Editorials
Origins of Greatness: Proto Survival Horror ‘Haunted House’ at 40
Most people think of Resident Evil when you mention the words “Survival Horror”, and rightfully so. Of course, you get old-school gamers who will also mention Capcom’s Sweet Home or Infrogrames’ Alone in the Dark. But before all of that, Atari had its own makings of the genre in 1982’s Haunted House. Being released for the Atari 2600, some today will shrug the game off due to its primitive nature when compared to other shinier, more modern games. But even at 40 years, the game is not only historically significant for sowing the seeds of Survival Horror, but an example of how the scariest things will often be conjured by your own mind.
Designed by James Andreasen, Haunted House was typical of games at the time, relying on the story in the manual to establish the setting. In the town of Spirit Bay, the curmudgeonly Zachary Graves lived a secluded life until his death, resulting in his mansion being boarded up and condemned. However, legend has it that Graves had a magic urn that was also a family heirloom of the first family of Spirit Bay. The pieces of the urn still remain in the mansion, though no one is brave enough to venture in to find them, as they say Graves’ ghost haunts the mansion. That’s where you come in: you decide to break into the mansion and find the pieces of the urn.
Gameplay consists of you having to navigate the mansion’s 24 rooms and four floors, armed only with a book of matches. The game borrows mechanics from another Atari game, Adventure, which was released in 1981. This time, the main mechanic is the darkness. You’re represented by a pair of disembodied eyes, stumbling around blind until you light a match, which illuminates items, doors, and stairways around you. You’ve got unlimited matches, but using more of them will result in a bad score (think golf, only you don’t go into the negative). Seeing as this was from the time you played to earn the best score, you can liken it to refraining from frequent uses of the typewriter to save in Resident Evil, as in doing so depletes your ink ribbons, but also would give you a bad grade at the end of the game.
Oh, and the matches also have the habit of going out in the presence of any enemies (due to the wind blowing them out), causing you to have to flee in the dark. Again, not unlike being forced to run/avoid enemies due to the scarcity of ammo in modern Survival Horror games. You can’t directly attack monsters in Haunted House, but you can obtain a scepter that grants you invisibility to them. However, Haunted House has what can be called a predecessor to Survival Horror inventory management, where you can only carry one item at a time. This means you’ll have to scout the area out with the scepter, drop it, then rush to pick up the urn piece or master key. Luckily, each urn piece you pick up will fit it into the other piece you’re already carrying.
Apart from the musical stings when you ascend/descend the stairs (or the “not really the ‘Twilight Zone’ theme” when you finish the game), there’s no music. You only have the sound of your footsteps to accompany you on your quest, with the occasional rushing wind. One could liken it to the footsteps you hear while tramping around the Spencer Mansion, and really ups the tension/scares, since the monsters will appear without warning.
Haunted House features nine different game variations, which are essentially the difficulty options. Lower types make things a bit easier for you, such as finding the master key in the first room, or having occasional lightning flashes to illuminate the floor. Higher difficulties increase the monster count, as well as having them follow you from floor to floor. The highest difficulties even punish you for losing a life if you’re holding an item, as it’ll be placed in a random room for you to find again. The game ends when you return to the main entrance of the mansion carrying the completed urn, or when all of your nine lives are lost. Again, this having to conserve your lives to better your score is akin to that ammo/item conservation we have now.
Admittedly, Haunted House today isn’t particularly deep or allows for greater replay value other than getting a better score on higher difficulty levels. However, you can see where many of the early Survival Horror mechanics came from that were adopted and fleshed out by the likes of Sweet Home, Alone in the Dark and of course, Resident Evil. It’s also still surprisingly tense to play today, particularly on the higher difficulties. It might not be as addictive or intuitive as newer titles, but historically, you can’t deny that one of the seeds of Survival Horror started here.
Thanks to AtariAge for the manual scans!
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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