably the world agrees that Dune is not the best Lynch movie, and it’s probably the one that you could leave behind if you were traveling to a desert island. But if he had not made that movie, he would not have then been owed Blue Velvet by Dino De Laurentiis, and you would not have the entire catalog of Lynch movies that we have had since. And even rewinding a little bit more, there you have The Elephant Man because Mel Brooks has watched Eraserhead and decides this guy is the one I want to come make this movie and has to convince the execs. So when you start thinking about these missing projects — and every director or star has a bunch of these in their history, things that didn’t quite happen — it kind of makes you then pay attention to what did happen and the machinations of it all. 

And I probably would say Inland Empire is my favorite Lynch. I might be slightly biased because when I saw it,, I lived in this little town in England where we didn’t have a cool cinema. It was just the one multiplex that would show big blockbuster movies. But, we had a museum that was a naval museum that was essentially a recruiting tool for the navy. But they had an incredible cinema that they used just to show recruitment videos and documentaries about battleships. So there was a couple in the town that started renting it in the evenings when the museum was shut to put on arthouse movies and horror movies and the cooler stuff. And we went to see Inland Empire there, and we were the only people in the entire audience that showed up. And to get to it, you had to walk through the museum after hours, so you’re walking through this empty dark museum to get to go see your movie and so sitting in a giant empty movie theater in a museum that’s been closed watching that movie was a real mind trip. At every point where the movie was really futzing with what was really going on, what was real, all these layers, I started being like, “Is this movie affecting my brain?” Such a weird, surreal setting watching this movie. And there’s a shot in that movie — and I won’t ruin it for people that haven’t seen it — that’s in my top five horror moments. And it’s not gory or intense; it just uses a boom mic. And for me because it was a moment in the film, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, and it was like, “Oh, maybe we’re settling in on what’s really happening.” It’s this scene where you think, ‘Maybe this is building to giving some solid footing in this crazy nightmare with all these competing, layered realities.” and just when you think that’s happening, it’s ripped away from you. You’re cast back into this maelstrom of unsettling, weird, different set-ups and that in itself, in a very abstract, Lynch-y way, was so terrifying.

I think sometimes that’s what’s cool about Lynch, he’ll cut to something very inoffensive, he’ll cut to a ceiling fan, and then he’ll slow things down a bit, and the soundtrack kicks in, and it’s like, “Damn, this ceiling fan is terrifying.” I don’t think we immediately related things to Inland Empire [on Immortality], but when I made Her Story, part of locking in the [creative direction] was me watching that and being like, “Shit, David Lynch is running ‘round filming things with a cheap video camera. I guess I could do that, too.” If that’s what he’s up to, why don’t I embrace this kind of aesthetic? It’s definitely one of the better movies about… the darkness behind the glamor of Hollywood and… what does it mean for an actress to lose herself in a role; to become so emotionally [invested] in that, and with the other forces swirling around her, where does that push her? It’s very intense and cool, and Laura Dern is incredible.

BD: The cheapness of the camera is definitely part of what makes Inland Empire feel as unsettling as it does. That early scene with Grace Zabriskie coming in and speaking to Laura Dern in the sitting room of her house sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Laura Dern’s character is very confused by what’s happening and you are very confused about what’s happening and the camera that Lynch is using to shoot that is a big part of why it feels as unsettling as it does. The cheapness gives it a sort of found footage feeling.

SB: He got excited by what happens when you blow it up on a big screen. It becomes “dreamy,” that’s his favorite word. That’s what I was digging into on Her Story. I watched Inland Empire. I watched a bunch of things, like real-life footage from investigation and interrogations that had been released into the public domain. And then, I watched the casting tapes from Basic Instinct, which had the same texture. It was all shot on a little dinky video camera with very little cinematic flair. There’s a different edge to it that’s interesting. There are a few things we’re playing with here, not entirely similar, but getting to interrogate what is the difference between cinematic reality and real reality in a deliberate way. 

BD: So, we’ve been talking a lot about Lynch without mentioning that one of the writers on this game is Barry Gifford, who wrote the book Wild at Heart is based on and the screenplay for Lost Highway. We’ve sort of talked about Inland Empire’s connection to Her Story, but do you see there being a Lynchian flavor to what you’re doing on Immortality and what Barry Gifford’s work is doing in it?

SB: Yeah, I want to be specific because Lynch’s name gets thrown around a lot in video games. “Oh yeah, we’re going for like a Lynch thing.” And you’re like, “What you mean it’s going to be slightly weird?” I think the most we’ve referenced him on this project is in understanding some of the more horror aspects and what types of horror do I like playing with and what is more disturbing. Some of his movies you wouldn’t out and out call horror movies, but there are always moments in Lynch’s movies that are upsetting and horrific and dig into those textures as deep as anyone does. Certainly understanding his toolkit and how he crafts those things has been on my mind. 

