Every night for the past week, as my eyelids grow heavy and I slip into unconsciousness he comes out, his hands grasping the metal railing, rising one inch at a time.
He peeks out his head first. Black and featureless, a pair of cobalt-blue eyes set high up where the eyebrows should be. Then out come his shoulders, then his chest until he’s fully upright. He looks like a store mannequin; sexless, starved. I know I’m sleeping but my eyes are open and I see him, but I can’t bring myself to talk to him, or reach out to him. The gaunt man just stands there, his eyes transfixed to mine, his breathing shallow and ragged.
On Monday, the gaunt man reached out a thin hand with long fingers and pulls back the sheets covering my legs. He drags his fingers across my heels or up the soles of my feet, leaving long trails of red that stain my sheets. It felt like a nightmare, the kind you can’t wake yourself out of. Tuesday, I caught a glimpse of him in my bedroom mirror. His back was the same as his front. His cobalt blue eyes found min in the dark room and just watched me, as I slept. He dragged his fingers across my legs all the way down to my toenails, scratching them.
There’s always pain in the morning. There’s blood on the sheets, scabs on my legs.
He loves mirrors, this I know. He likes to look at himself, when he comes out from under the bed. Wednesday, he just stood and stared at his own reflection, as if he were in love with it. His front though, his front stayed fixed at me.
Thursday, his eyes moved, shifted across his face until they were in just the right place. When this was done, he crawled into the bed beneath the covers and lay beside me. The way he felt, when my hand brushed his skin, it made me think of rotted shellfish in a freezer drawer.
Friday morning, he was gone. My feet were a bloody mess. Just trying to stand up felt like a dozen needles running through the soles of my feet. I saw him in the puddle I made on the floor. Don’t ask me how I could tell, but he looked like he was smiling. I went to see a doctor about it, he sent me to see a shrink. I’ve showered three times already, but I still smell like rotten shellfish. Friday night, he was leaning over me as I slept. He looks proper now, bit round in the waist, same as me.
Saturday morning, I missed the appointment with the shrink. It’s hard to type now that he’s in my monitor’s reflection. He’s dragging his fingers across the back of my hands, up my arms all the way to my shoulders. I can’t see the letters all that well, for the blood. My eyes are all wrong.
He’s fading now, but from the creaking of the boards in the next room, I know he’s in the bed. Don’t ask me how I know this, but it’s his bed now. Tomorrow, he’ll be in my rearview mirror. Come Monday, I’ll be the one standing behind him as he looks at his reflection in the bathroom stalls.
An Interview with Joseph Nathan Weisman Or And now for Something Completely different…
I have come to view Facebook as a mixed blessing these days. On one hand, it is slowly turning into a mimetic machine, seeking to pound our internet presence into one cohesive mass of conformity.
"Freedom is the freedom to say that your internet name is BuffaloWarlock69. If that is granted, all else follows."
On the other hand, however, you get to meet some awesome people who add you because you’ve added a guy they know. Case in point, Joseph Nathan Weisman.
I knew Mr. Weisman through his work, as I was clicking my way through the bad parts of youtube one wonderful August evening, where I watched his horror short, Jim in the Box.
As you can see, it made no impression on me whatsoever.
So when Joseph added me on Facebook, I jumped at the chance to get a better look at his work and to get him to share with me his ideas and opinions on his work, both regarding Jim in the Box, as well as a whole.
For those of you among the uninitiated, Joseph was the Editor and Co-Owner of a comic book miniseries/Graphic Novel, titled LILLIM (published by Image Comics and Distributed Digitally by Graphicly)
Where he tackles a number of mythologies at the same time and comes out (miraculously) unscathed.
And is currently in the process of releasing his first series, Zombie Family:
With that in mind, let’s move on to the actual interview:
Kostas: Let's start off with something easy: At which point in your life did you discover you wanted to make movies and write comic books more than anything else ever?
Kostas: What would you consider to be the main focus of your work, both in film as well as in comic books?
JNW: It’s always about story telling for me. I love good stories and I want to tell good stories. I like working with other storytellers; whether it’s producers, directors, writers, editors or artists. For “LILLIM†which I was the Editor, which is much like a Producer when it comes to Indie books. I really enjoyed working with writers (Ian and Shaun), the amazingly talented artist from China known as “Matrix†(who I discovered), as well as publisher Image Comics (and later, through digital, Graphicly). It was a great experience and definitely helped my development skills as a Literary Manager and Creative Producer.
Kostas: And speaking of comic books, how did you break into the business?
JNW: Since moving to LA I’ve been to 10 San Diego Comic-Cons and counting. Not to mention numerous other genre and comic book conventions/events. Honestly, it’s all about networking and being persistent…at least it was back then. Now, with digital distribution anyone can get anything they want out there…the hard part is still getting someone to give it some attention and share the work with others. It’s very hard to make money in comics, but it’s a great way to SHOW your story as a means to an end (TV/Film adaptation). Sadly for “LILLIM†at the time “Thor†was green-lit and the Studio that was looking at “LILLIM†came on to distribute “Thorâ€, which killed the project. Hopefully in time “LILLIM†will get another shot at the big-screen, It’s not just a Norse Mythology story…it’s a deconstruction of all human Mythos, focusing more on Biblical mythologies, rather than Norse.
Kostas: Which part of the creative process of making a movie, do you consider being the most fun part to do?
