Spooky Games

Whoa, I guess I forgot to post to this blog for a month? It’s suddenly October and lots… hasn’t changed. I’m still in quarantine with the family, still obsessed with horror, still plodding along and hoping that our nation/planet doesn’t completely collapse in the next few months. That said, the season has now aligned with my evolving sense of continual dread, and I might as well share that with whomever reads this.

So, this will be the first of several posts this month where I will talk about seasonal things of various kinds. Typically media-oriented, sometimes not, but all spooky/autumnal/horror-ish as that’s what I’m thinking about, like, all the time these days. I’m taking a major cue from Laura Hall’s wonderful 31 Days of Halloween newsletter — this is the sixth year she’s been sending off a seasonal email every day for the 31 days of October. I highly recommend it! Laura’s got great taste and an infectious attitude toward the creepy season, posting pictures, links, and (lately) online Halloweeny events to attend.

So, here’s my pale imitation in my own fashion… I’ll start off talking a bit about games, as, well, games have been on my mind. (When aren’t they?)


I think I mentioned a few posts ago that I’ve recently been obsessed with Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and have in recent weeks blinged out my Arkham game in some fun ways. I’ll have more to say about that, especially since the most recent big box expansion just arrived yesterday: The Innsmouth Conspiracy.

But rather than let this first spooky post be (s)hogg(oth)ed by that one game, I think I’ll start off discussing a variety of things I’ve been playing with the family.

We just received Horrified in the mail yesterday and have already played it a couple of times. I’m a bit surprised to say that it’s already become one of my favorite recent board games! Horrified is a completely collaborative board game themed around players stopping up to six different monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein(‘s monster)/the Bride of Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In other words, the classic Universal Monsters. I’m honestly surprised there haven’t been any other games (that I know of?) that have focused on these iconic horror movies, but I’m glad this one exists.

Horrified was designed by Prospero Hall, a Seattle-based studio who seems to employ a shockingly large number of people and whose design resume seems to be almost entirely media tie-in games with high production values. This game is no exception, clearly, and it wears its inspirations on its sleeve: It feels a bit like a simplified Pandemic mixed with, well, Arkham Horror. And that’s a good thing! It’s got monsters that inexorably hound you and will eventually kill you and/or the random villagers that spawn in the town. Unless, of course, you (playing the nameless Archaeologist, Scientist, Professor, Courier, etc.) team up, collecting weapons and bit characters from the classic Universal Monsters movies, and advance the tasks needed to get rid of them.

The way each monster is dispatched is something I absolutely love about this game. Each monster has its own little minigame you have to complete in order to beat them — each is unique, and uses unique mechanics. The Creature from the Black Lagoon’s is a bit like Candy Land, but in a good way: You expend resources of specific colors to move yourself on a little track toward the Creature’s lair. Dracula requires you to find and destroy (using only red resources) each of his coffins, dispersed across the board, before you can take him on. Wolf Man’s, shown below, makes you expend resources to find a cure for his lycanthropy before you can defeat him. It’s clever and I can see it making each matchup of two or three or four monsters really fresh and fun.

My son and I played the demo matchup (two players versus Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon) and it was pretty fun! Not too difficult on this setting, but still hard to complete completely unscathed. Horrified is just a charming little game — it’s, again, lighter than Pandemic and Arkham Horror: The Card Game by a long shot, but its love for the source material and refined, and its simplified mechanics are really nicely done. It’s a rarity: A thematic, media tie-in board game that I actually enjoy, and I anticipate we’re going to play it every Halloween from here on out (and perhaps more often in the short term, since quarantine appears to be never-ending).


A quick aside: I suspect we are the target audience for Horrified, as we are also fans of these original movies. Every Halloween, we dig out this beautiful Blu-Ray set I picked up a decade ago or so.

