I can’t play horror games. It’s a big bone of contention for me, because I’ve found myself missing out on big releases (Resident Evil 4 Remake, anyone?) due to the knowledge that I will give up halfway, tired of being on the verge of a panic attack. The closest I’ve gotten to playing a horror game recently is Dredge, whichI played very, very carefully in an attempt to make it as un-scary as possible, and Remedy Entertainment’sControl, which I didn’t quite love but whose lore and environment I admired.
This is very different from my attitude towards horror in other media – I am otherwise a huge horror fiend. My friends and I regularly buy a ton of wine and order in pizza so we can sit in my living room together to trawl streaming services for the scariest, best (or worst) films we can find. We’ll create Frankensteinian double features and then spend hours arguing over whether what we watched was good or not. Horror has always tackled society, turning common fears into metaphors and turning them into things that fill you with tangible, palpable dread. I much prefer watching characters get terrorised by monsters than I do subjecting myself to it, controller in hand.
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The Haunting of Hill House, loosely based on Shirley Jackson’s novel of the same name, was one of the few horror mini-series that I think about regularly to this day. It made me occasionally jump and scream while watching it, but mostly, I cried a lot. It was a beautiful exploration of grief and trauma, one that burrowed deep inside me and never quite left. It made me an avowed Mike Flanagan fan, and I later watched The Haunting of Bly Manor; based on The Turn of the Screw, and Midnight Mass; a gothic, supernatural religious horror.
You’ll understand why I was thrilled to hear that Sam Lake, the creative director of Remedy Entertainment, and Mike Flanagan hosted a panel this week at Tribeca Festival and spent quite a lot of time gushing over each other’s work. According toPolygon, during the Q&A, an audience member asked Flanagan if the creators might want to collaborate at some point, and Flanagan replied with an enthusiastic yes, with the caveat that nothing much was happening now because of the writers’ strike. “In the future, nothing would make me happier,” were his exact words, which set my horror enjoyer heart aflutter.
Is that anything concrete? Absolutely not. There’s no guarantee that this would ever happen, but it makes me happy to imagine it. Towards the end of the panel, Lake told Flanagan that he admired his work and that “Your characters confront their flaws in terrifying and supernatural circumstances, but through all of your work, there is always hope.” Flanagan is making extremely compelling horror work right now, exploring complex themes without dipping into the distinctly A24 style of arthouse horror, and that’s extremely impressive. Alan Wake, in turn, is widely considered one of the most interesting horror games ever made – just imagine that combination. I’m always too afraid to play horror games, but I would let that collaboration scare me to death.
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