Tag: film

Greetings, boils and ghouls! Welcome to a spoooooooky installment of Recency Bias wherein are found the thrillingest, chillingest, most terrifying…

OK, I enjoyed some spooky stuff these last few weeks and now I’m going to talk about them.

<Lightning crashes, a raven cries, a banshee shrieks in the distance>

Yeah.

Crow Country

As I stated in previous posts this month, I’m a relative newbie to survival horror, but it’s a genre I’ve already gained a lot of love and respect for. I spotted Crow Country on The Sphere Hunter’s Youtube channel, where she covers a lot of survival horror classics (I highly recommend her channel!). About a minute or so into the video I closed it and realized I needed to try the game for myself. I added it to my Steam Wishlist with the full intention of buying it when I got my next paycheck.

Then, I forgot about it. ADHD is really cool like that!

So imagine my surprise and excitement when I was browsing the Playstation Store the other day and came across Crow Country once again, this time for free to PS Plus members like myself. No brainer. I installed it, played it, and ended up marathoning the game all the way to the end in a single 5 hour session.

And what an awesome Halloween treat this game is! With a visual style inspired by the blocky, dozen or so polygon based characters of yesteryear (think FFVII)the game perfectly rides the line between fun and spooky. The majority of monsters are genuinely creepy, but when downed by your expert marksmanship they fall flat with a heavy and, frankly, quite funny thud. The interfaces are very reminiscent of early Resident Evil titles as well, in what feels like a great homage rather than a punchline.

The game is balanced really well, with some tougher and more stressful encounters that’ll test your reflexes, but lots of tricks and ways to get an edge such as the ability to use certain environmental hazards and traps against your enemies rather than stumbling blindly into the fifth trap you’ve been injured by in this one area alone. Hypothetically speaking, of course. There are also quite a few puzzles that are fairly simple and satisfying to solve as well as more challenging ones. This is a break out the notebook type game at times, and I love it for that.

It also has the option to play on a much easier Exploration Mode if you’re looking for vibes but none of the survival horror stress, and plenty of secret unlockables to reward diligent exploration and repeat playthroughs, and the brief runtime means that you will likely want to go through Crow Country multiple times.

This was a fantastic game for Halloween season, and I couldn’t recommend it more to casual and longtime fans of the genre alike.

Until Dawn (Film)

Sometimes a movie can creep under your skin, and settle in your bones like a bitter winter breeze. You leave the film haunted by its images, its implications; unsettled by the darkness you never imagined could be thought up by mortal beings.

And sometimes you point at the screen and say, “Ha ha. Look at those hot twenty-somethings get murdered.”

Until Dawn (which has so tenuous a connection to the video game its apparently licensed from that to call it an adaptation would be a pretty major stretch) is the latter. It is a mindless, empty calorie type of film wherein attractive young people get brutally slain often and repeatedly thanks to a time loop, the one interesting thing about the movie.

Well, that and the tap water scene.

While there are moments of genuine schlocky horror joy to be found, Until Dawn is also ruthlessly unimaginative, frighteningly dull, and horrifically under-baked, leaving the impression that this is what it might look like if you made gumbo out of every January release horror film of the last decade.

Still, the “water wall” joke is an all-timer.

Tender is the Flesh by Augustina Bazterrica

I tried to read this book several years ago. I failed to finish it, and not because it was poorly written (it’s not) or because it fails to tell an interesting story (it succeeds at telling a deeply fascinating one), but because it is the exact type of horror that scares me most: dehumanization.

I love a good monster flick, and ghost stories are a delight (hell, I’ve read so much Stephen King that I have a whole three shelves devoted to him like a half-hearted shrine), but what truly gets my heart racing, my palms sweating and each breath labored is the repulsive ways in which real human beings are so easily and readily able to depersonalize one another.

Bazterrica’s novel tells the story of a near future world in which a deadly virus has infected all of Earth’s animals making the slightest contact potentially lethal. To combat the virus, all animals are exterminated from the planet and in the wake of this event, what industry ends up with a pretty big crises on their hands?

The meat production industry, of course.

No longer able to breed, raise, slaughter, prepare, package, and sell meat products, the industrious leaders of many corporations begin to sell “special meat”, meat made from human beings bred and raised as cattle only to turned into food for a protein starved world.

The book is deeply critical of the ways capitalism turns back on those who live beneath it, stripping them of identity, complexity, and individuality to become either machines of industry or another kind of commodity. It is most frightening not only because the premise is so sickening (and explored in such thorough detail that the memory of certain passages is enough to make my stomach churn) but because the metaphor is so thin that one cannot help but be forced to reckon with its implications, with its suggestions, and with its bared teeth accusations aimed directly at the reader.

I finished “Tender is the Flesh” this time. And I don’t think it’ll ever truly leave me.

And that is true horror.