Horrified has some great connections to these movies, including a number of secondary characters from them as the villagers, and a bunch of the objects. Prospero Hall seems to have a lot of affection for the Universal Monsters, and included a lot of cute touches, including this amazingly cute bit printed on the back of the game board, which is the first thing you see when you open the box.

This is, of course, the cold open for Frankenstein, which you can see here:

And, incidentally, this is how Mark Gatiss opened his (generally excellent!) first episode of A History of Horror, a documentary series from the early 2010s about a, well, history of horror. The first episode focuses a great deal on the Universal Monsters, while subsequent episodes and the sequel Horror Europa focus on Hammer, 1970s American horror, and the rise of European horror. It’s worth a look, if you haven’t seen it before.

I would love to see Gatiss revive this series someday, focusing perhaps on Japanese and Korean horror, as well as whatever people are calling the movement of recent directors like Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. (Edit: I guess people are calling this “elevated horror?” Okay.)


Anyway, back to games: We’ve also been playing a lot of Ghooost! — yep, three Os. It’s a game by Richard Garfield, the brilliant designer of Magic the Gathering, King of Tokyo, the original Netrunner, RoboRally, KeyForge, Artifact, etc. This game ain’t as brilliant or as strategic as any of those other games, but it’s a fun enough way to pass the time. I picked this up years ago, when our oldest was still a baby and I was obsessed with finding out what other more obscure games Garfield had made. Hadn’t really played it until recently, and it’s… not terrible?

Basically, it’s a themely Uno with some special cards and twists, as well as clever naming of piles of cards that should be familiar to anyone who’s played Garfield’s card games. Though it took a few reads of the poorly written instructions to figure it out, it’s pretty simple: You have to put a card number higher than what was just played in the Graveyard, or you can take all the cards in the Graveyard, or take your chances that the top card of the Crypt is going to be a valid card to play. You play cards to the “graveyard” (a location on the fold-out box; a nice touch), draw cards from the “crypt” (a open-gravey looking card holder in the box) and then banish cards to the “discard.” Your goal is to get rid of all of your cards, plus all of the cards in your “mansion,” a reserved deck of cards that serves as a clock to end each round.

Each round is supposed to take only 20 minutes or so per round, but perhaps because I’m primarily playing with an almost-seven-year-old, they’ve taken a lot longer. That’s okay, the kids love it — it’s a game where an almost-seven-year-old and a four-year-old can easily figure out their way, as it’s, well, still basically Uno, and they just need to know what number is great than another. It’s a fun filler game for our family, and beyond how easy it is to pick up, it’s got cute spooky art, plus the kids love the idea that the box becomes the board you play in.


I’ve also been itching to dig out some old horror videogames that I haven’t played for various reasons. Perhaps because of my recent revisitation of Lovecraft, I’ve been drawn to finally check out Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. I’ll be honest — I bought this an egregiously long time ago. I think it was, along with the first Animal Crossing and Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader, one of the very first three console videogames I ever bought, way back in the autumn of 2002, though I didn’t play this very far in. (I can’t think of a better three games to encapsulate my early taste in games, either).

During quarantine, we converted a space at the bottom of one of our stairs into both a “play zone” for the kids initially and now it’s also become our eldest’s virtual classroom during the week. But it’s still full of my old games spanning the last two decades, and we just got a little cart to put a projector on, along with the old GameCubes, PS2s, Wiis, and N64. In the process, I found not just Eternal Darkness but the Prima guide I’d picked up from a Half-Price Books in the late 2000s — so, I really have no excuse to not play this, do I?

If you’re unfamiliar, this was the cosmic horror game for the GameCube. Many loved Resident Evil, sure, but this was a generation-spanning, cult-featuring, sanity-tweaking game that attempted to mess with the player in novel ways. Instead of simply mimicking Call of Cthulhu and other games explicitly adapting Lovecraft —where you’d have a decreasing amount of “sanity” level akin to health, mana, or some other simple metric — this game would also genuinely try to mess with the player, breaking the fourth wall. It would tell you that your save file was corrupt when it wasn’t, it might flash “VIDEO 1” repeatedly on the screen, making you wonder if your TV or remote was broken.

