Horror video games have been scaring players for several decades now, and today that fear factor has moved inside people’s pockets! While that might not be the best place for you to see your fear residing at, but in times when mobile horror games are ruling the roost, everyone is coming on board and is having a gala time playing these games! Furthermore, there is no denying the fact that mobile gaming is on the rise like never before, with more and more people of all age groups becoming proud owners of high-end mobile phones today. Here in this short article, we will acquaint you with some of the top-rated horror themed games that you can easily enjoy on your mobile phone today.
Distraint
Available for both iOS and Android platforms, developed by Jesse Makkonen and priced around $ 4.99, Distraint utilises the concept of side scrolling adventure and fuels plenty of new visual elements into it. The dialogues are concise and the puzzles are kept light, but the story is guaranteed to make you go bonkers. What sets this game apart from others in the same genre is how it creatively uses sound. If played using headphones, you will hear abstract sounds and hissing TV screens, from one ear to the other, as the visuals change based on the aural features. You’ll see insects dancing, walls bleeding and lights flickering, delivering that scary feeling of desolation. The concept in particular is amongst the smartest ones around today.
The Five Nights at Freddy’s
Scott Cawthorn, the developer of this game has ensured that if creepy animatronic animals and jump scares are your piece of cake, this game will freak you out! Priced at a reasonable $ 2.99 and available for both iOS and Android platforms, the characters with their surreal looks make this game a standout in its genre. You get to control cameras like a night watch guard, thereby providing the interactivity element. The aesthetics are quite like that of Child’s Play and SAW, hence are good enough to keep you on your toes! In fact, Scott has claimed that no one has been able to figure out the game’s real story yet! The fear you witness in this game is more because of the suspense element than blood or violence.
Sinister Edge
Developed by Everbyte and offered free of cost, this mobile themed horror game for iOS and Android platforms is a part puzzler and part walking simulator which is clearly inspired from Resident Evil and other urban legends like Slenderman. The game does its trick by creating a very spooky atmosphere. You witness storms rolling around in the sky, over a well-created mansion which screams ‘Don’t Enter’. There is a spectral masked antagonist that will pop up every now and then at random places, ensuring that he scares the wits out of you, as you go about exploring its dark corridors, in search of the keys. It is also one of the best horror themed games that makes excellent use of motion control in the form of puzzles. Resultantly you feel heightening of the tension as you go about frantically twisting and turning your device.
Although pumpkinperson.com started as primarily a horror blog, my readership is now so intelligent that few of you can relate to my low-brow interest in slasher films. But with Halloween only days away, it is an interested that must be indulged. But Halloween itself is an experience many readers can’t relate to, and not because you’re intelligent, but because a lot of you live in climates where the leaves don’t change colors and where pumpkins don’t thrive. Many of you will never understand the sheer joy and coziness of lying on a couch with a blanket and a warm cup of hot chocolate on a cold Canadian night, and watching a great horror film.
Racism in the horror community
Of course most horror fans disagreed with me that Texas Chainsaw 3D was a great horror film; indeed even hardcore fans of the Chainsaw franchise thought it was a disgrace that tainted the entire series. Although they’ll never admit it and lack the self awareness to know it, there’s a lot of racism in the horror community, and the fact the film’s protagonist was an absolutely gorgeous young white woman whose boyfriend was an athletic black man, was anathema to the predominantly white male horror audience. I believe horror attracts a lot of racists, because prehistorically, it was the mostly manly members of the tribe who defended the tribe against rival tribes, so even today, guys who are manly enough to watch horror films are genetically predisposed to ethnic nepotism. And indeed as I’ve previously discussed, subconsciously, the entire slasher genre was a rebellion against the liberalism of the 1960s.
But there’s another reason why slasher fans tend to be racist and that’s the fact that slasher films historically were uniquely focused on the white American experience. They tend to take place in stereo-typically white settings like suburbia (John Carpenter’s Halloween) or summer-camp (Friday the 13th), the backwoods of Texas (Texas Chainsaw Massacre) or a sorority house (Black Christmas). Indeed those four films really invented the modern slasher film and none of them had a single black character so for the Texas Chainsaw 3D to not only have a black character, but one who was played by prominent hip-hop star, and in a relationship with a gorgeous white woman, was a culture shock for many slasher fans.
