Incredible Fear

[davidn]

Is it just me, or is this scene from Incredible Games like something out of a nightmare? I'm serious - it might be clearly meant to be fun there and the pursuer has a more pink, blobby visage than most extradimensional serial killers, but particularly when he appears the second time... when I think about it, there's something quite genuinely frightening about the idea of this horrific creature who isn't bound by any physical considerations and can appear at any time, even seventy floors up after getting away from him. It's like Jason Voorhees with googly eyes.

And his appearance isn't exactly nightmare retardant if you grew up with this ghastly apparition - indeed, the murderous grin and harsh distorted electronic voice might make it all the worse. The thing that most people say they were scared of from this programme was the Dark Knight (shown here just missing a golden opportunity to vaporize Keith Chegwin), but I know which is the clear winner.

I seem to have been developing a large surplus of nostalgia for a lot of different things recently (some of which you might think as better left in the past), so I'll post about those over the next while, unless I forget to.

Comments

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I would not like to step into that elevator. Definitely nightmare material.

Is this actually a game show? If it wasn't so British, it could be something out of Japan, with it's strange monsters and questionably valued points.

[davidn]

This is real! I'm surprised by how often it's been said to me, on showing someone things that I used to watch, how close British children's TV seemed to Japanese television.

I'm not quite sure how to explain Mister Blobby to someone outside the United Kingdom... he started off as a joke character made up to play a trick on one of our television presenters, and then attained celebrity status and a number 1 Christmas single.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I found the right video, but given Mr. Blobby's inability to say anything but "blobby," I doubt it could be too much more sophisticated. Thanks to the internet, his influence truly can be spread throughout the land.

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

Wow, I used to love that show!

[davidn]

As did I :) I have quite often lamented how far downhill television has gone compared to what I used to watch, but perhaps it's just that children's shows aren't afraid to be more adventurous like this, while we're now stuck watching 45 minutes of someone picking random numbers as the worldwide pinnacle of quiz show entertainment.

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

I watched something the other day - Escape From Scorpion Island. Lasted an hour. The actual adventuring part probably took up 15 minutes. The rest was filled with reviews and flashbacks.

I was miffed.

As far as current adventuring programs go, Raven is pretty cool.

[davidn]

My youngest siblings watched Raven a bit and had good things to say about it - I've heard comparisons being drawn between it and Knightmare, but I've never got around to looking it up myself.

The stuffing of any and all programmes with reviews and looks ahead is one that I've noticed as a particular problem in America. Because they have to go to adverts every five minutes, the buffers at the start and end add significant weight to them, and I think that they could easily be over in about half the time if all the repeated footage was cut out.

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

You had some very... imaginative... game shows over there, didn't you?
Nice to hear it referred to as a "lift", though.

I also can't recall any specific examples to mention, apart from The Terminator, who cannot teleport, but the idea of being chased by such a relentless foe is indeed frightening.

But as far as horror movies go, I can't really take the slowly-walking GASP NOW THEY'RE RIGHT THERE slashers seriously anymore. It's been done to death, for one thing, and how threatening is a slowly walking guy anyway, unless you're in a dead end or just so stupid/uncoordinated that you constantly trip over your own feet? I suppose the idea is that the doomed protagonists are just so terribly frightened that they lose all common sense, but it still is painful to watch.

[davidn]

I always wondered why the people who ran away from the killer would never seem to get away from him, even though he was following behind them at a relaxed stroll. Unless they were running against a really fast-moving airport conveyor belt.

And we did! I rather miss them. You said much earlier on that the British seemed to love to fictionalize them, and indeed, this is yet another of the shows in which you could "die" (in this case, to be resurrected a few minutes later by having the others visit an ethereal smoke-filled floor to rescue you).

[rakarr.livejournal.com]

Was... was Mr Blobby on the smoke-filled floor too?

[davidn]

That would have been frightening, having him loom out of the fog! No, this episode of it was the only time that I ever recall him appearing here.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

I saw that in one of the videos. The lighthearted attitude towards death seemed a bit. . .lighthearted. Here's this guy, has a run-in with Darth Vader: Killed! Vaporized! The horror! He's gone forev- oh, wait, there he is. He's perfectly fine, and throws off a witty one-liner as if nothing has happened.

[davidn]

On an 80s/90s British game show, it's often a relief if you die in a way better than being cleft in twain by a huge (virtual) circular saw.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

This was seriously a game show in Britian? Wow, I really missed out by being on this continent.

. . .Also, I so wanted to see that kid get cut in half. Getting eaten by a wall is pretty good, but I wonder how they would have rendered getting sawed in half.