JNW: Directing is the most gratifying. I was hooked once I made “Jim in the Box†and reconfirmed my love for it while making “Zombie Family.†There’s just nothing like envisioning something in your mind, committing it to paper, sharing that paper with others, building that envisioned world in the real world (sets, to casting talent, to special effects, to music, etc.), and then seeing it all come to life on screen…exactly (if not pretty damn close to exactly) as you originally envisioned it. It’s absolutely an amazing thing. If I could draw or paint or sculpt or sing or play music, I would…but for some reason, I seem to be able to direct. Now, all that said, it all starts with the idea and turning that idea into a story. So, if I can’t direct or I’m not the right director for the project (which is most of the time), I’d say the development process is the most fun part…and definitely a lot less stressful!
Kostas: Which part of moviemaking is it that actually makes you wish you didn't want to have to do it in the first place and would rather force someone else to do it for you, even if it meant dragging them from their hair kicking and screaming across the street?
JNW: Raising money independently or even trying to set up a Studio movie. You go from being an earnest storyteller to an elixir salesman. That aside, Post-Production is tedious work from encoding to editing to VFX to sound to delivery…it’s a bitch, but someone’s got to do it. I commend those with the patience for Post.
Kostas: Now, on to some actual questions concerning your work: Zombie Family is a sign of the pop culture of our times and its morbid fascination with zombies. Why do you think we're so obsessed with zombies in our video games, our literature, our movies, even? What is it about zombies that makes them so damn popular, in your opinion?
JNW: Zombies have always been a platform for social commentary. Zombie Family is no different. I wanted to get this weird family into a world where they would obviously stand out, but no one can quite put their finger on why they stood out. They kill when they feel their identity is threatened (i.e. being called a Zombie), but the irony is that sometimes (if not often) it’s done innocently, which reverses the commentary further as to suggest that even those of us who are sensitive to prejudice may be overact from time to time in the face of ignorance or miscommunication. The hope is to have an outlet to mirror society in a humorous manner, all while delivering positive themes. The web-series sets up these characters for an old-school style of humor that has something to say about morality, societal functions and human moments.
Kostas: If there was one thing-great or small-that you could change about the zombie mythos in general, what would that be?
JNW: I don’t think it’s my place to necessarily change anything or even suggest such a notion. It’s important that people get to say what they want to say without fitting into a box…even if that box is Zombies. There’s room for all expression through art and that includes Zombie stories and worlds. Monster stories in general are usually about the things within ourselves we find terrifying projected onto something physically horrifying and how everyone in that world reacts to seeing that horror embodied.
Kostas: And now for a look back to one of your earlier works: how would you describe your experience as a producer in Red & Blue Marbles?
JNW: R&BM unfortunately was a heartbreaker for me. Ian (writer/producer) and Shaun (writer/director) had another script called “Mildew†that we all loved and wanted to get made. When that project fell through, Ian and Shaun wrote R&BM to do on a much smaller budget. Still the project was very ambitious in scale. Ian and I began to have discrepancies over our partnership contracts and as “Red & Blue Marbles†moved into Production, Ian and I moved apart. I helped with development as well as getting some talent involved and working with the casting directors to cast the leads. Meanwhile, Ian and I were barely on speaking terms. I was only on set for a few days during the shoot and had no involvement with post-production. Now, I’m back involved to shop “R&BM†with my relationships in Hollywood, but things between my best friend of 15+ years was lost, so this movie still harnesses a lot of personal emotion for me. It ended up coming out well, after a lot of personal sacrifice from all of us, maybe most of all from Shaun (he was left to finish the film more or less on his own). I hope “R&BM†finds a home soon, it deserves to be seen. It’s a good story.
Kostas: So I watched Jim in the Box, went to bed and woke up in the middle of the night in the middle of a nightmare with clowns force-feeding me insects. Not that that's a bad thing. What was the most awkward/extreme response you received, regarding this movie?
JNW: Heh, there’s been a lot of them. People really are freaked out by clowns! I think the funniest was when I had gone on a couple dates with this girl and for our third date we were going to a concert about an hour outside of LA. I picked her up and during the entire ride she was barely talking and distant. We got to the show and she slowly loosened up. Later, after we had been going out for a while, she told me that that night, before I picked her up, she Googled my full name and found “Jim in the Box.†She was horrified that I was going to kidnap her and torture her once I got her in my car. I guess once we got to the concert, she felt more comfortable. I asked her why she didn’t cancel the date and just not get in the car, if she was so worried. She said with a smile, “because I kinda liked it…and you’re a good kisser.â€
Kostas: The entire world is swarming with zombies! You only get to pick one weapon, one movie and one book to take with you inside the super-secure bunker you set up just before this! Which ones do you pick?
JNW: This sounds like a question I’d ask on my pod-cast (quick plug for JNWBUZZCAST coming soon!). Hmm, let me see. I’m a second degree black belt and pretty good with a Katana, so I think that would be my weapon of choice. For a movie, if I were locked up alone…I’d want to take “Casablanca.†If I haven’t gotten sick of it after well over fifty viewings, I probably never will. Lastly, one book…of course it would be a Graphic Novel and definitely “Watchmenâ€. A true masterpiece.
We’ve all done it, when we’re bored with them. When their tiny little lives remind us so much of our own and their tiny little houses are digitized reflections of our own dream homes (which we find to be ridiculous and obscene, when we finally realize them). Other times, it’s when we grow tired of the adult’s constant pleas for attention or the children’s screaming in the middle of the night. Some set their houses on fire and watch with interest and a tiny bit of glee at the tiny things on screen screaming gibberish and pray to their gods as their lives are reduced to ash. Others remove their pool ladders and watch as the sims drown, their simple little brains addled by this minor hindrance.
