Editorials
10 Years After Release, Haunted House Game ‘Anatomy’ Still Has Teeth [Retrospective]
I’ve often worried that I would never experience a piece of media that made me feel like House of Leaves did. I don’t mean I’m looking for something that plays with form in the same way, though that was a big part of the novel that made it such a touchstone for me, but rather something that gives me the same combination of intellectual and visceral horror in a way I’ve never experienced. Something that not only stimulates my rational mind but also bypasses it and terrorizes my primordial lizard brain. Something that brings me back to the childhood fear of unknown things lurking in the dark. Thankfully, my worries were put to rest when trying out Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy for its 10-year anniversary.
It’s really hard to describe what makes Anatomy so special just from a brief gameplay description. At its most basic level, it’s just about walking around a dark house picking up audio tapes and listening to them. From that description, you might expect something like Slender: The Eight Pages, where you’re being stalked by some sort of horrible, unkillable creature. But that’s not what Anatomy is.
The type of fear it’s going for isn’t the jump scare type, but rather a dread that seeps into your bones as you go.
The game is also presented as though you are watching it on a VHS, complete with tracking lines and a low static-y noise. To complement the analog horror aesthetic is a low-poly look that adds an aura of ambiguity to what you’re seeing, allowing your mind to fill in the blanks. Many games rely on eerie music to set the mood, but there’s hardly any sound in Anatomy. No music, no footsteps, just the crackly audio of the tapes and the creaking of the doors.
At its core, what makes it scary is both the contents of the tapes and the feeling of going through the house, each ratcheting up the intensity throughout the hour-long runtime of the game. It’s a haunted house game that asks you to think about the house itself as a body, and what it means for you as a person to pass through it. I really want to get into some of the details that make this game so affecting, so after this, I’m going to dive into spoilers of specific moments and concepts.
The game is three dollars on itch.io, so I wholly recommend you just pick it up and play it a couple of times unspoiled (there are multiple endings), but for everyone else, feel free to read on.
SPOILERS AHEAD:
The game starts in a dark room. It’s astonishingly dark. So dark it feels like a mistake. I immediately had the feeling that I should hug the wall to make sure I didn’t get lost, like a kid in the basement whose parents turned off the light because they didn’t know someone was still down there. It’s part of the intentional mood that the game wants to put you in from the first moment. Starting in the entry way of a small suburban house, you walk forward and turn right into the kitchen, where you find an audio tape and a tape player. After listening to it, text appears on the screen to tell you there is another tape in the dining room. This is the core structure of the game – listen to a tape, go to the next room it tells you.
This breeds a familiarity with the house itself. It tells you to go to the living room, and you know where that is because you’ve passed by it. But the moment it told me to go to the bedroom, my stomach sank. I realized that would require me going to the second floor, something I hadn’t yet explored; somewhere foreign and alien to me. This was one of the first of many moments that unsettled me through smart use of game design, writing, and understanding of human psychology. It’s a simple trick, but one that made me once again afraid of what lies in the dark, right as I was getting comfortable with it.
The tapes have a very dry and academic tone to them, starting by talking about the importance of the house to modern civilization before describing the rooms of the house as organs, ruminating about what the core functions of a house are, and comparing it to the human body. As they begin to “dissect a house as we might a human cadaver,” they draw parallels between windows and eyes, living rooms and hearts, all subtly beginning to plant the seed in your mind that the house you wander in is alive. It’s incredibly effective, elevating the haunted house story by not making it a ghost that menaces you, but rather the structure itself.
After a few tapes, you notice a pattern. Each recording describes a room, and then you’re sent to it. This is used to chilling effect with a wonderful bait and switch where you hear a monologue about the blackness of the basement, a dark place where memories are buried, then immediately have to venture there. It’s a perfect moment of dread as you descend into a room that’s darker and bigger than any other you’ve been in. It feels like a place where, if you get away from the wall, you’d be lost in an ocean of shadows. But you go down there, find a tape, and nothing happens.