As far as Barry and [co-writer] Allan [Scott], part of the research of digging into this was going back and speaking to people who were working in movies at this time and producing the great works at the time amongst the various creative pairings and things. And so, for us to make this, figuring out which bits are real… well let’s speak to the people, let’s pull in the people that actually did this work. So we spoke to a bunch of people. Is this research or is this me having a fanboy moment digging into all these stories? But then yeah bringing them in so we could pull in those textures and have those things. And there’s some fun stuff with Barry that we’ll probably get to later. But the very long phone conversations with Barry have definitely been a highlight for everybody on the team.

BD: In the fiction, are all three American made movies?

SB: So, Ambrosio is a European co-production, has a British director, and was shot in Italy, as many movies were back then. Then, when you get to Minsky, the interesting thing about Minsky is that the director of photography on Ambrosio is the director of that movie. He’s an American director, and that is shot in New York. And then the third of the movies, also shot by the same director but many years later, is shot in L.A. and New York, so yeah, it kind of starts in Europe and then moves to the twin cities of New York and L.A. It was an interesting angle on the second half of movies in the 20th century and the post-war reinvention of movies in a bunch of European countries that then seeds the New Wave and then inspires what happens in the ‘70s, initially in New York, you have that very kind of New York thrust of New Hollywood but then that stuff kind of spreads over to Hollywood as well.

BD: So, we are a horror website, and you’ve said that Immortality is “spooky.” Can you talk about the genres of horror that you’re interested in tapping into here?

SB: I will say, no one knows what happened to Marissa Marcel and the initial thrust of the game is figuring that out. There are a lot of dark and violent theories around what happened, why these movies didn’t come out. Back then, we didn’t have the internet and gossip sites, so it was easier to shut down rumors and have things just become vague bits of hearsay. So, we’re really interested in having players cooperate with us in digging into this. But if you’ve played Shattered Memories, we’re putting both feet back into that world. Her Story and Telling Lies were… the format was so explicitly banal, that was part of the provocation of Her Story: imagine anything less interesting than a database program from the 1990s. And you boot up the game, and it’s there, it’s a database program, and it’s a Windows desktop, and there’s nothing less evocative or Gothic than that. But that then is a perfect frame to then take people in that direction. So they’re expecting it less and it freshens things up a bit. So both of those projects were then rigidly defined by having to behave themselves because they had this real-world kind of framework, and it’s probably fair to say that we don’t have those same requirements this time around. And I have a personal love for… when you sit and watch a Hitchcock movie; you know that Hitchcock is, in some cases, trying to push your buttons. And is trying to set you up so that you’re more vulnerable to then him coming back on the attack. So a lot of my favorite horror stuff in any medium is the stuff that gets inside your head… [I remember reading] the idea that when you’re watching a movie or reading a book, you’re sort of letting something bad inside your head… It’s not just scary and upsetting but it’s what is even going on here?

BD: In addition to Immortality, you’ve said that you’re pitching a spiritual successor to Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Can you tell us anything about that pitch? Or what elements of Silent Hill you’re still interested in exploring?

SB: Yeah, it’s slightly less pitchy and slightly more in early pre-production. So, yeah, the interesting thing was, when I made Her Story, I was slightly reacting to, “All right, I’ve spent three years making a Legacy of Kain game that was then canceled.” There’s a chance that would have been a very cool game, but there was lots about it that was challenging. Part of it was, when I made Shattered Memories, it was a lot of me digging into a lot of my favorite games growing up were exploratory immersive sims and then getting into making Silent Hill games where you have a story emphasis on exploring these atmospheric locations. I kind of started to wonder, to question walking a character around a 3D space, is it too easy? You just naturally get this level of immersion and involvement, but then questioning, how does that specifically drive the story? 

And at that time, you were seeing games like Gone Home and stuff that we’re doing this subtractive thing of taking out gameplay elements. Gone Home very much feels like them taking the BioShock and survival horror vibes but then removing combat and inventory and all these things. So when I made Her Story, it was somewhat out of frustration and somewhat just wanting to push further in a direction, knowing that progress is very slow and incremental in AAA games. So I was excited to explore with Her Story, “What does a game look like if I don’t have the prop of walking a character around a 3D space? What happens if me being the protagonist doesn’t necessarily mean I’m the star of the story?” And it was still taking at the purest level, what is interesting about games: exploration, expression, challenge, and just translating those to something that wasn’t an avatar in a 3D space.

And now I’ve had sufficient time away from that world that I notice myself, at the end of every year, I’ll be on a couple of juries, and so I’ll play through every big game coming out. I’ll play through all the third-person story games and horror-adjacent games or action games. I just notice myself more vocally being like, “They’re doing it wrong! They should do this!” And then I’m like, oh, okay, maybe it would be fun to come back… I realized that with Shattered Memories I had not exhausted all of my ideas as to how to mix up the conventional third-person horror game.