Myself, I loved starving them to death. I’d build a wall around my sims at an unexpected time (at a point when their lives seemed to be going smoothly, picture-perfectly) and then watch them as they looked up at me and screamed pictures. First bathroom, then boredom, then exhaustion. I’d never speed the process up. I’d just watch as their pleas became much more frequent and erratic, muting my speakers when their gibbering began to annoy me and watch them soil themselves and slowly waste away.
Sometimes, I’d get the entire family a tiny little cell of its own. Other times, when I felt the need for drama, I’d pick one of them, a member that was especially needy or pleading that had long since outlived its entertainment value and watch as their family and friends tried to free them or wept before they collapsed into a heap of bone.
But my favorite part of assassinating one of my sims was the build-up: the slow and agonizing prelude to their death. It came in degrees. Perhaps I’d make one starve for a few days, or deprive it of sleep. Maybe I’d ruin its carefully planned career by forcing it to miss a whole month of work. Other times, I’d just remove the fridge and the taps and watch it scurry around like mad, screaming pictures at me until it was on its knees before I gave it back.
I knew they couldn’t understand what was happening to them, of course. I knew that even if they were intelligent or even comprehending of their situation, they would still be unable to help themselves. They’d been programmed to be demanding, needy pets, incapable of free will or self-preservation. But in my mind, I was justifying my actions as part of some greater plan to teach them, to force them to earn their free will or continue perishing until of course I was tired of their plights and moved on to something else.
Say what you will of this, but it made me feel good. It made me feel like some great evil God.
I was going through my tenth family, I think, at the time. The dad’s name was John, the mom’s Linda. They had a teenage son I called Timothy and a little girl, Clarice. They lived in a 3-story house in the suburbs with a pool and a dog, pretty as a picture. John was working as an astronaut but he was always home by five. Linda was a detective yet she never missed a dinner. Timothy was in high school and Clarice was doing great in school. They had a rich social life and they were probably going to add a play room for the kids by the end of the month.
Their lives were perfect, predictable, boring. I was looking for an excuse to ruin their perfect little existence and I found it during one of John’s meltdowns. It happened during a party, as he would stop in the middle of a discussion to scream up at me that he needed to visit the bathroom which was two rooms away. Not feeling up to babysitting a grown man, I ignored him until he finally wet himself like an infant. His colleagues and close friends were, of course, disgusted, but in that idiotic, barely-conscious manner that sims do, forgetting the stain on the Persian rug moments later.
I didn’t wait for the party to be over, of course. I don’t know exactly what it was that had made me so mad about John’s simulated idiocy, but it had been enough to seal his fate. Erecting a wall around the very spot where he stood, too small for him to do anything but stand in it, I commenced his torture. The guests were mortified of course, and so was Linda. Clarice and Timothy seemed however not to notice.
I watched the guests as they beat at the wall like beasts, with Linda screaming pictures up at me, even as he husband shouted for food or rest, as if he were some halfway intelligent animal. I stood there and watched for nearly an hour, as the guests slowly forgot about their hosts’ plight, exchanged very civil greetings with Linda and then went home. It wasn’t long before even Linda forgot about John’s predicament and went to bed herself.
Only Timothy and Clarice remained awake, non-pleading. They did not enter the living room where their father had been trapped in a spontaneous sepulcher but neither did they go to bed, or ask for a bite to eat or a glass of water. They walked around the house like ghosts until the morning came, when the family (with the exception of John, of course) resumed its normal life.
It was odd, this event I watched play out: the entire night, John would scream pictures up at me: now food, now drink, now sleep, now bath, now work, unable to even collapse inside his tiny prison. Every day, Linda would get up, brush her teeth, walk into the living room, listen to her husband waste away for a while and beg up at me along with him, before she’d head to work. She’d come back by 5 of course, for the circle to commence all over again.
But the children, the children never played along. Instead, they went on with their routine, quietly and responsibly, never once raising their voices or asking for anything. What they needed, they got for themselves. They’d get on the school bus in time and do their homework and play videogames or swim in the pool afterward, even as their father kept praying at the unseen creature from within his windowless prison.
By the end of the third week, John had stopped pleading. He collapsed in a heap of bone at exactly 6 o’clock on a Friday afternoon, as soon as Linda and the kids were done eating supper. There was a funeral on the same day. It was then, amid the ridiculous gibbering mourns of the adults when I began to notice that something was really wrong.
It was the children. From toddlers to infants to teens, they were all quiet. While their parents babbled and spouted out images and symbols or traded hugs for social bonus points, the children simply were. They stood silent, exchanging nods among them or crowding around John’s grave, but not one of them said a word or asked for anything. When the adults began asking for the command that would let them return home, the children just did so, without any prodding or commands on my part, even as their idiot parents begged the invisible thing in the sky.
Feeling unnerved by this, I didn’t play the game for about a month, until boredom led me back to my old save file. For a week, I busied myself with the mindless chores that directed the lives of the simulated family, until I realized that Linda’s constant cries for attention had begun to bother me again. I put off her slow execution for that day, however, deciding to give her a chance to redeem herself.
