Damian McCarthy is a Horror Genius

Sat down today to watch Hokum, Damian McCarthy’s latest movie.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Just like Oddity. I haven’t seen Caveat since it first came out, I didn’t even remember that I’d seen it until I looked at a synopsis today (I didn’t remember the title), but yes, I saw it at Night Visions when it was new, but I do remember being impressed with that too. Need to grab it on blu-ray when I can.

But before the effusive praise…

After watching it, I immediately put it on again, with the director’s commentary on. And I get to the part where he says that Adam Scott’s character was named after RedLetterMedia’s Jay Bauman and that’s when I really lost my shit.

Because then I went looking and found this:

When they talked about Hokum a couple months back, they had no idea…

ahhh, RLM never fails me. (their new horror trivia video is pretty good. I did pretty damn well playing along at home, too, better than the gay robot skeleton guy.)

Funny that in their discussion (which I didn’t watch until after seeing the movie just now, because I knew I wanted to see it and didn’t want anything spoiled) they do mention it’s better than Obsession (which is so fucked up awesome) and Backrooms (which is prettygooddecent) and I agree for pretty much the same reasons they had for saying so.

Basically, Hokum (and McCarthy’s body of work overall) is just atmosphere and dread, with no gimmicks, little-to-no cheap shit. It’s telling stories with almost no regard for the audience… which is an illusion of course, the commentary reveals how much effort went into making Hokum feel the way it does, but the final result just feels so real. Or at least real in the sense that it is its own reality, and we just happen to be looking in on it rather than it being for us.

Now Hokum, Obsession, and Backrooms are all doing different things, and I think opinions about which is ‘best’ is going to depend more on what type of horror you like in the first place.

Backrooms is just, as far as I’m concerned, a megadungeon. I was actually annoyed that we were following around furniture salesman dude and his therapist in the movie, because here’s this phenomenon happening and instead of being about that, it’s about this small story? pfffff. I was more interested in the actual explorers, the Async sequences, than anything with our main characters. But on the other hand, would focusing on the place ruin the very mystery that’s interesting to me? Cube was a great movie, the sequels, no. I was watching the movie more as science fiction and the horror and themes involved with our focus characters were just annoying distraction.

(It reminded me that my favorite Christopher Nolan movies are Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet because they play with such fascinating concepts, but only Tenet is smart enough to realize treating the characters as characters just gets the hell in the way of the exploration of the ideas. But all three movies could work by substituting out the existing cast of characters with entirely different ones and they’d still work. The Prestige is almost to these levels, but the Big Idea and the characters are so intrinsically linked that, I don’t know, traps the ideas in a way. I haven’t bothered with Oppenheimer or the Odyssey and don’t expect that I will since they seem from the hype to be extremely character-focused and that’s not what I want from a Nolan movie.)

Obsession, as I wrote about in March, before it went into wide release and so of course before anyone knew it was going to be a ridiculously big hit. (as I ended my writeup for it back then: “I hope it makes all the money in the world.”) But it’s a gimmick movie, and it certainly it more in-your-face about what it’s doing. And as I also wrote back in March: “I dare say it goes into full-on Lamentations-style perversity at points and therefore I can only give it my highest recommendation.”

But it works as a horror spectacle, whereas something like Hokum works on a deeper level. Long periods of character isolation with no dialogue that were tense and gripping and never boring. A parade of characters that all seem more tragic and pathetic than the next, they’re all trapped in their own hells even before we even consider the events of this movie. It’s a thing you simply feel on first viewing, and then think about an admire afterwards. And it earns its ending.

My opinions on these three standout horror movies of the year makes me think about how I approach things, and why. Certainly my own work is all about the gimmick, which hopefully conveys atmosphere in ways appropriate to the individual work’s gimmick, but it isn’t so much quiet dread. There’s something about sitting here behind the keyboard (or with the pencil and notebook) trying to figure out what I want the player experience to be, and how I go about engineering that experience through an adventure. And when it comes to just naked dread, absent of gimmick, I think I only ever did that in the beginning sections of Death Frost Doom.

See, I’m concerned with “what are they players going to do?” an an adventure and this sort of dread requires that they’re not doing very much, just experiencing something. And how do you do that? Well I figured it out the one time, and I at least try to make every one of my adventures be a different experience for people.

And let’s face it, having some sort of gimmick to hang the experience on lets a scenario work even if the players aren’t taking it seriously. There can be the duality of the players all laughing their asses off while the most horrific shit is happening in the game. If DREAD is what you’re going for, if the players aren’t buying in then it’s going to be a failure and when you publish something you can’t control who’s playing it or the circumstances the game is happening in. (I’m guessing the dread of Death Frost Doom hits rather poorly in a play-by-post game.) Sort of like how I imagine a movie like Hokum wouldn’t work in a party “let’s throw on a horror movie!” context.

But I recently recounted the story (oh who am I kidding, I recount the story all the time) about how the lead-up to the dungeon in Death Frost Doom led at least one group to just nope out of the adventure after finding the dungeon entrance and much of a victory I thought that was. Real people not wanting to bring their pretend people into the pretend place, basically made them not want to play the game they were there to play, because I’d done my job perfectly. That is such an ego rush.

Should I try going in that direction again, and if I do, how do I restrain myself. With a soundtrack of funeral doom while writing, that’s surely how. If anything seems like it would spike adrenaline or make me crave music faster than a snail’s pace, don’t include it. And see how that goes. Can I destroy all of you through sheer force of will alone, not just as a setup, but beginning to end? Or will this be yet another project with an outline and killer first page that sits forever dead on the hard drive?

I know I put Oddity in the opening graphic so I guess I need to talk about that a bit. It plays in the same heavy atmosphere as Hokum, but it’s a lot more upfront with what it’s teasing for the end, which is a bit… sensationalistic. But effective as hell, since it builds the suspense with its cards on the table so when everything finally happens it’s quite cathartic. It probably would have had a bigger potential audience than Hokum, all things being equal, which they weren’t, since Hokum was released by a bigger studio. It’s the kind of movie that should have been a prestige horror TV series, because that Cabinet of Curiosities could have fueled many episodes. Or maybe Friday the 13th: The Series covered that already? I only know that by reputation, never watched it, but its premise is close to Oddity’s setup in some ways. Top marks for this one.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of horror, if you’re not familiar with Damian McCarthy’s work, you owe it to yourself to change that. His earlier short films are available on Youtube.

While I’ve got you here talking about horror movies, news broke yesterday that Screaming Mad George died earlier this year. If you’ve seen Predator, Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Big Trouble in Little China (and those three movies were huge for young Jim), or Society (you must see this), you’ve seen his work. I didn’t know who he was or his contributions to things I loved back then, but I know now, and I encourage you to go watch one of the movies he worked on, and do it today, in his memory. After I hit ‘post’ on this piece here, I’m going to prepare dinner and watch Society.