Editorials
As ‘Devil May Cry’ Turns 20, Bloody Disgusting Revisits its Origins and Influences
The leap from the original PlayStation to the PlayStation 2 was one of the biggest in console history. Now developers had the graphical horsepower to make good on the cinematic promises made by games like Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII. Not only were games able to play at a faster pace, but they could also make the player look cool while doing it. No game made you look cooler than Devil May Cry.
Even though the series is known for its blistering speed and precise action, it started life as Resident Evil 4. RE2 director Hideki Kamiya was tasked with leading the fourth game in the series, but he wanted to take it a different route. Instead of the slow, methodical pace of the previous games, he wanted to emphasize action. His version of the game was going to star a new character named Tony who had superhuman abilities like those eventually seen in Wesker. Capcom wanted the series to continue to focus more on its survival horror roots, but it was undeniable that Kamiya and his team were onto something. Eventually he convinced those in charge to let him spin it off into a new franchise, giving birth to Devil May Cry.
Kamiya was influenced by his love of not only arcade games, but also of the social space itself. In interviews, he talked about how he saw crowds gathering around a cabinet to watch someone on a good run. The more the player took risks and showed off, the bigger the crowd would become. This gave Kamiya the idea for the real-time grading system that Devil May Cry uses. The game is already more of a challenge than most action games of the time, but adding the wrinkle of asking the player to vary up their combos and attack patterns to keep their style score high made Devil May Cry stand out.
Including a style system in the game would be worthless if the game didn’t have visually interesting attacks for you to use, and luckily they came up with a brilliant hook. Kamiya did some playtesting on another Capcom title, Onimusha, and noticed a bug that allowed players to launch enemies into the air with a sword slash and juggle them. Add this random bug in with a pair of pistols and you’ve got a signature move that gave Devil May Cry the visual flair it needed. The juggle also served the function of giving you interesting options to make the combat more open-ended. If you found yourself a bit overwhelmed by the number of enemies, you could launch one into the air to take it off the board for a moment.
Juggling enemies was just one of the many tools to fight your way through the hordes of creatures. Once again leaning on arcade influences, many of your attacks were performed through combos that included holding directions and specifically timing your button presses. This can feel overwhelming, especially with the challenge level of the encounters, but it keeps you engaged with the style system in fun ways that evolve and expand as the game progresses.
Given the strong identity that the combat has, it’s no surprise that the story and cutscenes match it in over-the-top absurdity. Much like Max Payne, which came out a month earlier, it takes inspiration from classic Hong Kong action films, but Devil May Cry also mixes in heavy anime influences along with horror elements, stemming from its origins as a Resident Evil game. Cheesy, B-movie one-liners and melodrama litter the script, painting Dante as one of the most memorable characters of the PlayStation 2 generation. You can learn everything you need to about the game from its opening cutscene, in which a woman walks into Dante’s office, impales him on a sword, and throws a motorcycle at him, which he of course shoots back at her with twin pistols.
The game not only went on to spawn four sequels and a reboot, but also influenced countless other games that wanted the same kind of stylish action, intricate, combo-based gameplay, and larger-than-life protagonists. For example, God of War amped up the set action pieces to epic proportions, spawning its own long-running series. Kamiya himself went on to be a founding member of Platinum games, creating the Bayonetta series, a very clear follow-up to the Devil May Cry formula. Everything Platinum does has some traces of Devil May Cry, especially their additions to the Metal Gear and Nier series. Some FromSoft games, particularly Bloodborne and Sekiro, definitely have the same fast, precision action that you would see Dante performing. Even the recent indie first-person shooter Ultrakill has so much DMC DNA that they use the URL “DevilMayQuake” to link to their Steam page.
There’s a reason that all the Devil May Cry games keep getting ported to new systems, even 20 years later. Despite the fact that you’ve probably played so many games that have been influenced by them, they still feel completely unique and fresh. It can be trite to describe a video game making you feel like a badass, but that ethos is in every fiber of the game’s being. Devil May Cry 5 brought the series back to glory two years ago, but even if we have a long wait for the next sequel, we’ll definitely see the Devil May Cry spirit alive in countless other games for years to come.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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