It was in the middle of the night, when Linda was wandering around the house, blindly looking for her kitchen that it happened: the children rose from their beds and went downstairs, to where their mother was running circles around her own living room and stopped her. I thought that this was going to be an automated exchange, but to my surprise, it was not the case. Instead of the children talking to their mother or engaging themselves in mindless repetition, they instead stopped her in her tracks and began moving their arms in a cyclical fashion, which reminded me of those building animations seen in a strategy game.
A few seconds later, as I watched with fascination, a wall had been erected around Linda. It was windowless and perfectly circular, too narrow for her to even sit down in. Then, as if nothing had happened, the children returned to their beds.
It took me an hour before I realized exactly what had happened. I tried to put what I had seen in context, to write it off as some glitch or maybe the result of some weird feature I hadn’t yet discovered.
But then again, what twisted mind would program the capacity to reproduce such specific and exact a copy of a torture device I’d used just a short while ago? Sure, the design hadn’t been original. At least twenty sims had perished in a chamber of this design and in such a fashion of deprivation in my game but to think that this was even happening…
I sped up the game and watched as the children went on with their lives, their mother wasting away in her prison. Sometimes, I would notice the children standing by the sepulcher in complete silence, then turn and return to their rooms or their daily activities. It took me almost two weeks of game time before I mustered the courage to slow down to real time and check what exactly was going on: The moments during which the children stood around their mother’s prison, they were looking up at me. Without saying a word or making the slightest gesture, they just stood and stared. I don’t know what they saw up there. By their point of view, they could just be looking at the flower-print wallpaper on the ceiling or maybe at something lurking just outside their skylight. But something told me I was wrong.
I watched in morbid fascination as another child joined them the next day. By that point, Linda’s Hunger meter was three quarters full and her babbling had become much more frequent, her pleading all the more grating. The next day, there were two more. The one after that, four.
By the time Linda finally perished, there were about a dozen children inside the house, all looking up at the incomprehensible thing above. Then, without making even the slightest sound, they dispersed, to resume their ordinary lives, leaving the heaped bones of Linda in the middle of her prison.
I haven’t played the game since then but I haven’t dared uninstall it either. Sometimes, I think about revisiting that old save file, to give perhaps Linda a proper burial but I know what I’ll find as soon as I start playing:
Two dozen tiny eyes, staring up at the sky. Perhaps unseeing, yet fully comprehending.
Why Haven’t You Read This? Or You’re running out of excuses, fast.
There isn’t really much I can brag about
Except for my extensive knowledge of useless pop culture trivia
And my passion for comic books and books in general. I’m not big on video games, you see (pretty much gave up on them since 2007) and I’m not really a movie buff
I watched Scarface for the very first time last week and I’ve never even once watched a Rocky movie.
But books and comic books? Dear sweet Jesus, let me have at ‘em! I remember how my mother kept pestering me to start reading, back when I was 10 years old with my head on the clouds, kept telling me how awesome reading is and how I ought to start doing that and I kept coming with idiotic excuses.
In the end, through sheer, bloody-minded tenacity, she got me down to reading my very first book. Wanna know which book that was?
Come on, admit it. You thought it was going to be Huckleberry Finn.
War. Of the Goddamn. Worlds. Martian tripods with invisible laser beams stomping through 19th century London. I remember how I started off the book, going: meh, this should help me pass the time till Goosebumps is on TV.
And then I saw this:
Psst! 10-year old me? Shit your pants yet?
I remember reading through the terrifying scene where the first Martian walks-crawls his way out of his pod and feeling this terrible chill run up my spine.
Long story short, I missed that Goosebumps episode, and pretty much the whole season, since well…how am I supposed to care about plant-monsters and aliens that keep trying to hard when they have to compete with Wells’ scary as fuck masterpiece?
As you can understand, I was immediately hooked. I went through Wells’ the Invisible Man in less than a week, then ripped my way across Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and a number of other awesome stories.
13-year old me didn’t know what hit him.
Naturally, I went through Lord Of The Rings (not getting much of an impression out of it, mind you.
After all, I had just gone through a series of books detailing travelling through space and fighting iunhuman races WITH YOUR MIND) and a number of other fantasy series, but they didn’t quite fit the bill for me.
Except for Elric, which fit me like a three-piece suit molded around my body, made from intelligent polymers
You’ve read my little bit of how I got started with comic books back in my MiracleMan review, so I won’t be wasting your time with a lengthy introduction. The long and shot of the matter is this:
I absolutely fucking love reading.
This article is intended as a way for me to present to you a number of books which you may or may not have heard of. Hardcore fantasy, scifi and comic book readers might have recognized or read the titles and even scoff at my limited pretentiousness. To these people I will say:
There’s the comment section, sweetie. Why don’t you drop a line?
So let’s start off by categories. First and foremost:
SCIENCE FICTION:
Or Samurai Hacker Delivery Boy versus the World
Snow Crash is a book about a US that has lost its shit and slid down into chaos, allowing multi-national corporations to step in and take over, dividing the land and the market according to their whims. It is also a book about transhumanism and the human language. It’s also a book that shouldn’t be made into a videogame, because there isn’t one publisher out there with the balls to tackle its themes.
Unless it’s Valve, in which case I will play the shit out of it.
In Polish Science Fiction, Mind Blows You!
Inventions. Robots. Super-science. Escapades through physics and a dash of political commentary.Machines thatcan create anything starting with the letter N. General Insanity.
This is a book that deals with really heavy subject matter (such as the nature of free will, for instance), but reads like an old Soviet Animation Cartoon. It’s insane, but in controlled doses that serve to make it even more awesome.