I’ll be playing on an old thrifted projector, so that last bit won’t be very effective for me, but I’m looking forward to finally digging into this game this month. And, perhaps, again on the Switch sometime soon, if Nintendo filing a new trademark this summer means what I hope it means.


Finally, speaking of Nintendo, it’s also time for a new update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I’ll be honest that we haven’t played the game much in the past few months, having binged enough of it for a while back in April. But the opportunity to grow pumpkins, get new Halloween-themed costumes, and to give candy to island residents? Yeah, we’re down with that.

As you can see in this perhaps-too-dark picture here (also now the header image for this site), I hopped on this morning and redecorated one of my rooms in as spooky of a fashion as I could manage with what I already had. I look forward to further spookifying over the next few weeks with whatever comes my way. I have, sadly, partially dismantled my Victorian/Sherlock Holmes room to make this sparse little creepyhole, but sacrifices had to be made. Someday, I’ll write a longer post on how my summer obsession with Sherlock Holmes led me to spookier territory.


Oh, and one final, final thing: I couldn’t resist trying my best to bring John Carpenter into the lovely world of Animal Crossing. If you were playing Animal Crossing and trying to make it seasonal, what melody would you pick for your town theme?

I mean, can’t you just imagine this guy shopping at Able Sisters?

That’s all for now. More soon — probably in just a few days, when I’ll regale you with stories of how much I just want to watch Vincent Price movies.

Stay spooky, my friends.

The Lurking Fear of 2020

I’ve been in a mood.

I quit social media in late July, during a period of dissatisfaction with the emptiness of conversation I’d been having on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Several months into this pandemic and its resultant social collapse, I found myself escaping into reading for fun for the first time in a long, long time. I was consoled originally by Sherlock Holmes stories — I reread them all in June and July, one per day — and then quickly found that the lurking fear of 2020 was not so easily ignored.

On this reread, I discovered that my new favorite Holmes stories were the cheapest, gaudiest, most lurid, horror-tinged ones. And there actually are a significant handful of these — the Sherlock Holmes Canon includes a story prominently featuring a severed ear! One with a gentleman storing his sister’s corpse in the family crypt! Another with a woman’s face which had been ripped off by a lion! Soon, I found my interests quickly turned into a brief obsession with Victorian penny dreadful literature (rewatching the Penny Dreadful television series, to boot). This morphed out of books and into games, and I pulled Arkham Horror: The Card Game off the shelf — a game I’d bought into significantly several years ago, but had never really played much of. I’ve played it a few times and really enjoy it, but I suspect that this and other Lovecraftian games beckon a longer, separate post down the road.

Anyway, my evolving summer reading as well as the devolving state of American democracy dovetailed nicely with the new TV series Lovecraft Country, which premiered on HBO a few weeks back. We watched the first few episodes, and I have since started falling down an ever-deeper series of figurative shoggoth-holes. I’d heard of this book a few years ago — the name of the novel by Matt Ruff was familiar, but I hadn’t read it (I have now read about 90% of it). I saw that Jordan Peele was associated with the series (as a producer), but otherwise didn’t know anything before watching. I anticipated a mixture of clever Lovecraftian criticism in the storyline, a lot of depiction of 1950s-era racism, and perhaps a few tentacles here and there.

First, if you haven’t seen the series, you probably should. Here’s the first episode in its entirety on YouTube:

I thought the premiere was very good! I have a ton of little quibbles with it, but overall its heart is in the right place, and it provides a Black-led cast and Black-centric framing of Lovecraftian horror that gave a novel and important spin to the old racist’s bleak world. It’s both a resounding middle finger to Lovecraft as well as a reclamation of his vision. The second episode was, to me, an enormous step down from the first episode (largely due to the directorial and acting choices more than the screenplay, which was largely faithful to the novel), but let’s focus on the positive for now.

