Dark Souls reviewed by Tim Franklin

Developed by From Software

Published by  Namco Bandai Games

Released in 2011

Available for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3

Certificate 16 - advisory

When you accidentally step back to your death over the battlements of a ruined tower. When you are suddenly crushed beneath a hurtling boulder. When a ghoul leaps from a darkened alcove and chews your face to shreds. When a golem splinters you in a single sweep of its axe. When a lizard breathes cursing vapours over you and permanently snips your health-bar in two. When you walk through a one-way door to find a tiny room packed with hell-hounds and a towering demon. When you're concentrating on a pendulum scythe and a snake priest electrocutes you. When you make it to the bottom of a maze of wooden walkways and blind ends, only to discover that the floor is made of poison. When you hear a door open behind you and never find out exactly what killed you. When invisible adversaries fire tiny darts of incurable toxin into your flesh. When you play for two hours and don't move your character ten feet. When you finally defeat a seemingly insurmountable boss after hours and hours of crushing defeats and grinding repetition, only to discover that to reach the next checkpoint you need to run directly towards the fiery breath of an unkillable dragon.

When these things, and worse, happen to you in Dark Souls, you will wonder why you are even playing this damnable game. But before you can even begin to wonder "Just when did I turn into such a masochist?", you'll find yourself out there again, lost in the wilderness of pain, ready to face your inevitable death.

Dark Souls specialises in terror, the fear and dread of unknown things. You tremble onwards into each new maze, shield raised, trying to be cautious but painfully aware that the game will murder you for indecision, too. Something is always hidden. Characters you meet will lie to you. Treasures are hinted at, just out of reach, locked beyond seemingly impassable barriers. Dungeons are gloomy, and become gloomier throughout the game. Where there is light, there are also hiding places, and fog, and traps, or else it is blindingly bright.

As your character wakes at the start of the game you find you are locked into an asylum for the undead, doomed to languish in madness until the end of time. You escape; a giant bird spirits you away to Lordran, the realm of the Gods. Here you are told to ring the two bells of awakening. Perhaps you will save the world - or perhaps you will damn it. No one will tell you. And while you wend your weary, destined path, monstrous challenges will rise again and again to crush you like a bug.

This is an alarming, challenging take on the fantasy genre. It is hardly the hero's journey – or, at least, not the hero's journey as we have become used to it. Where modern games coddle the player with an easy arc of moderate challenges and entertaining lightshows, Dark Souls is startlingly free. It is a freedom that will get you killed. Wandering carelessly on high cliffs will see you fall to your death. Accidentally murdering a non-player character strips them out of your game world forever. And as Dark Souls saves your progress after every choice or failure, you can never, never repeal your mistakes. This hardcore sensibility recalls classic roleplaying games from the world before computers; Dungeons and Dragons is of course the grandfather of the whole genre, and the trial-and-error slaughterhouse The Tomb of Horrors could almost be a mould for some of Dark Souls' (easier) levels; while the inability to backtrack really brings to mind the Fighting Fantasy adventure books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone.

Sartre would love Dark Souls's multiplayer system. "Hell is other people;" absolutely. You will soon notice messages scrawled in red sigils across the landscape. They have been left by other players of the game, and while some of them are handy hints, a good number will distract you just long enough for a dragon to stomp on your head. "Try jumping" is a popular, frequently fatal, suggestion, found beside most of the many bottomless pits. Players can also enter one another's game worlds, to help or to hinder. It is not uncommon for someone to appear and stab you through the spine just moments before you reach the safety of a bonfire checkpoint. 

So why should you play Dark souls?

For all its acknowledged viciousness (the tagline for the game, "Prepare to Die", would be pretentious if it was not so fair), Dark Souls never postures. It presents a remarkably convincing world to you, and what you can see, you can probably touch (unless of course it is a sneaky illusion). Distant vistas are a temptation to bid you explore, and you will be rewarded with strange new realms. The satisfying and physical combat engine means that your sword will clang off the stone walls of a narrow corridor, rebound from the shields of nimble foes, or force you to drastically overextend yourself when you miss a blow. Where there are mysteries you will only solve them through trial and error and luck - or perhaps you will not solve them at all. There is that option as well. This is a world you can lose yourself in, because it resists your attempts to bend it to your will. It feels bigger than you on a massive scale, and that puts a huge weight of reality behind it.

Lordran is a beautiful world, too. It is a single seamless construction, free from loading screens (though framerates will occasionally drop unforgivably low), with believable transitions from one realm to the next. Mundane environments are enlivened by excellent and believable architecture and geology and a sense of vast scale, which transition gradually into no less spectacular supernatural locales. Each level folds back on itself with the intricacy of a puzzle-box. On your first pass through a location you may assume that you scraped it bare of secrets while you were being wiped across the floor by its denizens, but there is always more to discover. This marriage of deathtrap and diorama will take your breath away.

Hard work makes victory all the sweeter. When you win in most singleplayer adventure games, you are rewarded with a glossy cutscene, a new power-up, and a nod in the direction of the next moderate challenge. When you win in Dark Souls, you are rewarded with a spectacular endorphine rush pumped directly into the reward centre of your brain. You feel like an unassailable God King, like the greatest genius since Einstein - and Einstein never killed a Taurus Demon. By making you work bloody hard for victory, you can trace a direct line from your fingers into the smoldering corpse of your greatest adversaries. When it is not making you hate yourself, Dark Souls is more exhilarating than any video game has a right to be.

It is also a treasure trove of terror. Each new environment will feed you into a novel, vigorous death trap. You know this is going to happen even as you pass the threshold. Every new creature, every piece of architecture has to be viewed through a lens of paranoia, as it could be the very thing that kills you. Every step you take without being ground into pesto ratchets up the tension, higher and higher. The microscopic chance that you might make it through a level unmolested on your first try is an irresistible lure, even as your pulse rockets towards heart-attack territory.

Really, you will play Dark Souls because once you start, there is no way out. It has the psychological profile of an abusive lover: it will batter you unconscionably, deny your most basic requests, turn a cold shoulder just when you need sympathy the most. It will train you to blame yourself for your own incompetence, not the game for its insurmountable difficulty. And there is something intoxicating about it that keeps you crawling back for more, something that makes alternatives seem wafer thin. It does not preen or pretend. It offers you an incredible fantasy world, but demands that you be good enough to earn it. After 45 hours of play (and having seen less than half of what the game has to offer) I've sold my soul to try and meet that impossible demand. I suggest you join me in the darkness.

1408 reviewed by Laura Bettney

1408

Directed by: Mikael Håfström
Released in 2007
Certificate: 15

The haunted house is, arguably, one of the most successful tropes in the horror genre, perhaps due to an almost ubiquitous fear that our homes could shift from places of great safety to sites of our extreme vulnerability. The idea that what we most have to fear could be lurking in just the next room is one which has been exploited in horror literature and film for many years. We have seen the concept of the ‘evil house’, wherein the danger lurks in the very bricks and mortar surrounding us and the impact this has on the minds of those caught within, for example, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000). 1408, based on a Stephen King short story, locates the terror in an even smaller geographical space; a single hotel room in the centre of New York City.

