Ten Horror Films You Must See

I just watched one of those top ten videos. You know the kind; you've probably seen far too many of them. I know I have. It got me thinking. I don't really have a top ten and I don't want one. There are far too many films out there for me to winnow down a list to just ten. Still, in these happy-go-lucky times when watching film is a solid go-to for folks who have to stay indoors, which ten horror films would I recommend to any horror fan?

Vampyr, 1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer. Semi-silent.

The silent film era birthed some of horror's finest talents. Directors and writers were finding their feet in a new medium, and an entirely new craft was invented: cameraman. Sometimes the results were less than satisfactory, but that didn't matter because you could put together a solid film with next to nothing in the bank. Many did.

One of the silent era's significant advantages was any film could be shown anywhere. Without language getting in the way, the audience could concentrate on what was happening on-screen. Sound broke that market, ushering in a new era where films had to stay in their home market to find any kind of success at all.

Dreyer, a Dane, was an orphan and had an unhappy childhood. He first worked as a journalist but switched to writing title cards for film, eventually graduating to film direction. Vampyr was very nearly his last feature, as it was a commercial failure and he was unable to find work for almost a decade afterward.

Vampyr is just at the cusp of silent and sound. Perhaps because of this Dreyer intentionally included as little dialogue as possible. Basing his plot on two Sheridan Le Fanu chillers, Carmilla and The Room in the Dragon Volant which features live burial, he cobbled together a serviceable plot about a young traveler who finds himself caught in a spectral drama. The plot's good but not great; what makes this film sing is its dreamlike imagery. The dancing shadows, the burial in the glass-fronted coffin, the corn mill - those stick with you years after watching Vampyr.

Cat People, 1942, Jacques Tourneur.

Produced by Val Lewton for RKO's low budget horror studio, this gives the horror world one unique artefact which I know you're familiar with: the jump scare. Or, as it's known then, the Lewton Bus, as the first known example involves a bus.

Young Serb immigrant to the US Irena Dubrovna fears the dark, because she thinks she knows what lives in the dark. The people she comes from tell stories about witches who can turn into savage beasts, a gift given them by Satan. Though good King John punished them for their many bloody crimes, a few survived and thrived in unhappy places up in the mountains. Irena's terrified their wickedness lives in her, and is careful never to become too exited, too passionate, in case their curse overwhelms her. Even so her American friend Oliver persuades her to marry him, only to bring doom on them both. She refuses to make love, terrified that passion will awake the beast. So he, in his misery and frustration, turns to his friend and work colleague Alice for a shoulder to cry on. Jealousy provokes Irena, and before long her passions get the better of her.

This, and Lewton's other films, show what can be done with imaginative camera work, clever editing, and above all a good story. If for no other reason than to see the very first jump scare, you should see this film.

Night of the Living Dead, 1968, George Romero.

Romero and his buddies, most of whom worked making cheapo commercials, became frustrated watching fourth and fifth rate horror flicks. Anyone could do better. Hell, they could do better. All they needed was a bunch of young people, plenty of blood and guts, and some nudity. That was what the kids in the drive-in wanted to see.

So that's what they set out to do, on a next-to-nothing budget. Movie legend says it was $12,000, though it ended up being more than that. About $60-70K in cash, plus extra in credit and equipment, or a little over $100K total. The main camera was second-hand, and the costumes came from Goodwill. The house was borrowed and due to be demolished, so they could do whatever they liked. For actors, they turned to friends and neighbors. Those friends and neighbors soon became investors - after all, the film's cash had to come from somewhere. Every single person you see on screen, zombies or otherwise, had at least a couple bucks invested. It was a hectic shoot, and nobody had only one job. You weren't just the woman who did make-up, you were the ghoul who ate the live bug and worked on sound too. They were young, inexperienced and ready for anything - and it shows.

