Editorials
‘The Greyhill Incident’ Is a Truly Terrifying Video Game for Anyone Who’s Afraid of Aliens
Now available on PC, and coming to consoles June 13, The Greyhill Incident takes place in a small town that resembles the cornfields and all around atmosphere of the town in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs. In fact, there are many comparisons between the two in the most awesome and frightening of ways.
You play as Ryan Baker and are in walkie talkie communication with others around the town who know something strange is afoot at the Circle K (Disclaimer: This is a Bill and Ted quote. There are unfortunately no Circle K convenience stores in the game). You’re all in agreement that the Government is lying and not to be trusted. Which is why you’ve all started this kind of nighttime neighborhood watch together. Things take a dark turn, of course, when the aliens show up and brazenly start abducting folks out of their homes. Including your own son.
You’ll experience the ground zero of an alien takeover of a small rural town in the middle of the night before embarking on tasks such as collecting tin foil to stop the aliens from reading your mind and finding nails to board up windows. Ultimately, you’re trying to find a way to rescue your son from the UFO that abducted him. All the while, attempting to stay hidden from the standard but still all too creepy thin, grey aliens. Which, in the darkness of the night, is not as easy as it may seem. The aliens are hard to spot. But when they spot you? They are just a little bit faster and very hard to shake. You can hide Friday the 13th: The Game style in various cabinets or trash cans but these aliens do not give up easily.
If you haven’t truly shaken them when you hide? Consider yourself abducted.
It’s not all pure horror with The Greyhill Incident, however. There’s a lot of tongue in cheek alien humor in the game as well. Such as finding alien probes all over town and characters looking and sounding like True Detective era Matthew McConaughey on a three day acid bender.
The game is all too aware of alien culture in all the right ways, but it’s also spot on about what’s so scary about it all…
Screaming. Actual screaming. I scared my wife who was peacefully reading on the other side of the living room with my squawks of grown man terror. This is not hyperbole. Full Disclosure: If you haven’t gathered by now, I am un-naturally scared of aliens. So, you may not have the same experience as I did. But I fucking yelped, guys. Sure, the screams were all from jump scares but I was honestly shaken for the first couple of hours I played the game.
The Greyhill Incident, while extremely simple, does an amazing job of tapping directly into my fear of aliens. It’s so dark and foggy and menacingly peaceful in the rural countryside. Then, one of those little bastards spots you. The music disrespectfully kicks on like a knife fight in your brain. You jump. You turn around to run. ALIEN IN YOUR FACE. Walking that damn creepy walk with their arms always flat down on their sides and with the determination of Tom Cruise. Their big, judgy eyes. You turn away. ANOTHER ONE. Like DJ Khaled serving nightmares instead of hits. You try to run but you can’t even see where you are going and have the endurance of a ninety year old who’s been hanging with Snoop Dogg all day. And the aliens are just a smidge faster than you.
They inevitably catch up and I’m not even sure what they do to you (when they get a hold of you, after a moment it just says “You’ve been abducted”) but they‘re all up in your face making the most skin crawling sound I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s so freaky, it’s actually annoying. I screamed SHUT UP like Arnold in Kindergarten Cop while simultaneously ripping out my headphones in fear-based frustration. It’s like a hyped up version of the clicky-clack sound you hear coming from the walkie talkies in Signs.
The good news? You settle into it as it becomes more repetitive (I get caught by the aliens a lot). I stopped screaming like a seven year old at a Taylor Swift concert after the first hour. But there are peripheral scares as well. If you’re like me and haunted by the mere imagery surrounding alien stories then you will appreciate the freaky way a body contorts chest first towards a UFO beaming it from the safety of its home at night. Or the way an abandoned tractor’s lights flash onto a field of skinned cows.
The sharp visual imagery of the cutscenes pairs perfectly with the accurately captured feeling of being alone on a farm at night surrounded by vast darkness. The two dance with glee in the pit of my stomach before….suddenly…..ALIEN IN YOUR FACE.
I’m not much of a gamer in comparison to most. So, in that spirit, this article is more about the fear The Greyhill Incident provides. I’ll leave the critique of the gameplay mechanic nuances to the more qualified. The Greyhill Incident as a whole is very simple and stripped down but that is not to say it’s easy. I had a very hard time with certain aspects that require a lot of trial and error.
The AI of the aliens is extremely smart and there are no loopholes. Very often after you’re “abducted” and sent back to your checkpoint, the aliens will be in completely different places than before, making them very hard to predict. They’ll spot you from quite far away and not give up their chase easily. Others hear the noises from afar and join in. These were some of the smartest villains I’ve ever faced in a video game and it’s infuriating but also challenging and realistic. Admittedly, I do wish there were a few more dynamics thrown in the mix. Once you’ve successfully hidden from the aliens and scooted through a level, it’s kind of a punch in the stomach to realize you have to do it again right away. You have a bat (another Signs tip of the hat) but it is not very effective and must be timed perfectly. You acquire a gun but it’s extremely rare you ever have any ammo. As scary as the aliens popping up was, I do wish the character had more to do throughout.
Ultimately, The Greyhill Incident knows exactly how to frighten the living shit out of those of us afflicted with the fear of aliens. There’s tons of insider jokes for those who aren’t scared but merely interested. Or even those who have just seen a few key alien flicks. It plays a little bit like a Dead by Daylight or Friday the 13th if they were strictly narrative games rather than multiplayer. There’s a fun spirit to the entire production and I’d love to see a more expanded version someday.
If my heart can take it, that is.
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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