When you get back to the kitchen and put that tape into the recorder, it starts talking about how the real most frightening location in the house is the bedroom. You go back upstairs to the master bedroom and find a tape, but when you turn around, the door is gone, and a tape player sits on the wall. Playing this tape begins a monologue about the true nature of the bedroom – “It is here, in the bedroom, that we are at our most vulnerable. Each night we shut our senses to the world for hours at a time, trusting in the house to keep us safe until next we wake.” It’s one of the most effective pieces of writing in the game, ending with a chilling line right before the game forcibly quits, ending your first run.
There’s a note on the game’s itch.io page that says to play the game multiple times for more endings, but what it’s really hinting at is that the first “ending” isn’t really the conclusion of the game. Much like Nier: Automata, the “second playthrough” of the game is really just a continuation of the narrative, presenting you with the house again, but with changes. The tapes start similarly, but become distorted in eerie ways before beginning to change entirely. The text telling you where to find the next tape is all wrong, with extra letters flowing offscreen. Glitches start appearing, warping the house itself in ways that make it strange and unfamiliar.
At one point, while exploring the house during the second loop, I realized you could turn on the light in the living room, and somehow this made it feel even more wrong. I thought the break from the darkness would be a relief, but it left everything feeling so naked and exposed. By this time, the house-as-a-body metaphor had fully got its hooks in me, and turning on the light felt like violating the house, seeing something it didn’t choose to show me. A book with good writing could present these same ideas to me, in fact The Haunting of Hill House heavily inspired this game with its famous opening, but the fact that this is a game that allowed me to interact with it and led me to come to this feeling rather than telling me through prose is what makes it truly special and justifies Anatomy as a video game, rather than any other medium.
The end of this loop is the closest thing this game gets to a jump scare, and it comes from a little creak. In the final tape, you hear a different voice interrupt the normal narrator, and it slowly becomes apparent that this voice is probably the house itself. The voice describes a man walking through the house, vandalizing it as he goes, then the house knocks him down the stairs by slamming the door on him. Right after this finishes, there’s the sound of the basement door opening right behind you, beckoning you to come down and meet the same fate as the man in the tape. A stellar moment that sounds so simple and understated, but feels monumental because of the tone and writing of everything surrounding it.
In the third loop, everything is more explicitly nightmarish. A red glow permeates the rooms. Furniture is floating off the ground or flickering in and out of sight. Strange sinew stretches across walls. The first tape I found in this loop was one of the most horrifying things in this game, a loop of someone screaming on a distorted recording. Usually, these tapes would run out after a certain point, but nothing I did stopped this tape; it’s wailing coming through the walls of adjacent rooms as I tried to distance myself from it. This type of horror sometimes feels cheap or unearned, but the way Anatomy perfectly raises the tension and terror makes it feel completely justified.
Eventually, it once again leads you to the basement, where it delivers a monologue that makes everything clear – not only is this house alive, but it also hates you. Hates you for prying and interfering. For harassing it. It’s been left alone for so long, and now you’ve disturbed it. This ends with one of the best lines in the game, as teeth begin to grow from the floor and ceiling: “When a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth.”
There are a couple of different endings that happen here, but you’re presented with a scene that takes place outside of the house. Looking at other people’s discussions online, it seems it’s not really clear what causes each ending, but mine had me walking down a city street, leading up to the house. It’s a jarring feeling to be outside after spending so much time trapped in the house, making for an interesting juxtaposition.
Launching the game one more time places you on the floor, unable to move and staring at the tape player. A final tape plays. If you load the game again, you’re still on the floor, stuck in the silence. There’s some instructions in the game’s Readme file about how to reset the game so you can play it again, but it was such a haunting way to bring this to a close. It left me with this feeling that no matter how much I wanted to start again, I was still just at the mercy of the house.
