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Showing posts with the label horror

Hitching a Ride on the Ghoul Bus: Treehouses of Horror and the Freedom of Halloween Episodes

The Halloween Episode is a rarity among rarities, a riddle wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in wax paper. In episodic shows, the passage of time is generally ignored - it draws too much attention to the artificiality of the premise and questions how the world of the setting syncs chronologically with the world of the audience. On top of that, when holiday episodes do come along, they generally have certain expectations of tone and theme - particularly when it comes to Christmas. Halloween episodes, though, are something different: the only real expectation is that they’re going to break from the normal “reality” of the show. They don’t necessarily have to be scary (or even have the trappings of scary things), but they do have to be weird. In some cases, particularly with more serialized shows, this shift allows for a new perspective in the ongoing story, a different way of seeing the narrative that will put past and future events in a new context. My favorite example of this would be Mill

Analyzing Analyzing Horror

There's something of a cottage industry in dissecting people's interest and love of horror media - I've certainly delved into the discussion , myself. Nonetheless, the sheer number of words put into understanding the genre's appeal is simply staggering , to the point where I find myself asking why horror is widely subjected to unique scrutiny rarely applied to other genres. (Well, maybe porn, but I'm certainly not going to unpack that here.) So, for today's Spooky Season post, we're going to look into why the quest to understand horror's popularity remains a topic as perennial and evergreen as... well, as horror itself. After all, what's scarier than getting meta with media? To start with, a lot of these articles present an engagement with horror that I find... odd. Many focus on the psychological effect of the fear response, the adrenaline rush that comes with being scared (from the safe distance afforded by being an audience), and even some weird

Some Great Pumpkins (We Think) For Your Games

Orange gourds and their kin are popping up all over. Halloween decorations are starting to dot the North American landscape. “Basic" people (we're told) are rushing to the shops to get themed lattes. The smell of the fall season is in the air, and the time has come to bring that fall feeling into our tabletop games. And I’m not just talking about the Risus Pumpkin Spice Edition ... no, this week we’re talking about the pumpkins themselves! From the smallest squashes to the greatest of orange fruits (yes, pumpkins are a fruit, not a vegetable!) pumpkins dominate the fall season. And what better way to bring all that autumn-ness into our games than by incorporating this old favorite. And just how will we do that? Grab yourself a slice of pumpkin pie or bread (or maybe some pumpkin soup? Roasted pumpkin? You pick!) and join Never Say Dice as we do a little picking at our pumpkin patches. - A Flavored Text The quickest and easiest way to get fall, and pumpkins, into your game is t

Small Scares for Tiny Tabletoppers

You’re watching a classic scary movie with some younglings and that one scene you think might be a little too much for them is about to come up. Do you cover their eyes? Make sure their ears are covered too? Use the remote to quickly skip past it? Or maybe you let them take in some mild horror and deal with the psychological fallout afterward? It would be so much easier if you had just a little more control of what's going on, some way to dial back the scares a tad or curtail the number of killings. Lucky for you, your spooky entertainment isn’t limited to TV specials, movies, and books. You can take the great artform of the scary ghost story and bring it to your own tabletop games, even when you have a younger audience. If fantasy gaming is more than your thing than horror (monsters like werewolves and vampires notwithstanding), there are still settings and adventures that mix the spooky with the sword-and-sorcery, such as Ravenloft and Ghosts of Saltmarsh for Dungeons and Drago

Dracula and Difficulty

"Difficulty" is a word that invariably comes up in discussion of games of any sort. It's a setting in electronic games. It's a skill check in tabletop games. It's the basis for heated arguments about the relationship between creators and players , between accessibility and experience . But, for all of this, can we really define difficulty as it relates to games? It's a term that can mean all kinds of things in all kinds of situations, but, at its core, it's about the way that audiences engage with stories and their stakes. And speaking of stakes... As I've mentioned previously in this blog, I started reading the original Dracula in October out of some lunatic idea of looking at the Castlevania series as an adaptation of the original novel. (Which may still happen someday, who knows what horrors the future will bring.) Life being what it is, it took significantly longer than I'd originally planned and I only finished the book yesterday. While focu

Creeping (Un)death!

We’ve once again entered that month full of spookiness. Witches, goblins, bats, and other creepy crawlies abound. One particular category of creature has been stuck in our skulls of late, and that's the undead. From skeletons to vampires and zombies, and a great number of spirit types in between, the undead are a large part of the creatures that populate the Halloween season. While scary ghost stories might appear at Christmas as well, this time of year sees a surge of interest in movies, books, and games featuring the undead. Though they appear in stories set year-round, this is when they get their chance to shine in the moonlight. Something's been troubling me though: while there are notable exceptions, the majority of the undead that appear in our stories are humanoid. Why is that and should we work to change it? -A A : The question of why our undead tend to be humanoid can be difficult to answer. It could simply be a matter of depiction - human/humanoid undead are just eas

Restless Dreams: Horror, Fantasy, Gaming, and Emotional Logic

The calendar tells us that it's October, and while it may not feel like it outside, this is officially the season for spooks and scares. Given the time of year and the twenty-year anniversary of its release (and also of my owning it) the next game in my backlog playthrough was obvious: 2001's Silent Hill 2 . Much has already been written about this game (there's a reason it's on so many "Best Games of All Time" lists, after all), so this post will be neither explanation nor analysis, but rather a exploration of the way horror blurs the lines between the world that we know exists, and the way we feel it exists... and the way that games, both electronic and tabletop, are uniquely capable of embodying this dichotomy. Given my love of horror and all things surreal, it's kind of surprising that it's taken me this long to actually finish the game. At the outset, it was because I felt obligated to play the original Silent Hill first, even though I was va