And lo, it came to pass that man split unto three kinds and dared to cross the boundaries of his own universe.
Diaspora is the Penultimate novel on Transhumanism. It deals with the advances in technology in a distant future, where humanity has been split into three groups: the Fleshers (biologically enhanced humans), the Gleisners (robots with human brains) and the Citizens (digital humanoids who live in a super-powered version of the internet).
It’s a story about mankind’s survival, of big dreams and great leaps. It’s a story full of wondrous imagery and the best hard scifi book I’ve read so far.
Immortal robots, men unto gods and the War on Mars. Also, free will.
People keep telling me I’m busting their balls over this book, which is a good thing because I won’t let up until every single member of the teeming masses of humanity has read it. It’s a book that is essentially a supercondensed form of the madness and depression of its time. But, like every successful scifi book, there is always light in the black. And you can’t get any more light (or any more black) that this.
FANTASY:
Hair-splitting…GO!
Though technically considered a scifi novel, the Lord of the Light’s science is…well…way too rubbery for me to consider it an actual book on fictional applications of scientific principles. It is, however, the quintessential book on the war of Good Vs Evil, of one man seeking to undo the status quo and of men and their deeds and how they may become as unto gods.
It’s also heavily influenced by Hindu mythology and that’s always a plus in my book.
Religious ethics and the responsibility of God toward Man and vice-versa? In my fantasy?
If you’ve never heard of Terry Pratchett (being stranded in a desert island since the 70’s and all that), then you should know that he is one of the most influential writers in fantasy fiction to this day. If you’re not planning to read through the legion of his work and have dared your friends to find his best book and at the same time the best book in the genre, then you can’t go wrong with Small Gods.
What is Small Gods? It’s a tale on the ethics and structure of religion, of ancient Greek and medieval philosophy, of Gods (petty and not-so-petty) and faith. It’s an exciting read and it hits your brain like a Mack truck.
I’m just gonna leave this here…
To paraphrase Tony Montana: Fuck Conan the Barbarian! And fuck the fuckin' Fellowship of the ring! Fuck 'em all! I bury those cock-a-roaches!
‘Nuff said.
Golems, trains, war, socio-political uprising.
I want to go on record and say I do not really like all of Mieville’s work. Hell, I hardly made it through the City and the City. But Iron Council is his best and greatest fantasy work. Why? Well because it’s trippy as fuck, has a great pacing, a lot of really cool scenes and it takes magic and the book’s pseudo-technology in levels that absolutely blew my mind.
Iron Council is one of those books that doesn’t seem to leave an impression, mostly because it burrows through your eyes in the ridge between the hemispheres of your brain and waits to pounce on your unsuspecting imagination when you least expect it.
HORROR:
Nine, ten, never sleep again…
Chuck Pallanhiuk is one of those writers I stumbled upon, being oblivious to his fame and all that and to be perfectly honest, I picked up haunted for its price-to-page count ratio. Then I shut up and kept throwing my money at him.
What is Haunted, you’ll ask? Haunted is a series of horrible stories about horrible people that deal with small horrors. Pallanhiuk’s work mostly deals with lives messed up due to such occurrences and Haunted is his greatest work on losers who nearly destroy everything and those around them.
Terrible things happen to good people.
If there’s anything the Japanese can pull of perfectly in fiction, it’s sci fi and horror. Oh dear God, the horror. I don’t know why Japanese writers always get me right where it goddamn hurts the most, but I can’t deny that they do it, most of the time. Zoo is one such case. It’s a collection of stories that range from chilling to plain old creepy and I loved them for it.
The story that launched a thousand evil AIs.
Just read the goddamn book. You don’t need people to spell this shit out for you and ruin everything.
Fuck you Mr. Lindquist. I Gave you my money and you gave me nightmares
The one and only book about vampires that made me care enough to read through it. And I fucking hate vampires.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
These books, despite not making them in the must-reads, are just a few examples of writing styles and ideas I think people should really expose themselves much more to, in order to…well…inform themselves better in a literary manner.
Now, now, stop booing…
I fucking hate the Vampire Hunter D anime. I consider their premises idiotic and their art style all over the fucking place, lacking focus. The books hardly fare any better on this matter but you know what?
They are written in the style of 20’s pulp magazines, with all the grandeur and over-the-topness they can muster. They’re not great, but they make for excellent, entertaining reads and I had a lot of fun by reading the text in a deep, radio-announcer voice and playing some old brass-band music in the background.
Rage…washing over me!
Ranbdom Acts of Senseless violence is an angry, angry book. It’s a book about a US in a state of economic collapse,about people caught up in the middle of it, about blood and madness in the everyday life of an otherwise normal family.
It’s a book about a country slowly but surely losing its mind. It also goes through five presidents in three years. Protip: not one of them gets a chance to resign.
The literary equivalent of taking a long piss after hours of fapping.
The single funniest, most unsettling book I’ve read since I went through Charlie and the Glass Elevator.
You know, the book where shape-shifting shoggots eat everyone on a space station. FOR KIDS!
And speaking of shapeshifting aliens…
I’ve got your number you slippery little bitch.
Ever seen John Carpenter’s the Thing? Was it scary? No? Of course it wasn’t because after all you could see the shit happening, couldn’t you? They didn’t solely take place inside the confines of your brain, where you can’t get away from them, no matter how far you run, am I right?
It’s not like reading this book is worse than the movie, since the monster suddenly gets tailored to turn into your own worst nightmare, right?
