The poignant opening scene of Carlota Pereda’s provocative horror drama Piggy establishes that the Spanish director hasn’t just expanded but elaborated the troublesome themes her 2018 short film of the same name addresses in merely 14 minutes. Sociable sadism, passive power, and the confusing ability of revenge to be both cathartic and contaminating are at the hurting heart of this unusual teenie slasher.
Published by Puppet Combo’s Torture Star Video, Jordan King and Henry Hoare’s post-apocalyptic video game Night at the Gates of Hell embodies a zealous homage to zombie cinema and survival horror games of the past. Like Bloodwash, Torture Star video’s preceding game, Night at the Gates of Hell pays tribute to Italian horror cinema – this time to the gore-drenched work of Lucio Fulci and Bruno Mattei. Unlike its predecessor, though, Night at the Gates of Hell is combat-heavy, longer in duration, and, above all else, full of flesh-eating monstrosities!
Players of Night at the Gates of Hell take control of David, a widowed man fighting for survival in a world overrun by the undead. Throughout his journey, David meets a variety of bizarre characters, including a small child (who may in fact be an adult masquerading as a child) and a perpetually naked prisoner. Characters from Bloodwash also appear in Night at the Gates of Hell, such as the loveable nice-guy Stan and the Creepy Guy, who cameos as a zombie in the game’s second level. Adding to the game’s range of characters is a plethora of enemies, with Night at the Gates of Hell boasting eighty-five unique zombie character models: that’s more than the number of zombie character models used in Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil 2 (2019), and Resident Evil 3 (2020) combined. Read more
2022 is the 90th anniversary of the many amazing classic horror films that were released in 1932, among them Freaks, Island of Lost Souls, The Most Dangerous Game, The Old Dark House, The Mummy, and White Zombie. To mark this anniversary, Horror Homeroom’s sixth special issue takes up classic horror, which we’re defining as any film released prior to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho – the film that saw the birth of ‘modern’ horror.
We have an array of fabulous essays that explore witchcraft and rise of documentary horror in Benjamin Christensen’s Swedish silent film Häxan (1922); the difference of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) – as well as the later Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Son of Frankenstein (1939) – from Mary Shelley’s novel; Frankenstein as a film about autism; imperialism and the continuing struggle over artifacts in The Mummy (1932); the resonances of Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) in American Horror Story: Freak Show; representations of mental illness in Bedlam (1946); the 3-D film craze that took off in the 1950s; nuclear holocaust and vaccination fallout in The Werewolf (1956); and representations of colonialism in Hammer’s Dracula (1958).
Our authors are: Erin Harrington, Alissa Burger, Margaret Yankovich, Jessica Parant (of Spinsters of Horror), Aíne Norris, Josh Grant-Young, Katherine Cottle, Zack Kruse, Justin Wigard, and Joseph Hsin-shun Chang. Our cover illustration is by Andrew Foley.
We want to thank them for their brilliant and thoughtful work.
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.
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
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