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Posted on September 2, 2022

Return of the Zombie Salesman: A Review of Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse

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Picture this: you are playing a video game about a zombie outbreak. Perhaps your avatar is struggling to survive as undead enemies hunt them in claustrophobia-inducing environments, like Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine in Resident Evil (1996). Then again, maybe your avatar is the one doing the hunting, slaughtering hordes of zombies with relative ease as Frank West and Juliet Starling can in Dead Rising (2006) and Lollipop Chainsaw (2012), respectively. Either way, you are likely imagining the following scenario for your hypothetical video game: a zombie outbreak has occurred, and the living must escape from, or do battle with, the undead to survive.

Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, which originally released for the Xbox in 2005 and was re-released on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch in 2021, is a zombie video game. Yet, in a subversion of the above-mentioned scenario, Stubbs the Zombie has players take on the role of a zombie: an undead salesman by the name of Edward “Stubbs” Stubblefield to be precise. In Stubbs the Zombie, the goal of the playable character is a wholesome one; Stubbs must find a way of reuniting with his love interest, a Marilyn Monroe lookalike named Maggie Monday. Yet, despite his wholesome quest, as an undead monstrosity Stubbs is a harbinger of death.

Posted on August 26, 2022

The Top 10 Horror Moments in the Batman Cinematic Universe

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While director Matt Reeves may have described the most recent Batman movie, The Batman (2022), as “almost a horror film,” horror as an aesthetic mood or idiom pervades representations of the character and his world across cinematic history. The stylistically and tonally diverse cinematic projects of Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, and Christopher Nolan and now, Matt Reeves, have deployed some quintessential tropes of horror filmmaking in the course of envisioning the caped crusader and his adventures. Batman has served as a convenient and uniquely ingenious cultural device that allowed directors to crystallize the social and political horrors of their times on the cinematic scape. This list consists of the Top 10 Horror moments in the cinematic history of Batman. The scenes are ranked in order of least to most horrifying, with no. 10 being a semi-comical scene that draws on horror aesthetics, and no. 1 being an out-and-out jump-scare moment.

menacing video game character set against a red backdrop

Posted on August 16, 2022

Bloodwash Review: A Giallo-Inspired Horror Video Game Awash with Gore

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Bloodwash is the latest video game to be published by Torture Star Video, a publishing label launched by Puppet Combo, the developer behind notable instances of playable nightmare fuel such as Babysitter Bloodbath (2013), Nun Massacre (2018), and Murder House (2020). Like these games, Bloodwash has a distinctive low-poly style reminiscent of video games from the PS1 era, as well as a story straight out of an old school slasher film.

As pointed out in publicity material for the game, Bloodwash is “giallo-inspired.” In a broad sense, the Italian term Giallo “has become synonymous … with mysteries and thrillers” (Koven, 2013: 204). More specifically, the term has come to describe “the Italian style of psycho-killer movies, which dominated much of Italian vernacular film-making in the 1970s, and, in many respects, were the precursors to the ‘slasher’ films from Canada and the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s” (ibid.) Tropes of Giallo cinema include stylised murder scenes, mysterious killers, and tormented women – three components that feature prominently in the video game, Bloodwash. Read more

Posted on July 31, 2022

From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D. K. Broster

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From the Abyss: Weird Fiction, 1907-1945, by D. K. Broster, edited by Melissa Emdundson (Handheld Press, 2022).

There’s a strange irony in the fact that while the names of Weird authors may be known to fans of the genre for their strange and unsettling visions, many of them were also widely popular for more mainstream writing. E. F. Benson, for example, was not only the author of “spook stories” like the deeply chilling “Caterpillars,” a personal favourite of mine, but became well-known for the camp and sometimes caustic humour of his popular Mapp and Lucia series. Dorothy Kathleen Broster was no different. Although aficionados of the Weird may know her for the oft-anthologised tale of Jamesian transgression and punishment that is “Couching at the Door,” it was the Jacobite Trilogy of Scottish histories that made her, as editor Melissa Edmundson points out, “a household name” to the extent that many readers simply assumed she was herself a Scotsman. Should it be surprising that a writer works in different genres and modes? No, but it is surprising when those genres are so opposed to each other – in Broster’s case, deeply researched depictions of historical reality on one hand and, on the other, tales which delve into the world’s occasional bouts of un-reality.

Posted on July 22, 2022

Hunky Punks: on Alex Garland’s ‘Men’ (2022)

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Certainly in the 1970s, both in Britain and America, there was a kind of movement of people leaving the cities – which had started to become polluted, overcrowded, sort of overheated – and trying to find better lives out in the countryside; and in doing so, they encounter both nature, but also the people who live with nature, and that’s very much a sort of class and cultural tension, but it’s also an environmental tension.

– Mark Pilkington, Strange Attractor Press, in Kier-La Janise’s ‘Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror’ (2021)

Perhaps the most unnerving Folk Horror to deal with these phenomena – with the ‘tension[s]’ attendant on urban flight – is ‘Baby’ (1976): the fourth episode of Nigel Kneale’s ATV series ‘Beasts’. Six months pregnant (and so middle-class that she still calls her father ‘Daddy’), Jo (Jane Wymark) has agreed to go rural with her husband, Peter (Simon MacCorkingdale) – a frustrated vet, hellbent on living out his Cottagecore fantasies. Read more