You always hear people say that a house has “good bones,” but Anatomy made me contemplate the question “what if a house had teeth?” And not in a Monster House cartoon-y way, but rather like a hungry dog waiting for the chance to finally bite you for teasing it so much. Even though the game lasts under an hour, it burrowed into my mind more than pieces of fiction several times that length. Ten years since its release, it hasn’t lost a single ounce of its dread, making for one of the most unsettling games I’ve ever played.
College kids, strippers and vampires—those were Donald P. Borchers’ only requirements when he approached Richard Wenk about writing and directing a movie for New World Pictures. As requested, Wenk cooked up Vamp (1986), a tailor-made blend of the decade’s teen movie craze as well as its horror boom.
Grim and earnest stories were still very much a part of the ’80s horror landscape, yet Vamp is something of a comedy. One difference between it and, say, Saturday the 14th, though, is the former avoids using schtick. Wenk’s movie proves that horror comedies also don’t have to subtract thrills from their recipes. Of course, it takes a minute before reaching that point; college antics and culture shocks preface this one macabre misadventure.
Vamp‘s initial setup is apt for a typical college-set, sex-driven comedy; to bribe their way into a fraternity house, two pledges (Chris Makepeace, Robert Rusler) go looking for some adult entertainment. Without wasting time on any further exposition, the characters embark on an all-in-one-night trip that quickly detours into terror.
To procure their elusive MacGuffin—a stripper willing to gyrate for some frat boys—Keith (Makepeace) and AJ (Rusler), plus a third wheel named Duncan (Gedee Watanabe), trade the safety of their remote college campus for the seediness of some unnamed city. The setting is recognizably L.A. by day, but as soon as night falls, downtown, along with the characters, slips into a kind of surreal universe. Director of photography Elliot Davis gave this early entry on his prolific résumé an unusual yet distinctive look; that Mario Bava-esque, magenta-green lighting is omnipresent, so much so that it’s almost its own character.
Chris Makepeace and Robert Rusler in Vamp
The faint comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s After Hours are merited, although not just because of Vamp’s distinguishing nighttime aesthetic. Save for the primary characters, the supporting roles in Wenk’s movie are also quite colorful and transactional in their behavior. The difference here, though, is the additional urge to ruin Keith and his friends at every turn. Some of that harm is humorous and tolerable enough, whereas the moment Vamp dishes out its first fatality, it’s abundantly clear how this movie qualifies as horror.
Vamp falls into that category of horror movie that reveals its genre with a scream rather than a series of whispers. The opening scene can function as a hint of what lies ahead—things are not at all what they appear to be—but otherwise, Wenk is more than happy to hold off on the horror. When that time does come, though, it catches the viewer off guard. In addition to the pure shock value is that sudden decision to upend the movie’s foremost feature. Or so it would seem.
If afraid of major spoilage, those new to Vamp would be wise to stop reading here. There’s just no skirting around the fact that the central fellowship in this buddy movie hits a serious snag when AJ is killed. That development causes the story to become more of a “long, bad night” journey for Keith and his romantic interest. So while Wenk scores points for subverting expectations, there is also a touch of sadness in his decision. Because if Vamp does anything well, it’s making the characters likable.
Something that comes easily to Vamp—and other teen horror movies from this same era—is its ability to invent young characters worth caring about, or at the very least, are interesting and not so immediately off-putting. More impressive is how Wenk did all this without actually fleshing out those characters. Still and all, Keith and his kind are a grade above cookie-cutter, and in some cases, aren’t completely devoid of growth.
Grace Jones in Vamp
Vamp appeals with an assorted cast of characters. No two are the same, nor are they operating on the same wavelength. The cinematically extroverted AJ, whose actor conveyed charm and vulnerability in near equal amounts, comes alive when he’s at his most undead. Makepeace then makes the chronically cautious Keith a sympathetic fellow, even as he’s more and more affected by the night’s bizarre events. Meanwhile, Duncan is indeed the designated loser of the whole bunch, but Watanabe still manages to humanize him. As a bonus, the role didn’t require him to pull a Long Duk Dong.