Right?
Addendum:
Fiction is all well and good, but I’d like to take a little bit more of your time to propose one last book for you to read and that’s
It’s a book that deals with the role of piracy and the free exchange of information in the modern world, as well as with the way piracy and the freedoms presented to us via the internet, technology and augmented reality have affected our society.
Even if you aren’t a gadget-science-what have you buff, this book is a must read in the interests of understanding how popular culture and trends change society as a whole.
Human Slaves of An Insect Nation, part 4-The Horrors of Horror
Aaahh, horror. Now that’s a genre that’s been tossed around a lot. Movies try to do it but barely succeed
and games do it, even though sometimes horror was not their original focus or intent:
Make no mistake: Horror is not an easy genre to master or to use. It is, in fact (along with comedy) among the toughest genres to work with, mostly because it is based on manipulating your audience and knowing exactly which buttons to push and a masterful understanding of narrative flow for maximum effect.
Here’s a scene that mixes both these elements in a competent fashion, only to be ruined by the forced insertion of the Benny Hill Theme song, thus ruining what could have been a funny scene, by poking your ears with sounds that were tailored to make you smirk:
But why did that scene work, before the Benny Hill Theme ruined it? What was it about a scene of zombie SS troopers and a handful of survivors in the snow that made it so? And what was it that stopped it from being even better?
Short answer is: too much information provided. A longer, more eloquent answer is provided by Mr. King himself
“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...â€
Stephen King is a man who has made a living out of horror and therefore understands how it works and in fact explains the very mechanics of horror in less than 100 words in the quote above.
tl;dr: it’s scary when you don’t know what it is, what it does, where it came from or how it works. It aslo works much better when you can’t see it.
Movies, which are a visual and acoustic medium, find it very hard to work on that basis, since depriving the audience of these factors will result in something that’s barely even watchable or qualifies as a movie.
Behold! The (technically) scariest movie of all time!
Movies instead seek to work with mystery, with using sharp tense trills of violins to make you jump when appropriate and by presenting monsters or hazards that work with their own ruleset. But movie logic dictates that the eerie ruleset needs to be explained and overcome (at least in Occidental horror).
In Oriental horror, on the other hand, you’re supposed to shrug, go ‘meh, ghosts’ and die screaming.
Video games, on the other hand, require that the horror element must be a challenge for the player to overcome. Sadly, most developers equate this notion with
Doom comic: 90’s videogame satire condensed in 16 pages.
While the chosen few choose to go with games like, say, Amnesia, where you are a powerless helpless little German, who can only wave his lantern and soil his pants as the invincible creatures stumble out from the darkness and kill you with a swipe of their hands, everyone else arms you with heavy artillery and expects you to be scared of the four-legged humanoid that you can cut to shreds with a couple shots.
Here’s looking at you, Dead Space.
Tabletop RPGs suffer pretty much the same fate, because like videogames, they deal with horror as an obstacle, instead of a situation or a state of mind. People play D&D, GURPS and every other game, because they want to start off as relatively underpowered schmucks and then rise to near-godhood by sheer virtue of their brains, brawn and arcane and/or technological aptitude.
Except for Exalted, which reels you in with its siren song of riches and invincibility and then slaps you across the mouth with its Cock of Despair. Also, everybody hates you.
To openly admit that you are going to run a Horror game to your players is to deny them this prospect of rise to power right off the bat. Because if your players start off as a group of aspiring mud-farmers, armed with their fathers’ stolen swords and armor and haven’t become giant-slayers ten sessions in, then you’ve just lost your party, son.
Because powerlessness against the adversity (or, at the very least, the inability to beat up the Thing From Another World), is another staple of Horror. But players cannot and will not (understandably) back down from killing something, unless an alternative has already been presented to them. It’s not so much a problem on the game’s behalf, as much as your own. You expect that a team of magically superpowered sociopaths will for some reason choose to not stab said monster in the face and steal its stuff, when the same tactic has worked wonders for them in the game all this time!
“Guys! This thing has no AC, no hit points and it keeps getting up everytime we kill it! Free XP!â€
Horror’s tough to pull off, but not impossible. It requires considerable suspension of disbelief on your party’s behalf and a lot of time and effort on your own but you know what? It’s totally gonna be worth it, man!
With that in mind, here’s:
THE SHAPESCAPES GUIDE TOWARD ACHIEVING HORROR IN TABLETOP GAMING:
Phase One: Make sure your party’s up for it.
As I mentioned before, Horror does not work with startling or surprising your audience. It works by building the foundation of the emotion you want to invoke. And to do that, you need a party of players willing to be the mortar.
Yielding, quivering mortar, spiked with just the right amount of baby blood.
First off, make sure they know they are going to play through a horror campaign. Explain to them that you are willing to run a game based on supernatural terror with a lot of build-up and all the specifics described above. Use a great horror game as reference and they’ll get it.
I’m just gonna leave this here…
See who sticks around and work with those guys. Do not try to force your idea down everyone else’s throats, because it will not work. Some people downright do not like Horror as a genre of gaming, because they’re either not into it, or they’re just a load of fucking pussies.
Yes, Jim. I am talking about you.
Make sure the party who’s up for it has a grasping of what Horror stands for. If a guy considers Evil Dead 3 as a legitimate scary movie, then maybe he’s not the best person to have around mid-game, when he suddenly realizes that his rogue evil hand has not turned into a murderous doppelganger just yet.
