Now, maybe the reaction has been more heated than strictly warranted, given the many more pressing worries we all have in the world today. Here on Substack, had some sensible words on the subject, which help to put the change in perspective. He pointed out that such a change would hardly be a first for an industry that, in its early days, used to print hundred-page manuals full of bespoke lore and illustrations, and now manifestly no longer does that. He also alludes to the fact that many of the best new games today are by necessity digital-only already, as they come from the indie side of the industry rather than from the big-money trend-chasers.

As true as this is, I still can’t help but feel the change as a loss - maybe not a huge loss in the grand scheme of things, but a real loss nonetheless. If I were to give a hot take on why it feels that way, I’d suggest that it has something to do with the chronic uncertainty of modern life, particularly for those in the 20 to 40 demographic that make up a majority of gamers. At this point, any change tends to feel like the ground quaking under our feet.

In a way, the fact that games are a pleasure and an indulgence, rather than a strictly defined survival need, makes such a disruption hit harder rather than softening it. For many of us, video games are a necessary refuge, and unilateral, supply-side changes affecting whether and how we can access the games we love are therefore felt especially keenly.

And it must be said that, whatever the reasons, it’s beyond annoying that we’ll likely have to digitally re-purchase games we already bought long ago. All things considered, we’d be wise to hang on to the consoles we have for as long as we can. God knows, RAM ain’t getting any cheaper any time soon.

What I will say, though, is that if nothing else, the news has made me think about the games I value in a different way, and specifically about what it is that makes them so attractive as physical artifacts.

For context, I am (to my mild shame1) the kind of adult who still buys a few action figures a year, and I tend to keep the boxes, not because I’m a ‘brand new in box’ e-commerce grindset person, but simply because I like boxes. I like the colours, the typefaces, the descriptions and the pictures. Most of all, I like the excitement made manifest in a box. A box isn’t just a box - it’s promise and enticement, a touch of magic to take the edge off.

What is true of toy boxes can also be true of game boxes, particularly when we consider the actual contents - not the discs, which are all pretty much just discs, but the printed extras that we often used to happen upon. These became rarer and rarer through the 2010s, and in the 2020s you’re lucky to get a sheet with a code on it, but the fact that extras were non-standard made them all the more exciting.

Something about such extras felt distinctly human - as if a developer somewhere along the line had been thinking of you, the end-user, with something other than the saturnine indifference that many big studios today seem to feel towards anyone who’s not prepared to fork out a hundred US dollars for a game they might not enjoy.

Maps I have loved

Being the age that I am, and the type of person that I am, my early life was pretty much defined by Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the corresponding boom in fantasy novels. Around this time, I owned a tie-in book with a large two-page printed map of Middle Earth, as seen in the movies, which I used to gaze upon while imagining going on quests.

This was, of course, based closely on Tolkien’s own map illustrations. Maps are referenced many times in The Lord of the Rings and particularly The Hobbit, where Bilbo’s fascination with maps is mentioned more than once, and Thorin’s map of the Lonely Mountain, with its secret moon-letter inscription and opaque instructions, is an important plot device.

For decades now, it has been more or less mandatory for a fantasy novel to begin with a map, and it’s also not unheard of for a game box to contain a map of the world we’re about to take our first steps in.

Skyrim and Oblivion

The first game I played with a map in the box was, of course, Skyrim. How could it not be Skyrim?

The game box boasts a glossy printed map, carefully folded to fit. In contrast to the in-game map, which is fully 3D and complete with clouds and effects, the printed map is made up to look like an in-universe artifact, with an aged parchment appearance, a stylised compass showing the cardinal directions, and the name of the cartographer.

The archaic, yellow-and-brown, hand-drawn style is highly evocative of Jackson’s Middle Earth map, with shaded mountain ranges, dark highways, and dotted red lines describing the borders of each jarldom, and insignias marking the hold capitals. The surrounding provinces aren’t shown in detail, but are each named, putting Skyrim in its proper context.

With this fine map, Skyrim was following in its predecessor’s footsteps. Oblivion included a similar printed map by the same fictional cartographer, showing the province of Cyrodiil, heart of the Empire.

The Witcher 3

Given the long-established relationship between maps and the fantasy genre, and the emphasis on adventure, discovery and exploration in roleplaying games, it’s perhaps unsurprising that The Witcher 3 would take a leaf out of Bethesda’s book, including an especially handsome and colourful map in its box.

Contrary to the heavy geopolitical overtones of The Witcher’s narrative, its map is quite loose and more vibes-based. The lands of the North are shown as densely populated by monsters, grim-looking soldiers, and general ne’er do wells, all as lovingly realised on paper as in the game. It’s a great preview of the art style’s incredible quality, giving the player a tantalising sense of the sheer scale of what they are about to experience.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Speaking of scale and quality, Red Dead Redemption 2 would also include a very impressive map rendered in a fussy 19th century style, all precise lines and contoured landscapes, and bordered all around with black and white pictures of landmarks from its fictionalised vision of Gilded Age America. The map is double sided, showing the south-western state of New Austin (John Marston’s original stomping ground) on the reverse, which has a special significance for fans of the first game.

In RDR2’s map, there is a nice resonance with the story’s central conflicts - in the map, we can see the romance of wide open spaces in a state of tension with the cartographer’s impulse to impose limits and establish ownership.

Charts

Maps aren’t the only artifacts we can discover in game boxes. For me, two printed charts also spring to mind.

Metro Exodus

Metro Exodus, the best two-legged Watership Down simulator on the market, has many things going for it. It’s intensely Slavic, people ramble about Dostoyevsky, your wife gets a horrible respiratory disease, and much of it takes place on a Soviet steam train. What it also has, though, is an inspired menagerie of post-apocalyptic wildlife, largely carnivorous, and this roster of creatures was the basis for a handsome printed chart.

From the winged demons that rule the skies, to the giant shrimps that infest every waterway from Moscow to Vladivostok, the whole gang is here, and all are nicely labelled with their names in cyrillic letters.

Fallout 4

Fallout 4, it must be said, has many things wrong with it. Is it an okay action-adventure game? Sure. Is it an RPG? Absolutely not. Is it a good Fallout game? Not really, no.

But if we can say one thing for Fallout 4, it’s that it does look nice, and it’s obvious that a huge amount of work went into its in-game art, from the interfaces, to the magazines, to the whole-ass retro minigames playable on cassette tapes for the Pip-Boy.

The game’s fully-animated perk chart, seen on the level up screen, was rendered as a lovely full-colour poster, with a nice sturdy quality to the print.

Reversible covers

The reversible cover was (the past tense somewhat saddens me) also a fairly common design feature of the video game box, often used to great effect. Typically, the ‘standard’ cover of the game would be a more commercially oriented design, crowded with titles, taglines, credits and calls to action, while the inner side would be more aesthetically oriented.

For example, Fallout 4’s standard cover shows the power armour helmet, with a back full of text, while the reverse is a panorama of the wasteland, with a Vault-suited protagonist gazing out towards the iconic Red Rocket gas station, dog in tow. As with a map, there’s a sense of freedom and adventure, of a new world to discover.

Mass Effect 3 would also make good use of the concept, allowing the player a choice of two covers showing either the standard male or female Commander Shepard, as you prefer.

For me, though, the reversible cover that sticks in my mind most is the one that has been stuck to my bedroom door for several years. Bioshock Infinite has a fine but unremarkable front cover, but the reverse? Holy shit.

This gorgeous scarlet and monochrome version of the cover foregrounds Songbird, the tragic biomechanical giant, with the false-utopia of Columbia among the clouds in the background.

Adornments frame the text and pictures, and on the back we have the key quote that the game opens with:

The mind of the subject will desperately struggle to create memories where none exist.

This is, of course, a mild spoiler to clue the player in on Booker’s unreliable-narrator status, and really deserves to be centred on the cover, as it is on the reverse.

The Proto-Steelbook

Steelbooks have been fairly ubiquitous in games and DVDs for a long time, peaking in the 2010s. Some people hate them, for reasons somewhat obscure to me - I myself own only one, of an early type, but it happens to be enough of a treasured possession to deserve a mention here.

The Force Unleashed: Ultimate Sith Edition

This is not the first time in recent months that I have written about Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. In a previous article on horror in non-horror games, I touched on TFU’s horror-infused ending, in which the hero is transformed into a terrifying cyborg servitor, taking Darth Vader’s place as the Emperor’s chief enforcer.

This doomed non-canon ending became a springboard into a dark mirror-universe, in which the heroes of the original trilogy are hunted down by the new Sith Lord, and all hope is lost. The expansion missions were available by download, but also through a special ‘Ultimate Sith Edition’ (tm), featuring a stylish steelbook box loaded with goodies.

Most notably, the special edition features a small art book with a foreword by the game’s lead writer, discussing the ideas (‘What if…?’) behind the expansions and the design process. This book shows a series of paintings of various iconic characters from the game, most notably the hero’s cyborg character designs. Each box had one of these paintings as a special lithograph on card, and I was lucky enough to get one of the best.

Closing thoughts

While I can’t help but feel that the loss of physical games is a loss, I would not want to end this on too downbeat a note. So, what I will say is that, whatever the big companies decide to do (short of killing us with robots), the demand for tangible representations of the games we love will remain, and the market will hopefully rise to meet it.

There is already a huge, thriving industry for fanart, be it hand-crafted, traditionally printed, or indeed 3D printed, and that industry isn’t going anywhere. I suspect that, with the loss of physical games, we will see more and more fanart by way of compensation.

We’ve seen similar things before with the loss of physical music - on markets like Etsy, I often see retro mock-ups of video game soundtracks on cassette tapes, and video game themes on music boxes. Perhaps in the future we’ll see mock-up game boxes from upcycled DVD cases, with original painted covers?

As Jeff Goldblum used to say, life finds a way, and while there’s life, there’s art.

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In 1997, the Fallout series made its raucous debut, and got off to a flying start with its intro cinematic. The part that I’m interested in, for the purposes of this article, is actually only the first half of the whole three minute clip, and features not a word of spoken dialogue, but tells us everything we need to know about how things got so bad in the first place.

The game opens with the Ink Spots’ song ‘Maybe,’ which plays to the midpoint. This wistful, nostalgic tune has a sharp dissonance with the images it accompanies, which are presented as a series of pre-apocalypse commercials. Between ads for Vault-Tec bunkers and Mr Handy robots, we see grainy black and white footage of US soldiers (‘our brave boys…’) occupying the recently annexed Canada.

Two men in power armour appear to exchange words as they stand over a kneeling prisoner with his hands tied behind his back, then one quickly steps up to shoot him in the head. For a long moment, he lies twitching on the ground, prompting a second shot to finish him off.

Looking up, the soldier notices the camera recording him, but shows no anxiety at having been caught in the act. He cheerfully waves, and the image is soon replaced by a call to action - ‘Buy War Bonds.’ The next spot is an ad for a Corvega sports car.

The commercials continue, and gradually the camera pans out, showing that the old broadcast is playing on a TV in the burnt-out husk of a city. The music echoes in the desolation, stutters, and finally cuts out, giving way to silence.

With very few words (and no dialogue), Fallout tells us everything we need to know about pre-war America. We have the sense of a society totally inured to violence, where jingoism has run riot and made the value of a human life trivial.

With this short clip, nuclear war no longer seems like a far-fetched premise, but an inevitability for such a society.

The fact that Fallout begins with this pre-apocalyptic flashback, before the narration even gets into the nuclear war, immediately establishes the series’ preoccupation with the past. As Ulysses would tell us (at great length), we must know history to understand the present, and therefore we have to understand what America was like before the Great War to understand how it is after.

This central concern gives the name of the series a double-meaning - in today’s English, the word fallout has come to mean not just literal nuclear fallout, but the lingering consequences of any destructive event. As we’ll see, Fallout as a series is less about literal radioactive fallout, and more about the psychological effects of past violence, and the lessons that survivors learn (or fail to learn) from it.

Hostile architecture

The sense of a belligerent pre-war America headed for disaster is everywhere in the original Fallout games, which established the visual language of the series as a whole. Aggressive art-deco faces glower from the ruins of Necropolis, and the Enclave’s sinister oil rig fortress is similarly adorned. In later games, female figures with classical helmets evoke furies and valkyries, while forbidding, hyper-masculine faces loom from the rubble of D.C.

There is something distinctly off about the aesthetics of pre-war America, and we can infer that these strange architectural traditions must have developed during the decades-long Resource Wars, which heralded the atomic Great War.

It’s suggestive that no such faces can be found anywhere in the post-war architecture of the wasteland - the simple adobe buildings of Shady Sands show a sharp break in continuity with pre-war America, and sure enough, its fair-minded farming community has little in common with the warlike spirit of old.

But the further we get from Shady Sands, the more Old World remnants we encounter. To the south is Junktown, an outpost ringed by a wall of rusting pre-war cars, just like those we see in the intro commercials. Further on lies the Hub, the trading centre of post-nuclear California, where grizzled merchants and caravan hands shelter in pre-war ruins of dark stone, hauling their baggage on wagons made from old car parts.

As the player continues to explore the desolation of the south, the game gradually assumes more and more of a gothic character. Undead ghouls lurk in the burned-out ruins of Bakersfield (now known as Necropolis), and the Super Mutants that occupy their water shed can only have been inspired by Frankenstein’s monster. What once was Los Angeles is now the Boneyard, and fittingly, the story ends with a battle under a deco-punk cathedral.1 Death and decay are everywhere.

In gothic stories, the past often intrudes on the present, and accordingly, when the player goes looking for the source of the mutants terrorising the wasteland, the trail doesn’t lead to some cave in the wilderness, but to a high-tech pre-war facility, where humans are being deliberately exposed to a man-made virus.

As we learn, the FEV (forced evolution virus) was being used before the war to turn humans into super-soldiers, but post-war, the same virus transformed an infected survivor into a unique mutant called the Master. Over time, he learned to physically absorb human beings, including their conscious minds and memories, and came to believe that by this method, he could combine all humans into a harmonious collective that would never go to war again.

Hobbesian praxis

The Master’s core belief - that humans are fundamentally destructive, and have to be forced to cooperate - is a response to the violent history we see in the intro cinematic, but it is also a continuation of it. The nuclear war is seen as proof that humans are essentially bad, and this conclusion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, justifying further acts of violence. The Master’s pessimistic idea about human nature is a constant refrain throughout the series, and again and again, we’re shown variations of where this premise leads.

New Vegas’ Caesar imposes a brutal regime on everyone under his rule, using terror tactics to make independent tribes into subjects and slaves. According to his rhetoric, this is the only way to restore order and civility to the wasteland.

Dead Money’s Father Elijah uses prisoners to scout out the Sierra Madre casino, and forces them to wear explosive collars, believing that cooperation is impossible without the threat of death.

In the TV series, Hank MacLean forces mind-control implants on prisoners, wiping their memories and making them into docile, perpetually happy slaves, which he claims will bring about a peaceful utopia.

If Fallout writers love one thing, it is a talky villain, so of course all of these villains get to make their case, and the best of them manage to do so in a sort of plausible way. It’s credible that they all believe what they are saying to some degree, or else are trying to convince themselves as much as the protagonist.

However, we also learn just enough to know that each villain (with the exception of the Master2) also has more self-serving motives, which their gloomy verdicts on human nature just so happen to justify pursuing.

Caesar, as a bookish prisoner of a warrior tribe, started down his path out of pure self-preservation, but as time went on, it also became about ego and the thrill of power. His intellectual justifications are very woolly and seat-of-the-pants if looked at closely, and the sense is that these are post-hoc explanations for what he was already doing. His lack of a succession plan is a clear hint that his whole project isn’t about a long-term civilising mission: it’s about him.

Elijah is perfectly candid about his obsession with the wealth and technology of the Sierra Madre. He dreams of building (and ruling) a whole nation via exploding collars, military holograms and [checks notes] vending machines, but, as Dog/God (a Super Mutant with a split personality) tells the player, Elijah’s real motive lies in his old age and looming mortality - he knows that he does not have long left, and is desperate to leave some kind of legacy that will outlive him.

Hank’s wider agenda remains unclear, although it seems that he is in league with the Enclave (the remnants of the US government), which makes sense in terms of his patriotic rhetoric and his hostility to the NCR.3 His true motive is perhaps best revealed in a scene where he has Biff, a brainwashed NCR Ranger, acting as a servant and waiting on him at the dinner table, though he is perfectly capable of pouring his own drinks. Hank simply likes having power over others, and everything else flows from that.

It’s also worth noting that all of these villains’ stated beliefs are placed in doubt by their respective narratives. Caesar claims that conquest and enslavement are necessary to restore civility; meanwhile, the NCR - which reviles slavery - surpasses the Legion in prosperity, territory and above all stability.

Similarly, Elijah’s belief that greed will inevitably cause his captive scouts to turn on each other is really a reflection of his own character, and is contradicted by the cooperation between the player, Christine, and even Dog/God,4 who can all peacefully part ways in the end, leaving most of the treasure behind.

Hank’s claim that the Legion will inevitably destroy New Vegas if not for his technology is yet to be resolved, but is thrown into doubt by the NCR’s previous victories over the Legion at Hoover Dam.

The Enclave

Having started with a look at the dystopian character of pre-apocalyptic America, it’s also worth looking at how Fallout imagines such a society might survive and seek to reproduce itself in the post-apocalypse.

The Enclave is the post-war remnant of the US government, which puts its power armoured troops in a direct lineage with the anonymous war criminals from Fallout 1’s intro. Appropriately, the faction is therefore a total basket case, which makes the Legion look reasonable by comparison. Led in Fallout 2 by a sleazy old man named Dick Richardson,5 the Enclave is American exceptionalism on steroids, and has achieved levels of racism previously thought impossible.

To the Enclave, everyone outside their own ‘pure human’ lineage is a mutant, and therefore a threat to the purity of their race. As such, they plan to wipe out 99% of the human species with a modified version of the FEV, and to this end, they send out squads of soldiers to abduct wastelanders for human experimentation, killing whoever resists.

In Fallout 2’s introduction, they are shown machine-gunning a family of Vault dwellers, and in the player’s first encounter with their troops in the desert, we see them wipe out another family, not even sparing the children. Meanwhile, in the TV series, our introduction to the Enclave shows their scientists tossing newborn puppies under a certain weight into an incinerator.6

Whereas the Master is on some level a tragic figure, who wished for a better future but learned the wrong lessons from history, the Enclave simply hasn’t learned anything at all, and doesn’t want to. To them, the guys invading countries, shooting bound prisoners, and using nuclear weapons had the right idea, but just didn’t do it efficiently enough.

Fittingly, the designs for the Enclave soldiers and vehicles are inspired not by anything human, but by predatory insects: their power armour has a much more curvy, organic look than the angular suits we see in the first game, with a rounded carapace around the shoulders, bug-like eyes, and a breathing apparatus reminding us of an insect’s mouthparts.

Similarly, their vertibird transports take after dragonflies, with tinted glass windows like compound eyes, landing gear like legs, narrow tails and wide wings. This insect theme hints at the cold, social Darwinist character of the Enclave - they are all hindbrain, and it’s hard to feel any sense of common humanity with them.

The Enclave would claim to be the only population of ‘pure humans’ left in the world, yet their insect aesthetics and reptile-brained worldview tells us how little that actually means. Ironically, their sapient Deathclaw slaves are shown to be gentler, wiser and more ‘human’ in a sense than their masters.

Fallout 3 would build on this irony, depicting the Enclave’s new leader as a super-computer rather than a human,7 and of course Frank Horrigan, the Enclave’s top soldier in 2, is a full-blown Super Mutant who accuses everyone else of being ‘muties.’

Not a Fallout villain

Before concluding, I would like to mention another post-apocalyptic story which is written from the perspective of someone who might as well have been a Fallout villain. This is a man who combines pessimism, misanthropy, and a selfish pragmatism. He makes the same essential assumptions about human nature as the likes of Caesar, and draws similar conclusions. He is not a Fallout villain, but he’s the platonic ideal of one.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the first Hunger Games prequel, is a kind of villain bildungsroman, following the future President Snow in his early years. Snow’s society, the Capitol, is pretty much what you would get if you combined the Enclave8 with Caesar’s Legion,9 which is to say that it’s a total horror show, complete with mad science, blood sports, rampant militarism, and industrial-strength racism.10

The book begins with several epigrams, first and foremost one from Hobbes’ Leviathan:

Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre: and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.

This gloomy polemic by Hobbes, who was writing in support of absolute monarchy, hangs constantly over the narrative. Snow’s mentor, the military scientist Doctor Gaul,11 seeks to model a Hobbesian state of nature - the ‘war of all against all’ - in the arena, believing that this is the natural state of mankind, and that the Capitol people mustn’t be allowed to forget it.

The Games are a symbolic collective punishment of the District people, and a ritual rallying the Capitol people together against them. For Doctor Gaul, though, they are also just good politics - the Capitol’s continued brutality towards the District people in the Games is itself a pretext for further oppression, to stop the Districts from retaliating. In this way, the Capitol can extend its tyrannical rule indefinitely, and justify anything in the name of order and security.

Although the young Snow’s chauvinist, de-facto racist12 beliefs are challenged when he becomes involved with a District girl, Gaul’s ideology is seductive to him - his early experiences of hunger, poverty and fear have left him with a jaded view of his fellow man, which he ultimately embraces, only briefly entertaining the alternative.

Snow has his ideological notions, but in the end, as with Caesar, it is self-interest that clinches it - when an exiled Snow sees an opportunity to worm his way back into the Capitol elite by selling out a District friend, he promptly takes it, and stands guard while the sentence is carried out. From this point on, his fate is pretty much sealed, and by the end of the novel he has shot and possibly killed the girl he once thought of running away with.

The film adaptation is worth a look, but it is outclassed by the novel,13 which I would heartily recommend, even those who are not traditionally Hunger Games fans - third person/past tense looks good on Suzanne Collins, and she makes the young Snow a horrible yet fascinating figure, reprehensible, but unsettlingly human.

Closing thoughts

If a Fallout villain believes that cooperation is impossible without coercion, then what does a Fallout hero believe? The answer, of course, is ‘anything you want them to’ - you, after all, are the player, and, assuming we’re not playing Fallout 4, this is your character to define, and your word is the word of God. You yourself might choose to roleplay as a Fallout villain, and ally with the likes of Caesar, if you so wish.

But if a Fallout hero is a rejection of a Fallout villain’s philosophy, then the moral lessons of the series are timeless, simple, but nonetheless important:

We do not have to assume the worst of everybody! Cooperation is possible, even in the wasteland! Golden Rule, motherfucker!

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The answer to all of these is ‘yes, but - ’

I have played enough scrawny characters to know that, even if the dice and numbers are not the main attraction for you, being mechanically weak can still sort of suck. A disappointing dice roll is always frustrating, because it slows down the game, whether that means drawing out combat or needlessly complicating the flow of a roleplaying scene. A strong character helps to keep the game moving, rather than grinding to a halt.

The ‘but’ is that you do not want, under any circumstances, to be a power-gamer. Players who put stats and abilities above all else are a plague - they have a competitive relationship with other players, and often an adversarial relationship with the DM, who is treated as an opponent to be overpowered rather than another player there to take part and have fun. They also tend to have little interest in roleplaying, which is not great when you’re playing a roleplaying game.

Speaking of roleplay, a good backstory is absolutely essential for any long-term campaign. An actor wouldn’t set foot on a stage without a thorough and definite understanding of their character, and nor should you, particularly since you are going to be making up every line and stage direction on the spot.

The ‘but’ is that you actually need to tell people your backstory at some stage, and many players are painfully self-conscious doing that - I can’t tell you how many times I have seen players just clam up whenever questioned or prompted,1 to the point that real-life weeks and months will go by without your characters gaining any trust or confidence in one another. Schroedinger’s backstory - which we are assured exists, but is never revealed - is often the same in practice as having no backstory at all.

Unfortunately, when given these three non-exclusive attributes - strong, backstoried, funny - many people breeze straight past the first two and opt for funny. I say unfortunately not because I’m a total killjoy,2 but because people tend to underestimate how difficult a funny character is to pull off, and also how limiting this starting point can be.

In the first place, being funny on purpose is a very different thing from being funny spontaneously - the latter tends to happen naturally when a group of grown-ups get together to play at being elves, and needn’t be forced. On-purpose comedy, on the other hand, is a full-blown art form, which an enormous amount of trial and error goes into behind the scenes. There’s timing, technique, set-up, context, juxtaposition. It’s a very tricky thing, which looks easier than it is, and doesn’t look that easy to begin with.

Of course, playing a funny-by-design character in a tabletop game isn’t exactly like delivering a stand-up routine, but they are similar in that they both involve a deliberate, pre-meditated effort to make someone laugh. The trouble is that a) effort is unsexy,3 and b) it’s often ineffective. We’re often a great deal funnier when we are being ourselves, and reacting to scenarios naturally, than when we are actively trying to perform funny.

The other thing about setting out to play a funny character is that, before we even begin, we have to ask - what is a funny character? If you don’t have a good understanding of the answer to that question, you are in trouble.

The name-pun: your first red flag

To start with, we might want to establish what is not a funny character. In RPG Philosophy’s video on gimmick characters,4 the example he gives of the typical DnD joke character is an ‘Orc War Chef’ - like a war chief but a chef, wears ‘plate armour’ made of kitchen plates, wields skillets as weapons, etc.

For me, this example is blisteringly accurate: in one short-lived Warhammer RPG, a player who is a frequent offender in this category wanted to play a genestealer named ‘Jean Steeler.’5 More recently, someone else introduced a character with a similar name pun, whose comedic gimmicks were already wearing thin at the second session.

RPG Philosophy goes on to make the point that, while these types of throwaway characters might be okay in a one-shot game, they are out of place in any long-term campaign, as they are not going to be able to respond appropriately to more serious story beats, nor are they likely to develop over time. Whereas the tone would usually vary from session to session, a static joke character keeps it artificially anchored in one place, at the cost of others’ enjoyment.

Funny, but not just funny

Returning to the question of what a funny character is - and, more broadly, what kinds of funny characters could actually be dynamic enough for long-term roleplay - examples of funny yet substantial characters are everywhere for those with eyes to see:

• Disco Elysium’s Harry DuBois is a very funny character. He is also a desolate, washed-up train-wreck of a man, who has developed amnesia not as a result of any recent shock, but because of a catastrophic break-up seven years ago, combined with the chronic stress of being a detective. As the game puts it, Harry has spent every working day meeting people on the worst days of their lives. Harry is pure tragicomedy,6 and the juxtaposed comedy and drama of the character heighten each other. You could absolutely play a Harry - a character who is superficially funny, but also has real, long-term problems to consider - in an RPG, and if you’re any good at it, it could be the adventure of a lifetime.

  

• Small Prophets’ Michael Sleep is a fairly similar archetype. An eccentric middle-aged man who works in a DIY shop, Michael has a deep sadness in him. His girlfriend Clea disappeared on Christmas Eve years ago, and, though everyone else in his life has moved on and accepted her likely death, Michael clings to the possibility that she might return. His house is packed with boxes of her things, and his living room is still arranged based on a picture of her favourite childhood Christmas, which he had hoped to surprise her with. As the story goes on, he discovers an old book of alchemy, and his sweet but demented father urges him to use it to create homunculi, which will be able to divine Clea’s fate. It is a very funny show, but also an extraordinary drama, and the lighter moments contrast with the more serious to great effect. You could absolutely be a Michael, on a harebrained quest to learn the fate of a lost loved one, in an RPG, and if you do it right, you could be a hell of a lot funnier than Jean Steeler.

  

• Fallout’s Lucy MacLean is another good example, and a fitting one, as she is heavily based on the average Fallout player-character experience. Her naive optimism and folksy speech are comically at odds with the hostile atmosphere of the wasteland, and her efforts to be a peacemaker are frustrated more often than not. However, Lucy is far from a one-note clown, and the drama and comedy of her character operate off the same thing: her humane worldview is contradicted at every turn by the bleakness around her, which takes a toll over time. Having played opposite Lucy-esque characters, I can confirm that a Lucy is a far more interesting, dynamic, and yes, funny PC to interact with than any Orc War Chef could be.

  

• Discworld is bursting with examples of funny but substantial characters. Whether it’s the Watch series or Tiffany Aching, Terry Pratchett was a master at using initially comic characters and scenarios as a springboard to launch into deeper themes. For example, Unseen Academicals is superficially about a group of elderly wizards forming a football team, but it actually centres on class, racism, and the politics around work. The character Nutt is an Orc who has been raised to be the ‘good’ example of his near-extinct race, to prove that they are worthy of existence, but as a result he is a neurotic whose self-worth is inseparably tied to work, and he can’t conceive of himself as having innate value as a person. He is counterpart and love interest to the university cook, Glenda, who is chronically undervalued and dissatisfied with her own working life.7 It’s a serious novel, and offers one of the most refreshing takes on Orcs in fantasy, but it’s also very funny. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Pratchett was himself an avid tabletop roleplayer and video gamer, who spent time playing Oblivion in his later years.

  

Why do we clown?

With so many examples of funny but substantial characters in pop culture, it can be hard to make sense of why so many tabletop players end up making shallow, name-pun characters instead. Surely, this is not the main attraction of the hobby. It’s also very much not what campaigns tend to look like on paper, or indeed on the many actual play podcasts out there, which typically combine comedy and drama.8

The decline of literacy could be part of it: when D&D began in the 70s, roleplayers were readers almost by definition, whereas many players today will not have finished a novel in years, and therefore won’t have come into contact with good, literary comedy like Pratchett’s.

But this still falls short of an explanation - funny but resonant TV is wildly popular, whether it’s Succession, Breaking Bad, or The White Lotus, and has been for decades. In video games, we have Disco Elysium and its offshoots, but also Baldur’s Gate 3, which matches the tonal range of a good D&D campaign with characters like Astarion, who brings high-camp comedy, but also has one of the darkest and most challenging backstories in the game.

My feeling is that the tendency towards joke characters isn’t necessarily rooted in a lack of understanding of what a good character is, or even a lack of desire to play good characters, but rather a defensive impulse. Many would-be roleplayers enter the hobby with the ghosts of disapproving parents and high school bullies looking over their shoulders, and one way of dealing with the resulting stage-fright is to clown instead of actually trying to roleplay.

Of course, it’s totally normal to feel anxious about the performance element of roleplaying games. Any performance is a risk - people might think that your ideas are rubbish, and of course fumbling a story you want to tell is mortifying. If you don’t try to do that, and instead set your sights on lower-hanging fruit, you can reduce the risk of feeling embarrassed, but you also pre-emptively limit your potential enjoyment, and are likely to miss out on the things that attracted you to the hobby in the first place. In my experience, those who play joke characters are always the first to become bored and lose interest in any given campaign, because they’re not really engaging with the interesting bit of the activity.

It’s also worth thinking about the implicit agreement between players when we set out to play these games - the deal with RPGs is that we all risk making fools of ourselves together, and that means we each need to be prepared to be perceived (and judged) by others. If only one or two players are willing to risk embarrassment, while others take cover behind clown personas, you are not sharing equally in the risks and rewards of the game. The result is that it feels less like a group activity, and more like a handful of isolated individuals contributing unevenly to the game, often at cross-purposes with one another.

And the other thing to remember is, trying and failing at anything in public sucks, and that’s also true of failing to make people laugh! If you’re playing a character whose name is their primary punchline, then your comedy routine is pretty much already on life support at session one, and will be dead by the third session at best. In a way, it’s actually easier to play a character who is funny sometimes but serious at others,9 and this approach gives you far more freedom to react naturally to developments in the story.

Therefore, be brave! Do more than the bare minimum! Don’t be a Jean Steeler or an Orc War Chef! Be a sad amnesiac with a hideous tie! Be a wistful alchemist! Be an idealist in a cynical world!

Life is fleetin’!

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5

He was talked out of this by the DM, and instead opted to play a racist bully.

To give a rough sense of my relationship with The Boys, I would class it as a kind of guilty pleasure. With its Amazon label, an Israeli war criminal in a key role, and its never ending deluge of gross-outs, its vibes have always been sour. I would not necessarily encourage anyone to watch it, except for scientific purposes, and if you can avoid giving Bezos money, you should.

Still, The Boys had its good points as a drama, and as a satire it was often funny and true to life. Some would argue that the show’s quality has long been on the decline, though I have to admit that this did not become obvious to me until the final season, which paid critics are insisting is good, while the viewer response is lukewarm at best.

I also found Season 5’s politics more unsatisfactory than usual. We’ll get further into that, but at the top, I will say that this show has lately started putting phrases like ‘chosen people’ and ‘promised land’ into the mouths of Christian nationalists, meanwhile the word Israel remains the only word too dirty for The Boys to say, not even once.

Given the topical nature of the show, and what has dominated the news for the two years of production, the omission is frankly weird, or would be if we didn’t know where Amazon stands (that is, behind the machine-guns), and if the casting hadn’t already provided a substantial hint about its creators’ sympathies.

Wasted time and unmet expectations

One of the most anaemic aspects of the final season was its plot, which ranges from distractingly weak to actually moronic. Of course, you can find plot holes in any number of great works, but, if the story is good enough, we’re usually content to gloss over them, if we notice them at all.

However, I found myself noticing a great deal, which as a rule of thumb is usually a sign that the character drama is no longer good enough to compensate. Most importantly, the show fails to meet any of the expectations set up in the previous seasons, and wastes much time spinning its wheels with B-plots that go nowhere, at the cost of urgency and momentum.

• The season begins with three of the Boys rescued from a not-MAGA internment camp. This is resolved in literally one episode, with sharp tonal whiplash from the far more impactful cliffhanger ending of Season 4, which forecast an end to the status quo and a raising of the stakes. The clear sense was that full-blown fascism had definitively arrived, and all signs were pointing to a sober, meaningful imprisonment storyline.1 Instead, we got about three prison scenes, followed by a swift escape. The rescued three show no signs of any long-term trauma after their year as political prisoners. The few references to their suffering are played for laughs (‘haha forcible cavity searches are so funny’2), and by Episode 2 it’s all business as usual again.

• The virus plotline is distractingly dumb. So, this deadly anti-superhero virus that they spent much of Season 4, and two seasons of a spinoff, hyping up is destroyed by its creator, and then remade by Frenchie from scratch in the span of two episodes. Frenchie’s only relevant experience is cooking meth. It’s like Oppenheimer destroying all of his notes and a high school physics teacher splitting the atom the next morning. As soon as it’s completed, it becomes obsolete when Homelander takes V1. It eventually sort of comes to something, as the virus debate pushes Butcher and Hughie into their long-forecasted confrontation, which in no way diminishes the stupidity of having Frenchie re-create it overnight.

• V1, the substance that makes supes immortal, is the only possible defence against the virus. It strangely becomes a major B-plot, spanning multiple episodes, for friendly supe characters (Kimiko and Starlight) to verbally agonise over whether or not they want to be immortal, when they haven’t even secured the V1 yet, don’t know if it’s safe to use, and are wasting precious time by delaying the use of the virus. As soon as the V1 is found, it becomes a moot point, as it’s promptly used by Homelander. So, what was any of this in aid of? I suppose you could argue that it’s about showing the difference between the good guys and Homelander, but is that news to anyone? A less charitable reading would explain it as filler to pad out the season’s sparse mid-section.

• The possibility of simply quarantining the friendly supes on an island is briefly mentioned by Frenchie, then dropped, though we’ve seen that the virus can’t escape a sealed environment and normal people aren’t carriers.3 This adds to the absurdity of the V1 debate.

• When Homelander shows up at the Boys’ base to look for Sage, he just kind of kills Frenchie and leaves empty-handed, instead of continuing to look for Sage or waiting for the others to return, as he could have done.

• The buildup to the final confrontation is very thin. The only barrier to the Boys’ entry to the White House is one locked door (which they somehow hadn’t anticipated), and a room where people fire bullets at them, though three out of five are immune to bullets. Is this really final episode material? Did they spend literally all of the effects budget on the volcano jizz man?

• The Soldier Boy chest blast power (tm) is A) a total ass-pull of a solution to the Homelander problem, and B) not what it used to be. Once billed as equivalent to a small nuclear blast, now it just knocks you over if you happen to be standing within six feet of it.

  

• The confrontation with Homelander leaves much to be desired. The inevitability of this character snapping and killing millions of people was hyped up for four entire seasons, promised by 5’s promotional art,4 hyped up even harder by his V1 transformation and new delusional disorder, only for the final fight to be the most standard, low-budget, no-frills Boys fight ever. It’s literally just four people punching each other in a room. No cities destroyed, no nukes deployed, nothing. Even Vought Tower remains conspicuously unscathed.5 While Homelander’s humiliating de-powering was anticipated, viewers had every reason to expect more payoff from the final episode of the final season of a show built on violence and suspense.

  

• Soldier Boy did not need to be in this season, and provided nothing of value. He came, he hung around and bickered, he got put back on ice. It bothers me that his status as a nepo-baby fraudster (arguably the most interesting thing about him) remains a footnote, while the body of the article is largely just dick jokes. Also, he does not need a spinoff, and nor does Stormfront.

Re-heated leftovers

What also became obvious in the final season was that many of the show’s main characters had long since been milked for every last drop of drama and development. They don’t sparkle as they used to, so much as wheeze to the finish line with the enthusiasm of the average Amazon employee at the end of a twelve hour shift.

• Hughie’s post-prison angst manifests in the form of a very small amount of relationship tension with Starlight, which quickly dissipates. This feels like a rehash of his previous jealousy when she had to work with her ex, which was kind of better: it introduced a touch of grit and complexity to an otherwise annoyingly straight-laced, unproblematic character. Apart from that, and his rising tension with Butcher (which mostly just boils down to ‘Butcher is a prick’), there isn’t much new with Hughie.

• Kimiko now talks, and I wish she didn’t. She used to speak only in sign language, now she speaks largely in porn references, and has become an old person’s degrading caricature of a young person. One wonders if this was really what the writers had in mind when they conceived of the moment at the end of Season 4 when she breaks her silence for the first time. Also, she and Frenchie are now fucking, which is weird, because I could have sworn they discussed this before and decided against it, with her describing him as ‘like a brother.’ If I were to give a hot take, I would say that they are ‘normalising’ the character - she must be magically cured of her disability,6 and must engage in compulsory heterosexuality, to be considered an acceptable human being.

• Frenchie is still a war criminal. He’s also somehow even more unbearably sentimental than ever before, and his death is the most heavily telegraphed, drawn-out, and uninvolving thing I’ve seen in a long time. To paraphrase the old quote about Dickens, one must have a heart of stone to watch the death of Frenchie without laughing. His post-death ‘power of love’ monologue is beyond self-parody, and the fact that it comes from such an odious actor adds a layer of irony and tone-deafness that makes it extra special. Great TV moment, no notes.

• Following Butcher’s example, MM briefly becomes a prick, but then decides to stop being a prick. His story lacks closure, as his multi-generational quest for justice against Vought and Soldier Boy remains unfulfilled, so his happy final scene rings hollow. They should have let him bludgeon Stan Edgar or something.

• Butcher is as he has always been. He has a few good scenes, notably with Ryan. As always, he can’t maintain a positive relationship with anyone for more than two minutes. He needs to be a prick, he can’t help himself. He’s probably one of the better on-screen depictions of a sociopath - he isn’t completely heartless, but he’s too blisteringly angry and impulsive to hold a steady course, and his problems snowball endlessly. I did not hate the overall direction of Butcher’s character, although the reprisal of Kessler was a very heavy-handed and unnecessary re-statement of what we had already learned in a better scene last season. Butcher’s death scene did not do it for me, either: again, it was so heavily telegraphed that by the time it comes, it feels like ticking a box.

  

Insisting upon anus jokes

Another thing that I really came to despise this season was the sub-toilet humour, which was more forced and cringe-inducing than ever.

In the past, The Boys did usually manage to strike a balance between jokes and more serious material: the comedy made the drama stand out by contrast, and vice versa, and it helped that the majority of the jokes were at least funny. Here, this was rarely the case.7 Again, it has partly to do with the expectations set up: in light of 4’s finale, there was a general sense that the stakes had risen and a more serious conclusion was approaching. Lest we forget, this is (or was) a funny show, but it’s also a show about a man’s all-consuming, Berserk-esque quest to avenge the rape of his wife.

Instead, I found myself watching a scene that seemed to go on forever where two quaternary characters sniff and describe each other’s buttholes, in the penultimate episode. It went on for so long and was so eye-wateringly bad that I ended up skipping ahead, and I just kept thinking: this is the second to last episode ever!

This was a pretty clear indication that I needed to lower my expectations from ‘scorched earth,’ and lower them I did, but not low enough, because the next episode began with a drawn-out scene where Hughie reads Frenchie’s will, in which he spends several paragraphs (and about two on-screen minutes) describing the times that he has seen his fellow Boys’ arseholes.

Again: was this really final episode material? For a show that used to have scenes like this? And is this braindead slop funny enough to justify itself? It’s like if you told an AI to write a Boys scene, but only gave it the most scatological Boys scenes to work with.

On top of that, many characters are badly Flanderised, notably Sage, who can now no longer speak without referencing Taco Bell. The writers also continue to self-report with characters such as Adam Bourke, the Worm Guy, and the sleazy Hollywood producer who reminisces about Woody Allen.

It was also crazy that they recycled the prehensile penis man into a prehensile scrotum man. If anything, it’s worse. I hate it here.

Bad politics, brought to you by bad people

Finally, it has to be said that the politics of the final season are about what you’d expect from an Amazon product.

For me, what was most exasperating was the dead silence on Israel. As mentioned above, there is a particular scene where one of Homelander’s propaganda videos says (of Americans) ‘We are God’s chosen people, and this is our promised land.’

The video is Western-themed, and of course you can talk about Evangelicals, or Mormons, or Manifest Destiny, or whatever you’d like to talk about, but the fact is that there is another group of people who call themselves God’s chosen people, and have been killing thousands of people every month in their so-called promised land for years now, with the full support of the USA.

Is it outrageous to expect a topical, political show to say something on that? It’s not exactly a stretch, given that The Boys is a sustained attack on the American right, one of the most Israelified groups of people on earth, and the demographic they like to make fun of the most (Evangelicals) are virulent Zionists to a man.8

Another pro-Homelander video advertises the ‘Homelander Youth,’ obviously a Hitler Youth allegory, but of course the show has nothing to say about the many American Jewish organisations (including youth groups) that recruit, raise funds, and distribute propaganda for the IDF.

Tomer Capone embodies the fundamental hypocrisy of The Boys. In his notorious 2016 interview, he describes abducting teenage Palestinian girls from their homes in the dead of night. One cannot imagine what the pretext for this was, but the aim of the exercise is beyond obvious - it is an act of dominance and intimidation. Even if these girls were not raped on this occasion, the message to them and their families was: ‘we can come for you whenever we want, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Capone also described seeing his friend shoot at a group of children, which for all we know is just his way of saying that he shot a child without admitting to that.

The Boys is not only Zionist by omission, it seeks to normalise Israeli crimes by employing an Israeli criminal as if there’s nothing wrong with that. I do think that Capone was likely chosen because he’s Israeli - God knows, it can’t have been because he’s a good actor, and there are thousands of other actors who could plausibly have played a French-Algerian, and were not known war criminals at time of casting. The fact that the character is French-Algerian is another layer of high-octane irony, given that Israel helped to kill hundreds of thousands of Algerians back in the ‘50s, supplying training and intelligence to French colonial forces.

Another disappointment is the show’s failure to offer any kind of closure or satisfaction about Vought, a company whose humdrum evil vastly overshadows Homelander’s. Lest we forget, Homelander was originally a victim of Vought’s Nazi scientists, and at his best he was a tragic figure, pitiful as well as monstrous. In the end, Vought’s continued thriving is depicted as if it were as natural and inevitable as gravity, a sentiment that makes complete sense when you remember that the show is funded and distributed by the real Vought (or one of the real Voughts).

There are many layers of irony to the whole project. In earlier seasons, The Boys even commented on things like pinkwashing and corporate use of identity politics, though in the final assessment it is itself a version of this, a collection of left-ish sentiments packaged and sold by the same forces it critiques.9

As Disco Elysium put it:

Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead.

Closing thoughts

Did the final season have any redeeming features?

Sure, I guess. A-Train’s sendoff was well-conceived, as was Firecracker’s. Ryan was a standout, though his role was far less pivotal than we had been led to believe it would be. Antony Starr continues to sell the outrageous character of Homelander as no-one else could. The Deep’s manosphere podcast was amusing. Ashley continues to be pretty much what I imagine J.D. Vance to be like behind the scenes.

Overall, though, it remains a fundamentally flawed project, starting on a foundation of hypocrisy, and petering out in disappointment.

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4

Introduction

If there is one thing that has always struck me about video games, it’s that they’re often more fucked up than they let on.

As a small bit of personal lore (the relevance of which will hopefully become clear as we go), one of my first big games, which I played on loop through my early teens, was Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. This game was (and, to some extent, still is) my Roman Empire. It’s a sweeping, ultra-violent, and thoroughly inventive midquel, in which Darth Vader’s secret apprentice1 travels the galaxy, makes enemies, speaks with the ghost of his father, leads anti-colonial uprisings, kills Shaak Ti (again), confronts his Jungian shadow self, etc. etc.

For me, though, one of the things that is most memorable about this game was the fact that it had a good and bad ending. This was a mind-blowing novelty for someone who had previously only played free flash games built by hobbyists, though of course it would have been old hat to anyone who knew anything about games at the time. More to the point, I was impressed by the fact that its bad ending was so unexpectedly gruesome.

In this scenario, the apprentice succumbs to his rage, and kills a pitiful limping Vader, only to become his involuntary replacement, and the Emperor’s latest slave.2 Maimed in the fight, the apprentice is bound within a nightmarish cybernetic suit, said to be painfully grafted to his very bones, and what little we see of his body (or what’s left of it) is sickly, corpse-white and waxen, every inch the nosferatu.

The final shot of this bleak ending shows the apprentice’s view through his mask’s narrow visor, paralleling the iconic shot from Vader’s perspective in Revenge of the Sith, and the sense of claustrophobic panic hits hard, especially if the player unknowingly blundered into the bad ending by a mistaken input, as I did on my first playthrough.

As morbid as this ending is, it’s also undeniably compelling, hence the developers built not one, but five separate versions of the evil apprentice character design, the most disturbing of which is a biomechanical monster straight out of a John Blanche painting, and wrote a whole expansion based on this doomed, non-canon timeline.

To give a sense of the character of these mirror-universe stories, the first mission has the apprentice visit Jabba’s Palace on Tatooine in search of the Death Star plans, where he carves a bloody path through the Hutt’s sycophants, and finally slays Ben Kenobi himself in the Mos Eisley spaceport, before he can set foot on the Millennium Falcon. This mission also includes a gut-punch of an encounter with Proxy, the droid who was the apprentice’s only friend, now a broken and abandoned husk in the bowels of Jabba’s Palace. Proxy is able to help his old master one last time before apparently shutting down for good, and leaving the man-become-monster truly alone in the universe.3

The game’s sequel (which is not as good), would also take a dark and occasionally horror-inflected tone. A resurrected version of the apprentice battles his own deformed and insane clones, as well as packs of ‘terror troopers,’ clawed cyborgs that move and fight like nothing human, tearing their way through a rebel starship like xenomorphs.

The point of this preamble is that, much like animals tend to become crabs if you leave them to their own devices for long enough, video games, no matter their source material, have a tendency to migrate towards horror. ,4 a man conversant on George Batailles and the solar anus, recently touched on this very trend. He made the point that horror is so attractive to developers because it is, fundamentally, emotive rather than technical. A scary game is measured by its impact rather than its budget or mechanical complexity.

There’s a lot of truth in this, and I’d add that the video game as a medium is almost unique in its potential for horror, for the simple reason that the interactive form can lead players to feel more deeply and personally immersed in situations than we might in a more passive format. At its best, virtual horror does not feel like it’s happening to a character - it feels like it’s happening to you.

More specifically, though, what I want to talk about here is the incorporation of horror elements into non-horror games. This, I would argue, has actually led to many (perhaps even most?) of the best and most memorable scares in gaming. While the experience of playing a self-described horror game can be transcendant,5 it can also be numbing. If horror is nonstop, then the player is quickly habituated, and finally bored.

On the other hand, the weaving of disturbing subplots and scenarios into games of entirely different genres can be particularly impactful because we don’t expect it, and like any good horror story, the contrast between the comfort of the familiar and expected, and the discomfort of that which does not belong, is key.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2’s 'Demon’ Knight

Ab insidiis diaboli libera nos Domine!

It’s time now to talk about the game (or one of the games) that actually got me thinking along these lines in the first place.

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is far from a horror game. It’s a stirring medieval adventure, witty, picaresque, and rigorously grounded in real history and scenarios. While there are many dark aspects to the game - from the atrocities of bandits and soldiers, to a gritty investigation into the crimes of an urban serial killer - KCD2 is almost aggressively rational. It has no truck with the supernatural, although it is deeply interested in folklore, religion, and superstition, and often teases spooky elements.

For example, in one memorable side-quest, Henry is tasked with gathering and stacking up human bones in the Sedletz Ossuary (a real site in modern Czechia) by a mysterious blind monk, who at the end of the quest is heavily implied to have been a ghost. Except, the same monk turns up many hours later, and reveals that he was only having a laugh at Henry’s expense (and indeed the player’s).

There is one quest, however, that comes very close to breaking with this trend. ‘The Mouth of Hell’ concerns an abandoned mine where a demon has supposedly made its home. The terrified villagers tell Henry of this beast’s supposed attributes - an iron snout, rattling chains dragged behind it, and a habit of mutilating livestock - and the local priest, who is desperate to put a stop to the panic, sends Henry to investigate.

As he descends into the mine-shaft, Henry glimpses the ‘demon’ below - a knight in foul and rusted mail, his face hidden by a ‘hounskull’ helmet, explaining the iron snout and rattling chains described by the villagers. Moments later, however, Henry falls from a rickety scaffold, and when he wakes, he finds that he has been moved to the depths of the mine and stripped of his gear.

At this point, the game undergoes a total change in genre. Suddenly, we are no longer playing an action-RPG, but a survival-horror game. Alone in the dark, unarmed and robbed of his precious gear, Henry - usually an able fighter - is suddenly vulnerable, and has no way of defending himself against the ranting knight, let alone overpowering him.

As he explores the bowels of the mine, scavenging what he can and avoiding the patrolling knight, Henry discovers a series of increasingly demented notes. We learn that the knight was once one of a team sent to the sulphurous depths of the mine to stand guard against the forces of Hell. The others were all lost, leaving only the forlorn ‘demon’ knight. For years, he has stood a lonely vigil, slowly losing his mind, but kept there by what he believes is a sacred charge. In his fear of devils, he has obsessively built countless wooden crucifixes, and ventures out only to scavenge food.

Eventually, Henry is able to arm himself and confront the knight. If Henry has found the knight’s contract, and passes some skill checks, he is able to convince the confused knight that he has come to relieve him of his duty, and persuade him to leave the mine. However, in my playthrough I did not succeed, and the only way to escape was to kill him.

If the knight is slain, Henry will find that his armour and helmet are impossible to remove, as if they have become a real prison for their wearer, stripping him of individuality. We often think of knights in terms of their codes of honour and the armour they wear, and this honour-bound knight is quite literally rendered faceless and anonymous by his knightly helmet, which becomes a substitute face.

Like The Force Unleashed’s dark ending, the quest plays heavily into claustrophobia, present in both the mine’s narrow passages and the knight’s confining armour, and, with its in-built survival and stealth mechanics, KCD2 makes for a surprisingly good horror game. Although the mine might not be a literal portal to hell, the strength of the knight’s belief makes it as good as, and it very nearly becomes Henry’s grave.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Whereas KCD2 is reluctant to embrace supernatural horror, and ultimately offers rational explanations for its weirder subplots, the Red Dead series takes a radically different approach, and is far more comfortable embracing the outre, from UFOs, to man-made chimeras, to devil-worshipping madmen.

Although nominally action-adventure in category, and firmly belonging to the Western genre, Red Dead Redemption 2 (hereafter Red Dead 2) offers some of the most memorable scares in the entire medium, and it works so well for several reasons:

• The incredible quality of the game’s environments, which heightens atmosphere and immersion at all times, but especially in moments of fear and suspense.

• The sharp contrast whenever the game (usually a gritty but moralistic outlaw drama) suddenly veers into darker territory.

• The rewarding exploration, which encourages players to seek out secrets, many of which hint at a larger, darker picture than what we see in the story missions alone.

• Horror affinities in the wider Western genre.

Before getting further into it, it’s worth noting that the first game, Red Dead Redemption, included explicitly supernatural elements in a subplot featuring ‘The Strange Man,’ a recurring figure who is heavily implied to be the devil, and quizzes John Marston over his past sins.6

Players have connected the Strange Man with Mark Twain’s depiction of Satan in The Mysterious Stranger, though as we’ll see, there’s another likely counterpart in the canon of Western fiction, which we’ll get to in the section on the Skinner Brothers.

Roanoke Ridge and The Murfree Brood

Y’all be careful where you wander…

Roanoke Ridge is one of Red Dead 2’s most iconic locations, and also one of the most important from a narrative perspective. It figures heavily into the plot, as Roanoke is the doomed Van der Linde Gang’s last hiding place, and therefore the setting of the final chapter of Arthur Morgan’s story.

It is also, to my mind, one of the single creepiest settings in all of gaming. Inspired by the Appalachian Mountains, and ominously named for the vanished Roanoke Colony, Roanoke is a country of deceptive arboreal beauty, with poison and decay seething underneath. Bathed in dappled golden sunlight during the days, Roanoke is a land of stately oaks and green sycamores, where narrow paths wind through uplands teeming with life. However, the haunting ambient music alone is enough to set an uneasy mood, keeping the player on edge. Even in daylight, it feels as if unfriendly eyes are watching your every move, as if Roanoke itself is listening.

It does not take long for Roanoke to show its true face. The player can only linger for so long before encountering the depraved clan that lays claim to this country: the Murfree Brood. A family of degenerate hill-folk, the Murfrees are inbred cannibals of the Sawney Bean tradition,7 drawn straight out of nightmare. Horribly deformed, with blotchy diseased skins and misshapen faces, they ride out on half-starved horses to terrorise the country, and collect grisly trophies from their victims.

The Murfrees can be found at night driving wagons weighed down with corpses, among them live female prisoners whose fate we are uncomfortably forced to speculate on. Even when making camp, Arthur can be surprised and threatened by Murfrees, ensuring that the player never feels safe in Roanoke. Their ambush encounters are many, varied, and vindictive, revealing the animalistic cunning of the Brood.

Though the Murfrees only feature in one story mission, it is by far the most frightening, veering away from Western outlaw drama and firmly into the horror genre. Arthur and Charles must blast their way through hordes of leering cannibals in a bone-strewn cave, and although they are able to rescue a young girl held prisoner there, she has already been a captive for days, and we can’t help but feel that we arrived too late.

If ever there was a time for exploding bullets…

The horror of this episode overshadows the whole final chapter, as the gang has unwisely made their lair in the former Murfree den at Beaver Hollow.8 The hideout feels desperately unsafe, and underscores how far the gang has fallen: like the Murfrees, whose prosperous days were long ago, Dutch9 is clinging to the past, while degenerating into deeper and deeper evil, and abusing the only ‘family’ he has left.

The Murfree Brood very likely owe something to Bone Tomahawk, a Western-horror film depicting a similar tribe of incestuous cannibals, although whereas Bone Tomahawk dubiously made its monsters Native Americans, Red Dead’s Murfrees are the descendants of white settlers from the 1700s, subverting older Western tropes of white civility and Indian savagery.

It’s even implied that Roanoke’s Natives knew that there was something wrong with the land - they left a series of trail trees pointing out the entrance to a mine that is revealed as the source of the poison causing deformities in Butcher’s Creek. Natives in Roanoke also built a mound in the shape of a serpent (again, suggesting poison), closely based on a real counterpart in Ohio.

There are also well-hidden but definite hints of metaphysical evil in Roanoke. In the diseased village of Butcher’s Creek, a glowing pentagram can be found at night, and players have discovered that the village’s five outhouses are positioned to form a larger pentagram, with tally marks showing the order to connect them to form the pattern. Nearby, a Viking ruin can be found where five trenches form yet another pentagram around an altar heaped with human bones, suggesting a history of human sacrifice in the region.

All of this simply can’t be an accident, particularly given the devil motifs lurking elsewhere in the game, and, more obviously, the use of a pentagram in the game’s vampire mystery.

The Saint Denis Vampire

Stay back, for your own sake! I walk with the undead…

Far to the south of Roanoke, in the swampy and malarial State of Lemoyne, the city of Saint Denis rises from the bayou. Of all the many great cities in gaming, Saint Denis is perhaps my personal favourite, for its bustling vitality and vivid sense of time and place. Based mainly on New Orleans,10 it is a polyglot city of Francophones, Anglos, Italians, Mexicans, Irish, and Chinese, and full of contrasts and contradictions.

It is a city where the player is never lost, because each district is so visually distinct, from the slovenly outskirts, to the reeking factory district, to the opulent avenues where the rich idle in their mansions. Early cinemas compete with vaudeville theatres, and new-fangled trolleys rattle along sparking overhead power lines, while electric streetlights brighten the humid nights.

Like most of Red Dead’s America, Saint Denis and its environs are packed with secrets. A forlorn ghost haunts the bayou, although as we’ll see, she might be the least scary thing out there, and a darker kind of spirit stalks the city itself.

Throughout Saint Denis, verses of macabre poetry can be found in blood-red paint on certain walls, and a newspaper article reveals that these were left at the scenes of strange murders, where victims were bitten and drained of blood. According to the news article, a similar series of ‘ritualistic’ murders was committed years ago, and though the supposed killer was hanged, the murders have resumed.

If the player finds all five verses, it will be revealed that they form a pentagram with a particular alleyway at its centre. If the player explores here at night, they will find a strange figure stooping over a corpse. If approached, the killer will identify himself as a vampire, warning the player to stay away, and will soon attack if they do not heed him.

The vampire’s appearance is evocative of the iconic Count Orlok, with a bald head, ghastly pale skin, and pointed ears. If killed, he will drop a unique dagger with skeletal figures on the handle, and he can be looted for a set of bat wings.

The encounter is so effective because it raises more questions than it answers: is this the same killer who was hanged years ago? Is he truly a vampire, as he claims, or just a madman? To me, the wonderful thing about this encounter is the tantalising sense of a darker, unknown world (a world of darkness, if you will) lurking beyond the limits of the player’s knowledge, which, together with the many other supernatural hints peppered throughout the game, becomes compelling.

The Night Folk

Some strange people ‘round these parts. Wilder than the animals, they are.

While Red Dead’s outlaw protagonists are out of their element in the murky streets of Saint Denis, they are at the very least somewhat safe there, street toughs and vampires aside. The same cannot be said for the surrounding bayou, a steamy and primordial swamp quite literally crawling with reptiles. Venomous snakes and snapping alligators spook the player’s horse at every step, and wading birds rise up like pale phantoms from the watery banks.

The bayou is enchanting by day, verdant even by Lemoyne standards, and possesses an eerie beauty by moonlight, yet there can be no mistaking its prehistoric hostility. The alligators are the least of the player’s problems here, for the most murderous creatures of the bayou walk on two legs.

Strange, dishevelled wretches armed with bows and machetes, the Night Folk stalk interlopers with a predatory intelligence. Their ambushes are sudden, treacherous, and often deadly - whereas the player can survive knife attacks from Murfrees, the Night Folk’s blades are always lethal, and it is easy to be caught unwares. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the Night Folk is that they never speak, though they communicate with one another in clicks and animal noises as they steal through the undergrowth.