John Russo, one of Romero's partners, is the zombie you see set on fire about halfway through the film as well as another zombie seen stabbed through the head by hero Ben. The fire story is one of my favorite bits of film trivia. Like pretty much every other special effects sequence the production team had very little idea how to do it. These days the sequence would be carefully plotted out for maximum safety. In Night of the Living Dead, they dressed Russo in several layers of baggy clothing and threw a Molotov cocktail near him. "I was trying to hit a stone out there," recalls Hardman. "Sometimes I hit it, and sometimes …I just can't believe, to this day, that I thought I could hit a stone that was really, what, twenty-four inches across, from the second floor window, over the porch roof." Some strategically pooled gasoline and a match would then set Russo on fire. It was Russo's plan. He felt it was unreasonable, as written, for Harry to throw all those Molotovs and not set a single zombie ablaze.

The idea was Russo'd catch fire and run off-shot, where he'd be extinguished. "I just went until I felt my hair burning." The look on people's faces as he ran past them, "this worried look mixed with glee," he remembered later, stuck with him the rest of his life.

Night of the Living Dead is my go-to example of how budget doesn't matter, experience doesn't matter, when making a movie. The only thing that counts is a willingness to get out there and shoot the film, no matter what.

Onibaba 1964, Kaneto Shindo. 

Japan is wracked by civil war, and the country is falling apart. Two women, a mother and daughter-in-law whose husband has gone off to war, fend off starvation by killing straggler soldiers and selling their equipment to a middleman. Then one of their neighbors returns from the battlefield with stories to tell, and he settles in nearby. The son isn't coming home, he says. He was executed for stealing food.

The lonely young widow sneaks out to see the young man every chance she gets, much to the displeasure of her mother-in-law who blames him for her son's death. She concocts a plan: with the help of a hideous mask she stole from a samurai's corpse, she pretends to be a demon spirit to keep the daughter-in-law at home through fear.

Thus begins the reign of Onibaba: the Hag Woman.

This is how you do a lot with a little. There's practically no set. Everything takes place out in the rushes next to a river, and in two rough huts. The only complicated bit was the hole in which the women disposed of the corpses, and into which the mother-in-law has to crawl in order to steal the mask from the samurai's body. It was impossible to dig any kind of hole where they were, as it immediately filled in with water. So they built a 'hole' above ground in a kind of tower supported by scaffolding, in order to get the shot.

Yet those night sequences, particularly once Onibaba shows her masked face, will stick with you forever. I don't want to spoil, but I will say that the ending sequence in particular … brrrr. Chills.

Dead of Night 1945, various directors. Black and white.

An architect, Walter Craig, is asked to visit a house in the country to advise on alterations. When he gets there he discovers he's seen the place before, in a recurring nightmare. What's more all the people in the house are the people in his dream, except he can't remember exactly how it ends. He knows it ends badly ...

This is an anthology movie, one of the earliest - possibly the first. Each person in the house tries to reassure Craig by telling him their own stories: the young kid with a bad experience at a house party, the racing driver who had a nasty dream after a car crash, the young bride who got a very dangerous wedding present, the psychiatrist who once had a patient whose delusions might not have been delusions. Each story is a short sequence, perhaps ten minutes long. Some of the stories are almost pleasant. You may recognize one or two, as they're based on famous short fiction.

Then comes the end, when Walter Craig finds out what happens after the lights go out.

I couldn't find a version of the trailer that didn't give away significant plot points so if you want to see this unspoilt, don't search YouTube.

This is an Ealing Studio movie, and while Ealing is best known for its comedies it could produce serious dramas when it wanted to. This is a rare example of Ealing's chiller side, and it works very well. It's hokey and creaky at the start, and then it begins to tighten the screws. By the final moments like Walter Craig the audience is hopelessly ensnared. What happens when the lights go out? What happens when the lights go out?

R-Point, 2004, Kong Su-Chang.

In 1972 South Korean High Command in Vietnam is worried about a series of radio messages received from a platoon that High Command thinks is long dead. They say they're lost at Romeo-Point and beg for extraction. Is this some sort of hoax? An enemy broadcast? Can anyone really be alive out there?

Heroic Lieutenant Choi and a group of cooks and ne'er-do-wells is sent to find out. It's a kind of Lost Patrol of the malingering and useless. Nobody expects them to find anything, and God forbid actual effort's expended to find soldiers lost out in the jungle. Except they do find those missing soldiers, and much more besides, out at the old colonial plantation house at the heart of R-Point.

It's got all the war movie goodness you'd expect and in many ways it's not much more than solid B-class filmmaking. But. But. It does the right thing. It lets the atmosphere carry the film, not the special effects or gung-ho guns blasting heroics. That means the creeps start in your mind, and once your mind is caught everything else follows.

Apologies for the non-subtitled trailer, but while there are subtitled trailers none of them are HD, so I went for pretty over convenient.

Ju-On 2002, Takashi Shimizu.

OK, either this or the Ring was going to be on the list. I went for the Grudge because of the two it was the first one I saw, and stuck with me the longest. It's loosely based on a short by Lafcadio Hearn, who you may remember me mentioning before.

This is actually the third in the series, but the first to see a theatrical release. The shot above is one of the earliest in the film, where social worker Rika Nishina goes to a house to check on an invalid. The invalid's an elderly woman who's supposed to be in her son's care. Rika discovers the old woman abandoned, the son nowhere to be seen. But the house isn't empty ...

The core concept is that, in folklore, a person who dies while consumed in a fit of rage comes back as an angry ghost. In the original story that spirit is obsessed with completing a task, and will never stop until the task is complete. In Ju-On the ghosts just come back angry, not obsessed - but whoever they encounter is infected by their curse, and whoever those people encounter also become infected. It operates on zombie movie mechanics, where first bit spreads the contagion until everyone's bit.

Kudos to Rika for carrying on, by the way. Was it me, no amount of dedication to the job would have had me set foot in that house.

Atmosphere does a lot of the work here. It helps that this is very much a house-next-door story. Many spooky house dramas take place in cobwebbed mansions. This is a perfectly ordinary suburban house. What could possibly happen there?

Well ...

Seoul Station 2017, Yeon Sang-Ho.

A precursor to the better-known Train to Busan, this zombie story focuses on events the night before Busan. Things are just starting to kick off, and one man's tragedy soon turns into citywide chaos and devestation.

OK, so far so zombie but what makes this work is not the animation nor the gore - though there's plenty of gore. It works because Yeon Sang-Ho has the sense to focus on three characters: a runaway daughter turned prostitute, her wannabe-pimp boyfriend, and her raging father. Those three carry the film. It's never just about zombies. The boyfriend and father comb a city on the verge of collapse trying to save the daughter, and it's their struggle above all else that really makes this work.

In that sense it's a spiritual successor to Night of the Living Dead, which also had the sense to focus on the characters and not the action surrounding the characters. Sure there was plenty of gore in Night - those zombies were chomping down on actual guts sourced from a slaughterhouse, after all. That wasn't what the audience was interested in. The audience desperately wants to know who will live and who will die, and that's because the audience quickly becomes invested in the characters.

The same is true in Seoul Station. Right up to those last few terrifying minutes, you want to know what will happen next to those three lost souls.

Hardware, 1990, Richard Stanley.

I was in two minds whether to put this or Stanley's Dust Devil on the list. They're both excellent, atmospheric films but I've seen Hardware more often and keep wanting to see Hardware more often, so I suppose this is the better pick.

If you know Stanley it's probably because of his recent Lovecraftian release, The Color Out of Space. This is Stanley at the start of his career. Up till now he's been shooting music videos for the likes of Field of the Nephilim. He's just this minute come back from Afghanistan, where he shot a documentary about the Soviet-Afghan War and the USSR's withdrawal from that bloody conflict. He goes from the battlefield straight into Hardware, and you can see the influence it had on his story. Chunks of the shoot feel like goth rock tracks too.

Yet where this works is in the visuals. Like R-Point there's a lot of solid B-picture filmmaking on display, and the SFX are about as ropey as you'd expect from a cheapo Miramax product of the '90s. Like Night of the Living Dead Stanley opts for violence, blood and nudity as those sell. However the visuals are what really makes it sing, just as they do for Vampyr.

For a very long time controversy prevented this getting a DVD release, but it finally became available in 2009. It can be difficult to find, but if you do get a copy, settle in for a midnight showing with a six-pack to hand. You won't regret it.

That's it from me! Next week, something completely different.

Silent Hill (Fear Itself)

Over the New Year's I tried to play Silent Hill 2 all the way through to the end. I had no choice; my copy is an aged PC version that, among its many bugs, wouldn't let me save, so it was play through till death or not play at all. I've seldom enjoyed a horror title more, and even half-bust as my copy is, that old corpse didn't disappoint.