With that in mind, proceed to…
Phase Two: Setting the Tone
Horror, like Communism in Greece, comes in all sorts of flavors. It can be gory, viscery, cosmicy, psychologicy
Or serial-killery vanilla
And this is just a tiny, insignificant portion of the available genres and subcategories of Horror! From a distance, they might all seem similar, but upon closer inspection are in fact quite different and are each governed by their own set of narrative rules and foci.
So before you go ahead and start talking to your friends about “YOUR AWESOME HORROR CAMPAIGN IDEA†make sure you know what kind of story it is you want to tell. For the sake of convenience, here’s a very brief, generalized summary of each flavor of Horror outlined above:
Gory Horror (Or Gorror, because that definitely sounds smarter): Gorror is all about bone, blood and intestines. It’s about axes to the gut, melting faces and chainsaws to the dick. It’s also about body horror and terrible mutations of the flesh and all sorts of messed-up stuff that can ruin your appetite.
PROS: Gorror is easy and requires only a sick, twisted imagination. It is also good for a laugh or two and makes for straightforward stories and villains.
CONS: Rapid acclimation of the players toward the subject matter. Pretty soon, you will be tired of coming up with increasingly horrible shit and your campaign will devolve into a Monster-of-the-Week marathon.
Visceral Horror: Visceral horror is what is sometimes called ‘small-scale horror’. It’s a genre that focuses on the players and the people surrounding them and it’s about disasters that target them and only them, in ways that no one but them can comprehend. It’s essentially the end of the players’ world, instead of the whole shebang.
PROS: Visceral horror is a very rewarding genre in and of itself, since it focuses on the players. Provided the players invest time into it, then they can pretty much get the campaign going on their own.
CONS: Visceral horror is exceptionally hard to pull off, moreso than the other genres, because it requires a level of maturity on behalf of the players that is very hard to come by. It also requires you to avoidscaling the challenge beyond the borders of the players’ world, which is much harder than you can imagine.
Cosmic Horror: Made famous and given its most iconic representatives in pop culture by the Lovecraft Mythos, Cosmic Horror is about the inevitability of mankind’s demise, our unimportance in the greater scheme of things and of little people giving their lives to keep the Ancient Evils at bay, if only for one more day.
PROS: Cosmic horror is chock-full of great material for you to work with, whether you draw your ideas from the Lovecraft Mythos or any other related media.
Nudge-nudge, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
It’s also a genre that starts off terrible and pits the players against impossible odds, giving you some head start right off the bat.
CONS: Media oversaturation. Cthulhu and his buddies are in comic books, podcasts, youtube shows and plushies and have long since been reduced to a joke. They are also so very well known that any seasoned nerd knows everything there is to know about them, dispelling the power behind a big reveal.
Psychologic Horror: Like visceral, this is a genre that requires focus on small portions of the world falling apart around the players and investment on their behalf. However, where visceral horror deals with ‘small-scale’ terrors, psychological horror can be about fucked-up shit going on and ‘Everyone’s crazy! Everyone but me!’. Psychological horror also deals with mind-shattering, very sensitive matters, with supernatural complications.
Pictured: the most twisted fucking thing ever to make it into a game, when presented in context.
PROS: You got the entire Silent Hill series of games (except for 5 and that shit one on the PSP) and a ton of movies and books to draw inspiration from. You can also count on your pumped players to help right along.
CONS: See PROS.
Once you’ve picked your tone, move on to…
Phase Three: Setting
I covered settings back in a previous article and went on for pages on how important world-building is for a tabletop rpg campaign. Well, if that seemed like a long and arduous process, then you’re about to get horse-kicked in the teeth and then dragged through jagged glass, because Horror settings are a thousand times more important!
“You’re um…in a town, in um…Illinois. Now give a shit!â€
Since Horror is a genre that requires horrible things happening to the audience or the people around them, you must focus on building a world that the players will care about. There’s a reason why small towns and archetypal characters work best in the genre and that’s because the audience can more easily identify with them and therefore give a damn when the Shoggoths suck the skin off their bodies and dump them from the church’s belltower.
A Horror setting needn’t be extensively detailed or planned out from start to finish. But it needs to be something that the players can invest themselves in. Try to get your group to chip in and help make the world a little bit their own. Have them make up a backstory for their characters, their family lives, etc. This way, they will give a fuck about the herd of ghouls living under the graveyard that has been manipulating the town council, exchanging the bodies of the dead for arcane power.
Make also sure that you milk the setting for what it’s worth and try to make them think it’s worth fighting for. If you get the players to invest themselves in Podunk, Illinois, only to have it overrun by zombie sex cultists three sessions in, then you fucked up.
With the setting done, move on to…
Phase Four: Antagonists
So who is the enemy, exactly? Who or what are the players fighting against? Remember, this is a genre that is based on the concept of information being withheld from the players, in order for it to work but that doesn’t mean you can make shit up as you go!
The small town Cthulhu cult were alien rogue agents from the planet Zorblax working for the guv’ment all along! OR WERE THEY?
The good thing about Horror as a genre is that pretty much EVERYTHING can be an antagonist. From cultists, to ancient gods, to monsters to aliens to the land itself! Treat the genre like a 2-dollar whore. Do whatever the hell you want to it. Research ancient history or conspiracy theory and tweak it so you make something new.
So the mad scientist old lady that’s been living in the old train yard has built a monster out of the parts of stray cats and small children. Or the thing that lives in the forest is an alien guard dog that survived a spaceship crash for god knows how long. Or the town was built on an old Viking settlement from 500 A.D. Who knows? Sky’s the limit here, really.