As for Dedee Pfeiffer, she is plain adorable as the mysterious After Dark server nicknamed “Amaretto”. She spends all night fixing her dress strap while at the same time trying to get Keith to remember how he knows her. As their offbeat romance grows, it becomes another highlight of this movie. Whether or not Pfeiffer’s character is really a vampire also creates some welcome tension in the story.
Like a lot of its contemporaries, Vamp went on to become a bit of a cult classic. That current status is determined by several factors, but without a doubt, the casting of Grace Jones is the most considerable. The image of her writhing on that unique-looking chair, a Keith Haring original, springs to mind whenever this movie is brought up.
Chris Makepeace, Billy Drago and Paunita Nichols in Vamp
Prior to that first display of unequivocal horror, local vampire queen Katrina (Jones) took to the stage and delivered a strip show like no other. One would expect nothing less from that renowned model and performance artist. By now reports of Jones’ tardiness on set are no secret, yet it’s also hard to deny her commitment to the part of Katrina. It was, in fact, Jones who took charge of her character’s appearance—on top of Haring painting her body and that now-iconic chair, she had Andy Warhol handle her costuming. And not too many actors could seize a room’s attention without saying a single line of dialogue.
In 2022, Vamp received a retrospective novelization from Encyclopocalypse. This literary union of preexisting source material—Wenk’s original screenplay—and new ideas from author Christian Francis amounts to a more comprehensive visit to the After Dark Club. The basic story there is no different than what’s shown on screen; however, Francis gets creative with the characters’ origins and designs, and he enhances a number of key scenes.
The novelization expands on the urban and social decay of the main setting, and supplies a background for the After Dark Club. Sandy Baron’s character, Katrina’s emcee and familiar, is given ample motivation for sticking around; up until the fiery end, he is loyal to his friend and former business partner “Squeak”, who looks like he was “fed through a combine harvester, and left as nothing more than a heap of mangled remains”. Then there is Billy Drago’s character Snow, the leader of a street gang called The Dragons. His reason for menacing Keith and AJ is more altruistic than in the movie; he and his peers act tough to scare off any potential food for the vampires.
Lisa Lyon in Vamp
If not for all the backstories, Francis’ Vamp would be a hell of a lot shorter. Instead, this tie-in read dives into how AJ met Keith—the orphaned Anthony Joseph hailed from a broken home back in Brooklyn—and how their friendship flourished over the years. Keith’s archership is no longer just an assumed part of his entire being; it’s a confidence-building extracurricular for a boy who got picked on before coming into the protection of the new kid in town. These supplemental, in-depth looks at the protagonists, plus their close connection, are maybe unnecessary. The movie already did a fair and concise job of addressing their platonic intimacy without the need for flashbacks and insights, specifically in that scene where AJ lays it all out as he sacrifices himself.
Where the novelization gets off course is its approach to the minor characters. Intermittently backstorying the likes of Katrina’s indentured servants, Seko (Leila Hee Olsen) and Vlad (Brad Logan), ends up disturbing the flow of the writing. Was it absolutely essential that readers know Vlad was the Grand Duke of the House of Romanov, or how Snow’s accomplice Maven (Paunita Nichols) became so dentally challenged? No, not really. However, one’s mileage with these random biographies may vary.
The novelization is a more substantial experience, but for a movie like Vamp, less is more. And as plentiful as they are, it never simply coasts on its campy charms, either. The character work sits comfortably in that realm between cursory and meticulous, the script is sharper than first realized, and Greg Cannom’s vampire makeup is straightforward yet effective. Most of all, the movie didn’t squander its out-of-the-box concept. Richard Wenk made his vision of a “comic nightmare in which just about anything that can go wrong does” come true, and it is very enjoyable.
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