That first episode opens up with the ostensible protagonist, Atticus “Tic” Freeman (Turner in the novel), waking up from a dream that is like a 1950s sci-fi nerd’s dream: Jackie Robinson slicing a Cthulhu in half with his baseball bat, Dejah Thoris dropping down from a George Pal War of the Worlds-style flying saucer. All mixed up with memories that seem very much like his experiences in the Korean War. Very little of this was “Lovecraftian,” of course, but damn if it didn’t do a good job of setting up the weird joy of mid-century pulpy science fiction and horror, and bring in Lovecraft with the period in which Arkham House and Lovecraft’s devotees were starting to bring his work into the public consciousness.

The rest of the episode does a great and clever job of connecting the real horror of sundown towns/counties with the old horror trope of getting to safety before the sun falls. The end of the episode takes a number of liberties with the Lovecraftian inspiration for the series (and a few welcome ones with Ruff’s novel, reframing a story-within-the-story as part of the main narrative), but it showed a lot of promise for the core ideas of the series. As I mentioned above, I’m almost done with the novel, and it’s pretty scattershot, but has a few moments of brilliance (the Hippolyta-centric chapter, the Ruby-centric chapter) that I am very excited to see on the screen, even if some of the reviews seem to indicate that the premiere episode was the best of the ones provided for review.

I also enjoyed the Lovecraft Country Radio podcast — at least episode 1, I haven’t listened to episode 2 yet. Hosted by two women of color (Ashley Ford and Shannon Houston, the latter who is one of the writers for the series), they did a nice job of breaking down how the show is reinterpreting horror for this narrative world. Here’s the first episode:

But yeah, I like it even though the show’s not perfect (the opening musical choices of episode 2 made me cringe hard; some of the casting choices in episode 2 didn’t work for me; the end of episode 2 diverged from the book significantly, and in ways I think will be to the detriment of the series). That said, I am happy to see Lovecraft back in the world of pulpy media as well as with a new spin.


But, beyond this series, the resurgence in Lovecraftian horror has been noticed by a few. Meagan Navarro wrote a brief, but interesting little piece on Bloody Disgusting a few months back called “The Elder Gods Are Coming: The Resurgence of Lovecraftian Horror” that’s worth a look. From the films Underwater and the Lovecraft adaptation Color Out of Space to the third season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Navarro connects these to existential fears drawn from the uncertainty of, well, everything these days. From the never-ending pandemic to the evolving police state to the growing specter of climate change, there’s never been a better time for humans to feel powerless and insignificant in the face of a world out of their control.

And maybe that’s what’s going on, and perhaps that’s what’s motivating my slide from reading the “rational Victorian” at the beginning of the pandemic down to the depths of feeling like an ant in a cosmos built for Old Gods. Obviously, Lovecraft Country went into production well before the world fell into its current state, and has done a pretty good job of connecting this sense of dread and creeping terror with being Black in the 1950s (and beyond). But, I think I’ve found myself increasingly seeking out more stories that try their best to shatter any remaining simplistic views of the pre-2020 world.

That is to say, I’m a white reader of Lovecraft who has typically only viewed Lovecraft’s racism as a significant but not fatal speedbump in my appreciation of his nihilistic world. I say that without a lot of remorse, really, just as a way of acknowledging that my whiteness has, of course, given Howard Phillips Lovecraft a pass, when many could not do that. And so Lovecraft Country — both the novel and the series — have been flawed but intriguing things, pushing me to think more seriously about the impact of a nihilistic worldview created by an inveterate racist. Perhaps I should have before now, but I’m glad I am, finally.

So, up next for me to read is Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, which is apparently a reimagining (at least in part) of Lovecraft’s “The Horror at Red Hook,” focusing on Black protagonists.