[davidn]

I must admit, I cringe every single time I see that near miss in the middle!

The deaths were usually very "clean", with the player vanishing and being replaced with the death icon (as modelled in my icon), and you can see that about 20 seconds through this collection - but they did try a splash of red in later series.

[crassadon.livejournal.com]

Ah, so that's where your skull icon comes from. I have often wondered about that.

Rather wish I had gotten to see this show while growing up. Though I imagine what the player experiences is not as thrilling as what we see on screen.

[kjorteo]

That thing is from Silent Hill, you can't fool me.

[davidn]

Now that you mention it, I'm very surprised that nobody else seems to have drawn comparisons between Insane Cancer and Mister Blobby.

There are a number of things about 90s Britain that I have difficulty explaining, but this is definitely a big one.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

...

...

...I have no words. The thought of that thing chasing after me screaming a distorted "Blobby blobby blobby!!!" as it flails at me with its arms is going to haunt the edges of my nightmares for the rest of my life. I hope you're happy now.

If ever I learn programming properly, I'm going to make my own indie horror game, and that will be my John DeFoe. Don't get in any lifts any time soon...

D.F.

[davidn]

Well, I can only apologize :) It was one of the very few things that I personally thought would make Silent Hill more comical rather than more horrific, when I got the image in my head! The distorted slightly Dalek-like voice that can only repeat one word at various levels of pitch and intensity really doesn't help with the... uncanny non-human fearsomeness. Indeed, part of why I found the scene in my post so... not right was because of the idea of being stuck in a lift trying to get away from a Welder-like enemy that could appear wherever he wanted at any time.

Incidentally I've been wanting to make some sort of horror adventure as well as a revenge of sorts... though that isn't really a genre that I'm familiar with making. They seem to have huge viral appeal in getting other people to play them to see if they have the same effect as they did on you, or just to get some sympathy about them.

[lupineangel.livejournal.com]

If you do make a horror game, I'd be all up for that. :P I suppose the first thing would be to decide what sort of 'source' produces the horrific things in the game. Off the top of my head, I can think of:

- a blatantly supernatural force, like Silent Hill or the Chzo mythos. Variant subgenres include demons and the undead
- amoral science, like Resident Evil was initially (although it seems to have drifted away into nonsense as it's become more action-orientated)
- simple human cruelty (some slasher movies, also q.v. anything vs the Nazis, although they're used so frequently as bad guys, the horror element is often lost)
- alien (not necessarily invaders from space, but anything the human mind can't understand - q.v. a lot of Yume Nikki, for example). Crossovers possible with the supernatural (Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos) and science (AM from I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream)
- psychological (depends on the person involved, but stuff like being trapped, falling, darkness, spiders, water and threat of drowning, body horror and so on)
- plants get organised No! Bad M. Night Shyamalan! Get out of here!

From there, you can work out some basic stuff like setting and plot, and techniques to draw players into it.

(In case you can't tell, I have a distinct taste for creepy games; my friend John got me into them a while back, and I've got a small library of them. Or at least, did have; the move to Linux has meant a lot of them fell by the wayside, and Wine doesn't seem to support a lot of indie stuff, sadly.)

D.F.

[davidn]

Let's see. How to say this so that other people won't understand it. One of the most terrible scenarios for me is to have something deadly presented as a game - two separate people who I've talked about other projects of mine with have mentioned the Saw films, and when it's possible to see something as a really twisted and harmful variation on something you enjoy, that's a... horrible thing to think about. At the same time, a lot of my own game-making comes from a love of making up... traps, or things to challenge people in a devious way. Everything is inter-related...

Harlan Ellison's short story also really got to me - perhaps not so much for the actual scenario as the way that it was written, taking such delight in the gruesomeness of his detail... but that's not a good thought, the idea of a godlike entity that can do anything, keeping his victims alive and hasn't run out of ideas over one hundred years. I should say there are very obvious ways of telling which works of fiction have influenced me the most :)

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

"She was polishing a suit of armour"... oh come on. How could you not get that?

You have an outstanding repertoire of old-school British TV shows which I think would be an absolute gas to watch. Maybe one episode or two per series, so I don't get overwhelmed with new shows to watch. :)

[davidn]

It's quite remarkable sometimes how... adult-oriented (and not necessarily in a dirty way) some of the things I grew up with were - just things that would go over children's heads. I remember being barred from watching the Earthworm Jim cartoon after my mum saw an episode of it - evidently she understood a lot more of it than I did!

And as you've already seen from these things that I post, they weren't gentle with their contestants in their live action programmes, either, with every one of them giving them a very reasonable chance of being killed.