Accompanying the viewer into this little section of Hell is Mike Enslin (John Cusack); the jaded, cynical, albeit relatively successful author of such titles as 10 Haunted Graveyards and 10 Haunted Lighthouses. For a man who so fervently denies any belief in ghosts, what these titles tell us is that Mike has certainly dedicated a vast portion of his life to searching for them, but has as yet been unsuccessful in his quest. In his dogged determination to investigate alleged hauntings wherever he can find them we see that, like the maverick FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) from Chris Carter’s The X-Files (1993-2002), Mike truly does want to believe. As he says to his fans, ‘Nothing would make me happier than to witness a paranormal event’. Indeed, the reason for his desire to discover evidence of an after-life is slowly revealed as the film progresses and we witness the tragic events leading up to his acrimonious separation from his wife, Lily. While researching a new book, Mike hears about the legend of room 1408 in The Dolphin Hotel. To begin with the viewer cannot help but join him in his mild amusement when he first makes contact with the establishment to enquire about the room; only to be told, ‘That room is unavailable, sir’.  ‘Wait a minute’, says Mike, ‘I didn’t tell you which date’. Stony silence ensues from the surly receptionist, then, ‘It’s unavailable’.

On the face of it, this is mere myth-building on the part of hotel staff, and holds all the faux terror of the fairground ghost train, with the audience being challenged to ‘roll up’ for what will inevitably be a fairly dull, uneventful experience. Indeed, this is how Mike sees it, as he calls his agent to pull some strings and get him booked in. However, he must still overcome the misgivings of the hotel manager, Gerald Olin (Samuel L. Jackson) who Mike must circumvent in order to secure one night in room 1408. Olin delivers his stock spooky lines with panache, “nobody’s ever lasted more than an hour [in that room]”; “I don’t want to clean up the mess”. At certain points Olin even seems to have slightly rattled Mike’s scepticism with his warnings.

We then begin to discover that room 1408 does indeed have a noteworthy history. Olin shows Mike a scrapbook documenting the room over the last 95 years. We learn that there have been 56 deaths in room 1408 since the hotel opened. 27 of these deaths were described as natural; the other’s... less so. If the first real tremors of trepidation begin to run through the viewer, Mike remains unimpressed, berating Olin for trying to scare him with tales of ‘ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties’. Not to be robbed of the final words in the exchange, however, Olin responds with utter seriousness, ‘I have never used the word “phantom”. It’s just an evil fucking room’.

It has to be said that Jackson and Cusack are unusually big names for 21^st century horror cinema. Since so much of the film revolves around their performances, particularly around that of Cusack, that the investment in top actors was a wise decision on the part of the casting team. Too often in horror films we see good ideas ruined by frankly poor execution. For a horror film to work the actors need to make you empathize with their characters in order to make you care about the fact that they may at some point in the film face a grisly death. This is what we get in 1408. Cusack is phenomenal here; not only do we see the cynical, sarcastic side of Mike, which he portrays to the world as a kind of shield to keep people from getting too close, but over the course of the film we also see him as a man who has made a great many mistakes throughout his life and regrets them all deeply. He is also likeable, despite (or perhaps because of) all his flaws, and even more importantly, he is absolutely hilarious. Cusack delivers his lines with impeccable comic timing, and this is highlighted even more clearly in the scenes he shares with Jackson, who is similarly gifted at delivering this kind of deadpan humour. Even towards the end of the film, when things have spiralled well out of control, some of Cusack’s reactions and delivery had me laughing out loud. It is a testament to the actors’ abilities and the quality of the script that humour and horror are blended so well in this film, providing emotional contrast to the rather doom-laden plot.

Of course, when we finally see it, the room itself is actually rather... nice. A sentiment that is echoed by Mike as he stands in the doorway, peering in, ‘This is it? Where’s the bone chilling terror? Show me the rivers of blood’. It is spacious and well-lit; it has a mini-bar that Mike makes increasing use of throughout his time in the room; the pictures adorning the walls are bland, yet somehow comforting. All in all, somewhere I would not mind staying a night. I mean, sure, there are problems: a closer inspection with a UV light reveals some rather ominous bloodstains scattered throughout the room; the thermostat is broken making the space unbearably stuffy, which the hotel engineer refuses to enter the room in order to fix; and the radio alarm clock keeps switching itself on periodically (always, horrifically, playing The Carpenter’s ‘We’ve Only Just Begun’). Nevertheless, thinks Mike, ‘it does have its charms’. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this is where we spend the next horrendously uncomfortable hour or so of the film, trapped in a hotel room which grows less and less charming by the minute. Of course, by the time Mike has witnessed enough to persuade him that Olin might have been telling the truth it is too late and the room simply refuses to let him go. At this point, the clock radio portentously begins a slow 60 minute countdown. 

The haunted /’evil’ house trope is excellently equipped for pulling off this kind of scare. There are numerous examples of films in which characters find it just too difficult to believe that anything really bad could happen to them in their own home, or indeed in a plush hotel room. After all, the horrific is not supposed to happen behind the safety of our locked doors, in spaces comfortingly lit by electric lights, where the sounds of our loved ones can be heard in the next room. Perhaps these characters are simply not aware of the statistics about exactly how dangerous the home environment can be on an average day; and when the supernatural gets involved.... By the time characters in these films have figured out that they really could be in great peril while in a neighbourhood full of other people or a hotel packed with guests and staff, events have passed way beyond the point of no return. By this stage, inevitably, characters are running around with an axe trying to murder the entire family, the ghostly inhabitants of the burial site the house is positioned over have become really quite unhappy about the situation or one person has been possessed by a fairly nasty demon and has a penchant for standing over their partner in quite a creepy manner whilst they sleep. It is the very blending of the mundane with the horrific that makes this trope so effective, and it is the mundane elements that mean we can all believe what we are reading or seeing to an extent, and, consequently, we can all be scared by it.

One interesting point never fully elucidated by the film regards what exactly the room is. What is the source of its malevolence? As the film progresses, there are hints from an increasingly battered, inebriated and terrified Mike that he believes he is progressing through various circles of Hell as described by Dante in The Divine Comedy. For example, at one point when the room descends into a bone-chilling cold, with snow floating downwards and settling, he mutters, ‘This is level nine, deepest level of Hell, removed from all light and warmth’. However, there are other aspects of Mike’s experience of this Hell which are intensely personal to him. He is, for example, forced to relive certain painful experiences from his past involving his ex-wife, his child Katie and his behaviour towards his ageing, ill father. Arguably, it is the psychological trauma he undergoes that affects Mike more than any of the other, more corporal, terrors the room throws at him. Indeed, it is after a particularly cruel trick, in which the room gives Mike all he has wanted for many years and then tears it away again, that he decides to make one final stand against room 1408. 

To say any more would be giving too much away. All that remains to be said is that 1408 is one of the most compelling haunted house stories ever committed to film. 1408 is not as experimental or as ‘gritty’ as some of the others that have been covered in the Nightmare Visions section; in fact for a genre film it has rather high production values. It is amazingly well acted, beautifully shot and cleverly written, with an ending that manages to disturb while also hinting that Mike may have at last found peace.