I haven’t read any of his other books, but LaValle wrote the introduction to the second of Leslie Klinger’s (mostly excellent) second volume of The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, and, in it, made a compelling argument for how we should dig back into these stories and come to terms with their racist underpinnings. His love of cosmic horror comes through clearly in this introduction, as well as in interviews he’s given about this novel.

I’m looking forward to diving into it further, while also looking forward to seeing how much more these works get reinterpreted, as they are largely in the public domain. I’ll complain talk more about this in my subsequent gaming post, but I look forward to seeing more folks take a look at Lovecraft and try to make sense of it for our current era, while eschewing the nauseating world that has, to date, made Lovecraft a corny joke: One of plushie Cthulhus and cartoons.

There’s nothing charming about Lovecraft (the man or his work), and there’s very little to laugh about in 2020 in general. I’m diving deeper into the bleakness, and maybe if you read this, you might too?

Finding VERTIGO in LA JETÉE

As I may have mentioned here, I’ve been running a very small, very sparsely attended movie night the last few weeks — every Saturday night at 8pm Eastern, we’ve been clicking play together and watching a number of (typically older) films. Black Sunday/The Mask of Satan, The Tomb of Ligeia, A Field in England, Band of Outsiders, and others. Originally horror and now starting to branch out into other genres.

Last night, we started off by watching La Jetée, Chris Marker’s wonderful, evocative science fiction short from 1963. Here it is in its entirety below, if you haven’t seen it, and it’s well worth the 28 minutes of your time to watch:

(Apologies for the subtitle track — the version someone uploaded to YouTube seems to be off sync for some reason, but it’s still largely intelligible).

I don’t think I’d seen this in its entirety since (gasp) … thirteen summers ago? It feels like just a few years ago, but I guess that’s how aging works. Yeah, it’s been a long time since I lived in Madison. I saw it on the roof of the Contemporary Arts Center, projected on a wall during one of their wonderful summer film festivals. Here’s a blurry photo from that evening.

La Jetée

On last night’s rewatch, I was really struck with the similarities to Vertigo, a film that seems to be universally-loved but I have never fully warmed to. (A quick aside — I’m not an idiot, and understand that Vertigo is in many ways Hitchcock’s crowning achievement, but I’ve always preferred Rear Window for reasons that might deserve their own post down the road. Simply, though, Rear Window is (1) more fun as simple entertainment; (2) a movie with an insane, captivating set that I never tire of looking at; (3) more interesting to me to watch as a critique of film viewing instead of film directing, which I have little interest in.)

Anyway, the visual and thematic allusions to Vertigo were all over La Jetée for me on this most recent watch, and it led me down a few Google rabbit holes last night and this morning. Most interestingly, I learned that Vertigo was reportedly Marker’s favorite film — that was news to me, notable only because it shows you how little I knew about Marker! Here’s a lengthy 1994 essay by Marker on Vertigo. La Jetée and Vertigo are both films about memory, and Marker’s exquisitely detailed thoughts on the latter are both a testament to Hitchock’s film, but also show the major impact Vertigo had on Marker.

I also found this wonderful little visual comparison of shots from the two films, which is nicely edited and scored.

While some of these connections were obvious — the tree rings scene jumped out at me on viewing La Jetée last night — there are so many more small connections here than I first realized. It’s worth a look, after you’ve seen both films.

And, if you haven’t seen Vertigo, what are you waiting for? Again, it’s not my favorite Hitchcock film, but Vertigo always worth watching, studying, and thinking more about. Oh, and if you are interested in joining us for more films on Saturday evenings, let me know and I can send you an invite to our private Discord. Tentative plan for next week is something by Henri-Georges Clouzot: Diabolique, Wages of Fear, or maybe even Quai des Orfèvres. Let me know in the comments or privately if you’d like to watch with us.

(Now to rewatch Vertigo as I work on my course syllabi.)

Page 3 of 4

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén