They Can't All Be Creepers

I always feel bad when I get a phone call and it’s the wrong number.  It always goes like this:

“Hello?”

“Hi, is so-and-so there?”

“Nope.  You got the wrong number.”

At that point, the other person always says in horror, “Oh… I’m so sorry.” 

I try to tell them, “It’s okay, no worries,” but I feel like if this exchange was in person the other person would be running away crying in embarrassment at this point.  

Prometheus

I don’t remember exactly how this all came about.  Awhile back I was contacted by a man named Michael Fassbender and asked if I was interested in being a part of a paid film studio internship. 

I don’t know what put my name on the radar; maybe my technical theater and creative writing on my Macalester College transcript; or the manuscript I had submitted to various publishers over the last two years; or hell, even this blog and my YouTube channel.  Regardless, my name, portfolio, and passion for film and story creation caught their attention.

Beware the Tooth Fairy

*NOT FOR KIDS*

For some reason, the last thing I still believed in as a kid was the Tooth Fairy.  I understood how Santa worked, but for the life of me I could not understand how my mom could possibly steal the tooth from under my pillow without waking me up.  There’s no way.  It had to be some mystical creature.

I was determined to catch this babe... or my mom, I guess... in action and put this whole matter to rest once and for all!

The next time I lost a tooth, I gave myself a pep talk, telling myself that I was only going to be a light sleeper that night.  Ha ha ha…that didn’t work.  I sleep through sirens, barking dogs, the alarm going off, the apocalypse, thunderstorms, seismic activity.  It’s amazing I make it to work on time every morning. 

Dark Santa

*NOT FOR KIDS*

It is often thought that when a vampire is slain, its minions perish as well.  That is why the Prince of Darkness, the father vampire, the first of its kind, is both feared and hunted.  Should he be slain, the world would be free of their menace.

Yet, Dracula is dead.  Abraham Van Helsing intercepted his coffin on its way back to Transylvania, opened it, and drove a stake through the creature’s heart. Why then are vampires still feared?  They cannot exist without  the father vampire still roaming the earth.

Unless Dracula was not the first of the vampires…

Fear: Jericho

There are only two video games that I have ever given up on.  I quit playing a medieval strategy game called Excalibur because the programmers were obviously against players saving their games.  By the time you’re on level two, you’re pissed off because every failed attempt is 30-plus minutes of your life that you didn’t enjoy, you didn’t get paid for, and you’re never going to get back.

The other was Jericho - the other game from that infamous $5 clearance bin. 

I brought Jericho over to my friend Charlie’s apartment.  Charlie was extremely gung-ho to play the game.  That should have been an indicator right there for me, but it wasn’t.   Nor was his vampire and werewolf movies, Event Horizon, and the case for Bioshock sitting on his PS3.

The full title is actually Clive Baker’s Jericho.  Clive Baker - the writer best known for family film classics such as Candyman and Hellraiser.  Oh boy!

In  Jericho the haunted ruins of an ancient city mysteriously emerge out of a sandstorm in the Kalahari desert.  The EVP readings are insane.  For that reason, your military squad, Jericho, is sent in. 

Before the main menu loads, there are the ten second advertisements for the various programming and production companies involved.  I don’t remember which company it was, but I will never forget the video.  It had this crazed, pale-faced dude wrapped up in a straight jacket with his eyes and mouth sown shut.  He’s in a padded room, mumbling maniacally to himself as he rocks back and forth.  He looked like something out of a rated R version of A Nightmare Before Christmas. 

So we’re not even to the main menu and I’m already freaked out.  However, this is my first time enduring horror in front of Charlie; I was determined not to be a wimp about it.

The main menu is nothing more than a pulsating wall of stretched out flesh.  Off and on the faces of the damned push against it from underneath.  Joy.

Gameplay starts topside at the gates of the ruins.  I’m okay with this.  Its quasi-daylight, minus the fact the sandstorm is still going on; I have guns; and there are six other people with me. 

Naturally, I shift over to the shotgun.  A shotgun does a lot more damage when something jumps out at you.  And you don’t have to aim with a shotgun; you just have to be facing the right way. Perfect, because I’m won’t be looking at the screen once the creatures start jumping out.

We have a few encounters at first, but nothing I can’t handle.  Then, someone on the team says, “We should split up!”  No.  No we shouldn’t.  But of course they don’t give a damn what I think, and half the team breaks off.

Alright, fine.  I still have four guys, including me.

We get to the entrance to the underground compound.  Its locked, of course.  It can only be opened from the outside, go figure.  Two of us are going to have to stand watch outside.  I’ll stand watch. 

Nope.  They send me in with one other guy.  The stone door rumbles back into place, and we’re trapped inside.  Its pitch black.

Great, ten minutes in and I’ve gone from being outside with six men, to being trapped in the darkness of a crypt with only one other guy, and no choice but to go forward and feel my way into a heart attack.

At this point, Charlie asks, “Hey, do you mind if I kill the lights so we can get the full effect?!”

Without missing a beat I say, “Yeah, let’s do it!” and a part of me dies inside.

We switched off every so often over the course of the next 4-6 hours.  Honestly, the game wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.  However, it is extremely complicated.  You had to manage all seven of your guys to utilize their different abilities.  Without playing regularly, I’d have to restart just to relearn all the controls.  And let’s face it, I’m not playing the game by myself.

Out of everything in the game though, the thing that scared me the most was that crazy little dude in the straight jacket.  I did not have nightmares that night, but multiple times I woke up in the middle of the night fully expecting to see him rocking back and forth, back and forth, at the foot of my bed, mumbling away through his sown shut lips...  

Fear: Darkness

My wife bought me two PlayStation 3 games from a $5 clearance bin at Best Buy.  One of them was called Darkness.  By the screenshots on the back cover, it looked creepy.  Now, I can handle creepy…as long as that’s all it is.

You play Jackie Estacado, a lackey for  mafia crime-load Paulie (typical, stereotypical mafia name).  Anyways, a job goes horribly wrong, and the two dudes you’re with end up dead.  Well, this doesn’t go over well with Paulie.  So, for your 21st birthday, Paulie makes you a little present in the form of a bomb strapped to a dead guy’s chest inside a closet.  BOOM!  Your body is blow clean out the seventh-story window.

That’s when the Darkness starts to manifest inside you. The screen turns an eerie blackish-purple; captions appear at the bottom of the screen in a gigantic, twisted font; and a demonic voice starts saying things like, “you’re soul does not belong to you.”

Shortly thereafter the Darkness emerges in the form of two massive black serpents that rip out of your back and hover in your peripherals.  You can have them attack people, or slither out ahead of you to scout the area.  You can also have them eat people’s hearts, which makes them more powerful.  As they get stronger, the two heads start fighting over the hearts.  One will have it in their mouth, and the other will be yanking at the severed arteries.

Okay, creepy… but I could keep playing on the principle that the only disturbing thing about the game was me. 

Of course, the Darkness cannot aid you unless you’re in the shadows.  Now, when you get freaked out in most game, you just fall back to the well-lit areas where you’re safe.  That doesn’t work here.  If you want to feel safe, you enter a room and shoot out all the lights… Because that’ll give you a warm fuzzy feeling when you’re in a haunted orphanage.

Eventually, you realize that the Darkness is taking over your body.  To stop it you eat the barrel of your gun and pull the trigger.  But you don’t die.  You awaken in the trenches of WWII, where instead on Nazis, they’re fighting against zombie-cyborg-soldiers that don’t die unless you devour their hearts.

Messed up, but whatever.  I was fine until I reached the bomb shelter.  The backdoor is down a long cement sewer drain.  Just before you reach the mouth of the tunnel, the silhouette of a soldier suddenly appears in front of you and instantly vanishes, scaring the crap out of you!  I damn near crappie-flopped on the living-room floor.  What the hell was that?!  That is not okay!

Against my better judgment, I kept going.  The sewer empties into a battlefield that’s covered in a heavy, rust-colored fog.  All you see are shadowed forms moving on the edges of your vision.  And then BAM!  Lightning.  The screen goes white.  Thunder crackles.  You heart skips.  And when the flash clears you’re offset twenty yards.  Get back to where you were.  Keep going.

Bam! Silhouette! And then its gone again.  But I’m still firing at nothing and screaming in my living room like I’m actually out there…

Stop firing.  Breathe.  Keep going.  Bam!  Lightning!  Silhouette!  Lightning!  Lightning!  Silhouette!  And suddenly, I’m surrounded by zombie-cyborgs and they gun me down.

While the game reloads the Darkness spouts off in its demonic voice while faces of death flash across the screen…

…I don’t play that game at night anymore…

Fear Week

I’ve decided to make this week ‘Fear Week.’

Everyone fears something.  Spiders.  Vampires.  Horror films.  Basements.  Campsites at night.  Clowns.  Sounds emanating from the other room.  At the same time, there is certain type of person out there that can brave the bone-chilling horrors with an air of nonchalance. 

I am not that person.

To better understand how my hardened soul works, I have found a segment of dialogue from an anime called “Ouran High School Host Club.”  Good show, by the way.   In the scene, the main character, Haruhi, is pulled into the hallway by the class president, Kazukiyo, because he has a secret he wishes to confide in her.

Haruhi - “You have Nyctophobia?  So you’re afraid of the dark?”

Kazukiyo (or me) - “Yes, and you can add to that Horror-movie-phobia, Scary-ghost-story-phobia, Being-startled-by-a-loud-noise-in-the-other-room-phobia, and Accidentally-seeing-trailers-for-horror-movies-phobia.  And what’s with those things? Why do they keep showing them without warning us about it first?  It just doesn’t make sense to me.  What ever happened to civil rights for the fraidy cats out there?  Cowards are people, too!”

Now that we’re clear about my feelings on the matter, we can move onto my following posts as to what brought the whole matter up this time around.

“What could it possibly be?”