They are also shown to be utterly vicious, pinning bodies to trees as gruesome territorial markers. In one particularly cruel Night Folk ambush, they will place a mangled horse carcass in the path, causing the player’s mount to spook and rush off into the undergrowth. The player must chase after it on foot, while ambushers close in on all sides, and if you do not catch up with your horse in time, it will be instantly killed.11

The Night Folk seem to be loosely inspired by zombie lore, leaving voodoo-related markings on trees near their territory, though who (or what) exactly they are, and how they came to be, is left a mystery. One particularly intriguing theory12 has them as residents of Saint Denis who live humdrum lives by day and take to the swamps by night. According to this theory, they stay silent and paint their faces to avoid giving away their true identities.13

They also more than likely draw some influence from Bone Tomahawk - their crusty white face-paint evokes the sickly skin of BT’s troglodytes, who are also shown as mutes with no language of their own, communicating only in animalistic whistles. Like the troglodytes, the Night Folk appear suddenly from the undergrowth and rush their victims in dead silence, attacking with arrows and fighting to the death.

Ye’ll find em right lively.

Although the Night Folk do not appear directly in the main storyline, there are plenty of side activities directing the player into the bayou, where they are sure to cross paths with them sooner or later. Like the Murfrees, the Night Folk have an indirect role in the plot, as two of the gang’s later camps are placed squarely in Night Folk territory, reflecting the decline of the gang, which is driven into ever darker and more dangerous territory.

Interestingly, the Night Folk are quite possibly connected to the Strange Man, and thus to the other devilish elements in the game. A shack can be found in the swamp full of prophetic paintings and inscriptions linked to the plot, with the Man’s distinctive top hat hung up beside a mirror. Each time the player visits, the paintings will be progressively updated, and in the final visit, the Strange Man’s reflection can be seen behind you in the mirror.

The Skinner Brothers and the Strange Man

They came… in the night… like jackals from hell. The screams! Something awful…

As if Night Folk and Murfrees weren’t bad enough, Red Dead 2 ups the ante still further in its chapter-length epilogue with the introduction of a band of murderers even more prolific, and (for John Marston) far closer to home.

John has only just hung up his hat in Beecher’s Hope when he receives an unwelcome social call from his new neighbours. These would be the aptly-named Skinner Brothers, who promptly carry off Uncle and begin to roast him alive.

Like fairytale beasts, the Skinner Brothers lurk in a dark forest, making their rude camps in the region of Tall Trees, an ancient sequoia forest full of wolves and worse. Concealing themselves in the treacherous terrain, these barbaric mountain men have found a vocation as ambushers and torturers, with a penchant for scalping travellers alive.

The blood-soaked Skinner camps are gruesome even by Red Dead standards, full of cages, bones, and mutilated corpses, and the frenzied Skinners delight in leaving carnage and devastation wherever they go. On the fringes of Tall Trees, murdered travellers can be seen tottering in the saddles of half-dead horses full of arrows, and John can stumble more than once upon the aftermath of Skinner massacres. On one occasion, he even finds a scalped and blinded victim still alive, rambling disjointedly as he succumbs to shock and blood-loss.

Some players have speculated that the Skinners, who are a mixed lot, but mostly white and English-speaking, were originally intended to be a hostile Native tribe, though I find it very unlikely that RockStar ever wanted to go there. Red Dead is very sympathetic to the plight of Native Americans, and discusses the massacres,14 displacements, and forced assimilation of this period. A beleaguered Plains tribe plays a crucial role in Arthur’s final chapter, so to pivot to a depiction of Natives as bloodthirsty ‘savages’ like the Skinners would be whiplash-inducing, to say the least, and sharply against the tendency of the series as a whole.15

Moreover, the Skinners have a closer and more intriguing analogue in the scalp-hunters of the frontier era, especially as depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian. Like the Skinners, Blood Meridian’s Glanton Gang are a multi-ethnic rabble, mostly white, though also including a troop of Native Delaware mercenaries. This is important, as the Skinners also have a number of visibly Native members, as well as elements of Native dress,16 and they are repeatedly described as a ‘mongrel’17 group of mixed origins.

Similarly, the Glanton Gang are described as wearing buckskins, much like the Skinners, which they adorn with trophies from their victims. They even used this style of dress to deceive witnesses to their crimes: in the memoir My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain, which was the primary source for Blood Meridian, Chamberlain describes how the Gang posed as Apaches while murdering Mexicans, whose scalps they sold to their own government, falsely claiming that they were taken from Apaches.

Chamberlain also describes an incident18 when the Gang discovered a ruined wagon full of arrows and scalped corpses, but concluded that white men must have done this, because Natives would not have left so many arrows behind.

The resemblance between the Skinners and Glanton’s men becomes more apparent when looking more closely at their philosophies and rationales. Both gangs are murderous, compulsive sadists, for whom killing has become an addiction, but also a source of common identity and purpose.

As Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden declares, ‘Men are not joined together by the sharing of bread, but the sharing of enemies.’ Despised by the world, the Skinners only have each other, and their murderous fellowship is enough to keep them united most of the time.19

While both groups are in a sense nihilistic, they also both seem to pursue a higher purpose, which imposes a kind of method on the madness. The Skinners can be overheard discussing their crimes as blood-sacrifices for a ‘Prince of Darkness’ who they call ‘a gentleman,’ which seems a clear reference to the top-hatted and devilish Strange Man.

Similarly, Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden (who is referenced elsewhere in Red Dead 2), is strongly implied to be the devil. He serves as the gang’s intellectual and spiritual leader, and is something of a gentleman himself, combining a civil love of learning and culture with primordial violence.

Regardless of the specifics of the Skinners’ lineage, they introduce a powerful infusion of horror into a narrative already steeped in bloodshed, and offer a vivid picture of frontier violence. The Skinner Brothers’ intrusion shatters John’s false sense of security at Beecher’s Hope, underscoring how transient his newfound peace and quiet really is.

Mad Max (2015)

Long-time readers will know that this game is very dear to me - I’ve touched on the strength of its narrative before, but here, I want to get further into its darker aspects, which are in many ways comparable with what we see in Red Dead.

In Mad Max, the title character roams a poisoned earth destitute of a biosphere, surrounded by the violence and folly of a dying human race. If the Skinner Brothers evoke Blood Meridian, then Mad Max is about as close as an action franchise tie-in is likely to get to The Road.

The wasteland is brilliantly realised here as a place of desolate beauty and endless, numbing depravity. Everywhere you look, there is blood, death, and putrefaction. Even Max himself, one of the few survivors with any memory of the pre-apocalypse world, is in the habit of eating maggots directly off of corpses, which we are given to understand is now the main source of protein for those who try to avoid cannibalism.20

With this level of grimness as a baseline, it’s not easy for Mad Max to generate peaks and troughs in tension, but oh boy, does it manage. Fully embracing the nightmare quality of its source material, Mad Max elaborates on the character of the wasteland’s inhabitants, especially the Buzzard tribe and the ‘ferals,’ to horrifying effect.

The Buzzards

The Buzzards are a small but memorable part of Fury Road, shown as murderous ambushers that erupt from beneath the sand in their spiked war machines. Because of their unique design and the brevity of their screentime, the Buzzards have a strong mystique: in all versions of the film, they are shown speaking a foreign language (Russian in the English version), and their bodies are swathed in cloth wrappings, with gas-masks covering their faces. According to the film’s art book, they were imagined as ravaged by skin diseases, and their spiked cars were supposed to reflect their insular tribal nature, literally keeping outsiders at arm’s length.

The Buzzards had also featured in Fury Road’s prequel comic, where they were shown as cave-dwelling cannibals21 and slave-drivers, who kill a mother and child Max had become attached to, re-traumatising him and sending him into the hermetic state he is in at the start of the movie. This plot point actually makes it into the game,22 although the role of the Buzzards is altered, with the woman and child (ironically named Hope and Glory) instead killed by Scrotus, the game’s arch-villain.23

In the game’s world, the Buzzards are fleshed out further, but keep much of their original mystique. They do not speak except in inarticulate snarls muffled by their masks, and their impact is increased by the fact that they are used sparingly: they maraud only at night, with the red lenses of their masks glowing in the dark, and appear in several claustrophobic underground missions. Each is structured far more like an episode from a horror game, building tension with stealthy shufflings, distant howling, and scripted jump-scares as Max is stalked from the shadows, before the inevitable onslaught.

Chumbucket, Max’s faithful (if insane) mechanic,24 is terrified of them, and appalled by their habit of dismantling cars and ‘profaning’ them with spikes in ritualistic fashion. With their masks, lack of speech, and their opaque customs, there is an overwhelming sense that there is no understanding or reasoning with these carrion eaters.

Ferals

More frightening still, however, are the so-called ‘ferals.’ This word is used in passing in Fury Road’s script, seemingly in the normal English sense, but the video game has an altogether darker take.

Among the War Boys, we find wizened humans that go on all-fours like animals, naked apart from suspicious-looking leather muzzles and harnesses. These ‘ferals’ are as vicious as the name implies, swarming, killing and eating their victims.

They are devoid of human speech and reasoning, and their codex entry explains that this is the fate of War Boys considered too defective to be trained, although variants belonging to other tribes also exist. The codex tells us that they are purposely bred as guard dogs, and human-sized cages can be found in every location where Max encounters ferals.

Although ferals are far from the game’s strongest enemies, and Max can overpower them in most situations, their sheer conceptual horror is enough to distinguish them as one of the wasteland’s worst foes. Every encounter with ferals is a visceral reminder of the fates worse than death that await those taken alive by the dregs of the wasteland, leading us to sympathise with Max’s delusional mission to escape to the ‘Plains of Silence,’ a refuge that may only exist in his mind.

Closing thoughts

As a palette-cleanser, I was going to include one more section, on Ghost of Yotei’s Spider Lily General mission, which offers a gentler, more folkloric kind of horror, as opposed to the more visceral material I have covered here. However, this one has already run on much longer than usual, and so, not wishing to overdo it, I will save that for another time.

There’s little more to add, so instead I will end with a question: do you have a favourite example of horror in a non-horror game that I did not get into here? If so, please share in the comments!

I would be particularly interested to hear about examples from lesser-known and indie games, as the examples I’ve discussed are all from big budget and well-known titles, which as a rule are only ever the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gaming.

Further reading

For more on non-horror games with horror sensibilities, see my articles on:

Space Hulk: Deathwing

Skald: Against the Black Priory

System Shock

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22

And is done in spectacular style. ‘Paint my name in their blood!’

This week, I’ve got a bit of publication housekeeping to do. Based on experience, I was anticipating a slow summer, and thinking of slowing down myself, but boy it’s been off to an early start. My numbers have never been stellar, but they’ve been on a steep downward trend since January,1 and as a result I’ve found my motivation to be at a low ebb.

As such, I am going to be making some changes (other than ‘write better stuff lmao,’ although hopefully that will be a result thereof):

a) I’m going to try posting on Tuesdays instead of Sundays.

Research indicates that Tuesdays and Thursdays are better for engagement, and my own experience suggests that most people read during the week anyway. I’ve probably made a rod for my own back by posting on Sundays for such a long time, so we’ll see if a change helps.

b) I will be posting fortnightly instead of three times a month.

This was a more difficult decision, but I hope it will be the right one, for the moment at least; I certainly felt a tremendous sense of peace after I’d settled on it.

Some people are capable of producing consistently good posts every week, but that has never been me. It takes me a long time, and many rounds of edits, to write anything I feel good about, and trying to have something worthwhile ready on an almost-weekly basis has begun to feel like being chained to a treadmill, to the detriment of my nervous Victorian constitution.

The hope is that my actual rate of production will not drop too dramatically, but the quality will improve: I look back at some of my recent posts,2 and I just see bloated rubbish that was never going to do well, but was forced out for the sake of having something to post. Of course, I do want this project to keep growing, but in order for that to happen (and for it to feel worthwhile) it sort of has to be good, and not slop churned out for a fickle algorithm.

Hopefully, with a lighter publishing schedule, I will be able to build up a backlog of more interesting material for later in the year. In the meantime, I need to sleep better, read more,3 and give more time to the other hobbies that have fallen by the wayside.

Poll(s)

As this is such an eclectic publication,4 I often struggle with trying to decide what my priority should be. Therefore, it would be very helpful and much appreciated if readers would take a few moments to answer the polls below.

Also, if there’s anything in particular you would like me to cover, be it a book, a game, a film, or even just a theme you’d like more on, please do let me know. I always like to hear from regulars, and writing with even one specific reader in mind is always more motivating and enjoyable than writing for Schroedinger’s cat, so chances are good that I will cover any requests (unless it’s, like, a massive novel or something; unless it’s a really good massive novel, or a massive novel I’ve already read, in which case I’ll see what I can do).

Continuing from last week’s post, in which I took a retrospective look at the first two of George Romero’s Living Dead movies, this post will cover the third and forth of the series.

Day of the Dead (1985)

Following the trend of the previous films, with Night of the Living Dead set during the first days of a zombie outbreak, and Dawn of the Dead beginning weeks into the disaster, Day of the Dead begins at a point further down the road, when civilisation is all but gone, and the threat of human extinction looms.

The opening paints a vivid picture, with striking scenes of a flyblown coastal Florida where rotting figures shamble among alligators under the tropic sun. The absence of news segments is a first for the series: every radio frequency yields nothing but static.

Set in an underground military bunker, the film follows a group of civilian scientists attached to a squad of soldiers under the demented Captain Rhodes (Joseph Pilato), a man who positively devours every scene he is in, but in a good way. Rhodes is so unrelentingly antisocial that he makes Doctor ‘Frankenstein’ Logan, a man who divides his time between vivisecting zombies and trying to educate them, appear downright reasonable by comparison.

Even more loathsome are Rhodes’ men, chief among them Private Steel, an overgrown schoolyard bully and (in the finest Living Dead tradition) a raging racist. Whereas Dawn of the Dead’s opening took aim at the police as an institution, Day of the Dead turns a critical eye on the US military, and the kind of personalities it cultivates and promotes. Common to both is the satire of macho posturing, which is taken to new extremes in Day of the Dead.

This is drawn out particularly well because Day was the first in the series to feature a female protagonist, Dr. Sarah Bowman (Lori Cardille). The oppressive confines of the bunker, and harassing comments by Rhodes and his men, add to the constant sense of menace and danger the film generates. Like most of Romero’s leads, Cardille was a little-known actress, but delivers a magnetic performance, one-part educated professional, three-parts cornered wolf.

Day also benefits greatly from Richard Liberty as ‘Frankenstein,’ who delivers a delightfully pulpy performance as the affable madman, at once the most decadent of the bunker’s inhabitants and the most civil. With a pleasant Mid Atlantic manner of speaking and textbook mad scientist looks, Frankenstein is strangely likeable, if creepy, and spends much of his time fussing over a docile zombie he names Bub,1 who he is training in the unlikely hope of finding a way for humans to co-exist with zombies.

Whereas the characters of Dawn of the Dead are trapped by their attachment to the mall and its material comforts, Day of the Dead uses its zombies as a metaphor for death itself, and appropriately the story is one of grief and acceptance in the face of the inevitable. At the beginning, Sarah is at the bargaining stage of grief, still invested in the notion of finding a ‘cure’ for the zombies, and the obsessive Frankenstein serves as her foil and counterpart. Both are trapped in prisons of their own making, trying in vain to turn the clock back.

Only by the end is Sarah able to accept the reality that what she seeks is impossible, and to reconsider the value of the time that she has, however long or short her life may turn out.

Day of the Dead was savaged by critics at release, and its good name never really recovered from that initial onslaught: it remains the lowest rated of the original three. However, I have to say that I don’t agree with the consensus: for me, it was thoroughly engrossing, with strong performances, sustained tension, and an oppressive atmosphere even by the standards of the series. It’s more than okay in my book.

Land of the Dead (2005)

Oh, Land of the Dead. Where do I even begin? This was not the last Living Dead film Romero made, and in fact the series has outlived him, grimly shambling on into the 2020s, a zombie franchise in more sense than one. However, it was the last I watched, because it is Land of the Dead, and it left me with the distinct feeling that the great man was running out of good ideas.

Like its predecessor, Land is set deep into a zombie apocalypse, and concerns a community of snobs living in a luxury tower complex called Tenpenny Tower Fiddler’s Green.2 It’s also about the slum-dwellers living in squalor beneath them, and a horde of migratory zombies led by a smart zombie named ‘Big Daddy’. He’s not even the most comically named character, since Land of the Dead also features a Mexican dwarf gangster named Chihuahua who dresses like this:

Land of the Dead centres on a man named Riley Denbo (which I was shocked to discover is a real English surname), and his belligerent comrade Cholo DeMora, who both live by scavenging supplies to sell at Fiddler’s Green. Denbo is a nice but avoidant type who would like to leave Fiddler’s Green behind and start a new life elsewhere, while Cholo wants to claw his way up the hierarchy and gain a place in the luxury and safety of the tower.

It’s worth noting that Cholo is Latino, and his name has specific connotations to do with race and class,3 and basically the only other non-white person we see in Fiddler’s Green is a subservient butler. Mr Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), de facto ruler of the tower, refuses Cholo’s request for a place among the elite, and Cholo proceeds to go berserk, commandeering ‘Dead Reckoning,’ an armoured truck designed by Denbo, and holding the tower hostage with its rocket launchers. Denbo is sent to recover the truck.

While all of this is going on, the zombie horde is slowly making its way to Fiddler’s Green, like the iceberg approaching the Titanic. With Big Daddy’s help, they are able to use tools and tactics, and the horde is given a certain amount of personality (insofar as that’s possible for zombies) with several recurring zombies. However, it’s quite difficult to take them seriously. There is a lot less emphasis here on the innate conceptual horror of zombies, as in previous titles, and a lot more on gimmickry and spectacle.

For example, one memorable zombie appears to be headless, then suddenly flicks his head - still attached by a piece of sinew - forward to bite someone in a way that raises eyebrows rather than goosebumps. Also, at least half a dozen characters are killed by surprise zombie bites, which seems unlikely - zombies are quite literally known as ‘stenches’ in this film, and are all visibly rotten, so how do people keep being surprised by their presence? Does no-one have a sense of smell in this universe?

Also, all zombies now apparently have super-strength, as they spend much of their screentime effortlessly ripping people asunder in wild spectacles of gore. This is very different - and, I would argue, less scary - than the previous films, which emphasise the fact that a lone zombie is physically slow, weak and clumsy. The threat lies in their overwhelming numbers and persistence, and even their seeming weakness is in itself dangerous, as it breeds complacency and recklessness (see: Dawn of the Dead). With the switch to ultra-hardy zombies with the strength of rabid chimpanzees, I could not help but feel that something was lost, and not just the faces and arms the zombies keep pulling off effortlessly.

The film also suffers from a screenplay sagging under the weight of misplaced action movie cliches, and an overabundance of named characters, most of them developed thinly if at all, and only there to be zombie fodder. Even the main characters are hard to define except in terms of vague tropes - Slack is the ‘hooker with a heart of gold,’ Charley is the ‘good-natured simpleton,’ and even Denbo, the nominal lead, has very little to him.

Unlike previous Living Dead heroes, he does get a backstory, delivered in heavy-handed ‘trauma plot’ style, but of course it’s incredibly banal in the context, because it is literally just ‘my brother was killed by zombies,’ which is presumably the same as everyone else’s backstory, and less distressing than the daily existence of Slack, the person he’s telling the story to. Denbo also does not particularly look the part of a grizzled survivor - his face would be more at home in a boyband, and his clothes are altogether too clean and tidy for the apocalypse.

Cholo is somewhat better - he’s arrogant, mean, and not particularly likeable, but he isn’t supposed to be, and besides, his cause is fairly righteous. His main goal is to get his own money back from Fiddler’s Green, which arguably doesn’t make much sense, given the relative value of cash and Dead Reckoning’s rockets in a post-apocalypse. It’s probable that Romero was trying to include some 9/11 subtext - Cholo is called a ‘terrorist,’ and threatens to blow up a tower symbolic of American capitalism.

Of course, the inhabitants of Fiddler’s Green are so unsympathetic that, if anything, I felt that they should have let Cholo cook. Denbo’s preferred solution - running away, and leaving the worthies of Fiddler’s Green to tyrannise the slum-dwellers forever - comes across as irresponsible at best, and he is only moved to action by the zombie threat to the tower. The oppressed are liberated as a side-effect of the zombie horde’s actions, whereas Denbo’s contribution is minimal.

On the upside, Kaufman, the villainous leader of Fiddler’s Green, is quite entertaining, largely because he is such a complete, unmitigated dick at all times, and it’s often quite funny. In one memorable scene, he coldly murders a board member who interferes with his attempt to flee with suitcases full of money, only to learn moments later that Dead Reckoning has been safely recovered. ‘I really wish you’d told me that a minute ago,’ he says, looking at the corpse with the long-suffering air of a man who is going to have some explaining to do.

The film also suffers somewhat from its attempts to humanise Big Daddy and his zombies, for whom he shows a brotherly concern and sympathy. However, this can only really go so far, because, no matter how Big Daddy feels about his fellow zombies, they are all still compelled to eat people alive. As such, when Denbo decides to spare Big Daddy and Co. at the end, tritely concluding that they are ‘like us,’ it rings false.

Whereas Night of the Living Dead was fresh, new and contained a spark of real originality, Land of the Dead is more of a genre piece, and its meta-commentary on the commercialisation of zombies (people in the slums bet on zombie fights and take pictures with chained zombies) does not undo the fact that it is itself more of a product than a work of art. Its class commentary, while perfectly valid, is also heavy-handed to a Snowpiercer degree, and leaves the viewer with nothing nutritious to chew on.

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However, for all their elitist credentials, vampires don’t have a monopoly on horror with ideas. Zombies too have delivered biting social criticism, and still do when they’re given the opportunity. recently wrote an excellent piece on Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later and its specifically British vision of a zombie apocalypse, complete with flag-shaggers and a manic horde of Jimmy Savile superfans. In her words, ‘These are not horror films about humanity: they are horror films about the British.’

Similar things might be said of George Romero’s classic Living Dead series, which revolutionised not only the zombie genre, but horror generally. Romero’s films are as American in their preoccupations as Boyle’s are British, but they are alike in that they both subject the viewer to nonstop flesh-tearing carnage, interpersonal aggression, and general dread for hours at a time.

I had not thought much about zombies since The Walking Dead era, so my recent Living Dead Odyssey was a refreshing one. In four consecutive evenings, I devoured the first four movies, and copious quantities of noodles, munching glassy-eyed as the bone-crunching horror washed over me. If truth be told, imbibing so much zombie mayhem in such a short time might have been overkill, but it was an Experience, and we all need new experiences sometimes.

In this post (divided into two parts for length), I want to break down each of these first four entries in order - the first three because they’re good, the fourth because it’s bad in an unusual way and I’d like to talk about that.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Night of the Living Dead has long enjoyed universal acclaim, and it’s not hard to see why. It was, and remains, the definitive modern zombie movie, and it is one of those classics in which the spark of genius is almost tangible, as electrifying as the mysterious energy that animates its iconic ‘ghouls.’

While modest in terms of budget and effects, there is an incredible rawness and urgency to it, and it makes for unsettling viewing even in these jaded days. The plot follows a motley group of survivors in the first days of a zombie outbreak, who become trapped and surrounded in an isolated farmhouse.

Unusually for the time, NotLD was filmed entirely in black and white, not as a cost-saving measure but as a stylistic choice. Romero felt that the gruesome images he wanted to show would be more effective without colour, and he connected this to the news. Through the 60s, news was still largely black and white, and, with the Vietnam War ongoing, harrowing B&W images were becoming seared into the American consciousness.

Night of the Living Dead is often likened to a wartime newsreel, and appropriately, news features within the film itself, as the frightened survivors huddle around TVs and radios, anxiously awaiting updates. A brief interlude follows a reporter interviewing scientists about the phenomenon, before joining a sheriff as he sweeps the countryside with a posse of volunteers. There’s an unsettling realism to these news segments, adding texture and believability.

The film was controversial on release, in large part because it is so relentlessly bleak and pessimistic, to the point that some critics read it as misanthropic.

In a way, the detractors did have a point. In the opening scene, a fleeing girl leaves her own brother for dead. Some time later, a sweet young couple are immolated in a painfully avoidable accident, and feasted on by hungry ghouls. An older man is prepared to let his fellow survivors die out of sheer spite, and spends the rest of his screentime bitterly quarreling with his wife. In a nasty subversion of the idyllic nuclear family image, said couple are finally killed and eaten by their own daughter, and it’s not even the film’s first family slaying, since by this point the abandoned brother from earlier has returned zombified and killed his sister. Even Ben, our hero (sort of), isn’t above hitting a woman.

Speaking of Ben, the film has an interesting social background, given that the character was played by African-American actor Duane Jones, who won what would have been assumed to be a ‘white’ leading role on the strength of his audition. Far from a subservient, non-threatening figure, Ben is tough, resourceful and decisive, and, though compassionate to a point, he can only be pushed so far, as several characters learn to their own cost.

Although Romero denied changing the script to reflect current events (not least the April assassination of Martin Luther King), it’s hard not to read a racial subtext into the older white man Cooper’s suspicion and hostility towards Ben, which ultimately comes to violence. This reading is particularly attractive given the persistent theme of racism in every subsequent Living Dead movie.

Still more suggestive is the film’s ending, when Ben is mistaken for a zombie and promptly shot dead by an all-white posse. The credits show stills of Ben rudely disposed of by grim-faced volunteers, with scant respect for human dignity: they won’t even touch the body, instead hauling him out with meathooks, and tossing him on a bonfire with the zombies. The connotations are writ so large that the question of authorial intent (or lack thereof?) is less interesting than the result.

Again, it’s worth repeating that the Vietnam War was ongoing, and false labelling of civilian casualties as hostiles (just as Ben is killed as a presumed zombie) was not only common, but even formalised by a system of ‘kill quotas’, which in practice encouraged troops to kill civilians and report them as Viet Cong.1

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

If Night of the Living Dead is an intimate, claustrophobic picture, then Dawn of the Dead is to its predecessor what James Cameron’s Aliens was to Ridley Scott’s classic. It’s bolder, brassier, bloodier, and generally involves more of everything: bigger settings, more monsters, more action, and enough gore to turn even the hardiest stomach.

With the shift to the 1970s, moody monochrome was replaced with a brighter, more saturated look, with vivid fake blood and sickly green-tinted zombie makeup lending it a hyper-real comic book vibe, which is altogether suitable for the kind of film this is.

In terms of plot, Dawn of the Dead is a veritable catalogue of human folly and frailties, and more forthright in its worldview than Night of the Living Dead. The story follows a group of four survivors, two of them deserters from the police (Peter and Roger), who join forces with a couple (Stephen and Fran) who worked at a news studio where the first scenes take place. During the apocalyptic weeks and months that follow, our ragtag survivors occasionally tune in to hear the news (always bad), and to listen to increasingly heated and unprofessional arguments on air as the last pretence of civility breaks down.2

In an early character-defining sequence, our two cops take part in a brutal SWAT raid on a housing block where Puerto Rican immigrants are suspected to be hiding corpses for Christian burial, reluctant to hand them over to be ‘neutralised’ (beheaded) to prevent zombiefication. One fellow cop is a murderous racist (Many such cases!), who is justly fragged by Peter; Roger witnesses the killing, but says nothing, and invites Peter to desert with him.

Soon after, the newly formed group seizes control of a shopping mall,3 which they proceed to seal off, clear of zombies, and fortify to the best of their ability. The mall is huge and opulent, a veritable temple to Mammon, and serves as a springboard for social commentary on consumer culture.

In the process, Romero expands on the mythos of his particular take on zombies to creepy effect. Watching the zombies shuffling about the mall, using escalators, and pawing at concession stands, the survivors speculate that they must dimly remember something of who they were and what they did in life, and are merely continuing to go through the motions of a consumer lifestyle.4 Consumers of goods have become consumers of brains, and the tragicomic implication is that they remained largely the same otherwise.

The critique of consumerism is mirrored by the protagonists, who become listless and unhappy in the mall, unsatisfied with their lives there, but at the same time too inert and comfortable to move on.

Meanwhile, the uneasy element of zombie memory is confirmed in the film’s climax, and makes explicit a disturbing implication: to become a Romero zombie isn’t merely to die, but to become trapped in a living death (tm), still aware and ‘ensoulled’ on some level. This is in line with the original Afro-Caribbean zombie myths (briefly referenced by Peter), in which a zombie is an undead slave to a sorcerer, and retains part of its original mortal soul and consciousness, but none of its human agency.5

As with the first film, Dawn of the Dead is thoroughly downbeat in tone, and takes a dim view even of its protagonists. In an uncomfortable scene, Peter offers to abort Stephen and Fran’s child, without Fran present, as if Stephen’s say in the matter is more important than hers. Peter and Roger (both, lest we forget, SWAT alumni) are both bursting with masculine bravado, and prone to risky ventures. The latter gets himself bitten and infected through sheer recklessness, and Peter’s efforts knock sense into him come too late.

Stephen is riddled with the same folly, putting himself and Fran in danger when he rushes off to join the other two men on a raid, apparently more concerned with his pride than with the safety of his pregnant girlfriend. The same cowboy mentality prevails when a murderous biker gang arrives, and Stephen, true to form, picks a fight he can’t win.

The bikers (who appear to have taken a wrong turn on the way to the set of a Mad Max film) serve as a dark mirror of the same impulsive machismo we see in the male protagonists, and their penchant for Nazi memorabilia harkens back to the racist cop’s explosive aggression in the opening scenes.

Taken as a whole, Dawn of the Dead is an unsentimental, almost absurdist epic on the subject of human (/American) stupidity. The police are belligerent goons; the Puerto Ricans are stubborn traditionalists; the survivors suffer misfortunes of their own making; the bikers are brainless vandals; the TV experts have no answers; and of course the zombies are all morons.

In case it’s not clear, I really enjoyed it.

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In Part 1, I established the relationship between the roleplaying game Skald: Against the Black Priory and the first season of HBO’s True Detective, from which Skald borrows key phrases, concepts and images. Both also make close reference to Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow.

Major spoilers for both Skald and True Detective ahead!

As regulars will remember from Part 1, Skald and True Detective both feature circular narratives, which accords with shared symbols (both stories feature an evil cult with a circular spiral pattern as its mark), and the shared concept of eternal return, explained in True Detective’s iconic phrase ‘Time is a flat circle.’ Variations of this phrase are repeated many times in Skald.

This week, I want to get further into the parallels (and differences) between the two stories by examining their endings more closely.

True Detective

In True Detective’s final episode, detectives Rust and Marty finally succeed in putting together the pieces and tracking down the child-killer Errol Childress,1 a key figure in the depraved cult of the Yellow King. On the way, they have a conversation which echoes their first on-screen dialogue: these bookended scenes cement the circular nature of the narrative.

More importantly, during the confrontation with Childress, seeds from that first conversation finally bear fruit. During that initial cargument (one of the show’s most iconic scenes), the atheist Rust justifies the crucifix in his house, explaining that he uses it for meditation: ‘I contemplate the Garden [of Gethsemane] - the idea of allowing your own crucifixion.’

This is, of course, an odd thing to say for a guy who fervently argues that there is no God, and Marty is as nonplussed as the viewer. Marty picks up on the flagrant contradiction in a following episode - as Rust pours scorn on the people at an Evangelical gathering, Marty remarks that Rust sounds like he’s panicking, and trying to convince himself rather than anyone else.

The contradiction is further stressed when Rust is shown to be incredibly proficient at getting confessions out of suspects: he himself explains his interview style in terms of religious confession, and his entire vocabulary and body language during these interviews screams priest, as he comforts and reassures even the vilest offenders, and holds out the promise of absolution in return for confession. Even his habit of proselytising his pessimistic beliefs ties in with this: in a twist of irony, the man who rails against religion is an evangelist of his own gloomy philosophy.

Rust is also implied to have a supernatural sensitivity, hinted at by several visions connected to the case. The show does offer a mundane explanation for these - Rust has drug-related nervous issues, causing hallucinations - yet several of his hallucinations coincide a little too neatly with developments in the story, in a way that allows for the possibility of a genuine psychic faculty,2 which affirms his symbolic priestly role.

This is further reinforced in his confrontation with Childress: the killer addresses Rust as ‘little priest,’ and sees him as suitable for a special sacrifice that will allow Childress to ‘ascend,’ becoming something other than human. Dressed in a spotless white shirt, Rust is likened to a sacrificial lamb, and in yet another twist of irony, his long hair gives him a distinctly Christ-like appearance. He follows Childress alone into a nightmarish overgrown ruin, and confronts him before a sacrificial altar. As foreshadowed, Rust willingly goes to his own crucifixion.

In this climactic sequence, we are also given two new possible interpretations of the cult’s spiral sign - the spiral may represent the maze-like stone ruin with the cult’s altar at its heart, or it may represent what Rust sees there. Before being ambushed by Childress, Rust has a vision of a dark vortex above him, and fans theorise that this, rather than the ruin itself, is what the cultists are referring to when they speak of ‘Carcosa,’3 which seems to be the cosmic realm where the Yellow King resides. Could the vortex be the entrance to Carcosa?

In the confrontation with Childress, Rust is stabbed in the abdomen4 and undergoes a symbolic death and resurrection. Afterwards, he confides in Marty about his near death experience, saying that he felt the presence of his lost loved ones. Rust is deeply affected by this brush with death, and for the first and last time in the show, he breaks down in tears.

It’s also worth noting that Childress’ last words to Rust, ‘Take off your mask,’ are lifted directly from The King in Yellow, and also feature in a memorable subplot of Skald.

Skald

Whereas True Detective closes its circular narrative with two car conversations, Skald’s beginning anticipates its end with a journey through a maze. This alone might give us pause, since Rust also passes through a maze on the way to his symbolic crucifixion.

The first maze encounter takes place at the beginning of the game, in a childhood flashback where the protagonist chases Embla through a dark maze on her father’s estate. At the heart of the maze, Embla is found wading in a pool, and as she trails her fingers across the surface of the water, kaleidoscopic colours swirl from her hands.5 This signposts her uncanny supernatural aptitude, which is crucial in the second maze journey, at the end of the game.

This second maze encounter takes place beneath the ominous Black Priory. It is rumoured that the Priory is the resting place of Emperor Gallian, a powerful Magos who founded the Empire thousands of years ago, but in actual fact, the Priory is implied to be not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of years old, and built by inhuman hands.

After traversing a maze in pitch darkness, the protagonist (now with Embla in tow) discovers what can only be described as a dormant spacecraft in the biomechanical idiom of H.R. Giger.6

The protagonist falls unconscious after crossing the threshold, and awakens naked and alone. The dark hallways of the ship form yet another maze, and, one by one, the protagonist discovers the chilling fate of each of their companions, so that by the time they arrive at the middle, they are well and truly alone (and the player is mildly traumatised).

Clues within the spacecraft help us to glean some understanding: we learn that a god-like being lies dormant within, and has been dreaming for eons,7 but now must wake up, or fall prey to his ancient rival, a monstrosity known as the Dragon, whose antagonistic presence is felt throughout the game. It is implied that this would also doom humanity.

Once again, Embla is found at the heart of the maze, and here, the final piece falls into place. Embla, of unknown paternity, and known as ‘Star-child,’ is revealed as the daughter of the dreaming titan in the centre of the ship.8 Her destiny is to merge with him, and be consumed, allowing the god to awaken, but giving up her own life in the process. In keeping with the fatalistic nature of the story, the protagonist has no choice but to assist her in this.

As in the flashback, Embla descends into a watery pool - this time a mechanical pod where her body is absorbed. Symbolically, there is a connotation of return to the womb (and the term ‘anti-womb’ is indeed used), but perhaps also of baptism and rebirth - Embla speculates that some part of her consciousness may live on within her awakened father.

More obvious are the parallels with Christ, the sacrificial Lamb of God. Embla is the mortal child of a god, sent to live among humans, and must willingly give her life for the sake of mankind. She obviously shares this symbolism with Rust, and, like Rust, she is also depicted as spiritually sensitive through her supernatural faculty.

Comparison

Although the two endings share many key elements, there are also profound and fundamental differences. True Detective’s ending is bittersweet - Rust broods on the fact that many of the cultists are still at large, and although Marty’s estranged family visits him in hospital, he weeps with regret over their separation.

However, the overall feeling is optimistic. Rust’s near death experience has shaken the foundations of his pessimism, and made way for the possibility of a moral and spiritual rebirth. For the first time in decades, he is able to look up at the stars and appreciate their beauty. The stars are the topic of Rust and Marty’s final words of the series:

Marty: It seems to me that the dark is holding a lot more territory.

Rust: Once, there was nothing but dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.

Skald’s ending, by contrast, is like a kick in the stomach. The player’s companions are cruelly and casually picked off, left either dead or worse. The protagonist’s fate is uncertain at best, and, with the awakening of the god and the launch of his spacecraft, the Outer Isles and all their inhabitants are destroyed in what the Empire writes off as a natural disaster. In a twisted echo of True Detective, the ending notes that ‘a new star is born’ (this being the spaceship).

Eerily, the spaceship in flight is shown to exactly resemble the reaver cult’s spiral symbol, which, together with other hints, raises an uncomfortable question: was the cult serving the Dragon, or were they serving Embla’s father all along?

From the murky circumstances of Embla’s conception (see Part 1), to her father’s likely role in manipulating the cult, to the cruelty inflicted on the player’s companions, not to mention the fate of Embla herself, the message is clear: the god’s awakening is, at best, a lesser evil, but the powerless player, ‘an insect at the feet of gods,’ has no choice but to accept it.

Having said that, it should be noted that, whereas TD’s ending is definitively the conclusion of Rust and Marty’s story, Skald was intended as the first part of a series. The creator has spoken about his wish to continue the story, though it’s not clear whether work is currently underway. Still, there are unanswered questions: is the Dragon defeated, or is this only the beginning of a new conflict on a cosmic scale? Does Embla’s ghost live on within her father? And did any of her companions survive?

The spirit of Skald as a whole is perhaps best illustrated by the fate of Roland,9 the first of the player’s companions to fall. A grim and bitter mercenary, racked with guilt and self-loathing, Roland is the last person you would expect heroic action from.

And yet, after suffering an infected wound on the threshold of the spacecraft, he accepts his fate, and chooses to sacrifice himself for his companions’ sake. Of all the companion characters, Roland goes to his death with the most courage and dignity, and in this, we see a familiar theme of ‘grimdark’ fantasy - even in the most hopeless circumstances, noble deeds are possible, and perhaps meaningful.

As such, for all its contrast with True Detective, Skald might not be as utterly bleak as it appears.

Thank you to those who have read both parts. Posts like these are always phenomenally unlikely to drive traffic, but a game like Skald deserves care and attention, and who would write something like this if not me?

If you enjoyed these posts, you might also like my posts on HighFleet, which I looked at in terms of Dune and Lawrence of Arabia.

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Further Alien/Giger references in Skald:

For the benefit of those not burdened with the weight of eldritch knowledge, Skald: Against the Black Priory is a dark fantasy RPG released in 2024, which was developed by a small Norwegian team headed by Anders Lauridsen. It has also been living rent-free in my head for weeks, and I would very much like to make that your problem, dear reader, if you’ll let me.

To give a rough sense of the premise, the story puts the player in the shoes of a mercenary sailing to the Outer Isles, a bleak and sparsely peopled archipelago on the northern edge of the Gallian Empire, which spans much of the known world. In an early flashback sequence, the protagonist visits the noble estate where they were raised, the child of a common master-at-arms serving Lord Cato. The protagonist grew up alongside Embla, Cato’s granddaughter, who was born with an uncanny supernatural aptitude.

Embla is the child of an unknown father, evidently conceived in murky and traumatic circumstances, and bears the nickname ‘Star-child,’ which would be less ominous if this were a different genre. We learn that she has recently gone missing, and that the protagonist has agreed to sail to the Outer Isles to find her. On arrival, we find that a disaster is underway, with animals transforming into monsters, and ordinary fishermen into murderous cultists. These events seem inseparably connected to Embla’s arrival.

Billed as Lovecraftian, the game draws heavily from the genre of ‘weird fiction,’1 and there is undeniably a strong influence from Lovecraft himself, with familiar terminology (by which I don’t mean racial slurs) and ideas from the great neurotic. Skald is thoroughly steeped in Lovecraft’s vision of a hostile universe, as well as his morbid fascination with the sea:2 even his iconic ‘Deep Ones’ - a race of aquatic monsters - make an appearance. The titular Black Priory, an ice-bound ruin of impossible antiquity, also evokes famous Lovecraftian settings, particularly the nightmare plateau of Leng and the Antarctic ruins left by the Elder Things.

Having said that, it’s important to note that, while Lovecraft codified weird fiction to the point that his name is practically synonymous with the genre today, the genre did not start with him, but took shape decades earlier. As such, knowing about Lovecraft alone isn’t really sufficient to make sense of Skald: in actual fact, the game has far more to do with two other works only tangentially connected to Lovecraft. Namely, these are Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895),3 and the first season of the HBO anthology series True Detective (2014).

The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories rooted in supernatural horror and weird fiction. The title comes from a play within the book, which is a recurring thread tying the stories together, and the play’s title refers to a malovolent entity by the same name.

The King in Yellow is closely referenced by both True Detective and Skald, which itself references both The King in Yellow and True Detective, to the point that you actually get more out of Skald if you know about True Detective. So, what we have here is a play within a book within a TV show within a video game (within a newsletter…). Are you still with me?

True Detective probably needs less of an introduction - despite the unpromising title, the first season is generally accepted as one of the best TV dramas of its day, and justifiably so. Set in rural Louisiana over a span of nearly twenty years, True Detective follows detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) in their investigation of a depraved cult embedded in Evangelical circles. Inspired by the very real Hosanna Church child abuse case, True Detective deals with difficult subject matter, and stands out not only for its haunting allusions to the unspeakable, but also its portrayal of the endemic poverty and corruption that funnels victims into the arms of abusers.

True Detective involves a subtle but definite element of the supernatural. Whereas the real Hosanna Church abusers incorporated Satanic trappings into their crimes, True Detective’s fictional counterparts perform ritual abuse and murder in the name of the Yellow King. This name comes up again and again throughout the series, along with a key phrase from Chambers’ fictional play that also appears in Skald - ‘Take off your mask.’ (We’ll come back to that in Part 2.)

These are, however, only surface similarities, and in fact, it wasn’t the Yellow King references that reawakened the True Detective obsessive in me while playing Skald, but something more fundamental, which stems directly from True Detective rather than Chambers or Lovecraft. In True Detective, the cultist Reggie Ledoux tells Rust that:

You’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle.

For Rust, this phrase becomes a constant preoccupation, haunting him more than a decade later. He comes to believe that, whereas in our three-dimensional world, we perceive time as a linear process, viewed from a different dimension, ‘a sphere becomes a circle,’ and therefore all events overlap. According to this theory, everything that has ever happened - or will ever happen - is happening simultaneously, forever. As Rust puts it:

Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re going to do over and over and over again.

This idea of circular repetition is built into the narrative structure of True Detective. We see Rust and Marty in three different decades, and each time resembles a repetition of the same cycle: in 1995 and 2002, Rust and Marty seek the same killer, but fail in both instances because of their own personal flaws and the fractious nature of their partnership.4

Only in 2012, the final cycle, are they able to succeed, putting aside old resentments and committing themselves to what has become a sacred duty for both men. Rust and Marty’s first and last car journey together bookend the series, with their conversation following a familiar pattern - Rust pontificating, Marty annoyed - and Rust repeating a key phrase5 in both dialogues. Skald likewise has a circular structure to its story, with key scenes repeated at the beginning and end of the game, which we’ll look at in Part 2.

Variations of Rust’s fatalistic mantra also appear constantly in Skald, particularly in key conversations with Embla, and figure into the game’s ending in a major way (again, Part 2 will cover that):

Appropriately, this idea - with its ominous connotation of inevitability - is repeated over and over again through the latter chapters of Skald:

In True Detective, the circular motif is also seen in the symbol of the cult,6 a spiral pattern, which has a double or triple-meaning in the context of the show. And of course, this exact same symbol (also with multiple meanings) appears many times in Skald, where it is the sign of the malignant cult that has sprung up on the Outer Isles, who borrow much of their iconography straight from True Detective:

Skald also borrows the phrase ‘black stars’ from True Detective and The King in Yellow7 - this reference is made by Ledoux8 and other members of the cult, who speak ecstatically of ‘the coming of black stars,’ and likewise it’s uttered by several characters under supernatural influence in Skald.

In Skald, the phrase evokes a dark and hostile cosmos, in line with the sensibility of weird fiction, while in TD, the reference can be linked to Rust’s pessimistic philosophy - for Rust, the universe is a fundamentally dark and hopeless place, and his depressive tendency makes it impossible for him to recognise light and beauty. Whereas for Rust this is an unhappy preoccupation, the cult consciously rejects good and delights in evil, and eagerly anticipates the darkening of the stars. Accordingly, stars figure into crucial final scenes of both TD and Skald, which we’ll get into in the next post.

The two stories also bear similarities in the troubling sexual connotations of the violence depicted. Although Skald is far less explicit than TD, this element is introduced very early on, and a disturbing implication hangs over the narrative. In a childhood flashback, the protagonist discovers their father in a drunken stupor, and, while helping him back to his room, he rambles disjointedly about a past failure that has haunted him ever since. He was tasked with guarding Embla’s mother, Valeria, but she disappeared from her room, despite the door and window being locked, and, whatever happened to her that night, her mind was ‘broken,’ and she was never the same afterwards.

It is strongly implied that this was the same night that Embla was conceived, and the inference of rape is inescapable.9 Valeria never directly appears in Skald, but is delicately said to have been sent away - perhaps institutionalised? - because of what happened to her. A parallel can be found in True Detective’s Kelly Rita, a survivor of the cult’s abuse who Rust visits in a psychiatric ward in a particularly haunting scene.10 Likewise, the image of the protagonist’s guilty father, driven to drink and eventually exiled because of his failure, has many parallels in TD, which often lingers on images of the families and bystanders left devastated by the consequences of abuse.

Skald’s reavers also parallel TD’s cult in that, whereas other creatures have been transformed by the malign presence on the Outer Isles, the reavers remain physically human, and capable of blending into society. After the ravaged village of Horryn has been cleared of reavers, the new guard captain is troubled by the sheer number of people flowing in from the countryside - they appear to be ordinary people, yet the reavers too were ordinary people: ‘Scrub away the blood and shit and markings, and what is the difference between a reaver and any other man?’

Likewise, True Detective’s cultists blend seamlessly into society, even as wealthy and respected people, and it is bitterly ironic that the child-killer Errol Childress is repeatedly encountered by detectives who fail to recognise him for what he is. In both Skald and True Detective, evil hides in plain sight, taking an all too human shape, and cannot be fully defeated.

As Rust laments at the end: ‘We didn’t get them all.’

Thanks for reading! I have tried to keep the spoilers moderate in this first part. In Part 2, I will be getting into the really juicy stuff, and unpacking the endings of Skald and TD. I hope you like sacrificial lambs and the Garden of Gethsemane.

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I have been low-key fascinated by the Legacy of Kain series ever since stumbling across a video about the first game, Blood Omen, which I subsequently tried and failed to get into, but still think of wistfully from time to time. Blood Omen is a 2D dark fantasy adventure from 1996, in which you play as Kain, a snotty white-haired nobleman slain by bandits, resurrected as a vampire, and promptly sent on a mind-bending quest across the bleak land of Nosgoth (presumably a combination of ‘nosferatu’ and ‘goth’).

Kain is bound by destiny to round up the truant guardians of the Pillars of Nosgoth (tm), a coterie of insane people with names like Nupraptor the Mentalist, in order to restore balance to the land and prevent disaster.1 Unfortunately, that ship has kind of sailed, and he ends up travelling back in time to assassinate an evil king before he becomes evil, provoking a mass vampire genocide in the process. This leads to Kain becoming even more of a misanthrope, rejecting his destiny as a pillar guardian, and plunging the world into an eternity of darkness under his tyrannical rule (as one does).

As grand as this all sounds - and as beautiful as Blood Omen’s 2D art is - it’s unfortunately marred by the fact that it’s incredibly antiquated, with unwieldy controls, awkward combat, and an unsatisfactory save system. What makes these barriers all the more frustrating is that the game is quite literally bursting with compelling concepts, particularly related to Kain’s vampire nature. He is powerful during the night, and weak during the day. He is capable of transforming into a wolf, a swarm of bats, a cloud of mist, or disguising himself as a harmless NPC while infiltrating towns. He can’t cross running water. When enemies are wounded, he can recover his health by draining their blood.

It’s a game that really makes you feel like an old-school vampire, and it anticipated the appetite for sprawling, mysterious dark fantasy worlds that would later give the likes of Elden Ring their rock star status.

Kain is also elevated by the disdainful, dulcet tones of Simon Templeman (Loghain from Dragon Age; also various Sith from KOTOR), who was virtually born to play a morose vampire antihero, and benefits from excellent writing. Fortunately, Blood Omen was successful enough in its day to be the beginning of a series rather than an end.

Soul Reaver and Raziel

Three years later, Blood Omen was followed by Soul Reaver, which, I am pleased to report, is every bit as edgy and extravagant as its title. Soul Reaver is a direct sequel, taking place during Kain’s vampire tyrant era, and puts the player in the shoes of Raziel, one of Kain’s vampire ‘sons’ who serve as the generals of his army.

The story begins with Raziel developing bat-like wings, which Kain, apparently in a fit of envy, rips apart, tearing out the bones and leaving only tattered flesh behind. Raziel is subsequently cast down into the bottomless Lake of the Dead, and falls in agony for what feels like an eternity, before finally arriving in a kind of underworld on the lakebed.

Here, he encounters Hermaeus Mora a mysterious entity with countless eyes and tentacles, the so-called Elder God, who becomes Raziel’s new patron, and directs him as a weapon against Kain. The Elder God is voiced by none other than Tony Jay, best known as Shere Khan and Judge Frollo, who as always delivers a menacing performance.

An emaciated husk of withered flesh and tortured musculature, Raziel in his new form is no longer a vampire, but a kind of wraith, who sustains himself by consuming (or reaving, if you will) the souls of his enemies. His character design is very striking in itself - he lacks a belly, alluding to his constant hunger, and has also lost his lower jaw, exposing the lipless maxilla when he pulls back his ragged mask to feed. His eyes are large and glowing, with no pupil or iris, and the emblems on his mask are evocative of tear-stains. He is a very literal example of gaming’s revenant archetype, living only to avenge himself.

He is also brilliantly voiced by Michael Bell - then in his sixties, but giving a youthful quality to the ageless Raziel - an incredibly prolific voice actor working from the 70s all the way through to the 2020s.

Gameplay and setting

Unlike Blood Omen, Soul Reaver is a 3D title of the PS1 era, and is much more accessible than its predecessor, particularly if played through the recent remaster, which includes both Soul Reaver titles with improved textures and character models, offering a major glow-up while preserving the essence of the originals. It’s also possible to play with all of the original graphics, and the player can switch seamlessly between the two modes with the touch of a single button, even during cutscenes. A photo mode is also included, making it easy to compare original and revamped (ha) assets.

Soul Reaver - much like Blood Omen before it - is ahead of its time in terms of its concepts and sheer creativity, and the mechanics intersect with the story admirably. Because of his ghostly nature, Raziel can phase between the spirit and material realms, with the world visibly changing and distorting around him as he does so. In the spirit world, straight passages become crooked, walls warp and change shape, and otherwise impassable obstacles become negotiable. The tattered remains of Raziel’s wings can’t be used for true flight, but he can use them to glide between platforms, and while he is vulnerable to water in his physical form, he can run safely across riverbeds as a ghost.

He also faces different enemies depending on whether or not he is physically manifested - whereas in the physical world he faces vampiric creatures, in the ghostly world he is threatened by soul-eating wraiths and underworld scavengers.

Combat in Soul Reaver is occasionally awkward, but conceptually sound, and for the most part very serviceable. Because Raziel spends most of his time fighting vampire minions, the whole combat system is conceived around vampire lore. For most of the game, there is no way to eradicate vampires directly - instead, Raziel has to stun them, and then either impale them with improvised stakes, or physically grapple with them, throwing them onto spikes, into fires, into rare shafts of daylight, or into running water.

Even with their bodies disabled, it’s necessary to suck up vampires’ souls (which is how Raziel recovers his health) to prevent them from reviving, and there are wonderful little details built into the combat system - for instance, if a stake is pulled from an impaled (and apparently dead) vampire, it will immediately recover and resume attacking. Even today, it’s uncommon to see a fantasy game make such great use of its central conceit, and the result is that the player really feels like a tortured ghost fighting tooth and nail with the undead.

The game’s boss-centric format is also used to great narrative effect. Each boss is one of Kain’s vampire generals - and Raziel’s former ‘brothers’ - all now hideously mutated from their original humanoid forms, having evolved in radically different directions in the centuries since Raziel was cast down. Each general is also sire to a corresponding race of vampire minions, who menace Raziel in the material realm.

The first vampire minions to be encountered are the brutish spawn of Dumah, a warlike general who is not met until much later. The Dumahim are almost orc-like, with dark green skin, stocky frames, and fists like maces. Then, there are the ghoulish, carrion-eating spawn of Melchiah, himself a crawling mass of corpses. Towards the end of the game, Raziel also encounters the children of Rahab, who have evolved into scaly, fish-like monstrosities, overcoming their aversion to water to escape the hated daylight.

Perhaps the most memorable (and uncanny) of Soul Reaver’s vampire kindreds are the spawn of Zephon. These are crawling humanoids with erratic movements and spider-like features, capable of climbing walls and wrapping their human victims in silken webs. If the cocooned victims in their lairs are examined closely, it’s clear that some are developing fangs and extra eyes, and transforming into Zephonim themselves.

Each vampire general is also well-realised, offering a memorable boss encounter, usually arranged as a puzzle. Some must be lured into traps; others can be destroyed with their own projectiles, or exposed to daylight.

Dumah is found apparently dead in a stronghold full of the skeletal remains of his slaughtered spawn, but returns to life when the stakes left in him by human vampire hunters are removed. Zephon is a Giger-esque, biomechanical monstrosity, fused into place like an alien queen, his barely-human grin separating into huge mandibles. Rahab swims triumphantly in a drowned cathedral, once host to human crusaders.

By absorbing the souls of each defeated boss, Raziel gains unique benefits, which (like an old school metroidvania) allow access to new areas of the world. He gains the ability to phase through barriers, to climb like Zephon’s spiders,2 and eventually to swim like Rahab’s aquatic vampires. After his first confrontation with Kain, he also gains the Soul Reaver (tm), a spirit blade bound to his arm, which is the metaphysical counterpart of Kain’s own sword.

The game does, of course, have its faults. There are a couple of murderously finnicky bits of platforming towards the end, and mid-game offers some remarkably opaque level design. It’s not as actively hostile to the player as the likes of System Shock, but nor is it as intuitive as a game of today, and there should be no shame in Googling solutions. The actual puzzles are very manageable, but problems do arise when the game expects you to know about specific inputs it has never deigned to inform you of, which happens a couple of times. On the whole, though, it’s reasonably accessible and rarely crosses the line into sadism.

Moreover, any shortcomings are more than made up for by the lore and atmosphere of this dying world. There is a strange synthesis of medieval and steampunk elements: Kain has blocked out the sun with the smoke from great factories, allowing his vampires free rein. The remaining humans have long since been reduced to a ‘domesticated’ state, serving only as a source of blood, and Kain’s restless courtiers bicker and feud among themselves for want of a challenge.

A besieged human enclave can be found and partially explored in-game, and Raziel has some unique dialogue setting the scene, although there is little to do there due to cut content. There was going to be a section where Raziel fought a secret cult among the humans led by a mad vampire-worshipping priestess voiced by Anna Gunn (Skyler White), but even without this, the encounter adds to the sense of a doomed world.

Soul Reaver 2

After a fairly abrupt cliffhanger ending, due to the first game being rushed to market, Soul Reaver 2 picks up pretty much immediately where its predecessor left off. After a dramatic duel between Kain and Raziel in what can only be described as a time machine, Raziel pursues Kain into the past, where he encounters Moebius, a devious, all-knowing wizard with the energy of a scheming eunuch.

There is a noticeable glow-up, as the original was built for the PS2 rather than Soul Reaver’s PS1. Much more of the game takes place outdoors, as opposed to the claustrophobic tunnels and ruins of the first game, and we have a better sense of Nosgoth’s scale and geography. There are mountains, swamps, lakes and forests, and even little hamlets in the dismal wilderness. The levels also tend to be far more ambitious and elaborate, and there is less of the 90s jank insofar as I don’t remember having to consult Google at any point.

Gameplay is also refined, particularly combat. Whereas previously Raziel’s combat abilities were fairly limited, consisting mainly of fist-fighting or clobbering enemies with improvised weapons, he can now wield swords and battle-axes, block incoming attacks, and even throw weapons at enemies. The weapons offer many ruthless kill animations, from beheadings, to punching his clawed hand directly through enemy torsos, to chopping zombies in half and leaving their severed torsos crawling on the ground. There are fewer vampire enemies, so this more direct, aggressive combat style makes more sense, as opposed to the first game’s emphasis on impalements and environmental hazards.

More importantly, the character models also received a marked glow-up, becoming far more detailed and expressive. Even Raziel is now able to emote with what remains of his face, and the rest of the cast is more animated still.

This is fortunate, because 2 features a larger supporting cast and far more dialogue, with Raziel on more of an emotional journey. Whereas Kain is a distant and mysterious villain in the first game, he is far more involved in SR2, and takes on more of an antivillain role. He is an ambiguous and secretive figure, always two steps ahead of Raziel, never saying anything outright when a hint will do, and knowing far more than he deigns to share about the various cosmic agendas behind Nosgoth’s problems.

Raziel also acquires a menacing new ‘companion’ in the Soul Reaver, his spirit blade, which becomes sentient after events early in the game, and will feed off of Raziel’s own life energy if it isn’t sated with enemy souls. Between this, Kain’s melancholy-white-haired-aura-farmer archetype, and the theme of struggle against fate, the games almost certainly owe something to Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone.

Raziel’s relationship with the Elder God also takes a turn; whereas in the first game, he loyally served the God, too preoccupied with his vendetta to ask questions, he begins the sequel with a far more fractious relationship with his former ally, who seeks to use him against Kain, whereas Raziel has no desire to serve any master and doubts the God’s motives. As we learn more, it becomes clear that the Elder God is not what he seems, and has his own malevolent agenda.

2’s story is pure melodrama - which I mean in the warmest possible way - and while it can be a little woolly in places, it’s very excusable given the game’s length and action-oriented nature, and the quality of the dialogue and voicing is outstanding. High points include: every scene involving Kain; every interaction between Raziel and the Elder God; and Raziel’s grandiose Jungian confrontation with himself (which I will not elaborate on here).

(This meme perfectly captures the style and spirit of 2’s story and dialogue.)

If 2 has a fault, it is that it runs on a little too long - though it’s still far shorter and more digestible than any big budget modern game - and involves a certain amount of repetitive backtracking. The latter comes from the time travel element of the game’s story, which on the one hand is used very well as a storytelling device, contrasting the various eras of Nosgoth’s history, but on the other, traipsing through familiar environments does get old.

Closing thoughts

As some of you probably know, the Soul Reaver remaster has only this month been followed by a remaster of Legacy of Kain: Defiance, which concludes Raziel’s trilogy and follows on from the dramatic cliff-hanger at the conclusion of SR2. Being perpetually out of the loop on gaming news, this was a surprise to me, as I had only lately got round to playing the Soul Reavers and writing this review. I will most likely play Defiance some time soon, and if there is interest I may write something about it too.

(I was still more surprised to learn that a new 2D Legacy of Kain, subtitled ‘Ascendance,’ is to be released at the end of this month!)

For the moment, though, I can wholeheartedly recommend the Soul Reaver remaster. It’s a solid modernisation of two fine games bursting with atmosphere and gothic flair. You can feel the enthusiasm of the original developers radiating down the years, preserved in the striking art direction, forbidding lore and brilliant voice performances. For the most part, the games have aged well in terms of design, and the refined assets help to make it accessible.3

In short, it’s a good place to start if you’re interested in Legacy of Kain, and why wouldn’t you be?

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Are you tired of hearing about Wuthering Heights? Would you like to wage class war on Emerald Fennell for being Emerald Fennell, and for having a name like Emerald Fennell? Do you irrationally despise Jacob Elordi for reasons presumably outwith his control?1

What if I told you that there was another gothic romance you could be watching in 2026, untainted by looksmaxxed Hollywood physiognomies and aristocratic dribbling? What if I told you that it was actually gothic and actually romantic, and doesn’t constitute an attack upon any Bronte sister’s aura (or Mary Shelley’s, for that matter)? What if I told you that it pre-dates the birth of virtually everyone involved in Wuthering Heights, most importantly Jacob Elordi?

I am, of course, talking about a Czechoslovak production of Beauty and the Beast from 1978, which I am sure we all know and love. In the (un)likely event that anyone didn’t see the specific instagram reel that caused me to fall down this rabbit hole, a quick outline -

Far from Disney’s fluffy sing along,2 Panna a Netvor (literally: ‘The Virgin and the Monster’) is… actually very dark. In fact, it’s so dark that it’s often categorised as a horror film, and it does feel like horror for about 90% of its runtime. The director, Juraj Herz, is best known for The Cremator, a horror-comedy about [checks notes] a Nazi corpse-disposal guy,3 so if anything Panna a Netvor was a relatively light follow-up, and it does offer some much-needed relief in the form of romantic drama.

Nonetheless, Panna a Netvor is thoroughly spooky and gruesome from the outset. It opens with a doomed wagon train struggling through a dark and misty forest,4 with flocks of crows calling ominously above. This shot of the birds is followed by a credits sequence panning over strange paintings that are hard to make sense of, showing naked human figures among ghostly human-bird hybrids. The bird-like figures are monstrous and contorted, yet the humans don’t flinch from them, instead stretching out their arms towards them. There’s a sense almost of worship, making the forlorn winged monsters angelic.

This, of course, foreshadows the appearance of the Beast, here depicted as a monstrous figure with the head of a falcon and scaly taloned hands, with a ragged cloak streaming behind him like wings. This bird-like image signals the film’s departure from the fairy tale,5 and accordingly, this is a particularly weird, complicated and tortured Beast.

Unlike the ugly-but-benign creature we’re familiar with, this Beast is cursed with an overpowering thirst for human blood: functionally, he’s a vampire, and genuinely quite a scary and problematic one, complete with the familiar psychosexual undertones. This is not a Guillermo del Toro de-fanged monster man, it’s a really monstrous man, whose dark side must genuinely be confronted and overcome. There is no need for a Gaston or an Oscar Isaac Frankenstein, or even a wicked fairy godmother - the monster is the monster.

In his very first appearance, the Beast corners a woman in the forest and claws open her chest, and when Julie (that is, Beauty) arrives at his haunted estate, she is rendered unconscious by a drug administered by one of the creature’s ghostly servants.6 The Beast prepares to attack her, but stops at the last moment, instead violently clawing the face of her mother’s portrait, which resembles Julie.

The monster’s violent appetite is represented by a menacing whispering voice, which he desperately bargains and pleads with in a series of unsettling scenes. The actor, Vlastimil Harapes, gives him a distinctly bird-like physicality, with rapid movements of his head, and his eerily human eyes can be seen glancing furtively through the mask as he struggles with his demonic nature.

As a substitute for Julie’s blood, he instead hunts deer in the forest, and it is notable that he repeatedly talks about hunting does specifically, using the feminine form, rather than the neutral deer. Very early on, the film links bloodlust and sexuality, showing animals butchered and gutted in a market7 immediately before a scene where Julie’s sisters discuss their arranged marriages, and this same gruesome entanglement of violence and desire is made manifest in the Beast.

What is most remarkable is that despite this grisly subtext, the film manages to make the Beast a profoundly tragic, even endearing figure. It helps that he is shown to struggle virtuously against his violent compulsions, and he also experiences something of an existential crisis (virtually mandatory in Soviet film), which progresses as his humanity increases. As his malignant inner voice8 says, he once lived without the burden of conscience, truly one of the birds and beasts, but with the arrival of Julie (and the implied weakening of his curse), he is faced with the pain of consciousness. He is alienated from both humans and animals, and his growing awareness of his isolation is agony.

Throughout, there is a sense that becoming human comes with a cost: after Julie touches the Beast’s talons, they are transformed into human hands, and though he is initially delighted, he is later distressed to learn that he can no longer catch does without his claws, and when his ghostly servants desert him he begins to starve. The film suggests that to be human is to be vulnerable, and to depend on others. Like a saint, the Beast is at once elevated and made tangible to the viewer through suffering.

There is less to say about Julie, who is a more straightforwardly virtuous fairy tale heroine. She is the beloved youngest daughter of a widower, with two comically obnoxious half-sisters, and, per the original tale, she goes to live with the Beast to save her father, who angered the Beast by picking a rose from his garden for Julie. Zdena Studenkova is dazzlingly beautiful in a very folkloric way, and wonderful in the role. She benefits from several scintillating costumes, as she should.

The Beast visits Julie each evening, and they converse, but only on the condition that she always faces away from him, and so never sees him, only hearing his pleasant and courteous voice. This conceit leads to a series of brilliantly tense dialogues, as Julie very often nearly catches a glimpse of her monstrous host as he moves about behind her. (And of course, she does eventually see his reflection, and Drama ensues.)

The gradual growth of their relationship, with alternating breakthroughs and setbacks, is as brilliantly written and performed as anything I’ve seen, and maintains suspense until quite literally the last minute. I found myself genuinely anxious towards the end, despite knowing how the story is supposed to end.

The setting, too, is beautifully realised, with the cursed forest and the Beast’s mouldering estate as the standouts. Trees and roots are a constant presence, always reaching out their gnarled limbs towards Julie threateningly, or perhaps longingly, just as the humans reach out towards the monsters in the opening credits. The estate’s iron gates are appropriately wrought in the shape of a double-headed eagle, and strange enrooted statues stand guard in front of the doors, furtively turning their heads to watch guests passing.

Uncanny paintings9 of monstrous creatures akin to the Beast and his servants can be found within, and a magical hidden doorway behind a curtain provides a passage between the Beast’s world and Julie’s family home. The Beast’s inhuman servants are always just out of sight, spying on guests and quietly serving them with food and drinks. The whole estate is deeply soaked in magic and mystery, much of which remains unexplained: there is no narrative of a fairy godmother or a secret princely identity. The Beast is permitted to remain an enigma.

In short (and not wishing to drag this out overmuch), Panna a Netvor is pretty much a perfect film, and despite its age, it feels like a very ‘new’ experience, simply because it doesn’t particularly look or feel like anything else. There’s perhaps a touch of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth in the otherworldly strangeness of the sets and materials, although the pacing, style and general atmosphere is more akin to something by Tarkovsky.10

Most importantly, though, Panna a Netvor impresses as a genuinely gothic - and genuinely frightening - monster romance, which refuses to de-fang or water down its monster at the outset. Monstrousness is not reduced to a trivial aesthetic: it is a genuine force that must be reckoned with. This is what makes it so suspenseful, and ultimately so affecting.

I’m including a link so that you can watch at your leisure, the stream is spotty but my overactive anti-virus thinks the download link is safe, and it lets you watch in your browser.

If you liked this post, you may also enjoy my recent post on medievalism in film, which covers a number of Soviet and Czechoslovak classics among others. Part 2 of my Darkwood series also touches on fairy tales, cannibalism and Soviet film.

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A dark wood, if you will. I was going to have a section at the end connecting Panna a Netvor to Darkwood, but it was untidy and too self-referential (particularly given that maybe ten of you at a push are interested in Darkwood, and probably not as austisticly as me). I’m just going to stick a screenshot from my note on the parallels here, and you can read my very good and big-brained Darkwood posts for more if you so desire.

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Obvious date rape parallel.

Today, I want to break down two of the most sinister pieces of propaganda I have seen this last week or so. Of course, there’s been plenty more since, but I want to keep this brief, so let’s begin.

Exhibit A: ‘About Iran, from an Iranian Woman.’

If you use the Substack app on a regular basis, you have probably seen this.1 It needs examining because, while you can easily pick out the imperialist/Zionist talking points if you’re attuned, it’s quite an insidious piece, which frames tacit support for the Israeli/US attack in a ‘nuanced’ way. This soft-sell for imperial ultraviolence has always been the most dangerous, because it is appealing to people who are psychologically normal, as opposed to the Freudian outliers that go for open fascist rhetoric.

The author does appear to be a real person, an American (of course…)-Iranian woman called Lili Michelle who does stand-up and puts clips on instagram and TikTok. She was apparently against the Israeli attack on Iran last year, but has evidently changed tack since.2

Of course, Lili being a real person does not mean that her post’s super-viral spread is entirely organic - whether an author is genuine or not, it’s easy to boost particular kinds of speech with bots, and Lili’s speech is, when you pare it back to the essentials, amenable to bombs. Still, I do think it’s at least partly organic, because again, this is the kind of speech that is agreeable to normies who want to be reassured that everything’s fine and they don’t need to do anything, and there’s always a market for that.3

Tl;dr, she is basically arguing that the assassination of the Ayatollah was a historic moment for Iranians, because he represents oppression, therefore how dare you think the current onslaught is a bad thing?

The entire article is parsed and structured basically exactly as a liberal Zionist ‘it’s complicated’ person would argue Israel-Palestine, and like a Zionist there’s a lot of special pleading and appeals to her own identity (substitute Iranian for Jew). She keeps saying that she is anti-war, but every such statement is always immediately followed by a ‘but,’ and that should tell you something. It’s no exaggeration to say that the whole article is just ‘but -’ statements followed by equivocation. For the most part, she frames the war as the lesser evil, and anti-war rhetoric as the greater. It’s a standard piece of apologia pretending to be something more sophisticated.

She even goes so far as to follow a (brief, incidental, glossing over) comment on the Minab school bombing with a ‘but’ :

Note the use here of the smaller number - fifty - when the real number is over three times that.* She uses emotive language like ‘devastating’ to camouflage what she is actually saying, which is ‘it’s sad, but.’

Consider also the familiar use of the passive voice: ‘children dying’ as opposed to the more accurate ‘children being killed (by Zionists).’ Even worse, it’s ‘children dying is not political.’ If children being killed for political ends is not political, what is?

(*The current number seems to be 186 total victims including staff and parents, and 165 pupils, mostly under the age of ten. Lili published before the full figure was known, but within 24 hours we were hearing numbers above 100, and at time of publishing (7/3/26), she has not edited it. We can only conclude that minimising it has become a choice.)

Moreover, consider the jibe about ‘people who were silent when tens of thousands of Iranians were brutally killed.’ This kind of tips her hand, because it is very recognisably the still-current imperialist/Zionist talking point about the killings during the recent protests. Since the crackdown, unverified4 Iranian death toll estimates have been a multi-purpose tool: they are thrown in the faces of anti-Zionists to relativise Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, while simultaneously manufacturing consent for the next attack on Iran. Trump himself quoted those estimates in his speech, alongside the usual superlatives about ‘the brutal October 7th attack,’ which should tell you something.

Invariably, Zionists also push the same charge of hypocrisy that Lili is pushing. ‘Why don’t you protest Iran?’5 is the new ‘Why don’t you protest Sudan?’,6 which in turn is the new ‘Why don’t you protest Yemen?’7 The only country these people don’t want you to talk about is Palestine.

Anyway, Lili goes on in much the same style. There are many more ‘buts’, and a core, recurring part of her argument is: how dare you privileged Western (implied white) people oppose this attack on Iran? Of course, this ignores the fact that a) Lili herself is posting about this ‘from the comfort of an American apartment,’ b) those apartments aren’t even that comfortable these days,8 and c) the most outspoken anti-war people in any Western country are going to be disproportionately not-white and disproportionately Muslim.

She appeals to identity-based credentials and lived experience, and quotes some snotty messages from her DMs, but ultimately, this is all just noise. You do not need to be an Iranian exile to understand that any military operation headed up by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu is going to be a sadistic bloodbath, and when they massacre a school within the first hour of the war, you should really read the room.

They even timed9 the attack to coincide with Purim, a festival celebrating the ‘pre-emptive’ killing of 75,000 Iranians. This was not lost on the Israeli public, who are currently accusing Iran of being Amalek, just like they accused Palestinians of being Amalek. This translates to ‘God has commanded us to kill every man, woman and child,’ if anyone’s wondering.

Before moving on, I screenshotted the ‘but’ statements from Lili’s article just to show how blatant this all is, and how familiar the ‘it’s complicated’ smokescreen is. This one super-viral post has turbo-charged her previously inactive Substack account, which makes me worry that there’s going to be more where it came from, because social media is a Skinner box designed to reward malevolent takes.

Exhibit B: The BBC should be abolished

This one is an absolute doozy, and represents the BBC doubling down on their familiar brand of barely-veiled imperialism. This was the same institution that employed Jimmy Savile for decades, and boy does it show at times like these.

Even just this opening salvo is worth dissecting, as it contains several signature features of the BBC’s standard Gaza Editorial Style.

Firstly, they couch the bare facts in language bordering on incredulity - ‘Iran says/according to Iranian officials’ is not used neutrally, but as a caveat, with the same disbelieving tone as the BBC’s trademark ‘according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.’ They still use these pernicious words to cast doubt on Palestinian death tolls to this day, despite the Health Ministry’s tally proving time and again to be a drastic undercount.

(If you’re not aware, the Lancet recently published a report which estimates that at least 75,000 people had been killed directly in Gaza by last January; the Israelis also evaporated around 3000 people with thermobaric bombs.)

This is followed by ‘Iran has blamed the US and Israel.’ Again, the language is incredulous: they are saying this as if anyone else is likely to have been responsible for an airstrike on Iran during a US/Israeli attack on Iran. The insinuation is that Iran could plausibly have bombed itself, an opinion that they do platform later in the article. Conveniently, they neglect to mention the fact that Israel lately bombed every school in Gaza and killed tens of thousands of children, and the US helped them do it. These small factoids would add credence to what the Iranians have reported, and are therefore relevant context.

Next, they do what they always do, and report the denial of the perpetrators as if they were a reliable source: the IDF is treated as a reputable and trustworthy institution, and the US’s empty promise to investigate itself is treated as credible.

Next - in case those pesky Iranians weren’t making it all up, and didn’t bomb themselves - they hedge their bets by including the bit about a ‘nearby’ military base (the classic ‘Hamas tunnels’ defence). The Guardian has an image showing how distant the two sites actually were:

It’s possible that the base was the target, but consider the resources and technology that the Israeli/US forces have at their disposal, and think about the kind of states we’re dealing with. Israel is a fascist theme park with a habit of sniping starving children, and the US is its funhouse reflection. In case there was any doubt, the American ‘Secretary of War’10 boasted after the massacre about how there would be ‘no stupid rules of engagement,’ and it would not be a ‘politically-correct war.’

The school was also targeted by not one, but two missiles, the second arriving after an interval and destroying the prayer hall where the survivors of the first strike were gathered. This is what they call a ‘double-tap,’ and it’s something that both the US and Israel do all the time. Al Jazeera has combed through the information in more detail, but the bottom line is that it does not look like an accident.

The BBC also saw fit to include the above bit from a social media rando blaming the regime. Because of course it’s Iran’s fault when foreign aggressors kill Iranian children, and it’s totally legitimate to platform baseless conspiracy theories when they suit the imperial agenda.

Contrary to the victim-blaming take boosted by the BBC, a warning was, in fact, issued around 9:45 (when the first bombs hit Iran), but by this point the school day had already begun. They were hit less than an hour into the war, between 10 and 10:45, by which point some parents were on the scene to collect their children. Again: a packed school was hit within literally the first hour. Think about that.

Lastly, this point about journalists was clearly included to sow doubt, to the benefit of the perpetrators of the atrocity. Meanwhile, the BBC routinely glosses over the fact that Israel has denied observer access to Gaza for two years, and killed more journalists there than have been killed in any other modern war.

(They also never mention the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons, which you’d think would be relevant context given the stated pretext for this war!)

Closing thoughts

To finish up, I want to acknowledge that yes, Iranians are suffering under an oppressive regime, and yes, that is a terrible thing. If there is a solution to that problem, I don’t know it, though there’s little reason to believe that endless sanctions and menaces are making the regime any softer.

[Edit 23/03/26 - Frankly, I now feel ashamed of this comment. Is it right for me - or anyone - to be talking about the ‘oppressive’ nature of the Iranian government, at a time like this? As if it is uniquely so, and as if we can trust any of the horror stories spread by a self-evidently despicable media? By advancing this dubious and ultimately irrelevant talking point, I feel like I was doing unpaid labour for Mossad.

A few weeks down the line, having watched how things are unfolding, I am honestly amazed by the courage, dignity and resourcefulness of the Iranians, who put us all to shame. At this point, my biggest fear is that Israel has picked this fight it never could have won in order to create the conditions where it has an ‘excuse’ to use nuclear weapons, something that its depraved populace is clearly itching to do.]

But (Lili had about twenty, I’m entitled to one) we can be sure of this: if one thing is less likely to benefit Iranians than an American-led bombing campaign, it is an Israeli-led bombing campaign.

God help us.

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Speaking of Yemen, and since Lili has invited us to play the numbers game, perhaps we should add the hundreds of thousands starved in Yemen by the US/Israel’s allies to the tally. Why not also factor in the tens of millions killed by Western sanctions worldwide since 1970? Iran is a kitten compared to its enemies.

Bizarrely, ‘why don’t you protest Yemen?’ was also asked of Palestine supporters by Zionists, when they were the ones that did it! These people don’t even take the trouble to know who they are killing at any given time. It’s like that John le Carre quote about the English:

In-game literature in fantasy games is so common that at this point, it’s almost passé. In the clumsiest cases, the player is drowned in disposable codex entries, to the point that you don’t so much feel like a hero on a quest as a recipient of spam mail, with nary an opt out button to be found.

Thankfully, this was never the case in The Elder Scrolls series, which has featured entire libraries of in-game books ever since 1996’s Daggerfall, the second entry in the series. The Elder Scrolls even has a nefarious god of books, and the title of the series itself refers to a collection of magical scrolls containing all knowledge. Small wonder, then, that TES went in for in-game texts in a big way.

These include in-universe novels, plays, histories, religious scriptures, romance, erotica, racist pamphlets, anti-racist pamphlets, scientific textbooks, Necronomicons, and more. Each new entry in the series has added more and more to this in-universe trove of fact and fiction, with many carrying over from one installment to the next. The biggest infusion came with 2002’s Morrowind, which added around 400 new books to Daggerfall’s existing 100, while Oblivion and Skyrim contributed more modestly to the final count.

These books are as varied in quality as they are in style and content, but the best of the in-game novels1 are not only entertaining, but offer the player important perspective on the various problems that are everyday realities in Tamriel, from political backstabbing, to supernatural disasters, to social strife. Through in-universe fiction, we can often glimpse vulgarised versions of ‘real’ history, replete with truncated timelines, racial and national stereotypes, sexed-up subplots, and giddy sensationalism.

The ‘non-fiction’ of The Elder Scrolls also has an important part to play, offering the player a deeper understanding of the worlds they are navigating. The series has always been particularly knowing (and even satirical) with its presentation of in-game ‘non-fiction,’ and very aware of in-universe bias and misconception.

For example, Oblivion’s ‘Guide to -’ series, which offers a traveller’s guide to each city in Cyrodiil, is unfortunately written by an incredibly bigoted Imperial woman by the name of Alessia Ottus, who has ‘strong opinions’ on certain matters (i.e., people that don’t look like her). Her books are so poisonous it’s almost funny,2 and serve as a map of the exceptionalism at the heart of the empire, which often goes unspoken in the Imperial province, but is definitely there.

Morrowind, meanwhile, incorporates ‘non-fiction,’ directly into its main quest. One of the player’s first missions for Caius Cosades (a buff, eternally shirtless, elderly spymaster with substance abuse issues) involves visiting a bookshop in the capital, and the story requires several later trips to bookshops and libraries, where the player has to source historical and religious texts in an attempt to make sense of the main plot. What emerges is a conflict of historiographies,3 pitting the Temple’s official narrative of the Battle of Red Mountain against the oral histories of the persecuted Ashlanders (from whom I pilfered my handle :P) and the revisionist texts of the Dissident Priests, a secret sect within the Temple.

Although some of the versions we hear are shown to carry more weight than others, none are completely authoritative, and almost everybody involved sincerely believes (and stubbornly sticks to) their own version. Even Dagoth-Ur, the main antagonist, who is a villain in most versions of the Red Mountain story, has his own perspective on the tale. He feels betrayed and misunderstood, and in fact appears more honest in some ways than the seemingly more benign Vivec, who lies to the player’s face about Red Mountain while confessing to his crimes in a message hidden in a book.4

It’s also worth noting that, whereas in many RPGs in-game texts are totally ephemeral, accumulating in databases exterior to the player’s own inventory, The Elder Scrolls’ books are embodied in a more concrete and immediate way. Each book is an interactive item with its own model, weight, sound effects and dimensions, meaning that only a limited number may be carried at a time. This limit is useful, as it can make books feel more valuable, and encourage players to be selective about what they choose to carry or leave behind.

In later games, this amounts to an implicit encouragement for players to invest in property and amass a library of books that interest them, with Skyrim in particular offering interactive shelves that can be filled, put in order, and accessed at leisure. Later games also give each book its own character through various cover designs, from the beautiful marbled paper covers of Oblivion’s remaster, to the ghastly covering of the Oghma Infinium, which is sewn from the skins of sapient beings.

Having drawn out this preamble longer than strictly necessary, it’s high time I began pitching some worthy examples from The Elder Scrolls’ in-game library. I have limited myself to seven, which I’ve picked out according to my own criteria, with the aim of illustrating exactly why Tamriel’s in-game books have always felt so meaningful to me.

A Dance in Fire

It was as if a crack in reality had opened wide. A flood of horrific beasts, tentacled toads, insects of armor and spine, gelatinous serpents, vaporous beings with the face of gods, all poured forth from the great hollow tree, blind with fury. They tore the Khajiiti in front of the temple to pieces. All the other cats fled for the jungle, but as they did so, they began pulling on the ropes they carried. In a few seconds time, the entire village of Vindisi was boiling with the lunatic apparitions of the Wild Hunt.

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First appearing in Morrowind, A Dance in Fire is the work of in-universe author Waughin Jarth, who has several other stories to his name and a whole biography. Jarth’s books were all written by Ted Peterson, a key writer and designer of the first Elder Scrolls games,5 whose contribution to the tone, outlook, and general vibe of the series as a whole can’t be understated.

Set in the wild province of Valenwood, home of the wood elves, A Dance in Fire is weird, quite dark, and surprisingly funny, juxtaposing the fantastical with the down to earth in a Pratchett-esque way.6 It centres on Decumus Scotti, an unpromising hero if ever there was one - Scotti is a timid middle-aged Imperial clerk who faces imminent redundancy, and so undertakes a harebrained scheme to salvage his fortune through war profiteering.

Because the wood elves are forbidden by religious prohibition to cut down or eat any plant, they are forced to import timber from abroad. As luck would have it, they are currently under attack by their Khajiit (cat people) neighbours, and are going to need a lot of timber for reconstruction. Therefore, Scotti hopes to win back his comfortable sedentary job by getting in ahead of the competition, and negotiating a contract for his office.

Unfortunately, he is Decumus Scotti, and therefore badly equipped for navigating Valenwood at the best of times, let alone during a war. During his adventures, his life is threatened by marauding Khajiit, by suspicious beverages, and by monsters ranging from giant insects to the eldritch Wild Hunt. Ultimately, he finds himself making a meal of his own business partner alongside his carnivorous elven hosts.

A Dance in Fire is very much a creation of the Morrowind era, when The Elder Scrolls was truly weird fantasy - Morrowind itself featured a setting as evocative of Moebius’ alien paintings as of straight-laced Tolkienian fantasy, and A Dance in Fire leans into that. Valenwood is a land of incredible shapes and dimensions, and bizarre architecture - whereas Morrowind featured a city of giant mushrooms magically cultivated, and another under the shell of a vast crab, A Dance in Fire imagines a city built from walkways among the boughs of a single tree, and another in the shape of a massive flower sculpted from flowing sap.

The imaginary society of ADiF is equally bizarre, with the wood elves’ topsy-turvy sense of morality, which rates a mortal life below that of a tree, and their eccentric leadership in the person of the Silvenar, a magical, apparently non-binary person who is said to be the literal manifestation of the wood elven nation at any given time.

ADiF thus has its part to play in supplementing the weird world of Morrowind, painting a picture of still stranger unseen provinces beyond the scope of the game, which we might one day visit.

The Argonian Account

Gemullus took Scotti by the shoulder and positioned him on top of the mass of bubbles. “You stand right here …”

Scotti sank quickly into the mud, staring at the smuggler, horror-struck.

“And remember to wait ‘til you see the red clay, and then the next time you see bubbles, push up …”

The more Scotti wriggled to get free, the faster he sunk. The mud enveloped Scotti to his neck, and he continued staring, unable to articulate anything but a noise like “Oog.”

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A rare example of an Elder Scrolls in-game book getting a sequel (which, I assume, means that the other writers liked the first so much they made Ted do it again), The Argonian Account is another Jarth story following Decumus Scotti, this time into the swampy province of Black Marsh, home of the lizard-like Argonians.

After his adventures in Valenwood, Scotti has gained an (unmerited) reputation in his office as an incredibly brave and resourceful outdoorsman who can be trusted to do the impossible. Having done little to curb this reputation, he becomes a victim of his own success when he is sent to the dangerous Black Marsh on a mission to discover why trade is at a standstill.

It follows the same general outline as A Dance in Fire, with Scotti’s guards and fellow travellers promptly killed by ferocious snake-like bandits, leaving him stranded in a strange land. He has to contend with treacherous geography, with clouds of flesh-eating gnats capable of gnawing off an ear or nose before the victim notices, and with some of the most peculiar methods of travel ever devised.

The Argonian Account’s depiction of Black Marsh as a tyrannised and watery province where native slaves toil under foreign masters is more than a little reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of central Africa in Heart of Darkness, and The Argonian Account takes a refreshingly anti-colonial stance. The province suffers under the Imperial yoke, and is able to prosper and trade with its neighbours only when foreign meddling is reduced. Given TES’ not uncomplicated record in that regard,7 it’s a good note to end on.

Immortal Blood

I did as he asked, and once again, his questions taxed my knowledge. There were many tribes to cover. The Bonsamu who were indistinguishable from Bosmer except when seen by candlelight. The Keerilth who could disintegrate into mist. The Yekef who swallowed men whole. The dread Telboth who preyed on children, eventually taking their place in the family, waiting patiently for years before murdering them all in their unnatural hunger.

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First appearing in Oblivion, Immortal Blood is a creepily evocative, cleverly structured, and, we are led to believe, authoritative text on vampires. It serves as a successor to Daggerfall’s ‘Vampires of the Iliac Bay,’ which elaborated on the lore and mechanics of vampirism via a vampire’s true account. Immortal Blood, on the other hand, is presented as a short story, but appears to be suspiciously accurate.

In Immortal Blood, a priest receives repeated nightly visits from Movarth, a pale, intense man who says that he is a vampire hunter, and explains that he can only visit by night, as he sleeps during the day. Each time, Movarth quizzes the priest, whose knowledge of vampires seems endless, and the priest shares the names and attributes of vampire clans all over Tamriel, from Skyrim8 to Valenwood. Each time, Movarth must depart before daylight.

The set-up is almost reminiscent of the One Thousand and One Nights - we are led to believe that when the priest has given up all his knowledge and outlived his usefulness he will be disposed of by the (implied) vampire Movarth.

However, all is not as it seems. On the second to last visit, Movarth asks about Cyrodiil’s vampires, and is told that in Cyrodiil, there is only one bloodline, which is known for stealth and subterfuge, and has outcompeted all the others. After scouring the province and failing to find a single vampire, Movarth returns to the priest, who reveals his own pale skin and fangs in the candlelight, before overpowering and killing his guest in a sudden role reversal.

This, of course, explains how, whereas previous games depicted many different vampire bloodlines competing for territory amongst themselves, Oblivion features only one strain of vampirism, which the player may or may not succumb to.

The Pig Children

No one -- not the oldest Dark Elf of Mount Dagoth-Ur or the Ancient Sage of Solitude himself -- can recall a time when the Orc did not ravage our fair Tamriel. Whatever foul and pestilent Daedra of Oblivion conjured them up could scarcely have created a more constant threat to the well-being of the civilized races of Tamriel than the obnoxious Orc.

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First appearing in Daggerfall, The Pig Children is not so much a fun bit of in-game fiction as a document of historical significance, in much the same way that copies of Der Sturmer are historically significant. Essentially, it’s a thoroughly nasty racist tract directed at one of Tamriel’s most vilified peoples.

Now, I am an enthusiastic proponent of Orcish Studies - an academic discipline that doesn’t exist, but should - and apparently so was the real-world author of The Pig Children (also Ted Peterson), who makes quite an interesting comment. Peterson uses both the language of real-world racism, and characteristic phrases directly from Tolkien, distinguishing between the Orcs and the ‘free peoples,’ placing the former outside the category of ‘civilised,’ and justifying their extermination.

Not wishing to get too bogged down in questions of Tolkien and racism, in the context of Daggerfall’s main story, The Pig Children is actually very important. Whereas Orcs in all subsequent Elder Scrolls games are a playable race, who regularly feature as friendly NPCs like any others, Daggerfall was the last to treat Orcs as a ‘monster’ race, appearing only as innately hostile dungeon-dwellers without speech - or so it seems.

As the story progresses, we find a fragment of a letter describing the massacre of an Orc village, including children (also men and women,9 respectively called ‘stallions’ and ‘mares’ in dehumanising style, in keeping with The Pig Children’s title; it’s hard not to think of similarly blood-curdling rhetoric in recent years10). The fragment was apparently written by a reluctant participant in the massacre, and is found among scraps of other letters that were evidently destroyed out of shame.

This grim artifact leaves a lingering impression on the player, and colours our perception when we first meet Gortwog, leader of the Orcs, who, unlike the generic dungeon Orcs, has a far more detailed and humanised sprite and portrait.11 Far from a simple brute, Gortwog is a shrewd, articulate statesman, and a major player in the game’s political drama.12

Whereas others scheme for material benefit, Gortwog has a nobler cause: he wishes for his people to be recognised and protected by the laws of the Empire. He wants the ‘humanity’ of the Orcs to be acknowledged in a world that despises them, and ultimately, he succeeds in forcing the Emperor’s hand.

Effectively, The Elder Scrolls took the venerable Orcish Question that confounded Tolkien himself13 for decades - are Orcs people? - and answered in the affirmative, cleverly using the mechanics of a dungeon-crawling game to comment on how the genre dehumanises human-like enemies.

(Also, shoutout to ’s essay ‘the default dungeon is colonial,’ which is very good and made me think about my own tabletop experiences differently.)

16 Accords of Madness, Volume v. XII (Malacath’s Tale)

‘I - I’m sorry...’ sputtered the voice of Emmeg Gro-Kayra. Malacath’s eyes went wide as he looked upon the severed head, seeping blood from its wound, but somehow kept alive. Its eyes wavered about wildly, trying to focus on the aspect of Malacath before it. The once-proud eyes of the champion were choked with tears of grief, pain, and confused recognition.

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Added in Oblivion’s Shivering Isles expansion, only three of the purported sixteen volumes feature in the games, each describing the trickster Sheogorath’s triumph over another Daedric Prince.

In this volume, Sheogorath (who is the Daedric Prince of Madness) makes Malacath - the god of the Orcs - the target of his cruel pranks. Instead of striking at him directly, Sheogorath chooses a mortal victim, Emmeg gro-Kayra, a young Orcish hero who defended his people in the dark days before Gortwog’s reign. He visits Emmeg in the guise of a frail old man, and gifts him the cursed sword Neb-Crescen.

The first time Emmeg draws the sword, he loses his mind, and the next thing he knows, he is standing over the mutilated corpse of a young Orc woman. Horrified, Emmeg flees, and Sheogorath summons Malacath to the scene of the crime.

The Orc god is furious, and rushes to take revenge, ambushing and beheading Emmeg. Only after he has done so does he recognise Emmeg as his own half-mortal son (!!!), and Sheogorath appears, carrying off Emmeg’s still-living head to his own realm of madness, and leaving the defeated Malacath to mourn.

The device of a hero tragically killing his own long-lost son is an authentically ancient one, from the Irish Cuchulain and Connla, to the Persian Rostam and Sohrab, in keeping with the mythic style of the story. The story also develops its motifs cleverly - Sheogorath’s appearing as a trickster ‘in the pale moonlight’ is of course evocative of the devil, and the moon (also referenced in the name of Neb-Crescen, as in crescent) is of course associated with madness, as in ‘lunacy’ and ‘lunatic.’

The Axe Man

After a time, there was nothing left of his uncle that couldn’t be washed down the cellar drain. The process of cleaning up came easily to Torik as well. Blood scrubbed up much quicker than the usual grime and saltrice flour that littered the cellar floor.

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Another classic from Ted Peterson, The Axe Man first appears in Morrowind, and tells the story of Minas Torik, a quiet, restrained member of the Morag Tong assassins. The author is intrigued by Torik’s stated preference for wielding axes, an inherently bloody class of weapon at odds with his meek exterior, and sets about quizzing him about his history.

Torik relates that he was sent at a young age to live with his uncle, a ruthless plantation owner, who had promised to make him a partner in his business. In reality, he made Torik a servant, keeping him busy at all hours with gruelling manual work, terrorising him with beatings, and never teaching him anything about the business.

At last, badly in debt, his uncle announces his intention to leave the plantation and flee the country, leaving Torik behind. The boy calmly lifts an axe from his uncle’s luggage, finding it no heavier than his work tools, and proceeds to methodically cut him into pieces and wash what is left of him down the drain.

The story is structured almost like a fairy tale, with a foundation of bitter irony and poetic justice: Torik is something of a boy Cinderella, and appropriately, his repetitive movements as he kills and disposes of his uncle are likened to the various domestic duties described in the first part of the story. The final line is particularly ironic:

The house and all the belongings were sold to the debt collectors, but Torik took the axe. It seemed that his uncle had given him some worthwhile business skills after all.

The Lusty Argonian Maid

‘Certainly not, kind sir! I am here but to clean your chambers.’

‘Is that all you have come here for, little one? My chambers?’

‘I have no idea what it is you imply, master. I am but a poor Argonian maid.’

‘So you are, my dumpling. And a good one at that. Such strong legs and shapely tail.’

‘You embarrass me, sir!’

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No picture of The Elder Scrolls literature would be complete without a mention of this deeply, deeply silly offering. First appearing in Morrowind, The Lusty Argonian Maid is often described in-universe as erotica, but is written more like a sex comedy akin to a Carry On film. It became a running gag even in Morrowind itself, to say nothing of the rest of the series.

The book consists of a couple of short exchanges between the eponymous maid, who has the ominous name of ‘Lifts-Her-Tail,’ and her employer, Crantius Colto, transparently a self-insert of the author, Crassius (as in crass) Curio. These conversations positively sag under the weight of innuendo.

The joke works largely because the actual material is so profoundly unsexy, from the choice of an Argonian (who are, lest we forget, lizard people) heroine, to the unpromising appearance of Crassius Curio, who actually features in Morrowind (and during the main quest no less!), and is as much of a sex pest as you’d expect.

The book crops up again and again in the later games, usually in funny contexts - in Skyrim’s Dragonborn expansion, the hero is sent off by the anxious wife of a staid, eminently respectable advisor to recover her treasured ‘portfolio’ from a shipwreck, and of course it’s actually a special edition of The Lusty Argonian Maid.

(Included because I suspect would be deeply disappointed if it didn’t make the list.)

Closing thoughts

I hope that those who are still with me have appreciated this indulgent window into weird fantasy, the postcolonial implications of Orcs, and the big-brained nature of Ted Peterson. This one has already run very long, and there’s little more to add, so I will end with a question:

Do you have a favourite Elder Scrolls book that didn’t make my list? If so, please let me know in the comments!

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As regulars will know, I spent several weeks liberating the island of Ezo last year, which is to say that I enjoyed Ghost of Yotei a bit too much. As I’ve said before, it’s a grand adventure full of high drama and excitement, and a thematically rich one, in touch with its Western/jidaigeiki roots.

There are many ways in which Yotei feels more like a Western than its predecessor - we can hear echoes of Ennio Morricone in the soundtrack, and the core revenge plot, with the framing of the villains as ‘outlaws,’ evokes that particular vibe. In an older post, I also discussed the game’s framing of Atsu, the main character, as an avenging ghost, and cited several Westerns while tracing the cinematic roots of that archetype.

More to the point, elements of the game’s story feel distinctly similar to gaming’s greatest Western - Red Dead Redemption 2 (or RDR2, not to be confused with the little guy from Star Wars).

Both games take place at the end of a violent and chaotic era - in Yotei, the Sengoku period, and in RDR2, the Wild West era of American history. Both frame their central conflict around nature vs civilisation, with the latter depicted as an oppressive and corrupting force. Accordingly, both games’ protagonists have animal motifs, with Atsu’s wolf1 and Arthur’s stag/coyete. Both also touch on colonialism, with RDR2 dealing with the genocide of Native Americans, and Yotei to a lesser extent dealing with the oppression of the Ainu people.

Yotei’s larger than life villains are also distinctly reminiscent of Western archetypes. From Blood Meridian’s Judge Holden to Westworld’s Man in Black, Westerns can be measured by the vividness of their villains, and Yotei is no exception. While playing, I had the nagging feeling that the main villain - the nefarious Lord Saito - was reminding me of someone, and it wasn’t until many hours in that I realised who it was.

It was only Dutch van der Linde, the not-so-magnificent bastard of RDR2, a character I like insofar as he makes me absolutely furious, but I can appreciate the writers’ skill in very carefully, deliberately, and believably crafting this insufferable loon.

Dutch van der Linde

Dutch van der Linde is basically just… an absolutely horrendous guy, on every level. For the sake of brevity, we will be focusing mainly here on his character in RDR2, a prequel that features and develops him far more extensively than the first game.

Dutch is an outlaw who presents himself as an anarchist and a revolutionary, yet virtually every word out of his mouth is contradicted by his actions. Although he gets exponentially worse over the course of the game, we are made acutely aware of his hypocrisy from the game’s opening chapter.

Dutch describes himself as a proletarian figure, frequently emphasising his humble immigrant origin.2 He is also an avid and outspoken reader of Evelyn Miller, a Henry David Thoreau-esque figure who preaches simple living and harmony with nature.3

This talk, however, is wildly at odds with the reality of Dutch - he dresses in a black fur coat in the prologue, which is soon replaced with an opulent three-piece suit with a silk waistcoat. This is in stark contrast to the shabby and threadbare clothing of everyone else in the gang. His matching revolvers are pearl-handled, engraved and inlaid, and he rides a perlino Arab stallion called ‘the Count,’ a distinctly aristocratic title.4 His tent is far bigger and more ostentatious than any other in the camp, and boasts a gramophone that he uses to play classical music and opera.

Not only that, but he has a kept woman, Molly O’Shea, who is from a wealthy background and does not contribute to the gang in any way, nor is she ever expected to. Meanwhile, Dutch not only preaches equality, but spends every waking moment badgering other members of the gang (especially Arthur/the player) to get to work. Dutch himself contributes remarkably little to the gang’s coffers, and is conspicuously absent from many key robberies.

He is venomously opposed to capitalist figures such as the Braithwaites (an old Southern plantation family who built their wealth on slavery), mafioso Angelo Bronte, and crooked railway tycoon Leviticus Cornwall, and yet he autocratically controls the gang’s finances, and has a morbid obsession with money. In an optional scene near the end of the game, Arthur can discover just how much wealth Dutch has been hoarding without the gang’s knowledge, while repeatedly putting his followers in harm’s way on the pretext of the need for money. Dutch’s lust for lucre has long since passed the threshold of greed, and become a kind of mental illness.

Tellingly, a conversation can be overheard between Dutch and Uncle, an aging reprobate who is sharper than he appears. Uncle tells his listeners that Dutch sees himself as an American king, and the gang as his knights, and the remark hits a nerve with Dutch. In a Freudian slip, Dutch likens Uncle to a court jester, and Uncle plays into this, defusing the situation by playing the fool. It’s suggestive that Arthur, not Dutch, is named after a legendary king, and the name foreshadows his ultimate moral victory over Dutch.

Dutch is also outspokenly anti-racist and pro-Native, castigating ex-soldier Bill for negative remarks about the Sioux; and yet, when representatives of a local tribe appear, Dutch’s first thought is how to exploit them for his own profit. The Native band is disarmed and confined to a meagre reservation in the far north, where they are slowly dying of treatable diseases while soldiers block shipments of medicine (oh boy, what does that remind me of?5). When they try to break the blockade, Native women are punitively raped, and when their chief goes to negotiate, he is humiliated and threatened.

Dutch takes advantage of the situation, manipulating the son of the chief into a doomed raid that gives the army the excuse they need to finish their project of ethnic cleansing, for no other reason than to draw attention away from his own gang’s activities. He does something very similar in the first game, stirring up young Native men into a doomed rebellion, effectively using them as cannon fodder for his own agenda.6 Dutch’s stated anti-racism is further contradicted by the fact that he turns a blind eye to the outspokenly racist Micah, who racially abuses other members of the gang in earshot of Dutch, and is never held to account.

Even Dutch’s hare-brained (and much-memed) notion of taking the gang to Tahiti, where he proposes to buy up land and go into business as plantation-owners, smacks of the very colonialism he claims to oppose. He speaks of Tahiti in terms of riches, comfort, and endless leisure, and his references to ‘dancing girls’ comes with a nasty subtext, given the colonial context and the gang’s history of exploiting young women7 (and also given the behaviour of other rich men on islands…).

It’s worth noting that, contrary to Dutch’s anarchist claims, the gang has a highly gendered division of labour, with the women doing all of the domestic chores while the men act as providers, bringing in money from robberies, and thus have more of a say in the gang’s activities.

Over the course of the game, as Dutch increasingly loses control of the gang, he spirals into paranoia, and becomes viciously resentful of Arthur, making him the scapegoat for all the gang’s problems. Arthur is an orphan, raised and manipulated by Dutch from an early age, and over the course of the game, it’s shown that all of the gang’s members are likewise outcasts with nowhere else to turn,8 and many feel indebted to Dutch, hence his power over them.

So long as the gang fawns over Dutch and shows absolute loyalty, he is content, but he is extremely thin-skinned and insecure in his authority. The moment he receives any pushback at all - which comes increasingly from Arthur - he becomes indignant, resentful and even violent, reproaching Arthur with charges of ‘disloyalty’ from the game’s prologue onwards. Fundamentally, Dutch is defined by a sense of entitlement. He feels that he deserves the absolute, unquestioning loyalty and admiration of those around him, and whenever this is withdrawn, he becomes dangerous.

Lord Saito

Ghost of Yotei, meanwhile, features a superficially different, but surprisingly similar central antagonist, in the form of Lord Saito. Saito is an exile from the Japanese mainland, and a feudal lord from the samurai class, who lost his lands in the civil war and fled to Ezo with his remaining followers.

He arrives in Ezo as a fugitive with only a handful of supporters - known as the Yotei Six - but becomes established as de facto ruler of the island over about sixteen years. He begins consolidating his rule with the Night of the Burning Tree, a brutal massacre of the swordsmith Kengo (Atsu’s father) and his family.

As we learn, Saito singled out Kengo because he had been one of his feudal subjects, and deserted him during a time of famine. This led to further desertions (at least according to Saito), and many of Saito’s followers starved, including his baby daughter, leading to his wife’s death by suicide soon after.

However, this humanising detail is not presented as a justification for Saito’s actions, but rather an insight into his warped perspective. Atsu’s mother, Yone, says that Kengo’s desertion was triggered by Saito’s raiding of villages for food, and given how atrociously we see Saito and his followers behave on Ezo, we have every reason to believe that these raids were brutal and excessive. Also, it is only Saito’s belief that the other desertions were Kengo’s fault - for all we know, this is just his rationalisation of events, that puts the blame on a scapegoat rather than admitting his own failures as a leader.

Like Dutch, Saito’s worst crimes are committed out of a sense of aggrieved entitlement - as a feudal lord, he demands his subjects’ absolute loyalty, and when it is withdrawn, he seeks to punish not only adults, but their children as well. Far from a sign of strength, Saito’s ruthlessness is a mark of his fear and insecurity - there are hints that this goes back to time spent as a hostage during his childhood, and he is overcompensating for the powerlessness he felt then.

As ruler of Ezo, Saito styles himself as ‘the Shogun of the North,’ and presents himself as a more enlightened alternative to the mainland’s new ruler, and a champion of freedom, but we have to ask: freedom for who? Throughout the game, Saito and his followers act as brutal tyrants, robbing, extorting, terrorising, and enslaving the island’s Japanese settlers. They are no better to Ezo’s Ainu natives, many of whom are implied to have been killed or displaced by Saito’s forces.9

Although Saito is said to have given many commoners the opportunity to rise to samurai status by fighting for him, it’s clear that his generosity has its limits: outside his training camp, many ronin grumble at having been refused entry. Interestingly, Saito is also willing to recruit women, but only as ashigaru, common foot-soldiers armed with spears and muskets, rather than being trained with swords like samurai.

Even this is too much for Saito’s men, who grumble at the presence of women in their ranks. In his first conversation with Atsu, Saito appeals to her exclusion, pointing out that no other samurai clan would ever give her the opportunity to rise to samurai status, and implies that he, on the other hand, would be willing to do so.

However, this apparent open-mindedness from Saito is sharply contradicted elsewhere. In justifying his use of female soldiers to his men, he cynically remarks that ‘bodies are bodies’ - in other words, they are cannon fodder. A dispute can also be overheard between some of the female gunners: one argues that guns represent the future, and therefore their weapons are proof of Saito’s trust in them, but another doubts this, and complains that they are not trained with swords like samurai.

More damning, however, is the story of Oyuki. Oyuki is a major character, a woman born to a family of shinobi loyal to Saito, who took on a masked male alter-ego as the Kitsune, one of the Yotei Six. During the Night of the Burning Tree, Oyuki took pity on a young Atsu, and let her escape. As punishment, Saito branded her with Kengo’s tools, and Oyuki, recounting the story to Atsu years later, says that ‘If I screamed, the others would know that I was a woman. You can imagine what would happen next,’ to which Atsu sadly affirms that she can.

The implication is clear, and this makes sense in the context of what we know about the Yotei Six. The Snake, one of the six, is strongly implied to be a rapist, with his men saying they will bring Atsu to their boss, because ‘he likes them rough around the edges.’ The description of his sword is also incriminating, remarking that the Snake would ‘leave his cruel mark on every brothel he visited.’ The Oni, another of the six, is also suspect: he is hospitable towards Atsu while she poses as a bounty hunter, but a female prisoner tries to escape his castle and is cut down. We have to wonder why she was being held, and why she tried to run.10

As with Kengo’s family, we see the same entitlement with Saito’s brutal treatment of Oyuki - she was born a servant of his family, served and protected him her whole life, and yet all it took was one act of disobedience for him to subject her to torture and threaten her with rape. He has no sense of reciprocal duty to his subjects: they exist only to serve him, and if they deviate, they are savagely punished. Years later, he deposes Oyuki from her position and replaces her with a male sycophant, who smears her as ‘a bitter and jealous woman.’

In short, Saito’s feminist credentials are about as sound as Tywin Lannister’s, and the opportunity he claims to offer Atsu should be taken with more than a pinch of salt. His talk of freedom and equality is incongruous coming from a member of a feudal elite, and sure enough, he spends most of the game burning villages, orchestrating massacres, and generally being atrocious.

Interestingly, there is a question as to whether Saito changed, or whether he was always this cruel - when asked why she followed him, Oyuki explains ‘He was different then - or maybe I only thought he was.’ This is a close parallel to a conversation between John and Sadie in RDR2’s epilogue - Sadie believes that Dutch changed in the time she knew him, but John (who knew Dutch better) disagrees: ‘You saw a man who changed. I saw a man who got found out for who he really was.’

Another parallel between the two lies in Saito’s abusive relationship with his sons, who are known to Atsu as the Dragon and the Spider. Saito only ever makes vaguely affectionate references to them in their absence, but plays the aloof and disapproving father when he is with them.

The Dragon is the favourite, whereas the Spider has long since given up trying to please his father, and spiralled into alcoholism. However, it’s implied through various item descriptions that even the Dragon is deeply unhappy, having to go to ever greater extremes to please his father, and never receiving much in return. With this context, it is unsurprising that the Dragon is responsible for massacres and terror on the Oshima Coast: how else do you please a father like Saito?

Parallels can be drawn with RDR2’s Arthur and John, Dutch’s proxy-sons, who he plays against one another with favouritism - as Arthur says to John, ‘I used to be the prize pony, but now I’m just the workhorse’ - although both are ultimately usurped by Micah. Unlike Arthur and John, however, who grow closer over the course of the game, the Dragon and the Spider are always steadfastly loyal to one another.

This could explain Saito’s coldness towards his sons - it may be that he envies the relationship that they have, and it’s interesting that he does complain about their absence, whereas in all likelihood he himself has driven them away.

Closing thoughts

Whereas villains are often more composed, powerful, and in control than the protagonists who face them, these two are distinguished not so much by their control, as their lack of it, and this is what makes them so dangerous.

Dutch is so hyper-sensitive to criticism that he is constantly on a hair trigger, perceiving any dissent as outright betrayal, and Saito will play the affable and generous warrior-lord, but is prepared to torture and kill anyone who disobeys him at a moment’s notice.

Both also pose as rebels and freedom fighters, while every detail of Dutch’s character broadcasts a view of himself as elite and others as his inferiors, and Saito preaches freedom while tyrannising an entire island and everyone on it. Both also abuse those closest to them, using their sons to do their dirty work, and engage in brutal colonial violence towards the natives of their respective lands.

Finally, there’s a close parallel in their shared identification with the dark side of civilisation, with each corrupted by greed and symbolically opposed to the natural world. Dutch laments that ‘You can’t fight nature, you can’t fight change, you can’t fight gravity,’ while Saito says of Atsu, ‘You can’t tame a wild thing, but I am tempted to try.’

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Spoilers ahead.

Introduction

For those who are not sufficiently attuned to obscure French horror that was advertised nowhere, The Vourdalak is a 2023 vampire drama directed by Adrien Beau, and it is also possibly the best horror movie I watched in the whole of last year. An honourable mention would go to Interview with the Vampire, with which it has some overlap - as I said of IwtV at the time, it’s a very stylish film, but also a nutritious one, bursting with social and political connotations, and leaving plenty for the viewer to decode and interpret.

The same can be said of The Vourdalak, which, like IwtV, is concerned with abuse, and situates that abuse within a family. The plot is loosely based on ‘The Family of the Vourdalak,’1 an 1839 novella (first published 1884) by Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy,2 but innovates on the source material in a substantial way.

The novella is set in the 18th century, and framed as a story told by an aged French aristocrat of his travels in Serbia as a diplomat in his youth. There, he stayed with the family of Gorcha, a local man who has disappeared into the mountains in pursuit of Turkish raiders. Before departing, Gorcha says that he will be back within six days, and warns that if he returns any later, then he must have become a vourdalak, a kind of vampire that feeds on the blood of its own family.

Of course, this is exactly what happens, and the Marquis bears witness as, over several days, the undead Gorcha picks off his family one after another, starting with his young grandson.

However, whereas the novella has a fairly quaint and comfortable atmosphere, and is peopled with straightforward stock characters, Beau’s film is far more forbidding and psychological from the outset. It’s a story full of twists and turns, and it gets very dark very quickly.

The casting and direction are both superb, and give it an intimate, stage-like feeling, while the stifling domestic setting concentrates all of the cast’s energies into a common space. Between that and the queer overtones, it’s a sort of vampirism via Tennessee Williams, and deserving of far more attention than it got.

Dramatis personae

Given the structure of the film, a rough outline of the characters seems a good place to start:

• Marquis Jacques Saturnin de Antoine, the protagonist. A young French aristocrat and diplomat, complete with powdered white face, beauty spot, auburn wig, and male pattern baldness. Robbed by brigands and left without a horse, he is advised to seek out Gorcha’s house for help. A bit of a fuckboy, and comically ineffectual in a fight, but ultimately virtuous. We like him.

• Gorcha, the patriarch of the family, now a vourdalak. He is a rotten and emaciated corpse, represented by an intricate mannequin voiced and performed by Beau himself. The juxtaposition between his hideous appearance and his son Jegor’s uncritical adoration has an almost comical effect - Jegor dotes and fusses as Gorcha coughs blue slime all over his food - but also figures into the central drama in a significant way. Whereas the others in the family are horrified by Gorcha from the moment of his return, Jegor cannot (or refuses to) see him for what he is.

  

• Jegor, Gorcha’s eldest son, and leader of the family in his absence. In his presence, the others are cowed and stand in silent subservience, their heads bowed. Jegor is the family’s protector against the Turks, but he cannot see the enemy within, and is utterly devoted to Gorcha, who can do no wrong in his eyes. A heavy drinker, intolerant, dismissive of women.

• Pyotr, Gorcha’s second son. Heavily implied to be gay and/or trans.3 When Jacques first encounters Pyotr, he is wearing women’s clothing and earrings, but changes into men’s clothes after the return of Jegor, who scolds him. Pyotr is gentle and withdrawn, and joins the women in the family in the conspiracy against Gorcha.

• Sdenka, Gorcha’s daughter, who Jacques becomes infatuated with. Strange and secretive, with mystical leanings. Sdenka has a strong depressive tendency, and still lives with the family because her reputation was ruined by an affair with a vagabond, who Gorcha murdered. De facto leader of the attempted mutiny against Gorcha.

• Anja, wife of Jegor and mother of Vlad. Whereas Jegor fusses over Gorcha upon his return, Anja is disturbed and quickly takes Vlad away when Gorcha begins to pay attention to him. Anja overhears Gorcha attacking Vlad in the night, and finds the boy sick the next morning, but Jegor refuses to listen to her, leading her to join the others in the mutiny against Gorcha.

• Vlad, Gorcha’s grandson. Like Jegor, he seems unable to see through Gorcha, and becomes his first victim.

Jegor the enabler

From these rough character outlines, it’s clear enough that this is very much a story about patriarchy, and the hierarchy within a patriarchal household, which is in this case less of a spectrum, and more dialectical: all of the authority lies with Gorcha, the head of the house, while those beneath him are faced with a choice: either they submit, or they band together against him.

Unfortunately for the would-be vampire slayers, they are also opposed by Jegor, the eldest son and Gorcha’s heir apparent, who acts as his right hand. In his father’s absence, Jegor has absolute authority; in his first scene, he is a stern and imposing figure, and the others automatically submit. Here, though speaking harshly to Pyotr, Jegor comes across at least somewhat sympathetically, having just returned from fighting the Turks who have massacred most of their neighbours. He is affectionate to Anja and Vlad, and behaves courteously towards Jacques, promising to secure a horse as soon as possible.

However, in Gorcha’s presence, Jegor is utterly transformed. His former dignity is replaced by a slavish sycophancy, and he becomes Gorcha’s unquestioning enforcer, bullying the others for their disobedience and demanding they submit to their father’s every whim.

This is illustrated in a gruesome episode when Gorcha first joins them at the house: Pyotr’s dog is alarmed and barks at him furiously, and the vourdalak demands that Pyotr kill the animal. Pyotr refuses, but Jegor forces him to do it, using Gorcha’s rifle.4

Pyotr is left distraught: as Jacques says afterwards, a dog’s love is unconditional, and is without judgement or assumptions (and therefore the perfect companion for the excluded Pyotr). It is bitterly in keeping with the premise of the vourdalak creature (that it feeds on its family) that Pyotr is estranged and abused by his own father and brother, yet is understood and accepted by Jacques, a stranger.

It’s also worth noting that as soon as Gorcha arrives, Jegor begins to drink heavily. It may be that he is following his father’s example (there’s a clear parallel between Gorcha’s addiction to blood and Jegor’s alcoholism), but there’s also a sense that Jegor too is fearful in his father’s presence,5 and copes by drinking and by trying to appease Gorcha. There is certainly a history of abuse between father and son, which Gorcha justifies in terms of ‘making a man’ of Jegor.

Wigs, coats and scapegoats

Adrien Beau worked in the fashion industry for ten years, and so it is no surprise that The Vourdalak puts great emphasis on the importance of outer appearances, often juxtaposing the surface and what lies beneath. We see this in Pyotr’s cross dressing, in the dissonance between Gorcha’s appearance and how Jegor treats him, and in Jacques’ makeup and wig, which he loses towards the end, revealing a balding head. Early in the film, Jacques bites into a beautiful red apple only to find a worm wriggling inside, and this key moment foreshadows several toe-curlingly horrible twists towards the end.

Costume is also essential in Jegor’s characterisation. Shortly after Gorcha’s return, he takes to wearing his father’s fur-trimmed coat, and, like his alcoholism resembling blood-drinking, the ominous costume change hints at his gradual transformation into a second Gorcha. Sdenka scolds him for it, drawing the audience’s attention to the symbolism.

In a crucial scene, Gorcha himself places the coat around Jegor’s shoulders after he had earlier taken it off; moments later, Jegor himself lets the coat fall to the ground, shocked by [major spoiler in footnote]6, only to quickly find in Jacques a new target for the anger that should be directed at Gorcha.

And of course, in the very next scene, Jegor is wearing the coat again.

Gorcha the abuser

If Jegor is a coward and an enabler, Gorcha is far more malignant. Previously, I’ve written about vampires as symbolic rapists, and The Vourdalak’s depiction of Gorcha leans heavily into this, and in a particularly disturbing way.

The film’s depiction of Gorcha’s predation on young Vlad is laced with disturbing innuendo. This undertone is first felt in Anja’s visceral danger instinct when Gorcha clowns at the dinner table, making the young boy laugh: she quickly seizes the boy’s hand and takes him away, putting him to bed early despite his protests. In the novella, Gorcha entices the child in the same scene with promises of gifts, ignoring the discomfort of the adults.

The next morning, Gorcha is absent from his bed, and Anja reports hearing him whispering in the boy’s room at night, and says that she discovered the bed empty apart from ‘a damp and soiled sheet.’ Anja tells this story in a drawn out and uncomfortable scene, with Pyotr and Sdenka listening in horror. It’s not a great leap to make the connection with sexual abuse, particularly given that Gorcha’s vampirism is elsewhere associated with lust. This seed is planted almost immediately before Anja’s story, in a nightmare sequence showing Gorcha in Jacques’ bed,7 and whereas the poster shows Gorcha looming behind Jacques about to bite him, the film itself has a nigh identical shot showing Vlad in the same position.