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Laura Bettney is an Assistant Psychologist with a degree in Psychology with Criminology. She is a lifelong fan of horror working on her first short story. Laura also reviews albums and gigs for the American Indie (in the original Pixies, My Bloody Valentine, and Dinosaur Jr sense) online magazine, Delusions of Adequacy.

Apparitions reviewed by Lorna Jowett

Apparitions

UK, BBC

Originally Aired 2008

Producer: Carolyn Reynolds, Tony Wood

Writer: Joe Ahearne

Despite the huge amount of TV horror that exists, some people still think you can’t really do horror on TV: that television is too mainstream, too concerned about “least offensive programming”, not niche enough, not cult enough, and not daring enough. Horror fans know, however, that innovative horror has debuted on the medium that brought us Quatermass, Ghostwatch and Being Human (or, across the Atlantic, The Twilight Zone, Dark Shadows and Dexter) even if they’re often categorised as something other than horror, something more TV. It’s difficult to see Apparitions as anything other than horror. But it’s definitely horror for television and this is where it gets interesting. Apparitions is The Exorcist on TV. Even now, it seems unlikely and, on BBC1, almost incredible. I remember seeing trailers for it and thinking, it’ll never work. But, by mixing realist horror with bankable BBC elements, including a star actor (Martin Shaw) and a writer/ director with a track record in fantasy and horror as well as mainstream television (Joe Ahearne), it did, gaining a 20.6% audience share for its first episode.

Anyone familiar with Ahearne’s work, knows he previously wrote and directed 6-part Channel 4 series Ultraviolet (1998), an unforgettable revision of the vampire hunter story, as well as directing various episodes of Doctor Who early in its reboot. Fantasy mixed with realism is common on TV but before Misfits and Being Human, Ahearne was taking the aesthetic tradition of kitchen sink and social realist British TV drama and applying it to horror and the supernatural. Even in a story about vampires or about exorcising demons the setting, the world in which the characters move and the world in which the action takes place is utterly real, utterly contemporary, so when we do see demonic possession or exorcisms, these things are made real in a way that other, more extravagant and spectacular horror never achieves. That we see these horrors on our TV screen in our living room makes it, if anything, more grounded in the real.

And what do we see in Apparitions? Things barely imaginable for BBC1 in a primetime slot, even after 9pm. The basic premise of the show is that Roman Catholic priest Father Jacob believes that “Satan is not an exotic presence in our lives” (episode 1). Jacob is supposed to be examining proof of alleged miracles but is sidetracked into exorcism. Demonic possession and exorcism lend themselves to extreme body horror and despite Ahearne saying in pre-release publicity that “This is a story where the exorcist is centre stage – not the possessed victim,” Apparitions does not shy away from these elements. In the very first episode one of Jacob’s friends has his skin flayed from his body and dies. In another, a rapist incarcerated in prison is possessed, not by a demon but by a saint (episode 3), causing him to literally sweat blood. It doesn’t stop other prisoners trying to rape him in the washroom. In yet another (episode 4), a 70-year-old pregnant woman tries to secure an abortion. The visceral nature of these scenes is rendered in detail. When Jacob’s friend and student Vimal is flayed, we see the aftermath rather than the process, yet the camera lingers on the pools of blood and exposed flesh, blue lighting (another favourite of Ahearne’s) serving to make the blood look eerily black. The body is seen again in the following episode during an autopsy, this time brightly lit. A bible is later bound in Vimal’s skin, and close-up shots show the marks of hair follicles in the book binding – a subtle but stomach-twisting reminder of the grisly killing.

Apparitions aired on BBC1 and BBCHD, positioning it as a flagship show and affording the best possible medium for its special effects. Effects and spectacle are always an issue in screen horror and Ahearne wanted to avoid CGI because he believes it lacks emotion, a feeling shared by many horror directors in film and TV. The more complicated stunts are rooted in performance, grounding them in something tangible rather than in the details of make up, wirework and effects. Some proposed scenes were cut because they were judged to be less “real” and therefore out of keeping with the rest of the show and its authentic feel. Still, what remains is remarkable in a primetime drama on BBC1. Not surprisingly Ahearne admits that there was “quite a bit of nervousness about extreme horror on television because we don’t tend to do a lot of it”.

Apparitions made it to BBC1 partly because it was Martin Shaw’s idea. I hadn’t watched Shaw on television since The Professionals (1977-81) because his work for TV tends to be for a mainstream audience and I don’t watch much mainstream drama. With a career of acting that includes stage roles and occasional film parts and that started on TV in 1967, Shaw is a well-known face on British television. His most famous roles are in TV staples such as detective, medical and legal drama series and Ahearne describes Shaw as being “at the top of television.” This very bankability sells Apparitions as a primetime BBC1 drama, despite its high level of horror and inclusion of the supernatural. Shaw brings the authority of his past roles to playing Father Jacob, as well as their mundanity, to counterpoint the fantastic elements of Apparitions.

Jacob is at the centre of this drama, though whether it validates his position is unclear. In Ahearne’s previous series, Ultraviolet, vampire hunters were as much in danger of losing their humanity as any vampire recruit: in Apparitions, Father Jacob is accused of being mad and deluded by many other characters. Shaw makes his character’s faith convincing but repeated denials and disbelief from those who encounter Jacob continually undermine any sense of rationality (in the diegesis and for the viewer). Moreover, to most of those he interacts with, even associates in the church, Jacob’s faith is as exotic as demon possession. “Many of those beliefs are out of place in a secular society like Britain,” comments Ahearne, “and it creates great conflict which is the engine for drama”. Similarly, the rituals of Catholicism function here as another form of spectacle, contrasting with contemporary secular society (abortion clinics, prisons, psychology) and with other religions (Islam in episode 5), as horror does with realism. While shooting the majority of the series in Liverpool or London underpins the show’s contemporary social realism, location shooting in the Vatican enhances a sense of simultaneous realism and exoticism in the finale episode.

It should be apparent from this description that religion and the Roman Catholic Church are not depicted simplistically here. The Exorcist supposedly went down well with the Catholic authorities, since its priests are heroic figures fighting evil to the death. The very idea of a priest as hero might make some reluctant to watch Apparitions but, since this is a drama created by Ahearne, it’s not that clear-cut. The church as an institution is painted much less sympathetically than Father Jacob. Religious belief is, perhaps, upheld by the narrative to the extent that it suggests demons exist. But Apparitions really tackles religion as morality and neither offers definitive answers, nor gives only one view. It debates the nature of evil: are bad things in society the work of the devil or is this just ducking the issue and avoiding social responsibility?

Although Ahearne notes that Apparitions makes reference to classic horror films (and to Silence of the Lambs, a prestige production that also effectively brings horror into the mainstream) the series engages with “current live issues” and contentious areas for contemporary Catholicism such as abortion, homosexuality and the holocaust. With episodes negotiating potential child abuse or post-traumatic stress disorder, the show ranges from intimate family life to international conflict. Many of the episodes raise questions about violence, for instance: about how it is used and justified, when it might be acceptable, and when it is considered criminal or simply evil. While Apparitions delivers spectacular “horror” exorcisms or possessions on a regular basis, Ahearne is more interested in extremes of good or evil, and in how we judge extreme acts and extreme beliefs.

Some online reviewers comment that the show is a mish-mash of exorcism horror movie clichés. Of course it is: that’s how genre works, whether it simply recycles, or whether it renegotiates and re-presents. Vimal, Jacob’s friend and student is attacked and flayed in a bath house, apparently having given in to repressed homosexual desire. Cliché? Well, yes, but homosexuality remains a major issue for the Catholic Church (and other religions), homophobia is still rife in contemporary society, and self-loathing is nothing new to Catholics. Vimal’s sexuality is something many around him prefer to ignore; his death is a threat close to home. And, like countless horror protagonists, Jacob must live in fear that all those close to him will die before he can defeat the evil only he seems to believe in.

Apparitions and its reworking of possession and exorcism will not appeal to all horror fans. Ahearne knows exactly how to use TV and its realist conventions to best effect for horror, so it’s surprisingly low-key in places, surprisingly graphic in others. As in most contemporary TV horror the grey areas of morality are to the fore. Adding religion just makes it more challenging. Can you be objective about vampires? Probably. But religion? Like it or loathe it, religion still affects how we see the world and Apparitions sketches out how it can be a vehicle for complex TV horror.

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Lorna Jowett is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Northampton, UK, where she teaches some of her favourite things, including television, film, horror, and science fiction, sometimes all at once. Research currently focuses on genre, aesthetics and representation in television, film and popular culture. Her monograph, Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2005, she is on the editorial board of Slayage: the Journal of the Whedon Studies Association and she is currently writing a book on TV Horror with Stacey Abbott.

Limbo reviewed by Tim Franklin

Developed by PlayDead
Published by PlayDead
Released in 2010
Available for Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, PC (Steam)
Certificate: Mature (M) - advisory only

As Limbo opens, you are presented with a forest of black trees, huge trunks stretching the height of the screen in a barcode pattern of black, white light, and more black. Behind and between them the forest stretches away, deeper, wrapped in heavy mist. The earth is black loam covered in black grass, and the light that penetrates the gloom is diffused by the constant fog. Where a solid beam of light makes its mark, it is painfully bright; over-saturated as a bad photograph. A little boy opens his bright white eyes and blinks - perhaps you didn’t notice him, lying on his back in the grass, because he too is completely black. He sits up, and now you’re into the game. You walk to the right, and begin your journey.

You will notice the way Limbo is presented to you before you notice what is being presented. In the videogame graphic landscape, currently dominated by hyper-realism and brown urban palettes, Limbo’s expressionistic greyscale startles and charms. Limbo’s game director Arnt Jensen developed the art style for Limbo while working as a concept artist at IO Interactive, as a way to keep himself sane in the increasingly corporate work environment. After an initial aborted foray into programming the game himself, he released a video of Limbo’s art in motion onto the internet, seeking out developers who could turn his animation into a game. The team that formed from this search is now the game studio Playdead, and comparing the final game to Jensen’s mock-up it’s apparent that the consistent, striking art style has been the guiding principle throughout Limbo’s development, informing the other aspects of the game’s design.

Although the doll-headed profile of the human(oid) characters will prompt some comparisons with Burton, Limbo is closer to the eerie gothic illustrations of Edward Gorey, or the expressionist silent cinema of Germany in the 1920s. The forests later give way to an urban hell straight out of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927): environments warp and mutate to produce dreamlike distortions of scale that evoke Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). The nameless protagonist is tiny in the forest, pursued by a gargantuan spider and dwarfed by the trees all around, but his encounters with industrial machinery suggest a built environment more to his scale. The random junctures between radically distinct environments, arbitrary mechanisms and improbable urban constructions throw the notion of a consistent world into doubt. The effect is uncanny and unsettling.

The sound design in Limbo deserves a special mention: eerie, airy and industrial, the synthesised soundscape hisses with a low level of static and an understated note of menace. It’s a benchmark in restraint, and combines with the panoramic hugeness and stark desaturation of the game’s environments to create a deeply immersive experience that floods the senses with white noise while depriving them of detail. When something disturbs this equilibrium you fix on it immediately. Limbo is best played in a dark room, in an empty house, with headphones clamped over your ears.

Your little boy will die, often; strangely silent as his neck snaps, his back breaks, and his torso is chewed up or his head is impaled with sudden rag-doll violence on a spike and the lights in his eyes go out. The world is littered with death-traps, some accidental (there is no shortage of deadly drops, precarious tree trunks or shorting electric circuits) and others literal, apparently constructed by Limbo’s itinerant pack of lost boys who appear from time to time to lethally bully your avatar and then flee. The art style colludes with the environments to make them even more deadly, obscuring some threats by blending them into the background and making others literally undetectable. This doesn’t feel like a failure on the designers’ part, but more like the product of a malicious and mischievous sense of humour. Often the only way to crack a puzzle is to die in the teeth of it, again and again. It’s a testament to the charm of the game and the satisfaction of completing one of Limbo’s deathtrap puzzles that this morbid design mantra will rarely spoil your fun.

Limbo channels the cosmic horror of H. P. Lovecraft (of Cthulhu fame). Trapped in an incomprehensible universe of perpetually shifting rules and geometry, your boy is treated less with malice than with supreme indifference by his many murderers. Death at the spear-tipped talons of your spider nemesis is particularly ignominious: immediately bored with its kill, the arachnid flicks away your tiny corpse and returns to its previous repose.

Despite the persistent terror, this isn’t a nihilistic experience. After every failure you are presented with an immediate chance to repeat, and potentially escape, the previously fatal trap. There is always a way to succeed - inevitably, given that this is a game and not a Beckett play - but it still feels significant. Coffined in spider silk, enslaved by a mental parasite, trapped in a slowly filling water-tank, the nameless protagonist will engineer (or stumble across) some way to escape from his bind, rendering his previous deaths inconsequential. It will just take a few drownings or decapitations to figure out how to get to that point. Despite having no facial features except for eyes, your boy seems to be plucky and likable. Compare this to the state of the torture porn genre, a realm where violence begets deeper and deeper violence, and your little protagonist’s adventures become a humanist crusade to assert personhood in the face of an uncaring universe.

Limbo’s gameplay is satisfying and simple. It’s a puzzle platformer, a genre that went neglected for years until Portal (Valve, 2007) reminded everyone what was so fun about it - encountering seemingly impassable obstacles, from which you must glean some notion of a path and a plan before committing yourself to a rapid bout of twitchy reflex gaming that will either transport you to the other side, or the grave. Limbo shares a 2D design with its ancient forebears Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee (Oddworld Inhabitants, 1997) and Heart of Darkness (Amazing Studio, 1998), as well as their penchant for graphically inventive deaths and Heart of Darkness’s child protagonist. The puzzles rely on a modern physics engine which is subtly implemented. You may find yourself getting stuck on puzzles that cry out for binary solutions (switch on or switch off?) but which must be resolved by careful manipulation of momentum, inertia, and later in the game, magnetism and gravity. There are entire games in the marketplace devoted to each of these conceits; Limbo bends the rules of the game world a little at a time, never staying too long with any one idea.

Limbo is in fact very slight; a play-through should clock in at about the 4 hour mark. Given the low price-point for the game, this doesn’t grate too much (pound for pound Limbo compares favourably with cinema and comes out even stevens against budget DVDs), but the ending will come as a surprise, appearing at no particular dramatic juncture. This is perhaps a weakness of Limbo; while the levels are immaculately designed, there is nearly no narrative structure. You progress from left to right, away from one trial and towards another. This is made tense by the sympathy the hapless protagonist generates, and the awful beauty of the world he is locked in, and the game constantly innovates both its puzzles and landscape, pulling you on with pure entertainment. But the context for the boy’s actions - he seems to be seeking out a girl - is only suggested in very fleeting moments throughout the adventure. Even Mario had more plot.

Limbo is a creative whole. The plot and the gameplay have been folded around a singular graphic style that is never compromised. Purity of purpose has created something that is both beautiful and playable, wince-inducing and addictive. Limbo knows its limits, and perhaps that is the real reason for its abrupt ending: when the good ideas run out, the game stops. Compared to the lacklustre padding in many mainstream games, this seems immensely preferable: a short, sinister and utterly unique little game that will make you die again and again and again and come right on back for more.

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Timothy Franklin works for Lancashire's literary development agency, Litfest. He's nearing the end of a course in playwriting at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, and a collection of reviews and mad railings at the government can be found at his blog, Unsuitable for Adults. He's a gamer, and that's where his interest in horror is most keenly focused.

The Devil’s Backbone reviewed by Enrique Ajuria Ibarra

The Devil’s Backbone
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Released in 2001
Certificate: 15

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is most widely recognised for his hit blockbuster films, such as the Hellboy series and Blade 2, and also because of the huge praise and critical acclaim received for his 2006 film Pan’s Labyrinth [review]. With a rich and elaborate visual style, Del Toro’s work showcases his keen interest in the monstrous, the vampiric and the supernatural, as he delves into and explores them through the use of popular culture and folklore.  However, insufficient attention has been given to his early work; when assessing his contributions to 21st century horror it is worth considering the high quality of the director’s productions before his global success; such as The Devil’s Backbone (2001). In this film, Del Toro creates a horrifying atmosphere, as a ghost’s insistent haunting is situated within the pain and desolation that a civil war leaves on its people. Produced by Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, this film provided the ideal springboard for Del Toro’s future, more popular and more complex films.  Just like his other films, The Devil’s Backbone is influenced by the director’s fascination for classical horror, the macabre and popular fiction. With its carefully crafted dark scenes and violent events, it masterfully offers a painful, yet highly attractive, portrayal of how people react to the threat of others in times of raging political and social instability.

The film tells the story of Carlos, a newly arrived boy at Doña Carmen’s and Dr Casares’s orphanage and refuge for children whose Republican parents fight or have died in the Spanish Civil War.  Shortly after his arrival, Carlos sees a ghost, which the rest of the children – who cannot see him, but apparently have heard his voice – call ‘the one who sighs’. Determined to find out who this spectre is, Carlos slowly uncovers disturbing secrets about the adults and other boys who live there: Carmen is a widowed woman who has decided to keep on running the school her late husband had opened, even though it has become a heavy burden for her; Dr Casares is an Argentinean who has decided to stay in Spain because he is madly in love with Carmen; Jaime is the leader of the boys, who takes to bullying Carlos, yet is obviously afraid of someone else in the complex. Finally, there is Jacinto, the caretaker, who does not bother to hide his disdain for the school and its residents. After being persistently haunted, Carlos discovers that Jacinto has been trying to steal gold hidden in the building’s grounds.  When the Civil War gets too close to the walls of the orphanage, prompting Carmen and Casares to escape with the children, Jacinto decides to take more drastic measures to get what he wants. After a violent fight that shatters the orphanage and kills the adults, Carlos learns of the identity and the origin of the ghost. Once the mystery of the haunting has been solved, Carlos, Jaime and a group of children decide to put matters to rest once and for all in a climatic, spectacular and bloodstained finale.

In The Devil’s Backbone, Guillermo del Toro works with the traditional conventions of the ghost story: in an old building there resides a spectral figure that haunts the current inhabitants of the place and this figure will not rest until the circumstances of his untimely death, a mystery or a secret for the haunted characters, are uncovered and avenged. Del Toro heightens these haunting sensations through the isolated setting and by enhancing the otherworldliness of the ghostly apparition with low-key lighting and unearthly tones. Carlos usually encounters the spectre at night and always when he is alone. The ghost also leaves terrifying signs of his passing, such as footsteps on wet floors and an eerie trail of blood in the air. An unsettling sensation of being observed is established as the spectre is always seen looking at Carlos from dark thresholds, keyholes and basements. The camerawork is also remarkably effective in generating unease: most of The Devil’s Backbone is filmed using dolly shots – seamless and very smooth camera movements – that glide through every part of the orphanage like a silent and invisible otherworldly observer.  By using such simple techniques, the film reinforces in the audience that shuddering sensation of something ghostly watching the characters’ every movement and action.

These floating camera movements, combined with the implied presence of the ghost in the shadows, establish the impression that the spectre always stands at physical borders, aware of his non-corporeal state. But at the same time, he slowly begins to incorporate himself into the physical world as the film develops. Initially, the ghost is perceived only for a brief instant, but as the story and plot unfold, he increasingly manifests as a more concrete and material being to Carlos. Having been haunted since he first arrived at the school, Carlos decides to confront the spectre to try to understand what he wants. The ghostly child expresses a need to wreak revenge on the one who took his life. Significantly, the ghost has chosen to appear only to Carlos, casting doubt over whether he is real: in the end, he might just be a figure that came to exist in Carlos’s mind after his traumatic experiences and hardships in and outside the school.

That the main characters in the film live under the constant fear of a war raging on outside the walls of the school is highlighted by an artefact that looms over the very centre of the building’s courtyard: a deactivated bomb that fell on the night that a young boy disappeared.  The children believe the dormant bomb is really alive and that it whispers and echoes secrets and truths, if you ask the right questions. Del Toro chose the historical era of the Spanish Civil War as a constrictive and stressful setting in which to develop this compelling ghost story. Considered to be one of the most devastating events in European history, the Spanish Civil War has left its imprint by defining Spain’s culture as one marked by the haunting resonances of the people who died and disappeared during the conflict. The Devil’s Backbone not only reflects on the conditions of war and violence that affect individuals, but also society at large. The characters in the film all represent a political faction of the Civil War.  Most obviously, Carmen and Dr Casares represent the liberals; Jacinto, the military fascists and the children, the Spanish people themselves. Paired with the spectral presence of the ghost, personal grudges and interactions between all the characters establish the focal message of the film: war is traumatic, and more than that, it is culturally haunting; repeating itself in memories, actions and reactions that seek to speak of silences and secrets that demand to be told, avenged and laid to rest.  Mirroring the ghost’s appeals to Carlos to avenge his death, Spanish culture is haunted by those who died and disappeared during the Civil War.

The main appeal of The Devil’s Backbone is its masterful balance of horrifying ghost story and traumatic war drama. Guillermo del Toro draws on his considerable knowledge of the history of horror cinema, admitting in interviews to have been greatly influenced by horror classics from the sixties and seventies, such as the Hammer Studio films and Italian directors Mario Bava and Dario Argento, when he created this haunting narrative. These influences are clearly discernible in the film’s setting as well as the development of the characters. Several scenes are evocative of classic Italian gialli such as The Girl Who Knew Too Much, Suspiria and Inferno: the unsolved horror mystery is infused with a palette of bright colours, excessive violence and copious amounts of blood and wounded flesh, just like its Italian counterparts. Del Toro has also confessed to have been influenced by classic Hollywood Western films such as The Searchers and those directed by Anthony Mann; the desert landscape in The Devil’s Backbone is reminiscent of the isolated settings of the Old West. With convincing and outstanding performances from the young actors, and with the participation of notable film and television stars from both Spain and Argentina, del Toro’s film lives up to the director’s very own personal goal: to create an appealing spaghetti western/horror hybrid. The Devil’s Backbone is a successful horror ghost story because it keeps reminding us of the universal appeal of the ghost: how it comes to culturally stay and permanently haunt us with such traumatic delight.

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Enrique Ajuria Ibarra is a doctoral candidate at Lancaster University. His thesis project analyses the social and political criticism found in fantasy and horror films from Mexico and Spain, and he has particularly done extensive research on the films of Guillermo del Toro. He has participated in several conferences both in the UK and abroad and has published book and film reviews for The Gothic Imagination and Re/Action Magazine websites. His main interests lie in the use of fantasy, horror and gothic theories to explore particular examples from film and literature, both in Spanish and English.

Dead Space reviewed by Tim Franklin

Developed by EA Redwood Shores
Published by EA
Released in 2008
Available for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Microsoft Windows
Certificate: 18

Dead Space is now a flourishing videogame franchise, with entries on the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, iPhone, PC, tie-in movies and comic books, but when it was released in 2008 it came out of leftfield. A product of massive publisher EA’s skunkworks EA Redwood Shores (now Visceral Games), it was an original title in a genre that had for years been dominated by the seemingly untouchable Resident Evil franchise. Although Redwood Shores had big aspirations for the game and the fictional universe surrounding it, a sequel was far from certain - in a risk averse industry most series only have one title to prove their financial clout, or face an ignominious burial. The stellar growth of the Dead Space franchise is a tribute to the strength of that first game, an entry which is imaginative, brutal, terrifying, and far greater than the sum of its parts.

First, we must admit that some of those parts are salvage. The plot in particular has had several previous owners: responding to a distress call from the mining spaceship Ishimura, Issac Clarke is part of an engineering team that attempt to save the scuppered vessel. Within seconds Things Go Wrong in a big way and the mainstay of the team are torn apart by the game’s resident nasties, The Necromorphs (a name which sounds as though it has been taken from a 1980s Clive Barker title), leaving Isaac and a few other survivors to keep the floundering ship from crashing into the nearby planet. It is not worth stating how many films, books and games this setup could have been taken from. Isaac meanwhile is personally motivated by a search for his lost wife, a member of the Ishimura’s crew. The Ishimura has more than a hint of the Nostromo (Ridley Scott’s Alien, 1979) about it, all industrial functionality and claustrophobic space-efficiency. A trail of audiologs unravels the grim backstory to the game with reasonable charm, but these could have been re-used from id Software’s Doom 3 (2004) with only the minimum of editing. The series script writer Antony Johnston has provided snappy writing, though, and although the delivery method for the plot is old hat, the payload is explosive. 

If the design of the Ishimura channels Ridley Scott, the Necromorphs come from John Carpenter and Barker.  Reconfigured human corpses, their body parts are repurposed for novel and violent ends. Shoulder-blades become scythes, intestines become tentacles. Personal features are displaced to ugly points about the body, deformed, mutated and very reminiscent of the iconic William Birkin from Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 (1998). In a neat inversion of game and horror tradition, aiming for a Necromorph’s head (or comparable facsimile) is the slow route to a kill. It is better to prune monsters limb by limb, stripping away their offensive and locomotive capabilities until they finally collapse. A couple of larger monster designs have traditional sign-posted weakpoints hidden on their armourless undersides and nether parts, which are not exactly disappointing, but still don’t compare to the horror and pleasure of ripping out a standard ’morph’s legs only to have it drag itself towards you on its foreclaws. 

Given the massive zombie fad in 2008-2010, it is a little surprising that the Necromorphs stand as the benchmark “undead in space” - the Doom series being the notable videogame exception, and Event Horizon (1997) holding the corner for film. And in spite of the game’s hard sci-fi setting, the Dead Space alt-zombies derive from a supernatural source, a religious cult artifact known as The Marker. Uncovering the scrivenings and journals of cult members aboard the Ishimura reveals the tortured events that lead the crew into their zombified state, without indulging in too much mad-scientist scene chewing (perhaps a response to 2007’s excellent Bioshock, which also uses audio logs to develop backstory, and introduced the first mad sociologist into the world of videogames).

Your tools of dismemberment are refreshing. The best among them are literal tools, engineering implements pressed into service as ad hoc weaponry. There are one or two videogame staples in the mix - the welding torch behaves rather like a flame-thrower, and the marine rifle does what it says on the tin. Your staple weapon is a plasma bolt cutter, which pumps out limb-splintering shots with a satisfying bark, and telekinetic buzz-saws, a man-portable mining laser and short-range sonic rock drill are among your other improvised armoury. Rather than grenades, you have limited access to a stasis field and a telekinesis glove. Weapons, widgets and your armour can all be upgraded in exchange for power nodes. These important items are fiercely rationed and usually hidden behind a wall of teeth and pullulating flesh.

Putting your toys into play is great fun. Dead Space is one of the few successful descendants of Resident Evil 4 (2005); a third-person horror game that gives you control of an empowered but vulnerable lead character. Isaac has strong offensive capabilities and considerably better range than the Necromorphs. But he is a glass cannon: it only takes a few hits to reduce him to a bloody stain; Isaac’s clunky pace and poor maneuverability, matched with the very restricted field of view, are vastly outclassed by his sprinting, wall-crawling, leaping antagonists. It is a gameplay formula that turns every conflict into a series of hasty, life-or-death decisions - which of the many targets do you shoot first? Is the gun in hand the right one for the job? Is now the time to use your precious stasis attack? Make your stand here, or blast a path to higher ground?- by which point, if you haven’t acted already, something will be wearing Isaac’s face like a hat. 

Occasionally, particularly in the closing act of the game, the balance between power and threat tips. Too many foes or too little fire-power turn tension into grind as death after death stack up on top of you and you are forced to repeat the same sections over and over. Even these will provide some stomach-turning anxiety as you gird your loins to repeat the onslaught of alien brutality.

The core rhythm of your adventure, familiar to protagonists of horror in all media - explore a bit, something jumps out on you, you beat it into a paste or you die - is not innovative, but it is well-executed. The disintegrating Ishimura supplies a very neat sequence of maguffins to motivate your exploration, as you fix poisoned oxygen supplies, refuel the ship, and (horror of all videogame horrors), recover key cards. Each section of the ship; landing bay, engineering, accommodation, hydroponics and other more esoteric locations, provides a neat parcel of objectives divided into discreet subsections. The levels are characterful, hitting a sweet spot at which exciting combat arenas pass off as credible environments, believable places where people lived, ate, or (more likely) performed nefarious scientific experiments. Occasionally you will need to trek through a previously visited location, but these at least get a makeover from the Ishimura’s continued explosive decay.

Beyond the writhing meat and alien potatoes of the game is a spread of appetising diversions. Artificial gravity has failed in some areas of the damaged Ishimura, unhitching your playing arena from the perceived “floor” and sending threats at you from all directions. Others are open to vacuum, adding a slowly failing oxygen supply to your resource-management worries. These also nod in the direction of realism by muffling aural cues about approaching gribblies; in Dead Space’s vacuum sections, no-one can hear you scream.

Dead Space packs in a lot more than this: high quality voice-acting, set-piece boss-fights, a brief dalliance with zero-gravity basketball, and a string of third act twists that, although not revolutionary, are carried through well. It has panache, polish, and enough individuality that its debts to its forebears: Doom 3, System Shock (1994), the whole Resident Evil series (1996- ), The Thing (1982), Virus (1999), Alien, Aliens (1986), Alien 3 (1992), Alien Resurrection (1997), are easily overlooked. Most importantly, it is so scary that even hardened horror cases (Twisted Tales co-founder David McWilliam included) have been known to turn off their games consoles rather than press on once the shit hits the fan. With the release of the sequel this year, the series’ first entry is available pre-owned for pennies. If you have not tried a horror video game before, whether you are a gamer or a horror buff, start here.

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Timothy Franklin works for Lancashire's literary development agency, Litfest. He's nearing the end of a course in playwriting at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, and a collection of reviews and mad railings at the government can be found at his blog, Unsuitable for Adults. He's a gamer, and that's where his interest in horror is most keenly focused.

Pan’s Labyrinth reviewed by Enrique Ajuria Ibarra

Pan’s Labyrinth
Directed by Guillermo del Toro
Released in 2006
Certificate: 15

There are very few times when a film has a significant, lasting impact on its audience. Whether it makes the spectator leave with a feeling of contempt, happiness or sadness, it is the remarkable quality of its production values and its originality that leave their trace on the viewer. Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is one such film. With full liberty to explore his magical, wild and dark imagination, del Toro was able to present one of the most enchanting and harrowing stories ever seen on screen. Pan’s Labyrinth is not just considered the Mexican director’s masterpiece so far; it is also regarded as a highly successful piece of cinematic work that has pleased audiences worldwide. It is a contemporary fairy tale that reflects on how the Spanish nation has culturally appropriated Franco’s historical regime: with horror and dread dressed with fantasy and the supernatural in order to make sense of events that have been rarely addressed openly for various reasons. Pan’s Labyrinth is not just the journey of a girl looking to find meaning for herself whilst confronting her cruel, fascist stepfather. It is also an exploration of how fairy tales speak of social fears and anxieties. Del Toro has once again created a story where he is able to combine all the themes that fascinate him. He recovers the darker side of the fairy world as it mediates the horror of an actual and traumatic military regime.

Set at the end of the Civil War, the film tells the story of Ofelia, a young girl who is obsessed with reading fairy tales, and her life alongside her mother and her new husband in an isolated forest region in the north of Spain. Ofelia’s stepfather, Captain Vidal, commands a group of soldiers set to destroy any traces of Republican insurgency in the area.  Vidal is a cold and very precise man, a prime example of fascist militarism, and Ofelia soon takes a dislike to him. Whilst her mother is bedridden because of a risky pregnancy, Ofelia lets her imagination run freely and she soon discovers a labyrinth next to the mill where they are staying. Inside, she wakes up a faun who reveals to her that she is the lost princess of the King of the Underworld. If she successfully accomplishes a series of three tasks, Ofelia will be able to prove herself as the rightful princess and return to her real father’s realm. Thus, she begins an adventure that takes her to strange and mysterious places filled with fantastic and dangerous monsters. But when her real life starts suffering from devastating personal blows, the supernatural and mundane worlds start to bleed together. In her very final test, Ofelia must stand up to the challenge of facing the greatest and most horrifying monster of all and make a vital decision that will determine the success of her quest.

Guillermo del Toro has often claimed that both his previous Spanish production, The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Pan’s Labyrinth share a strong bond; the two films address the continuing cultural effect of the Spanish Civil War by means of fantastic or supernatural devices, and they both feature children as their main characters. Whilst The Devil’s Backbone contains a male or masculine perspective of such historical event, Pan’s Labyrinth presents itself as the female or feminine counterpart. The two films are brother and sister to one another; each portrays the horrifying struggle of war and military political imposition in its own particular way. In the case of Pan’s Labyrinth, the film engages with symbols of femininity alongside very evident gender and social issues. Particularly seen from a girl’s point of view, the film’s supernatural settings are all presented as enclosed womb-like spaces where Ofelia descends to and crawls into. It is in these domains that the richest and most fantastic scenes take place: the underground world is thriving with a sense of safety and well-being that is clearly opposed to the patriarchal military rule of Captain Vidal in the real world.  It is through the character of Vidal that the film exposes the cruel, relentless and strict, male-oriented politics of the Francoist regime. Women are subdued, silenced and overlooked. They are mainly portrayed as passive characters, marginalised with domestic tasks, often considered to be incapable of action, reflecting Vidal’s prejudices. In the midst of this evident gender stratification, Ofelia is portrayed as a girl who is capable of acting independently and of taking responsibility for her own decisions. In the same way, another prominent female character in the film, Mercedes, the housekeeper at the mill, utilises Vidal’s presumptions about feminine passivity to plot and work against him in order to help the Republicans hiding in the forest bring him down. Del Toro not only attempts to bring a feminine point of view to the Francoist regime in the film, but also draws attention to the subject’s ability to choose, a trait that was suppressed in Spanish society during Franco’s dictatorship. Thus, political imposition merges with issues of masculinity and femininity, exploding and colliding in an encounter that is inevitably drenched with blood.

Del Toro’s films are particularly characterised by their close attention to bodily injury and the infliction of pain; either accidentally or on purpose, his previous Spanish language films all feature copious amounts of blood, cuts and wounds. Pan’s Labyrinth follows this same style with Vidal’s methods of punishing disobedient loyalists and rebels. Even though his cold personality is discernible from his very first appearance in the plot, it is when he decides to punish some rabbit poachers that his true monstrosity unfolds.  In a series of quick, yet effective close-up shots, Vidal slowly crushes a young man’s nose and mouth with a bottle of wine. The precision and the severity of the wound are made all the worse by the casualness with which Vidal inflicts it. His determination, paired with his strict military upbringing, make him a man to be afraid of. Throughout the film he single-mindedly executes anybody who strays from the ideological premise of a “clean, new Spain”, whether they are Republican rebels, wayward poachers or his stepdaughter Ofelia. Vidal is the horrific representative of a military regime that exercised its power through fear, obedience and enforced silence. When someone does not follow the rules, they are in danger of being crushed by the extreme and officially endorsed force of Vidal.

The audience is encouraged to empathize with Ofelia’s desire to escape from this horrific existence. Del Toro’s film makes good use of the structural elements of the classic fairy tale to tell her story. Pan’s Labyrinth is a cornucopia of supernatural settings that aptly demonstrate del Toro’s rich and prolific imagination. From the tree-like figure of the faun, to giant toads and an evil and terrifying child-eating Pale Man, the film explores Ofelia’s imaginative capabilities and her knowledge of classic fairy tales. Firmly believing that she is a magic princess herself, she dutifully performs the tasks she has been assigned in order to return to the underworld kingdom. With the aid of fairies and magical instruments, she is able to face all adversities and escape from life-threatening situations to prove she is a member of supernatural royalty. Despite everything, what Ofelia demonstrates at the end of the film is her worth as a human being: it is her ability to choose that eventually defines her destiny and ends this magical, yet terrifying, fairy tale.

What makes Pan’s Labyrinth such a remarkable film is that it always keeps the horror separate from the supernatural. There are frightening elements in the fairy tale world that Ofelia interacts with, but if one pays close attention, none of those terrifying creatures actually physically harm her. Horror is driven away from the magical world and it is clearly nailed down in the mundane world. Del Toro has masterfully crafted a film full of enchantment and sadness, where any rebellion can be easily crushed by a political regime that is represented as cruel and relentless. Pan’s Labyrinth explores the historical fears and traumas of a national community and mediates their horrors by means of supernatural creatures, settings and situations. With its successful combination of fairy tale, historical realism and horror, del Toro has created one of the most memorable films of recent times. 

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Enrique Ajuria Ibarra is a doctoral candidate at Lancaster University.  His thesis project analyses the social and political criticism found in fantasy and horror films from Mexico and Spain, and he has particularly done extensive research on the films of Guillermo del Toro.  He has participated in several conferences both in the UK and abroad and has published book and film reviews for The Gothic Imagination and Re/Action Magazine websites.  His main interests lie in the use of fantasy, horror and gothic theories to explore particular examples from film and literature, both in Spanish and English.

Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales reviewed by Glyn Morgan

Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales
Adapted by Jeremy Dyson, directed by Polly Findlay
Liverpool Playhouse
Running until Saturday 23rd April

‘A striking debut, his stories nestle in the little vacant chink between Roald Dahl and Borges’ declared The Observer’s Adam Mars-Jones of Jeremy Dyson’s collection of short fiction, Never Trust a Rabbit (2000). Given such early comparisons, it is fitting that Dyson’s latest project is a stage adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected (1979). There have been previous adaptations of these dark and often sinister short stories, most notably in the early seasons of the TV series Tales of the Unexpected which ran for nine years from 1979 until 1988, but this is their first rendering on the stage.

Whilst answering questions at our reading event before the show, Jeremy Dyson pointed out the weight of expectation that was upon the play with many people hoping for Ghost Stories 2. Ghost Stories was Dyson’s last play, and having also seen it at the Liverpool Everyman in 2010 I can say it was a genuinely frightening, atmospheric, tour-de-force, which drew screams from the audience on multiple occasions. Dyson’s anxiety about people’s expectations of “more of the same” is well placed because Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales definitely doesn’t fit that bill; it’s something completely different, fresh, and stands up on its own terms.

Nevertheless, there are some similarities between the two plays. The format, for example, will be familiar to anyone who saw Ghost Stories with its framing narrative for short, seemingly self-contained, stories. A detailed examination could even find some similarities in the manner of both plays’ final twists but, not wanting to spoil either, I won’t reveal their endings here. The stories Dyson has adapted include ‘The Landlady’, ‘Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’, ‘Man from the South’, ‘William and Mary’, and ‘Galloping Foxley’, though I should disclose that I haven’t read any of the original stories, nor seen the TV adaptations, and so my opinions and judgements are based on the play alone.

There are elements of humour in all of the tales, often blended with moments of high tension and/or unease. The first, ‘The Landlady’, with its dirty-looking, dishevelled eponymous B&B owner who has a fondness for taxidermy, is light-hearted but also extremely dark. Indeed, it is highly reminiscent of The League of Gentlemen (1999-2002), which Dyson co-created alongside Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. ‘Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’, about a woman having an affair behind her husband's back, is the weakest of the stories with no real horror in a scenario which most members of the audience will have figured out from the beginning. In contrast, ‘Man from the South’ was possibly my favourite, partly due to the eccentric and over-the-top character of Mr. Palacios, played by Nick Fletcher, but also because of the manner in which tension is built up, the director, Polly Findlay, carefully managing audience expectations to  construct a heart-in-mouth moment which never materialises. ‘William and Mary’ is constructed around an unexpected science fictional idea: a Philosophy professor dying of cancer is tempted to continue his existence as a brain in a jar. The set design and mood evoked the classic American B-movies of the mid-twentieth century, whilst the dark humour of the previous stories was certainly present and correct. The final short story, ‘Galloping Foxley’, contains more of the wonderful tension building seen in ‘Man from the South’; however, it is also the most uncomfortable story to watch. Detailing the terrors inflicted on a young boy by a senior pupil at a boarding school, there are no laughs to be had in this story, a sinister and suitably twisted tale that, unfortunately, was the most feasible of all.

If the play had ended with ‘Galloping Foxley’ the dampening effect on the audience's mood would have destroyed all of the black humour and sly enjoyment of the preceding majority. Fortunately, both Dyson and  director, Findlay, know their craft, and the framing narrative brings the audience out of its reverie with a bang. The final act is quick and effective, in complete contrast to the tension-building moments of the preceding stories, which are ultimately diffused before they can reach their terrifying conclusion.

Having seen the play on its opening night at the Playhouse in Liverpool, there were one or two minor set malfunctions, but on the whole the directing and design was superb. As with Ghost Stories, the evocation of place and time through clever set design and lighting were flawless; you could easily believe you were watching the action unfold on a 1950s train, in a cluttered pawnshop, or in an outdoor lavatory on a winter’s morning. A combination of a rotating set and rising and falling foregrounds gives depth to the stage and allows the rapid creation of self-contained spaces within the confines of the boards, a credit to set and costume designer Naomi Wilkinson. All of this adds to the immersion that comes with Dyson’s excellent writing, and the engaging performances of the six cast members, particularly Matthew Kennedy, who was playing the young boy (on other nights in Liverpool you may see Sam Rees Bayliss instead, as they share the role).

There are no screams in Roald Dahl’s Twisted Tales and there aren’t any hide-under-your-seat-scares; equally, there are no roll-in-the-aisle laughs. What we have instead is a finely honed balance of amusement and unease which works perfectly for the play’s slender 80 minute running time, but would probably be difficult to sustain for much longer. This is certainly a horror production, but it’s a much more subtle beast than Ghost Stories. Twisted Tales is the species of horror that anyone who has ever lain in bed at night wondering about the noise they can hear downstairs knows, those people know that the scenarios we construct in our minds are the most affecting; and everyone involved in this play knows it too.

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Glyn Morgan is one of the co-founders of Twisted Tales. He is currently studying for his Ph.D at the University of Liverpool, his thesis looks at non-mimetic fictions of the Second World War. He maintains a blog about his studies (all to infrequently updated) here, as well as runs a popular Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Club, and a Graphic Novel Reading Group.