For those who never had the pleasure, Silent Hill is a survival horror video game series originally developed by Japanese studio Konami. It's set in the one horse town that is Silent Hill, populated only by shadows and the damned. There's a map of the surrounding area, but you can't rely on it. There were other people here, some of whom are dead. The others? Well, you probably want to avoid them if you possibly can ...

People who come here seldom find what they wanted to find, and are lucky if they get out alive at all. Sometimes they stumble in, like Harry Mason, who just wanted to find his missing daughter. Some of them deliberately make their way there, like James Sunderland, who wants to track down his supposedly dead wife, or Heather Mason, who'd leave Silent Hill alone if only it would do her the same courtesy. Or you could be like Harry Townsend, who just wakes up one day and finds that he's trapped in his apartment, with no real idea why or how.

Silent Hill 2 is the best of the series. The rest? Eh, they have their moments, but none of them are as consistently frightening as James Sunderland's trip into nightmare. It's one of the most effective horror games of all time, and for good reason. No other game, and certainly none of the other Silent Hill titles, is as good at reaching into your mind and making you think; and once you do that, the shadows can get into your brain. After which, there's no chance at all.

This game partly inspired the hot mess that is the Silent Hill movie, with Sean Bean playing a Sunderland-esque role. Bean's a reasonable physical match, but that's about the only good thing that can be said about it. The terrible thing is, there are times when it becomes a really good movie, only to disappoint the viewer in the very next scene.

What makes Silent Hill work? Ultimately its character. You believe in James, Harry, Heather and the rest. You understand what they want, and why they're in the situation that they're in. Those strong characters then get to bounce off the weirdness that is the town, which will explore and exploit all of their flaws, until they break.

Silent Hill the town is a very odd place, even more so than it seems at first glance; and at first glance it's pretty damn odd. It's shrouded in mist and darkness, so you can't see all of it, and it's easy to get lost. Your initial impression is that it's a one horse burg, the kind of place that hasn't many young people because they all move off to the big city as soon as they can. Maybe it had a past, but it definitely doesn't have a future.

Then you begin to explore, and to wonder. How many one horse towns have apartment buildings? A fully functioning hospital and a separate medical clinic? A prison, a Civil War museum, a Historical Society, a lakefront Hotel, a funfair, a park? Suddenly it seems much bigger than before. But where are all the people? Yes, there are abandoned cars here and there, and signs that something cataclysmic happened. But there are far fewer corpses than you'd expect if there was a natural disaster, and far fewer survivors.

One of the first living people James Sunderland meets is Angela, whose importance you only really understand when you see her for the last time, at the end. Without wishing to spoil, it becomes clear that the Silent Hill she experiences is a completely different kind of Silent Hill to the one James has had to fight through. Here's her final scene. "You see it too? For me, it's always like this."

This demonstrates two very important truths: first, that Silent Hill is different for everyone. Second, that everyone in Silent Hill gets the experience that they think they deserve.

Ultimately, this is about Hell. But this isn't about scales being balanced or some kind of judgement. This is about the punishment we make for ourselves.

Angela sees the things she sees not simply because she's being punished, but because she thinks she deserves to be punished, and in that particular way. Taking that example, James too must see the things he sees for the same reasons. Which suggests that Silent Hill, the town, bends its appearance, its essential being, to the expectations of people like James and Angela. There's a Hotel, yes, but perhaps it only exists because James needs it to exist. For Angela, there may be no Hotel. She's clearly somewhere, in that final scene, but it might not be the same somewhere that James thinks he's in.

In that case, Silent Hill is just a set, a dreamscape. For James, the Hospital is clearly designed as a insane asylum. For someone else it might be an ordinary hospital, or a school, or some other building. Two people can be in the same place, the same room, and yet have completely different experiences.

Moreover this malleability doesn't stop at the streets and buildings. As James proves in his relationship with Mary not all the people are really people. But as with the environments, these phantoms aren't created by a god or devil figure. It's people like James who invent them out of nothing at all. Ultimately all they are is a reflection of the protagonist's mental state. Nor are they there to be helpful; after all, this is about punishment, not salvation.