Jegor’s refusal to listen to Anja, or even to consider that Vlad might have been attacked, is also suggestive in this context. Anecdotally, we probably all know of rapists and child molesters whose families, friends and colleagues simply refused to accept the truth, and like Jegor, they instead find scapegoats in victims, witnesses, or even the legal system (in the rare case of conviction), instead of the abuser in plain sight. And of course, we see the same thing constantly in public life.8

Tellingly, whereas Jegor denies the threat to his son until it is too late, closing ranks with his father instead, it is the women who recognise the threat straight away and move to protect the child, helped by Jacques and Pyotr. It is no coincidence that both of the men who side with the women are considered effeminate,9 and both soon become targets for violence because of it.

In keeping with this theme of misogyny, there is also an implication that Gorcha may have abused Sdenka in the past. He leers at her, leaning in close and groping her breast with his skeletal hand, saying that he feels ‘more than love’ for her.10 In light of this substantial hint, Gorcha’s murder of Sdenka’s lover takes on a new significance: was this just about honour and reputation, or was there also an element of jealousy?

Class in The Vourdalak

As Adrien Beau noted in an interview with Variety, his film is in a sense a role reversal of the typical vampire scenario. Whereas Dracula casts the vampire as an aristocrat lording over a castle and the surrounding lands, The Family of the Vourdalak was written more than forty years before, and instead depicts an aristocrat who finds himself staying with a vampire from the peasant class.

This is perhaps unsurprising, given that Alexei Tolstoy was himself an aristocrat with connections to the tsar’s court, who travelled through Europe as a diplomat, much like the Marquis in the story, around the time it was written.

However, despite this difference in perspective, Beau’s elaboration on the source actually brings it closer in line with the symbolism and subtext of vampire stories more generally. Whereas the Dracula type11 carries a social subtext, with the elite depicted as predatory and literally parasitic, sucking the blood of their subjects, The Vourdalak models this in miniature. Gorcha may not be the ruler of a fiefdom, but he is the lord and master of his household, and can prey on his subordinates with impunity. In Marxist terms, there is very much a class struggle going on in Gorcha’s house, but it has nothing to do with the visiting aristocrat, who happens to be on the side of the uprising.12

When push comes to shove, Gorcha’s authority is ultimately backed up by violence, but Beau also shows that Gorcha’s power is not only the result of menaces, but normative, rooted in societal expectations and taboos. For Jegor, and to some extent the other children, to go against their father is unthinkable in itself. Without directly threatening violence, Gorcha is thus able to quite literally get away with murder.

Production and presentation

Before concluding, it must also be said that The Vourdalak is a very beautiful and stylish film despite its (presumably miniscule) budget. It was recorded on 16mm film, giving it a pleasantly vintage look, and uses copious vaseline to give the light in each scene a soft and hazy quality, evocative of historical paintings.

There is nary a hint of the mandatory blue/grey filter of Hollywood productions, with the outdoor scenes in something that resembles natural daylight (!!!) with no desaturation to speak of, and Jacques’ vivid blue frock coat and auburn wig making him look like the foppish young aristocrat he is. The landscapes are especially picturesque, with bright autumnal woods and dramatic cliffs surrounding the candlelit stone building where the grim drama plays out.

One haunting shot follows another, and the film is incredibly successful at drawing the viewer into another time and place, from Jacques’ first tentative steps into a haunted woodland, to the skin-crawling horror of the final scenes.

The use of a mannequin to play the vampire is divisive, with a minority of viewers finding it too outlandish, but personally, I adore the tactile creepiness of the Gorcha puppet, and find that it helps the film to stand out in the age of CGI (not to mention the post-postmodern AI-based unreality we appear to be hurtling towards). Beau explained the choice in terms of the limited budget, which would have ruled out extensive use of digital effects, but also noted that:

…with special effects it looks real but it feels fake, and with what we created, it looks fake but hopefully it feels real.

Closing thoughts

The Vourdalak is a ‘good’ film in terms of illustrating uncomfortable social truths in an effective way, but it’s also a very watchable film, and in fact a very re-watchable film. Generally, I don’t rewatch very often, but I found myself going back to The Vourdalak within a couple of months of discovering it, and enjoying it perhaps even more on a second viewing. In sharp contrast, I went off (the superficially similar) Nosferatu almost completely on a second viewing, which I didn’t expect, and it took me a while to puzzle out why.

The most obvious, mathematical difference is in the runtimes: The Vourdalak is a trim ninety minutes, whereas Nosferatu sprawls out to 132, and frankly, there is no reason on earth for it to be that long.13 Where Noferatu goes beyond suspenseful and teeters on the verge of self-indulgent, The Vourdalak is a lean, efficient beast: every scene is disciplined and purposeful, packed with visual hints and layers of foreshadowing, and there is very little redundant dialogue, with almost every line having some wider significance or double-meaning.

Without wishing to spoil too much, it also benefits from a more lively (ha) and psychologically complex vampire. There’s a flirtatiousness to Gorcha, and an element of camp offsetting his uncanny appearance and unctuous voice, whereas Eggers’ Orlok is pretty much exactly what you’d expect him to be and little more.

Speaking more generally, The Vourdalak is a reminder that you don’t always need tens of millions of dollars and all of the latest technology to make something really good. You can, in fact, still go down to the woods with a strange puppet, a supply of 16mm film, and some talented French people, and make something wonderful. In a world increasingly preoccupied with money and technology, perhaps that’s a worthy point to end on.

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Armando Iannucci’s 2017 film, The Death of Stalin, has been part of my backlog of acclaimed movies for many a year, and some months ago1 I gave it a chance. As many readers will know, Iannucci is best known for political comedies, particularly The Thick of It, Veep, and In the Loop, as well as the various Alan Partridge offerings. These are of varying quality, ranging from biting satire to more complacent fare. We’ll get into the trend towards the latter, which I’d suggest The Death of Stalin is part of, but first, a rough overview.

The Death of Stalin is, as you’d expect, about the death of Stalin, and is an adaptation of a French graphic novel of the same name by Fabien Nury, which it follows closely. The choice of subject is, it must be said, kind of a weird one - as historian Richard Overy wrote at the time:

Where the suicide of Hitler in the bunker has a squalid drama, captured effectively in the 2004 film Downfall, the death of Stalin has to have the drama squeezed out of it, drop by drop. He did not take his own life nor, as far as the evidence suggests, did anyone else.

Accordingly, it was found necessary to spice things up by a) distorting the real timeline to connect various tangential events with the titular death, and b) inventing things that straight-up didn’t happen, including two fictional massacres.

The slant of these inventions is always to make the Soviet regime more seedy, violent, and absurd than it already was. Unsurprisingly, the film was banned in Russia and a number of other post-Soviet states, which many critics took to be proof that TDOS was a hilarious masterpiece that hit the mark, and like any banned media, the bans added fuel to the film’s legend.

My feeling, however, is that if you are going to go after the USSR and/or current Russia (and there are perfectly good reasons to do so), you could at least keep the focus on things that actually happened, instead of continually shifting it to things that didn’t. It’s not as if you have to invent anything to make Stalin’s era look grim, yet Nury/Iannucci did just that, many times over, and in the process made it very easy for Russian leaders to justify treating it as defamation.

In terms of plot, an elderly Stalin dies of natural causes early in the film, and the rest of the story revolves around his ministers squabbling over power in the aftermath. The most important of these are Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), then a high-up minister, and Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), head of the secret police.2 The all-star cast is very prestigious, and it’s a quality production, but the film has its critics, and I’ve found myself to be one of them.

The inventions

The Yudina incident

The film’s opening is true to Nury, but not to reality. It begins with Stalin making a call to a radio station which has just broadcast a live music concert, asking for a recording. Since the performance wasn’t recorded, a panic ensues. The director has a new audience dragged out of their beds to record applause, rushes a fresh conductor in after the previous suddenly collapses, and bribes the pianist, Maria Yudina, who initially refuses because she hates Stalin. Subsequently, she sends a note to Stalin denouncing him, and while he is laughing at the note he collapses.

This is ‘based on a true story’ only in that it’s based on a story. The anecdote comes from a memoir which is purportedly by the composer Shostakovich, the authenticity of which is still disputed. The story has not been substantiated by biographers, and even this uncertain version differs greatly from what is shown in the film.

The discrepancies are as follows:

a) The film shows dozens of people dragged out of their beds literally at gunpoint for the sake of the recording’s acoustics. There’s no mention of an audience in the source,3 only Yudina and two replacement conductors, nor does it seem likely that a theatre director would have the authority to summon whole squads of riflemen at short notice.

b) The collapse/death (?) of the first conductor is another embellishment. The source says that he was too nervous to perform, not that he was so nervous he literally dropped dead on the spot.

c) In the film, Yudina is bribed with 20,000 roubles by the director after she refuses to play. In the source, this sum wasn’t a bribe, but an unexpected gift from Stalin himself afterwards,4 which prompted Yudina to send her reproachful note in response. Yudina was also known for being extremely generous and careless with money, and the idea of her demanding a bribe, as she does in the film, seems out of character (and we know a lot about her character, because she was a well-known public figure and a very unusual one, and many friends wrote about various episodes from her life).

d) The purported incident took place ‘in Stalin’s final years’ with no exact date, but it definitely did not happen on the night of his death. The source described Stalin’s surprising lack of reaction to the note, so he had time to receive the recording, send the money, receive the note, and to unexpectedly take the high road afterwards.

e) Yudina in the film says multiple times that her family was killed by Stalin. If this is true, I can’t find anything about it, though there are many English articles about Maria Yudina, mostly covering her biography by Elizabeth Wilson and her status as a dissident icon. If Stalin had killed her family, you’d think these articles would mention such an important and relevant fact.5

f) Yudina in the film is wildly miscast, being played by the elegant former Bond girl Olga Kurylenko, then in her thirties, dressed in blue silk. In reality, Yudina was an eccentric, intensely religious woman in her mid-fifties, noted for wearing floor length black dresses made of sack cloth.

While the source’s story is unsubstantiated, it is at least consistent with Yudina’s character. She was a zealous Christian convert (originally from Judaism) who always wore a large cross when she performed, which was asking for trouble in the aggressively secular climate of the time. She was also homeless for years as a young woman, and lived her whole life in poverty and debt. She gave away what little money she had to charity, and was banned from performing for five years for reading Boris Pasternak’s banned poetry.

With this context, it’s absolutely believable that Yudina would risk her life by sending a critical note to Stalin: after all, she spent her whole life taking risks and making sacrifices for her beliefs, and was not anyone’s idea of a pragmatic person.

The film’s yassified, contextless version of Yudina, in contrast, is thinly characterised and self-contradictory, and inferior to the more interesting woman she’s based on. She’s hard-nosed enough to demand a bribe, yet reckless enough to provoke Stalin. She’s also both fearless enough to send the note, and fearful enough to be terrified when Beria finds it. The film also makes her a friend of Khrushchev, which endangers him politically, and for this reason among others it’s beyond unlikely that such a relationship existed in reality.

Massacres and arbitrary killings

TDOS also features not one but two fictional massacres, both of which have a pronounced scent of bullshit about them, so it’s no surprise to learn that they didn’t happen. The first takes place when, upon Stalin’s death (tm), the NKVD proceeds to loot his dacha and murder the entire staff, from guards to elderly maids, for no apparent reason. This feels very much like a movie trope of the sort of thing that might generically happen upon the death of a dictator, and of course no such thing happened in reality.

Not content with this, the filmmakers invented a second, even bigger massacre when crowds of mourners are shot by the NKVD during the state funeral. This one feels particularly devious, since Buscemi’s Khrushchev puts a number on it, saying that 1500 people (!!!) had been killed. The use of a specific figure could make an uninformed viewer think that this really happened, but it’s also completely made up. The factual basis is that over a hundred people reportedly died in a crowd crush during the disorganised funeral, which is very different from over a thousand demonstratively loyal Soviet citizens being massacred for no particular reason by the state. It’s hard to read these falsehoods as anything other than demonisation.

Further, TDOS enjoys showing arbitrary on-the-spot killings, such as Beria’s execution. In the film, he is dragged straight from the committee’s meeting room to some kind of barn and given a four-minute trial that is more of a shouting match, before being shot on the spot. In reality, the process was far more drawn out, with Beria arrested in June, and tried and executed in late December. The trial was by no means a fair legal process (and did indeed happen in some kind of barn), but the months of deliberation provided a veneer of legitimacy. The film also shows Beria’s guards and supporters being gunned down in the Kremlin itself, which didn’t happen - some were indeed killed, but after formal arrest and imprisonment.

Svetlana’s exile

The film ends with another distortion as a final flourish - the fictional banishment of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, who Khrushchev decides must leave the Soviet Union and go into exile in Vienna. As with Yudina, this is not only a total falsehood, but does a disservice to a real woman, who died only six years before the film’s release. Svetlana really did leave the Soviet Union as a defector, but a) this happened a full fourteen years later, in 1967, and b) more importantly, this was on her own initiative, and the real story of her defection is far more interesting.

The film vaguely alludes to the extent to which Svetlana’s life is dominated by the state, referring to her partner Alexei Kapler. The film heavily implies that Kapler was murdered by the state, which did not happen, though he was politically persecuted and spent five years in Arctic exile and another five in a forced labour camp. However, there’s no context provided re. Kapler’s imprisonment - the film doesn’t explain, for instance, that Stalin hated his relationship with Svetlana partly because Kapler was an artist, which Stalin disapproved of, and partly because he was Jewish (which is a whole other discussion).

By retconning fourteen years of Svetlana’s life, the film also erases her later unsanctioned relationship with Brajesh Singh, an Indian communist who she was forbidden to marry. She defected on her one and only permitted trip outside of the Soviet Union, when she visited India to bring Singh’s ashes to his family after his death, and took the opportunity to seek asylum via the US embassy.

TDOS makes Svetlana’s courageous choice into an unwilling exile, implying that she wanted to stay in the USSR and was for some unexplained reason forced out by Khrushchev. This makes little sense politically, since she was no threat to the men in charge, whereas her defection and subsequent criticism of the state was embarrassing for them.

The invented detail of Svetlana being exiled to Vienna specifically gives the distortion a gloss of truthfulness - like the invented number of murdered mourners, this false detail makes it feel all the more dishonest. As far as I can tell, she never went to Vienna, making her way to the US from New Delhi via Rome and Geneva.

The effect of the inventions

The problem with these inventions is that a) they stand out in a way that prompts the viewer to do some reading, and if you do any reading at all you’ll start to realise it’s bad fanfic, and b) the bad fanfic distracts from and undermines the things that really did happen, including some of the most shocking elements.

For instance, the film is actually quite good about showing what a truly horrific individual Lavrentiy Beria appears to have been. Not only was he responsible for brutal purges and millions of deaths, but he was also a prolific serial rapist and murderer - they were still digging up skeletons around his old mansion in the 90s and 2000s.6

The film is unflinching about depicting this, including really odious details, like the girls being given flowers afterwards - if they did not accept the flowers (which were supposed to imply consent), they were promptly arrested. The trouble is, in light of the deceptive details re. the massacre and the exile, it’s easy to mistake details such as this as yet more mythologising.

The fact that the film has the rapist Beria leering at and threatening its hot young fictional version of Yudina comes across as cheap, particularly with the context of the actual history. The sense is that they erased the real woman a) because the middle-aged, eccentric Christian Yudina isn’t very marketable and doesn’t cleanly fit into the film’s liberal, secular outlook, and b) to allow for greater drama via implied sexual menace.

All of this also makes the film’s end credit sequence, which shows photographs of characters being changed and blotted out, feel particularly ironic and in bad taste, because the film itself is willfully changing and blotting out real people who lived not that long ago, particularly the film’s women. It’s erasing Yudina’s faith, and blotting out Svetlana’s defection, i.e. their most defining biographical features.

It’s more interested in creating a picturesque vision of Soviet villainy than showing how real people resisted state tyranny, and to this end, it’s as happy to distort the truth as the Soviet state itself was.

Foundational problems

Apart from the tendency to make shit up, which is likely to be problematic in any historical story, it seems to me that the shortcomings of TDOS - comedically, politically, and dramatically - all stem from its awkward premise and subject. Because TDOS is about Stalin and the USSR in the 1950s, it has to clear many hurdles, and it doesn’t always succeed. These hurdles are:

1. Audience ignorance.

2. The bleakness of the subject.

3. The fact that it’s a political comedy.

1. Audience ignorance

This is a fairly straightforward and obvious problem, and it’s one that the filmmakers don’t really manage to resolve. It’s clear that TDOS would work much better if the average person knew who even half of these people are, but as it is, very few could name more than one or two of Stalin’s ministers, let alone explain who they were and what they did.

In Western countries, Molotov’s name might be the best known, if only because of the Molotov cocktail and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and people vaguely know who Khrushchev is. But Malenkov? Bulganin? Mikoyan? Yudina? Vasily and Svetlana? Whereas In the Loop used familiar proxies and composites to satirise the Iraq War, then ongoing, TDOS struggles to get knowing chuckles out of its audience, because this all happened in 1953, and who are these people again?7

References to events like the doctors’ plot don’t really land either, because 99% of the modern audience is going to need to consult Wikipedia to get the joke, and when they do they’re not going to find it that funny, because ethnic persecution isn’t very funny.

Speaking of…

2. The bleakness

TDOS also struggles to be comedic because it is dealing with such unrelentingly grim material. The film’s depictions of political violence, including many references to torture, give it a bleak and edgy quality, which is particularly acute given that much of this really did happen on a massive scale, and not that long ago. Overy was right to talk about the film wringing drama from its subject, because that’s more often than not what TDOS feels like - a drama rather than a comedy.

The genres can be skillfully combined, but here you can kind of see the seams where they’ve been knitted together. There are still funny lines and scenarios,8 but the simple fact is that In the Loop would have had a different vibe if Malcolm Tucker, on top of being a bully and a warmonger, had also been a serial rapist, and that’s sort of what TDOS is trying to pull off.

3. The politics

Finally, TDOS is trying to be a political drama about an era that virtually everyone already agrees about. Politically, Stalin’s Russia is the epitome of low-hanging fruit, and saying that Stalin was bad is as close as you can get to saying nothing at all.

Given the safe nature of the territory, it seems odd that TDOS, due to its banned status, has an air of punk rock about it, and was given glowing reviews by many an outlet for what it had to say. As a general thing, I’d suggest that if you’ve made a piece of political art and it’s universally lauded by mainstream papers, then you probably haven’t really said anything. The less content, the less controversy.

The Russian ban says less about the value of the film, and more about Russian sensitivities. It’s important to remember that Stalin’s status in Russian memory is complicated, not least by the fact that he led the country through the Second World War, during which tens of millions of Soviet people were killed.9 Is it any wonder that people might have mixed feelings about him, and might take umbrage to a geopolitical enemy making fun of his death?

Many (including the creator himself) have also suggested that the film was relevant to Trump, which… is it, though? Does 2017 Trump, a bloated plutocrat in the first year of his first term, really have much to do with 1953 Stalin, a former bank-robber/newspaper editor twenty-nine years into a revolutionary dictatorship? Do these sound like fundamentally similar men?

Stalin’s background is worth considering here: as a child, his father often beat him so badly there was blood in his urine, and he grew up in a poor provincial town where brawling was commonplace. It’s possible to draw a line from this early abuse at home, through his education in an oppressive seminary, to the many years spent in Siberian prisons for political crimes, and come away with some understanding of the conditions that made Stalin the ruthless, paranoid man he became. He was desensitised to violence almost from the moment of his birth.

It would be hard to think of a background less similar to that of Trump, who was reportedly a millionaire by the age of eight, and whose only likely role in a revolution would be organising counter-revolutionary death squads, or in the best case scenario being torn apart by angry SNAP recipients. You have to go really far in de-historicising individuals and ignoring material conditions to arrive at the conclusion that Trump is just like Stalin.

If truth be told, the comparison is an insult to Stalin.

Closing thoughts

So, why, then, was The Death of Stalin so acclaimed?

Well, a) five seasons into Stranger Things, I think it’s fair to conclude that people like shit stuff, and b) it’s not unwatchable - the cast is good, the production looks expensive, and the screenplay, for all its problems, has its moments.10 To a casual, not-too-opinionated viewer (that is, the antithesis of me), TDOS might manage to pass as a better movie than it actually is.

However, I would argue that there’s a deeper reason TDOS struck such a chord with so many critics, which has less to do with quality, and more to do with Western nostalgia about the Cold War. This was, after all, an era when Western people could think of themselves as enlightened, upstanding people opposing an evil empire.

Nowadays, many still hold versions of that position, but with a lot more cognitive dissonance - it’s hard to uncritically support your geopolitical bloc when you’ve watched American/British/German-made bombs hitting refugee camps every week for two years, while proponents make speeches more evocative of Hitler than Stalin. The week of publishing, the US crossed a new threshold, with the administration openly defending a murder committed on camera by a government agent, while in the UK hunger strikers are in critical condition after seventy days without food. Meanwhile, Israel has just announced plans for a new ‘offensive’ against what is left of Gaza, having banned 37 aid organisations this same week.

With all of this ongoing, The Death of Stalin’s tendency to depict tyranny as foreign and eastern, rather than saying what the director says he means,11 has not aged particularly well. If you were going to make a satire about Trump, wouldn’t it be better to make it about someone who actually resembles Trump, and isn’t tied to a historic outgroup?

Of course, at this point, a long-form Trump satire would have the same foundational problems as TDOS, in terms of content - a genocidal narcissist who is as likely to be in the Epstein files as Epstein is almost too bleak a subject for satire, and you’re also going to struggle to differentiate it from The Boys.

The Middle Ages in film is a substantial topic, to say the least, and occasionally a charged one. There are deep and long-standing controversies about how this period of European history has been depicted in both scholarly works and pop culture, which have long since burst the banks of academia, and penetrated into the Twitter and sub-Twitter ecosystems.

To give a rough and vagueposty outline of the debate:

• Viewpoint A - The Middle Ages were exceptionally backwards, barbaric, and miserable. Everyone ate slop, no-one knew of the existence of colours other than grey and brown, life was largely about plague, leprosy, fear, superstition, getting cucked by lords, etc. etc. This was a view that became established during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, and was heavily reinforced through the Victorian era. It’s a load-bearing structure in ‘Whig history,’ the conception of history as a straightforward journey from an oppressive past to an enlightened present. It’s also connected to the tendency of Europeans to idolise the Roman Empire, and to take for granted the value judgements of Roman historians.

• Viewpoint B - Since the later 20th century, scholarship has gradually shifted away from A, and become critical of the assumptions of Whig history. Proponents of B point to complex trade networks spanning long distances, sophisticated material culture, literature, poetry, theology, etc. These scholars are also critical of the generalisation inherent in A - the Middle Ages spans circa 1000 years, and involves the entire European continent, as well as parts of West Asia, North Africa, etc., and can’t be understood in terms of a single stereotype.

As you can probably tell, I have more time for B than A. The Whig view has many nasty associations: it was popularised through Enlightenment era universities, which relied on patronage from the new mercantile elite, who, like the Romans they idolised, were deeply invested in colonial exploitation, and in finding ways to justify it. For Victorian Britons, ogling fake medieval torture devices wasn’t a neutral act, but an ideological one - by comfortably shuddering at the barbaric past, they affirmed their present self-image as ‘civilised,’ in contrast to ‘uncivilised’ peoples elsewhere.

It’s therefore no surprise that in the present day, Elon Musk is a raging Whig (albeit an illiterate one).1 This is an instructive example, as Musk is so obviously a literal and spiritual descendant of old-style colonialists, and his notion of a free and enlightened present is as exclusionary as the apartheid he grew up in. The fact that he identifies with and holds forth about Rome, a society based on slavery, while profiting from modern slavery, and is also one of Israel’s key partners in crime, speaks to the Whig view’s compatibility with a ghoulish misanthropy.

The reason I bring up Whiggery and its consequences at the outset is that the films I want to talk about here are old, and therefore lean towards the older view of history, which characterises the Middle Ages as barbaric. By acknowledging this, I do not necessarily make a judgement on these films as works of art - actually, I would argue that a huge part of why they are so good is not in spite of their Whiggish tendencies, but because of them. As a medium, film is fundamentally about strong images and dramatic scenarios, and therefore a little sensationalism is, if anything, preferred, and the Whig view’s longevity in the popular imagination is pretty plainly connected to its sensationalist qualities.

The movies I discuss here stem from various countries and contexts, and we’ll get into the nuances of that, but they were all made in the same eleven year period, and are closely connected in terms of their foundations and subject matter, i.e. they are all very heavily about sex and death, and conceive of their settings as a chaotic, Hobbesian state of nature where men are subjected to extremes of violence and temptation, and must struggle between their bestial and spiritual natures.

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The Seventh Seal is an absolute classic in medieval cinema, but, like many a classic, most people (including me until circa three weeks ago) know only a few iconic images from it and not much else. In this case, the bit that people do know about is the opening scene, when Max von Sydow’s character - the weary crusader Antonius Block - encounters Death on a beach, and challenges him to a game of chess, with his life as the stake.

What follows, however, is a rich and lively picture of medieval life (/medieval death) reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales, as Block and a number of rag-tag companions make their way through a perilous forest towards the castle where his wife has been awaiting him for twelve years. The movie is carried by several outstanding performances:

• Max von Sydow plays the character of Block with great nuance and humanity. Block is a compassionate and introspective figure, who is beset with existential anguish, and as he faces his looming death, he struggles with the question of whether or not there is a God.

• Gunnar Bjornstrand brings a sardonic, almost Mifune-esque quality to the squire Jons, a dissolute rogue full of ribald songs and cynical commentary, but ultimately devoted to his master.

• Bengt Ekerot’s version of the Grim Reaper is notable as a key inspiration for Terry Pratchett’s famous take on the character. Tall and thin in his black robe, with a pale and nondecript face devoid of hair, the actor is brilliantly cast, and brings a sly mischief to the iconic role. In a characteristic episode, he casually saws down a tree while the doomed man in its boughs attempts to bargain with him in vain. He has the air of a long-suffering functionary who is prepared to indulge his human victims, but only to a point.

The film crystallises around these excellent central roles, as Death and Block carry on their game of chess - and their larger game of cat and mouse - over several days, with trickery and deceptions on both sides. The story takes place during the Black Death, and is a nutritious, if occasionally anachronistic,2 soup of iconic medieval images - Bergman presents us with flagellants, crusaders, travelling minstrels, witch burnings, and the Danse Macabre, seen at the start and end of the film.

The Seventh Seal is, unsurprisingly, concerned primarily with death, and with the terror of death. Its protagonists live their lives not knowing what the next hour - let alone the next day - will bring, and cope in different ways, acting as foils for one another.

Block seeks solace in religion, and his struggle to find it is as much a theme of modern as medieval culture.3 Others distract themselves with lustful hedonism, leading to a comic subplot involving a minstrel, a blacksmith and the blacksmith’s wife, which could have been lifted straight from Chaucer.

The film in general is much funnier than you’d think, while still dealing with serious issues and ideas, and ends on a bittersweet but strangely comforting note.

The War Lord (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1965)

A lesser known Hollywood offering, and a box office flop, The War Lord is nonetheless a highly entertaining watch, and worth a few words for its thematic similarities to some others we will be touching on. This film was the work of Franklin J. Schaffner (best known for pop sci-fi like Planet of the Apes and The Boys From Brazil), and starred none other than Charlton Heston in its lead role.

Heston plays Chrysagon de la Creux, a Norman knight arriving in his new fief in northern France. The film is far grittier and bleaker than the more romantic American medieval films of the 1950s (e.g. Ivanhoe), and its screenplay is derived from a stage play, which gives an intimate quality to its central drama.

The War Lord revolves around Chrysagon’s infatuation with Bronwyn, a local peasant girl, who he sleeps with4 per the mythical ‘droit de seigneur,’ here depicted as a pagan custom kept alive by the local population. Unrest breaks out when he refuses to give her back, which leads the peasants to collaborate with Frisian raiders against their new lord. This is all further aggravated by Chrysagon’s contentious relationship with his slimy younger brother (a classic failson of the Theon Greyjoy type), played brilliantly by Guy Stockwell, which boils over during a dramatic siege complete with siege towers, battering rams, flaming arrows and more.

In short, they threw everything, including the kitchen sink, at The War Lord, and I have to say, it works… surprisingly well. The swampy wetlands, inscrutable locals and pagan trinkets give an almost folk horror atmosphere to the production, and Chrysagon’s austere tower house conveys the straightforward brutality of High Medieval feudalism.

It is also, however, a highly mythologised piece - obviously, there would not have been pagans anywhere in France in this century, and the film’s bizarrely iron age-looking Frisians add to the anachronism. However, The War Lord is expressing a real theme of medieval historiography - in the Middle Ages, they perceived their current era as one of enlightenment, and the result of the triumph of Christianity over ‘barbaric’ pagan ways (we’ll be circling back to this theme shortly).

This narrative is apparent in The War Lord, with Chrysagon’s decision to marry Bronwyn, rejecting the pagan custom,5 and his later reconciliation with the Frisians representing the Christian theme of forgiveness.

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966)

Andrei Rublev is only the second film made by the great Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky (written about previously), but by its mesmerising quality you could easily mistake it for the work of an experienced director at the height of his powers. Of all the films discussed here, it is distinguished by its visual authenticity, and also by sheer drama and spectacle. It’s a must-watch for fans of Tarkovsky, as it features many images that would become recurring symbols in his later work (e.g. horses and hot air balloons).

In terms of genre, it’s a sort of biopic, centred on the eponymous 15th century icon painter, but also a portrait of medieval Russia more generally. Structurally, the film is divided into a number of ‘short stories’ showing various incidents in the life of the hero, played by the excellent Anatoly Solonitsyn, thereafter a frequent collaborator of Tarkovsky’s. (Both men died of lung cancer within a span of four years, and Tarkovsky’s wife later died of the same disease. Rumour has it that this was due to chemical exposure while filming Stalker.)