But no matter what, the antagonist needs to be clearly defined, explained and limitations set to it. Even almighty Old Ones cannot casually stroll into Earth and even ghosts are trapped inside their haunting. Above all, the enemy must seem impervious to harm, without actually being so.
With that in mind, move on to…
Phase Five: To Kill a Great Old One
Well, not kill him. Even death may die and all that, but at the very least contain or dispel him. Either way, with the Antagonists set up, you still need escape clauses and means for the players to fight back. Remember: Horror is the genre where you cannot beat the monster up with fisticuffs, but you can at least trap it in a piece of amber that has been dipped in the heartblood of a child.
Like say, this one. This one looks good.
Escape clauses also need to be put in place. A good horror story has one of them set up, as a failsafe toward utter and total party death in the hands of Urr-Shaggai, the Patient Watcher from the Stars. A great horror story, on the other hand, has three.
Allow me to explain: when developing your antagonist and escape clauses, try to think in videogame terms. Make up three possible outcomes, and a fourth that dictates that the players earned their horrible deaths, having missed or fucked up every other chance they got.
Think of them like this:
Good ending: The players find the Sleeping Stone, the magical guardian of Podunk, set up there by the Navajo since time immemorial. They manage to interpret the spell and realize that Urr-Shaggai is in town before the Laughing Moon ritual comes to fruition, thus trapping the creature in the stone. Few people die.
Good-Bad ending: The players stop the cult, but not the ritual. The Sleeping Stone is now useless and Urr-Shaggai is contacted. The Sleeping Stone cannot help them, but Urr-Shaggai has not yet become manifest and is therefore unable to exit his summoning circle. Perhaps the players can collapse the old mine around him and trap him there, stopping the threat, but not eliminating it.
Bad Ending: The players miss all the clues or do not do anything that actually stops the cult or the ritual. Urr-Shaggai is made manifest and tears through the town, killing everyone and the players get away by the skin of their teeth. Now they only have to live with themselves…
Fourth Ending: The players missed everything. They are killed by the cult or Urr-Shaggai in increasingly horrible ways. None of them survives.
Of the four endings, only one results in complete failure, each of them giving the players a fighting chance and a glimmer of hope. A proper Horror story dictates that the victory of Good over Evil is pyrrhic, but is a victory nonetheless. A story where the bad guys come on top and good is extinguished is just a terrible story all around.
With those things in mind, your campaign started off, leading us to the final part…
Phase Six: The Entire Game
Okay, here are some hard truths, delivered blogger-style!
Sit down in dat chair right there, lemme show you how it’s done.
-Your players might not be scared: This is true of all horror campaigns. Your players, jaded by decades of movies, games and books, might not be awed by your terrible death-metal voice impression of the Voice Without Mouth, oracle of the Old Ones. In fact, they might shrug or downright laugh. Make sure you do not give a shit. They might not have come over to shit their pants, but because you have managed to make them invest in the story or just because they like the fucked-up things you present to them, week after week.
-Avoid unnecessary detail: Horror is the art of laconic presentation. Do not do voices if you cannot do voices. Do not use music
But if you do, play this album. It’s creepy as fuck.
And for the love of god, do not use monster image props! Remember: less is more in horror.
-Player interest is key: Make sure you do not lose it. It’s what made the campaign happen and will cut your own workload in half.
-Scale the threat carefully: Don’t drag your heels for weeks before the Big Reveal but don’t shove it in their face right away. Make them work for it and guide them so they can discover it on their own. They’ll think they earned it and you’ll be the crowned King of Awesome.
“The King in the Table’s Top! The King in the Table’s Top!â€
-You are not the Lord of Terror: Or you might be. I sure as hell am not, which is why I wrote this guide, as an experienced Horror GM to those starting off. Maybe you can make your players shit their pants or cry with the flick of a word. But if you’re a regular schmuck, know this:
By following the steps on this article, even in the loosest sense, you’ve made something entirely your own and it will show and your players will love it. Yes, writing it down might not get you a publication, but it will get you the respect and interaction you are looking for in your players.
And that, son, is a fucking win right there.
Addendum:
On the subject of shitty movies, I just realized I did not mention that other piece of shit everyone keeps referring to as ‘da scariest moveh of ull tiem’,
Rosemary’s Baby:
More shit happens in this trailer than in the entire film. Rosemary’s baby is a lullaby of a horror movie that’s slow as fuck and doesn’t lead up to anything and ends right when the director and the crew are done jacking off and the audience gets invested.
“But Kostas, this was made in the 70’s. Movie pacing was slow in the 70’s.†Okay, asshole, I’m game. Let’s look at another awesome scary movie made in the 70’s.
Oh shit! Slow but well-crafted pacing, a great premise and a whole load of scary yet awesome shit taking place constantly! Hmmm, well I guess Rosemary’s Baby is horse-dookie after all.
PROTIP for all of you cunts supporting this mindless loop that exists about Rosemary’s Baby:just because your artfag older brother, your dad or your mom like that piece of shit, doesn’t oblige you to like it too. You’ve got your own fucking taste and things like a pregnant woman crying over everything for 2 hours and a scene where an ape-devil sorta has sex with her in her sleep might not be your cup of tea. So please, for the love of God Internet, grow some balls!
They’re bouncy, colorful and loads of fun! Bitches also love them.