So taking all that on board, how can you, as Keeper, simulate Silent Hill with a ruleset such as Fear Itself? 

Fear Itself has at its core the idea that ordinary people, without special abilities, magic or some kind of overarching Destiny (with that all-important capital D), can be plunged into terror beyond their imagining or control. This works nicely with Silent Hill's insistence that its protagonists be ordinary people, without powers or indeed weapons beyond the sticks and items they can scavenge. Often its scenarios are designed to be one-shots, which is perfect for a Silent Hill session. Also, in its character creation mechanic the players are encouraged to identify and describe The Worst Thing You Ever Did, which fits perfectly into the Silent Hill punishment trope. 

Finally, the characters are encouraged to develop a goal, and again, this is perfect for Silent Hill, since its protagonists are usually very goal-oriented. James' goal is to find out what's going on with his supposedly dead wife, for example. Heather's is to find out what Silent Hill wants from her, and incidentally to avenge her dead father figure Harry Mason, so that's both a goal and a Drive in one easy package.

My suggestion would be that, in addition to developing a character, each player also develop something that the Wraith RPG would call a Shadow. Don't worry about Stats for these creatures; the main points are the archetype, Drive and Goal, which work in just the same way as they would for an ordinary character. Except, as with Wraith, the Shadow's goal is to oppose the player's character, to drag them further down into the abyss. So their archetype, drive and goal ought to be a polar opposite to the player's character. 

A Jock player type might have a Brain Shadow, for example. That Brain's Goal might be to show up the Jock in front of his girlfriend, if the Jock's Goal is to rescue his girlfriend, and so on. An alternate Shadow for a Jock, assuming that his goal is to rescue his girlfriend, is to have a substitute girlfriend whose personality is the polar opposite of the Jock's actual girlfriend. So if his original girlfriend is a Good Girl, the Shadow is a Sexy Girl.

Instead of abilities, a Shadow has an Aberrance pool. That pool can only be spent to help, or frustrate, the character. Helping in this instance means adding points to a character's Pool, to help with tests or to uncover clues. Say a character wants to interrogate an NPC. The Shadow can contribute Flirting, Intimidation or Interrogation to assist, by using Aberrance on a 1 for 1 basis. If an important door is locked, blocking progress, the Shadow has the key, or knows how to bypass it, on a 1 Aberrance spend. Or say an Athletics test is needed to overcome an obstacle; the Shadow can contribute points to the test. 

Frustration is the same thing, in reverse. Though the Shadow can never willfully obscure clues, it can contribute pool points to increase the difficulty of a test. I suspect this will often be used to increase the difficulty of Stability tests, but not always.

This pool should be two points less than the Investigative build points used to create the character. Assuming 16 build points, then the Aberrance pool is 14, and so on. Aberrance can be refreshed whenever the character loses Stability. For each point lost, the Shadow regains Aberrance on a 1 for 1 basis, up to a cap of the Shadow's original Aberrance pool.

Shadows have no General abilities. They piggyback on the characters. So in a Fleeing contest, for example, if the character successfully flees, then so does the Shadow. Shadows also have minimal Health, and no Stability. However they can never truly die. If killed in a scene, perhaps by a monster, a Shadow can reappear, apparently unharmed, a few scenes later. Ultimately as a reflection of the character that created it, a Shadow cannot die unless and until the character that created it dies. 

A Shadow is never played by the person who created it. A Shadow's role should always be taken by another player, whenever possible. If that isn't possible for whatever reason, then the Shadow should be played by the Keeper.

OK, that's it for the characters. What about the town of Silent Hill?

Well, the great thing is that there are plenty of online resources that can help you create it. One of the most useful is this fan-created map of the town, but there are plenty of map examples online. That part of the map used in Silent Hill 2 is marked as South Silent Hill, but really you can pick and choose as you see fit. Print out this map. That way the players can draw on it, just as happens in the games.

What, exactly, is in Silent Hill? Ultimately that will be up to the players, but I suspect that it will depend greatly on whether or not they have played any of the Silent Hill games. Those who have will almost certainly expect to be able to go to their favorite locations. Brookhaven Hospital is a recurring setting. Heaven's Night nightclub may turn out to be a fan favorite, as might Neely's Bar. If you have the time it would be a good idea to ask, preferably at least a week or two before the session, which locations the players want to visit, and then build scenes around them.

If the Keeper's uncertain about an area, there are plenty of online resources that describe them. Alternately, make it up out of whole cloth. So long as there's plenty of atmosphere and fog, you should be fine. Even within a Silent Hill location there were always plenty of fenced-off or gated areas the player could never get to. The bit of the Hospital the characters are currently in could easily be one of those. 

The creatures encountered in Silent Hill often depend on the protagonists themselves. So James Sunderland, for instance, first encountered Pyramid Head because Pyramid Head is intended as a play on his frustrated masculinity and libido, all gleaming muscle and huge weapon. Ideally, as with the locations, the Keeper should get a week or more worth of heads-up about the Worst Thing The Character Has Ever Done, which should give enough material to design the look and basic behavior of the creatures the character encounters. 

It may also be useful to ask if there are particular creatures the players want to encounter, or avoid. Some long term fans of the series may feel that a particular creature type is done to death and just not interesting any more. Others may really look forward to, say, the Nurses, or Robbie the Rabbit. 

However the key to monster design here is to take a hard look at the character and see what can be done. So in Silent Hill 3, for instance, where there's a strong undercurrent of sex, Heather is often attacked by creatures that resemble walking spermatozoa, or giant misshapen muscle-men, and in one section has to kill a giant purple worm that suddenly emerges from a huge hole in the wall. As I recall, I beat it to death with a stick. Paging Doctor Freud. But the point is that the enemies she faces are dependent on Heather herself, so you as Keeper need to know about the characters' goals and Worst Thing. 

Try to keep it simple. Dividing it up into the Seven Deadly Sins is a handy reference that may help you in a pinch. A creature motivated by Lust is bound to be different from one motivated by Gluttony, and so on. Also remember that the Sin will affect the environment as well. Angela sees Silent Hill in a completely different way from James, because her motivating sin - linked to her goal and Worst Thing - is different from his.

Once all that's done, send the characters off into Silent Hill. Each character will probably arrive on his or her own; this isn't a moment for the Mystery Machine to rock up and start disgorging plucky teens and their crazy dog. But after they arrive each character will probably encounter the other characters one by one, just as James first meets Angela in the graveyard and leaves her there, or finds Maria in the park and brings her along with him. 

You shouldn't be afraid to let the characters split up and explore the town on their own, because when not on stage a player can assume a Shadow role. If there are a lot of players this becomes tricky, so you may be better off doing this in a smaller group. 

Alternately if you don't mind things getting really complicated, you can assign off-stage players recurring monster roles of one kind or another. Robbie the Rabbit returns, or one of the Nurses takes on a more human intelligence. 

I'm going to leave it there for the moment, and come back to this in a Part 2. So long for now! See you in a bit.

Triumphs and Tragedies: Silent Hill

The other day I went digging in the basement for my Bill Hicks CDs, and discovered a cache of things long forgotten: the discs for Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, arguably the best of Konami's Silent Hill horror series. Like any sensible person, I immediately installed Silent Hill 2 - my personal favorite - on my PC,  and was overjoyed to find it still worked. Kinda.

The save function is irretrievably borked. The console version only let you save at predetermined points in the game, an idea that sounds crazy but works really well in survival horror titles; the PC edition kept those old save points, but also allowed you to save in-game whenever you wanted. The save points are dead. Any attempt to use them doesn't crash the game, but doesn't create a usable save file either. Any attempt to use the in-game save option crashes the game completely.

Otherwise Silent Hill 2 seems to work well enough. It was never intended to run on a PC like mine; it's only a squidbrain standard box, but compared to the original specs it might as well be the starship Enterprise's holodeck. I seem to have the option of minimizing it to the desktop and getting on with my day, at least without causing its tiny brain to melt. Otherwise, if I want to do this - and assuming it won't implode halfway through - my only other option is a marathon non-stop session.

Which I may try.

Before I do, I wanted to talk briefly about the importance of atmosphere. When I first dove into James Sunderland's nightmare, I got as far as the bit where he recovers the radio - veterans will know what I mean - before being brave enough to tempt fate and hit the save button, hoping it would work better than the predetermined save points. Naturally, it didn't. However even playing that long, perhaps fifteen minutes in all, the player's given a crash course in what makes Silent Hill great: atmosphere, atmosphere, atmosphere, with a side order of pure terror.

You start on the outskirts of a strange little holiday town, Silent Hill, where you spent the last happy days of your life before your wife died of a wasting illness. You think she's still in Silent Hill, so you make your way there. Except you can't get there the usual way as, for whatever reason, the roads are blocked; you have to walk. Through the thick, all-concealing fog. With no idea where you're going, or what it is that's making that horrible noise off in the distance.

Nothing like paranoia to make you paranoid.

There are no signs of life. Whatever happened here, happened quickly. Cars are left abandoned by the roadside, as if the owners just got out and vanished off the face of the earth. You get to town only to find that all the shops are shut, the houses abandoned. Some of the streets are sealed off with police warning tape, while one - a main boulevard - has collapsed altogether, making it impassible. The place might have been abandoned for months, and there are signs that properties have been boarded up and left to rot. Then you see something moving, off in the distance, and nasty looking bloodstains on the sidewalk seem to indicate recent activity of the very worst kind.

By that point I'm already wound up, and James doesn't want to avoid trouble; he wants to walk right towards it. In true nightmare logic, any attempt to wander in a different direction is met with warning tape and chasms, which in a tabletop session might seem like railroading, but somehow in a video game only enforces the otherworldly atmosphere. Of course you can't walk away from trouble. That's what being trapped in a dreamscape is all about.

It doesn't help that there's clearly something out there. I can hear it, but thanks to the fog, I can't see it. It's not human, whatever it is, and I can't help but think it intends me harm.

Some of this can be replicated in a tabletop session. I don't know if a Keeper can pull off the fog effect without an actual fog machine, or at least a darkened room. There's something about not being able to see trouble coming that puts people on edge, but it's a very sensual effect, and I don't think it can be recreated through imagination alone, at least not to all players equally and at the same time.

Sound effects, particularly these days, are not a problem. Tablets, smartphones and bluetooth enabled speakers can really screw with people's sense of reality. There are any number of wireless speakers out there small enough and loud enough to be hidden, and yet still be effective.

But to walk into a town and find nobody there, no sign of life whatsoever, that's the real kicker, and that's easy to pull off in a tabletop session. It can work in any number of ways; a Great War scenario in which you find the trenches completely abandoned is as effective as walking through empty London streets. Sometimes that event is nailed in actual history, while in other cases it can be just as illogical and insane as you like. Of course, waking up in a hospital bed after a disaster has wiped out humanity is a very popular trope; aside from 28 Days, The Walking Dead and Day of the Triffids both nicked the idea, and I don't for a moment think they were the only two to do so. In gaming, Portal pulls exactly the same trick, twice. Even Silent Hill does it, in the Room, fourth in the series and a big disappointment for me.

While the trope is cliched, the end result isn't; encountering a familiar environment, completely abandoned, is something that will chill pretty much anyone. It's a signifier not just that something has gone very badly wrong, but also that things will never be the same again. That's why it works so spectacularly in horror; the unspoken goal of a horror story is to return everything to a safe and normal end state which, of course, is impossible, and the empty, mocking streets and houses of Silent Hill know that only too well ...

edit: one unforeseen consequence of playing without a save function is that, when you die, you go back to the beginning, all progress lost! It's been so damn long since I played anything without an autosave function that I completely forgot this important bit of gaming history. Darn you, Pyramid Head! Time to take a break, I'm thinking.

Bookhounds of London: Buried Under The Floorboards

This shall be the last post of the year, so let's make it a ghostly one!


One of the tales in Lord Halifax's Ghost Book concerns an apparition that made its presence felt by planting ice-cold kisses on the lips of the unwary. This only occurred in a specific part of the house, and when the owner decided to renovate and turn the ghost room into a staircase, thus hopefully getting rid of the problem, he told the Clerk of Works to let him know if the work crew discovered anything unusual.

"[Having been told that the workmen have found something] Mr Thomas went down and learned that they had discovered a coffin between the joists of the floor in the room where Miss Tait had slept. From its appearance and from the fact that it had no screws but only nails, the coffin appeared to date from the 17th Century. It was firmly fastened to the joists by iron cramps, but owing to the shallowness of the space between the joists and the floor, there was no lid, the floor boards serving this purpose. There was no trace of any bones within the coffin, but it carried certain marks which suggested that it had once contained a body."

In a house close to where I live now, a former owner is interred underneath the front step. A little further distant is another house, one I worked on as a student, where bodies were found within touching distance of the wall's foundation. It's a tradition now long forgotten, but it wasn't that long ago that a family might choose to be buried on the family land, or within the house itself. Moreover, in a house with floorboards and cellars, there are plenty of ways of hiding things you'd rather not be found again.

Or there could be things living up there, down there, under there. I can hear rats running in the roof void as I type this. Of course, they might not be rats. I can't see them; I can't be sure. But they sound like rats ...

This crops up again and again, in ghost stories. In M.R. James' short story Number 13, for example, the floor boards have to be taken up in order to solve the mystery, and even then, much is left untold. Or take the J-Horror Dark Water; there, the mundane hiding place of the body is a significant part of the plot. Sometimes in fiction this hiding place is represented by whole secret passages and rooms, not unlike Clue, but the best kind of secret is one hidden right under the occupier's nose.

From a Keeper's perspective, the body under the floorboards is a handy McGuffin to have. It doesn't have to be a dusty manor house either; in a Bookhounds game, almost every house the characters will ever inhabit or investigate has wooden floorboards, a coal cellar, space up in the attic. Sometimes this space is truly abandoned. Think about all those houses in the UK, 1930s build or prior. That's at least a third, probably more, of all the housing in the country. Every one of them would have had a coal cellar, yet how often now do you find a house with its original cellar? They weren't magicked away; previous owners filled them in, but imagine what could be down there now.

A place like this could provide benefits, for those willing to seek them out. The Rough Magick sourcebook gives us the Magic ability, and says that some spots are powerful enough that a would-be magus, visiting it and studying carefully, might gain 1 point of Magic. This gain usually only happens once, on the first visit, but some Places of Power offer more; a potential gain of 1 point per year. Not all haunted spots would offer this benefit, but if anywhere is likely to, it will be that quiet, shunned room with the ghastly secret under the floorboards.

Now consider a Bookhounds era game, before the Blitz remodeled London. All those old houses, the near-Dickensian warrens, the churches and the estates, the pubs and the shops, centuries old some of them. Imagine what could so easily be hidden away, down in the dark.

As an example:

Thomas Drugg and Sons, Bakery

This family business, established 1872, is a thriving concern. The current Drugg, Albert, is a hard-working man in his late 30s, and his two brothers work with him in the shop while their married sister, Mrs Fuller, keeps the books. All of them grew up here, in the rooms above the bakery, but none of them live on the property now. Albert is the closest, at two streets away, while the rest are further on. Mrs Fuller is the furthest, living out in Metroland.

Some of the empty rooms are used as shop office space, but most of them are disused. Once, for a month or so about a decade back, the Druggs tried renting the space to a medical student, but that didn't last. Nobody's lived on the premises since then, and the few staff the Druggs bring in don't arrive before four in the morning. Nobody talks about what goes on inside, just before midnight. The Druggs don't like gossip.

Tucked away under the floorboards of one of the upper rooms is a dream diary, a small wooden box, and the skull of what might be a very large rat. The diary belonged to Alice, the Druggs' youngest sister, who went missing in 1902. The skull, knowledgable occultists will realize, belongs to a Rat Thing. The box contains soil, which analysis will confirm has certain characteristics that mark it out as not of Earthly origin.

At night, if anyone's foolish enough to stay, doors do not keep closed, and a mysterious white cat pads noiselessly from room to room. Stability 4 test (supernatural creature up close) to witness this phenomenon.

Magicians crave items like that dream diary, and the soil; they can help increase a sorcerer's power. Drugg and Sons grants 1 potential Magic on the first visit, provided that the visitor stays overnight.  But some say that places like Drugg and Sons are linked to other parts of London, in a great web that connects one psychic pool to another. Claim one, and you might be able to work out where some of the others are, as you trace the great psychic web across London.