The film is truly epic in terms of its visuals, and captivates the viewer with a sense of scale rivalling and even surpassing many modern blockbusters. Tarkovsky appears to have built an actual medieval city for the purposes of the film, which is sacked in an apocalyptic outburst of violence by Rus and Tatar forces around the film’s midpoint. This gruesome sequence involves hundreds of actors and dozens of horsemen in authentic suits of armour, armed to the teeth with lances, bows and sabres. The terrified townsfolk bar themselves in the cathedral, only to be slaughtered when the doors are broken down, and the priest is tortured with molten lead when he refuses to give up the gold, and dragged out by horses.

In terms of spectacle, this episode is a high-point to rival any Hollywood epic, and yet it is almost surpassed in the film’s final segment, which shows the founding of a gigantic cathedral bell inscribed with an image of Saint George, with swarms of workers building the enormous clay mold and slaving away in furnaces, and finally heaving the enormous bell up on a groaning scaffold that obviously had to be physically built.

Tarkovsky famously defected from the Soviet Union in later life due to censorship of his work, and this was forecasted by the state’s reaction to Andrei Rublev - the film was initially banned for several years due to its themes of religion and artistic freedom. However, Andrei Rublev is not necessarily pro- or anti-religion. In the existentialist tradition, Andrei struggles with his faith throughout the film, and in an incident reminiscent of The War Lord’s pagan subplot, the hero is at one point tempted by a pagan girl, and subsequently looks away in shame as she is put to death by Christian fanatics.6

The film also interprets Russian history in a way that would be familiar to Soviet viewers, and not incompatible with the state ideology. In a scene showing a Passion Play, Tarkovsky draws a parallel between the suffering of Christ and that of the common people languishing under princely tyranny, and throughout there is an emphasis on class struggle.

The opening shows a jester arrested for mocking the nobility, and in later episodes violence is driven by a petty feud between two noble brothers, one of whom collaborates with Tatars to sack the other’s city, while the other has poor artisans’ eyes gouged out to stop them from going to work on his brother’s cathedral. Later, the images of industrial labour during the bell-founding plays on the Soviet self-image as a union of workers.

However, like all art that’s actually good, the film is not didactic and can be read in different ways, which clearly wasn’t compatible with the strident and inflexible politics of the Soviet Union at the time.

Marketa Lazarova (František Vláčil, 1967)

Another Soviet classic, Marketa Lazarova is often cited as the best Czech movie of all time, and, of all the films described here, it is perhaps most apocalyptic in tone and atmosphere. The film is centred on the Kozliks, a family of brutal robbers in a wintry and desolate Bohemia. The story follows their troubles with the law, and their feud with their opportunistic neighbour, Lazar, whose daughter, the eponymous Marketa, is kidnapped by the Kozliks.

In terms of class, the Kozliks are at best the pettiest of petty nobles, unkempt, dishevelled, and half-feral, with strong animal motifs. The head of the family wears a goat’s skin and horns on his head, alluding to his base and devilish nature, and his sons are often likened to the ever-present wolves that lurk beyond the pallisade and prey on travellers.

These animal motifs have an obvious sexual component, with a shocking incest subplot revealed through flashbacks, and Marketa’s abduction and rape by Micolash, Kozlik’s elder son, forming a central element of the story. As with other medieval films of this era, paganism is a strong theme, with the Kozliks as wild quasi-pagan remnants contrasted with the Christian piety of their captives, and the director plays on the conflict and attraction between these extremes.

Micolash is at once Marketa’s tormentor and protector, and this uneasy dynamic7 is paralleled in the love affair between Alexandra, Kozlik’s daughter, and a German captive who is literally called Christian. The Soviet themes of class struggle are not so apparent as in Andrei Rublev, but are surely there: the poverty and isolation of the Kozliks drives their opportunistic crime, while the absentee king’s forces sent to bring them to justice are led by a man who was once a travelling merchant, now risen to a higher rank; there’s also the contrast between the wealthy German captives and their Czech kidnappers, a dynamic with which players of Kingdom Come: Deliverance will be familiar.8

MK is not quite so spectacular as an Andrei Rublev, but with its bleak and dilapidated scenery, ethereal choral music, and the director’s skillful camera work, which often uses PoV shots to place the viewer directly in a character’s shoes, the film works a dream-like spell, bringing the viewer directly into its bleak vision of medieval life.

The Valley of the Bees (František Vláčil, 1968)

A kind of spiritual sequel to Marketa Lazarova, The Valley of the Bees was Vláčil’s second edgy, sexually charged medieval drama in as many years, and, while not as famous as its predecessor, it’s still compelling cinema and well worth a watch. It’s also the gayest film we’ll be discussing here by a large margin, which adds a whole other dimension, and deserves examination.9

(Side note: I inevitably picked up on the homoerotic subtext, then wasn’t sure whether or not I had hallucinated it, and had to dig out my old Marketa Lazarova DVD, which has an essay by film scholar Peter Hames in it. Fortunately, Hames’ essay does indeed affirm my reading of the film, and I wasn’t groundlessly headcanoning like a tumblr user circa 2011.)

TVotB begins with Ondrej, the son of a Czech lord, at his aging father’s wedding… to a child Ondrej’s own age. In a well-meaning prank, the boy hides live bats in a basket of flowers he gives to the bride, which drives his father into a rage. After throwing his son against a stone wall and leaving him mortally wounded, the father, in fear as much for his own soul as his son’s life, bargains with God, promising that if the boy lives, he will send him to join the Teutonic Knights.

(Un)fortunately for Ondrej, he does live, and is duly sent to join the Teutonic Knights, an order of ascetic, celibate warrior monks. Here, he befriends Armin, a German knight, who proceeds to act insane for the remainder of the film’s runtime.

Throughout, Armin is subtly but consistently hinted to be in love with Ondrej, though this is never outright admitted or acknowledged by either of them. The two are inseparable in their time at the Teutonic fortress together: in preparation for a fast, they lie side by side on the beach, each gripping the other’s arm while the cold waves numb their lower bodies as a precaution against lust.

In a subtle but telling moment, without a word spoken, Armin gives up his own opportunity for a last meal before the fast, giving his food instead to Ondrej. Like all of Armin’s actions, this can be read in two ways, and thus has a plausible deniability - by giving up his meal, he is affirming his fanatical devotion to the Order, yet it is also an act of self-sacrifice which betrays his care for Ondrej.

However, the two’s paths sharply diverge, with Ondrej deserting the Order, unable to live by its rules. Armin’s reaction is explosive: he feels personally betrayed and sets off in pursuit of Ondrej, vowing to return him to the Order and save his soul even if it costs him his own.

Ondrej, meanwhile, returns to his home, where he learns that his father has died, and becomes involved with his widow, Lenora.10 However, the film is equivocal as to whether Ondrej’s bid for freedom is a good thing: as in Marketa Lazarova, there is a dark and animalistic side to Ondrej that runs wild without the Order’s discipline, and he is drawn to follow in his father’s footsteps, indulging in blood sports11 and assuming the same arrogant and impulsive persona.

Armin’s reaction is like that of a jealous lover, and he arrives at Ondrej and Lenora’s wedding like a man stricken. As a wedding present, he gives Lenora sand from the Holy Land; when Ondrej fails to recognise this precious token, taking it for sand from a beach, the betrayal is complete, and tragedy becomes inevitable.

I will not spoil the ending, but suffice to say, The Valley of the Bees finishes in an unforgettable outburst of bloodshed and pathos, and its final scene is ambiguous, leaving the viewer uncertain of how to feel.

Closing thoughts

Through this overview, we can see a number of common elements running through medieval cinema in this particular era, which are still for the most part embedded in the genre to this day.

• Struggles with faith are a recurring feature, present in foundational classics like The Seventh Seal and Andrei Rublev, both of which draw on the existential tradition, featuring troubled and introspective protagonists who question throughout their lives, and are never definitively answered.

• Conflict between desire and the intellect is a common theme, with protagonists often struggling with temptation, and directors are often equivocal about this, preferring to let the viewer interpret and judge the characters’ actions for themselves.

• Related to this, medieval films often contrast fictionalised wild and passionate pagans with repressed Christian protagonists.

• Medieval dramas rely heavily on a dialectical contrast of opposites to define their characters and conflicts, such as pagan/Christian, chaste/lustful, noble/peasant, male/female, etc., and societal conflict is therefore fundamental to the genre.

• An apocalyptic element is often present, whether through plague, famine, war, or all three. Like post-apocalyptic fiction, characters live in a state of fear, uncertainty and lawlessness.

To fans of George R.R. Martin (always the spectre at the feast), much of this will be sounding familiar, and all things considered, it’s no surprise that his medieval series became his magnum opus. It’s worth noting that Martin has also been a prolific sci-fi writer, who has written post-apocalyptic stories, and his atheist/agnostic worldview accords with the existentialism of medieval cinema.

While the factual foundation of the genre in history remains open for discussion, there is no denying its allure, and of course every medieval film is also a historical artifact in itself, reflecting the time and place it was made in. Andrei Rublev is intensely Russian and Soviet; Marketa Lazarova and The Valley of the Bees reflect an artistically and socially transgressive Czechoslovakia; The Seventh Seal successfully combines medieval and modern elements in its style and preoccupations.

Introduction

People associate From Software’s video games with many things: atmospheric settings, great level design, comically large swords, and of course formidable bosses. What we don’t tend to think of are the documentaries of Werner Herzog, one of the film industry’s most outstanding Weird Guys (who would, to be fair, be a great Dark Souls NPC).

However, Armored Core VI is no ordinary Fromsoft game. Indeed, in terms of gameplay, story, and visual style, it is in many ways a conscious attempt to break away from the formula of the last 15 years or so, and to do something a bit different, and it’s very successful in that task.

For those not familiar, AC6 is heavily inspired by mecha anime, i.e. anime about giant robots and the autists troubled young people who pilot them, and accordingly, it puts the player in the shoes of a mech pilot.

Becoming one with the machine

First of all, and before getting into its Herzogian credentials, it has to be said that AC6 is probably the best mecha game in existence,1 by no small margin: it looks amazing, with fantastic graphics and stylish art direction, drawing heavily on classics of the genre like Gundam and Evangelion. The gameplay is also very, very good. It revolves around thrilling mech battles, demanding skill, intuition, and lightning fast reactions from the player.

Whereas most Fromsoft games are about limiting the player’s mobility through tight stamina pools and restrictive terrain, AC6 offers unprecedented speed and agility, and gigantic environments to fight in: mechs dart across the screen like dancers, dodging and weaving amidst luminous jets and vapour-trails, leaping buildings and skating across lakes. All of the staples of the mecha genre are here, from railguns, to energy swords, to characters with alarming names (such as Middle Flatwell, Thumb Dolmayan, and V.II Snail), and the game’s fluid animations and effects make battles an incredible spectacle.

What is most striking about AC6, though, is the fact that it really makes you feel like a mech pilot. To explain what that means, a few words about the genre are necessary. Mecha tends to centre on epic rivalries between ace pilots, whose original motives become irrelevant in their obsessive struggle for mastery. It also likes to muse on the dichotomy of human and machine, which are brought into harmony as pilots adapt to their mechs, making them extensions of their own bodies, until they no longer feel complete or fully embodied without them.

Accordingly, AC6 is highly skill-based, and unlike an Elden Ring, where it is possible to game the system by optimising your stats and equipment, AC6 offers no shortcut to gitting gud. It’s all about finding a loadout that suits you, and then training and conditioning your reactions until everything becomes second-nature. When you - the player - become one with the machine, suddenly boss-fights that used to be insurmountable become effortless. There’s a nice synchronicity with the narrative here, because of course this is exactly what the unnamed and unseen pilot is also experiencing.

Mecha and war

However, for our pilot, this identification with his machine does not come without a cost. Basically every mecha anime since Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979 has been… surprisingly bleak,2 luring viewers in with boyish escapism only to ambush them with gloomy ruminations on the horrors of modern warfare. MSG is essentially a war drama, centred on Amuro Ray, a young boy conscripted into a brutal, nigh-apocalyptic struggle between the Earth Federation and the Principality of Zeon, a rebellious colony in outer space.

Amuro’s wartime service is pretty much just a drawn-out series of tragedies, as he loses comrades, rivals and friends to the constant fighting, and is repeatedly subject to military discipline. Meanwhile, his pacifist mother rejects him, and his distant father spirals into dementia. There are very few upsides to Amuro’s time in the military.3

While Amuro does appear to be on the ‘right’ side, insofar as the Federation is opposed to an odious fascist-style movement in the colonies, a major theme of the series is brutalisation, and the effect of war on the individuals and the societies that fight, as the normative rules of peacetime are gradually broken down.

On a memorably bleak occasion, Amuro seeks out his mother’s home, and finds the place ransacked and full of drunken Federation soldiers, who beat him up: he doesn’t believe them when they tell him they did not find anyone there, and though Amuro later finds his mother safe, we are left with the lingering impression that Federation troops can’t be trusted, and lawlessness is becoming the new norm. By the second series, Zeta Gundam (1985), this disturbing trend has reached its logical conclusion, and now the Federation is the authoritarian menace, with the new protagonist Kamille finding himself on the same side as former (and future) villain Char Aznable.

Of the many Gundam series, perhaps the one that shows the horrors of war most acutely is Gundam: Thunderbolt (2015). Set during the events of the first series, it follows protagonists on both sides of the war, memorably depicting the ‘Living Dead Division,’ a squad of Zeon amputees whose severed nerves are directly wired into their machines, reducing their reaction times to give them an edge in combat.

One such amputee is Daryl Lorenz, a young boy who sacrifices his last limb for the sake of his comrades. Thunderbolt also features the surgeon who is forced to perform the operation, and subsequently loses her mind. It’s as powerful a depiction of wartime dehumanisation as you will find, showing human bodies and minds used up coldly and deliberately for no sane reason. As Daryl becomes quite literally disembodied, his machine becomes the only way he can experience the mobility he has lost, and his identity becomes inseparably tied to his role as a pilot.

Lessons of Darkness

To take a hard left turn - in 1992, Werner Herzog created one of the most remarkable war documentaries ever made: Lessons of Darkness (currently on Youtube). Filmed in Kuwait during the immediate aftermath of the Iraqi invasion and occupation, Lessons of Darkness is not a conventional informative documentary, so much as a work of art. It is a slow, stylised meditation not just on the Gulf War, but on war itself, and what Herzog sees as the destructive and irrational nature of humanity.

In the voiceover, Herzog adopts the tone of an alien observer, who bears witness to the chaos with an attitude of bemused detachment. He provides no context about the background of the war, and offers no insights or opinions.

The documentary consists heavily of footage with no commentary whatsoever, mostly filmed from helicopters. These are surely some of the most extraordinary, apocalyptic images ever put to film. Herzog shows us endless expanses of fire and smoke from the burning oil fields; lakes of spilled oil reflecting the sky like a mirror; desolate wastelands strewn with the husks of destroyed vehicles; titanic skeletons of bombed-out refineries and burst containers. We watch workers toil for what must be hours in scorching heat to put out fires and cap spills, only to light the overflow on fire again.

Most haunting, however, are the film’s interviews, of which there are only two. In the first, after showing us the inside of an interrogation chamber, and panning without comment over tables laden with improvised torture devices, Herzog shows us a woman who watched two of her sons tortured to death, and lost her voice from pleading. ‘She cannot tell her story, but still tries.’

Later, we see another woman with a young boy who has also lost the ability to speak, after a soldier stomped on his head during a house raid. ‘He has spoken only once since, and then he only said that he never wants to learn how to talk.’

AC6 and war

Armored Core 6 shows us nothing quite so distressing, and whereas Herzog does break from his detached perspective to show us human beings and to hear their painful testimonies, AC6 is remarkable not for its humanity, as for the distinct lack of it. Whereas every other Fromsoft game features recognisably humanoid characters, capable of triggering emotive responses from players, AC6 does not feature a single human portrait or character model.

Although its characters are voiced, and a fairly lively bunch, the only visual representation we have of any of them are their digital icons, which appear on mission screens when they communicate remotely. Other than that, we spend the entire game looking not at human beings, but at machines.

Indeed, the central character Ayre, a disembodied alien who exists as a kind of ghost in the machine, appears no less human than the rest of the cast, because from the player’s perspective, they are all equally ephemeral, represented only by visual abstractions and voices without faces. Indeed, if AC6’s pilots met in the flesh, it is doubtful that they would even recognise each other. This is a familiar theme from Gundam: when Amuro and Char, long-time rivals who have fought many times in their suits, cross paths aboard a neutral station, they don’t know each other, and exchange idle pleasantries before going their separate ways.

Likewise, AC6’s disembodiment is not just a quirk, but appears to be a deliberate stylistic choice, which plays into the story in a significant way. The player’s pilot is an amnesiac mercenary, and, like most pilots we encounter, is defined entirely by his work. He has no other identity, no history, no relationships to speak of, and even his callsign is not his own invention, but merely scavenged from a wrecked mech. He has no meaningful existence independent of his job, and thus no bodily life outside of his machine. For much of the game, he works for ruthless corporations, and switches sides with total indifference, working for one bloc one day, and another the next. His handler and others repeatedly refer to him with dehumanising language, describing him as an ‘attack dog,’ and using him as a pawn in their obscure agendas.

Like Herzog’s alien observer, this dehumanised pilot witnesses (and takes part in) destruction mindlessly, without context or understanding. Indeed, for much of the game’s first act, the player is doing the dirty work of corporations, helping them to root out native resistance to their ruthless exploitation of the planet Rubicon.

The resistance’s name - Rubicon Liberation Front - and their banner, which shows a fighter in a keffiyeh, has obvious geopolitical associations. Desert landscapes evocative of Herzog’s 1992 footage feature in several missions, and the storyline’s focus on corporate impunity and the cynical pillaging of resources is a familiar theme from the news. It’s also suggestive that many battles take place in towns and cities that are presumably inhabited, and though we are never informed as to whether our actions harm civilians, the implication is there (see also: HighFleet).

The game consciously plays on the player’s sense of alienation and moral unease, notably in the first clash with an AC (or Armored Core (tm) - these are the better class of mechs). The opposing pilot is a young rookie who is fighting for his life, and it never feels like the outcome of the battle is in doubt. ‘I just wanted to be like you,’ he says, before his feed cuts off abruptly and his life comes to an end.

The player’s sense of being a small, exploited cog in a brutal machine is reinforced by the world design, which seems calculated to induce something akin to agoraphobia (see also: Space Hulk: Deathwing). The surface of Rubicon teems with immense industrial infrastructure, and the player is made to feel constantly dwarfed by their surroundings, even though their AC towers over houses and cars. The power and mobility of the AC adds to the sense of detachment the player feels towards the world around them, and like Herzog’s helicopter, we are often in flight, seeing the devastation of war from a physical and emotive distance.

The incredible productive abilities of this futuristic society are almost utopian, which plays into a common theme in mecha: in animations like Evangelion and Gundam 00, there is no small measure of wonder at the potential of technology. The viewer is often invited to marvel at immaculate futuristic cities, space stations and so on, and it’s hard not to share the obvious enthusiasm of the artists and animators. This idealistic view of technology is no surprise, given the role of science and industry in Japan’s post-war revival.

However, the same enthusiasm is usually tempered with ambivalence: Gundam also sees peril in technology, with mobile suits, superweapons, autonomous drones, and brainwashed cyborgs representing the dark side of technology, which can just as easily become a tool of destruction and oppression, rather than creation and liberation.

In AC6’s setting - as in Herzog’s documentary - it’s hard to find many upsides to the proliferation of technology, which has only empowered humanity’s destructive side. The only humans we hear much about - fellow pilots - are generally jaded wage-slaves who kill for a living, and their in-game bios are littered with references to poverty and hardship. A number are ex-military, and there’s a sense that this is one of the few paths out of deprivation in this setting; many have also undergone dangerous surgeries to enhance their abilities as pilots, much like Gundam’s cyber-newtypes.

The most significant industries we hear about are weapons manufacturers, and warring over resources is the order of the day on Rubicon. None of this gives the impression of a Star Trek-style post-scarcity society: although the technological capacity for such is clearly there, it’s also clear that the wealth generated by this technology is concentrated in very few hands.

If anything, the setting feels dystopian rather than utopian, and accordingly, the player must complete AC6 multiple times - with each new playthrough adding new choices, challenges, and revelations - before arriving at anything even vaguely resembling a happy ending.

Without giving too much away, it’s worth noting that a major antagonistic force in the game is artificial intelligence, and AC6 in general feels surprisingly relevant to the various maladies of our current moment in history.

As most gamers will know, CD Projekt Red has lately announced that they are going to make not only a Witcher 4, but a whole new trilogy in the next six years. On the face of it, this proposal strikes me as dubious at best, for both practical and artistic reasons, and I have no role here if not to complain about what’s hot.

On the practical side, three Witcher games in six years sounds like a lot, and it sounds like a lot a) because it is a lot, and b) because CDPR has a history of over-promising. The studio has been more of a ‘two big games per decade’ kind of outfit since the 2000s, and even then, they are prone to mismanagement. We are talking about one of the most notorious studios in the world for ‘crunch,’ basically working developers to the brink of death in the months/years leading up to a release (which is technically legal but shouldn’t be).

Ethical implications aside, experience shows that this is no guarantee of a good product. Cyberpunk 2077 was much anticipated, and eventually became a very successful and acclaimed game, but many will remember the glitchy, largely unplayable clusterfuck that it was on release. In the years leading up to Cyberpunk’s debut, many op-eds were published arguing that it would be better for the studio to delay the game, rather than resort to crunch, but crunch they did, and the result took literal years of post-launch revisions to fix.

Whether it was worth it in the end is for others to judge: personally, I found the setting so viscerally unpleasant to be in, the missions so railroady, and the NPCs so unappealing, that I barely scraped through the interminable prologue. In the many hours of backseating my sister’s game, watching blue-haired pornographers talk about gonks, eddies, and braindances, the only character I eventually gave a shit about was Takemura, who I liked less than Mr Brightman.

Whether Cyberpunk was good or bad is really beside the point, though, and, picky and oppositional as I am, my reaction needn’t be taken too seriously. The larger point is that even if Cyberpunk had been the greatest game ever made (as the hype at the time suggested it would be), crunch still would not have been a humane and decent way to proceed, and in an ideal world, the market would be a little more ethical, and more willing to withhold custom from companies that treat staff badly. I like video games, but I would also like the people that make them to be able to see their families, and to not lose years of their finite lifespans to chronic stress.

There’s also the fact that, since Cyberpunk’s release, AI has arrived on the scene, and big companies are already testing the waters to see how much they can get away with. AI is the spectre haunting every creative industry, and, given how much CDPR values profit, and how little their employees, I can’t help but suspect that the planned trilogy will be quietly supplemented with AI code, assets, and maybe even writing. It’s worth noting that the original Witcher trilogy was released over a whole nine years, with the first game in 2007 and the last expansion in 2016, and, while the studio has far more staff and technology at its disposal now than it did then, there are still reasonable grounds to be wary.

On the artistic level, I have to say that I have a hard time getting excited about The Witcher 4/5/6. I had very mixed feelings about the confirmation of Ciri as protagonist, not for misogynist reasons (there was a lot of that going around), but more because this is a character who is so deeply rooted in the novels, of which I am not a fan. I did give the first one a chance last January, and… violently disliked it, for reasons I went into at great length at the time.

The long and the short of it is, Sapkowski keeps being paedophilic, largely about Ciri herself, and I can’t be doing with that. His geopolitical context is also a bore, as it consists of interminable sparring between evil people who all speak with the exact same voice and register. One imagines that this is what shareholder meetings at Blackrock are like. Also, Sapkowski would clearly quite like Yennefer to step on his balls, whereas I would like her to go home and rethink her life, or at least to stop committing sex crimes.

My opinion of the novels, however, isn’t the main thing here, and I don’t begrudge anyone a different view. The problem with Ciri, as I see it, is that she is a book character, therefore a character with screeds and screeds of history exterior to the game. This leaves virtually no room whatsoever for player expression, agency or conjecture, all of which are at least somewhat (I would argue very) important in the roleplaying genre. There is no mystery to Ciri - she is quite literally a major character in a popular Netflix series.1 There is nothing left to speculate about, nothing to infer, no ambiguity that can’t be clarified by a visit to Reddit.

It says something that Bethesda still continues to make money with every new iteration of Skyrim, one of the best big RPGs to allow a player-defined protagonist, instead of a fully pre-written, voiced and designed one. To this day, you’ll still find people who talk about their own Skyrim characters as if they were fully-fleshed out personalities, because despite the game’s very limited dialogue system, the excellent worldbuilding poses questions that feed the imaginitive process. Baldur’s Gate 3, which does much the same thing but more elaborately, rocketed to success,2 and a huge amount of the content that you still see about BG3 today revolves around the different character options available to players, whether those are cosmetic, rare dialogues and reactions, or memorable quest outcomes with implications for characterisation.

Of course, Geralt was also a book character, and one with a lengthy history through the novels, but there was a crucial difference: Geralt originated as a short story protagonist. Therefore, like many a short story hero, he was pretty much built to be dropped into a scenario and observed, and had a certain predictability as a common thread from one story to the next. Like a Western protagonist, Geralt was vividly sketched around a few core traits, and those were his outcast status, his knowledge and expertise, and the recurring conflict between his vocation and his morality.

Moreover, because the short stories were written months or years apart, with the author’s ideas evolving as he wrote, there are inconsistencies and contradictions from one to the next, with some details dropped and new ones substituted. Rather than editing these out, Sapkowski chose to keep them when they were released as collections, and even built a framing narrative around them. The first collection situates each as a particular memory being recounted by Geralt to a listener, and the author thereby introduces the sense that he is an unreliable narrator, which accounts for the inconsistencies and enhances Geralt’s mystique. A huge part of the character’s appeal lies in ambiguity and contradiction, and this in itself becomes another core trait. The witcher is both offputting and endearing, and the author purposely included uncertainties that invite the reader to form their own opinions and conjectures about him.

All of this is a great basis for a video game protagonist, and especially for a game like The Witcher 3, which is remembered as much for its sidequests and expansions as for its main storyline. TW3 has some of the best and most memorable quests in any open-world game, in large part because each functions exactly like a Witcher short story or novella, with Geralt as the common thread, and poses questions not only about the creatures and people he encounters, but also about the witcher himself - is he a man or a mutant? Will he ruthlessly carry out his contract, or find another way? How does he interpret his place in a changing world?

This structure allows for player expression, with one player’s Geralt not necessarily the same as the next. Crucially, little context was required for a player to enter into the spirit of the thing, just as if you had stumbled across a Witcher story in a magazine without necessarily knowing what came before, and without needing to know.

With Ciri, on the other hand, there is a very intricate, detailed, concrete backstory describing every formative experience of her life, without which she is not Ciri,3 and it seems that all of her most fateful decisions have already been made. She has saved the world from the White Frost. She has rejected her royal bloodline and become a witcher. What is left to discuss? What questions can three new games pose about Ciri that haven’t already been answered? Her backstory is also so incredibly traumatic that it seems unlikely that any new disaster will feel impactful.

Maybe this reveals my own lack of imagination: they must have some ideas, surely, or they wouldn’t be announcing three new games with the air of Father Christmas pulling an especially large present from a sack. I would be very happy to be proven wrong.

Still, what little we do know seems, if anything, to contradict the spirit of both the literature and the previous games. Apparently Ciri is going to undergo the Trial of the Grasses, something that is thematically questionable,4 and likely to be very contrived: game-Ciri is already peak plot armour, with her extreme magical powers, special bloodline, and having the ability to [checks notes] to teleport anywhere in the multiverse at will. Having her survive a process that only 3/10 children survive, as an adult (which we’re told is impossible), after saving the world from entropy itself, seems… yeah. She is God’s favourite princess and the most interesting girl in the world.

But of course, she has to go through the Trial, or she won’t have the witcher eyes and the potions, both of which the market fully expects from a Witcher game. Therefore, she must have these characteristics whether it makes sense or not. It’s also obviously going to be a narrative necessity to neutralise her Elder Blood magic, which is incompatible with the kind of gritty, grounded plot that players will expect and want.

There’s also the broader issue that the book series is about a time when monsters are dying out and witchers are becoming obsolete, something that is also heavily alluded to in the short stories. The games lean into this as well, prominently featuring the fortress of Kaer Morhen, a crumbling ruin populated by three aging witchers who no longer train apprentices. The whole focus of the novels is on the Nilfgaardian invasion, a moral and political crisis obviously meant to parallel Nazism from the Polish perspective, which forces Geralt to reconsider his isolationist worldview.

I only know the broad strokes of the books, but I am told that Ciri’s arc amidst all of this is to recognise that her role as an aspiring witcher is not to protect people from the dwindling monsters, but to protect them from other people.

However, all of the new trailers and promotional materials are implying that a major part of Ciri’s role is going to be about hunting monsters, something that should really be of less importance in the post-invasion world. But again, the market demands monsters, because the concept and image of the Witcher game series is all about hunting monsters, whether it makes narrative sense or not. (If nothing else, Ciri training for a profession that no longer exists/should not exist is going to be very relatable for Gen Z.)

Now, obviously, I assume that the monsters will be overshadowed by human villains, because that is the whole point of the series, and an articulate, recognisable threat is needed to sustain the kind of narrative people recognise as Witcher over a whole trilogy. But is this not just a re-tread of the first three games, which are themselves a re-tread of the books? Are we not just going to be getting a re-tread of a re-tread, which will be entirely predictable? Is this not the rebootification plague we see in cinema? Must we scrape every barrel?

The tendency of capitalism is to generate endless iterations of things that make money, and of course games have to make economic sense. Still, I can’t help but think that a studio like CDPR can afford to take risks, and in fact it was risk-taking and doing something new that made them their name and their fortune in the first place.

Would I like to see another big fantasy RPG5 from CDPR? Of course. Would I like to see three new Witcher games, with the same story beats as every previous Witcher game, but more contrivance and fewer mysteries? No, not really.

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