Of course it would be absolutely idiotic and evil to smear everyone who didn’t love this film as much as I did as a racist, because ironically, another reason why this film was so hated is ignorance of HBD. Allow me to explain…
MAJOR SPOILER ALERT: STOP READING IF YOU PLAN TO SEE THIS FILM
The plot: A young woman (Heather) who hates the parents who raised her discovers she was adopted, so she and her friends go on a road trip to Texas to visit the house she just inherited from her recently deceased biological grandmother. Little do they know that locked in the basement of the house is Leatherface, a mentally retarded chainsaw wielding maniac who wears the actual faces of his victims as masks. After Leatherface kills her boyfriend and her friends, Heather flees to the police where she discovers that Leatherface is actually her biological cousin and her only living blood relative. Other family members (the Sayers) were burned to a crisp by a mob of angry Texas rednecks who were furious that the Sawyers were cannibalizing the local teenagers.
When Leatherface and Heather discover they are relatives, Leatherface stops trying to kill her and Heather stops trying to flee him, and instead the two join forces against the rednecks that burned their family to death. This plot twist infuriated horror fans because (1) it portrayed Leatherface as a hero when he’s supposed to be a villain, and (2)they found it completely unrealistic that Heather would join forces with a homicidal maniac who sawed up her friends, just because he’s her only living blood relative. Horror fans found it unrealistic that Heather would even want to avenge the burning of a family she never knew, since that family were chainsaw wielding murderers who deserved to be burned alive.
HBD themes
An understanding of HBD (i.e. behavioral genetics) helps one appreciate this movie. HBD teaches that we are genetically predisposed to help those most genetically similar to ourselves, so this could have overwhelmed Heather’s disgust for her biological family’s vile nature. In addition, this tendency to help the genetically similar is intensified in inbred people according to blogger HBD Chick, probably because when you’re inbred, your kin are even more genetically similar to you; and the Sawyer family epitomizes the stereotypical inbred Southerner, though I don’t know if this inbreeding has occurred for enough generations for selection to work, which HBD chick feels is important. HBD also teaches that behavioral traits are highly genetic, especially in adulthood. Blogger Jayman sometimes argues that parenting has virtually zero impact; so it really doesn’t matter that Heather grew up a normal girl, instead of being raised by a family of murderers. She didn’t need to be raised by the murderous Sawyer family to become just like them; her genetic link was enough.
Another way all Texas Chainsaw movies are HBD aware is that Leatherface has an extremely low IQ. This makes sense from an HBD perspective because he comes from a family of inbred psychotic right-wing murderers. Studies of cousin marriages show it clearly depresses IQ (and other Darwinian fitness traits like height) and the criminally insane also have low IQ’s, and some HBD research suggests conservatives might too.
The film doesn’t touch on race, but that’s clearly the elephant in the room as the town rednecks fail to respect the authority of the black sheriff who in-turn does not respect them, leading to an interesting climax that horror fans also condemned as unrealistic.
The age of the heroine
Another reason so many horror fans hated this movie so much is that the film’s timeline implied that the character Heather was born in 1974 (the year of the first Chainsaw movie), making her nearly 40 since this film appeared to be taking place in the present day (the film came out in 2013) but since actress Alexandra Daddario would have been about 25 when she played her, horror fans went absolutely ballistic. I tried to calm a few of these people down, saying maybe the character is a just a really young looking 39 year old who hangs out with 20 year olds since she works in a grocery store (I had a boss like that), or maybe the character had plastic surgery; but horror fans would have none of it, and condemned it as an absurd plot hole they could not get past.
The psychology of this is quite interesting: young people value their youth so much that they don’t want to believe an older person could ever look as young as them, and young male horror fans are disgusted by the thought that a woman they are sexually attracted to could possibly be almost 40. I believe this relates to the conservatism of horror fans, since traditional values suggest a man should never be attracted to an older woman, and that women should be sexy only when very young (peak child bearing years) since it’s conservative to believe that sexuality is only for reproduction. On the DVD commentary, the film makers do a lot of damage control, denying that a timeline was clearly specified, but it was too little too late.
WARNING: If you’ve never seen the original 1980 Friday the 13th film, this post contains spoilers.
Pumpkin Person previously blogged about my idea for continuing the Friday the 13th series, but now there’s word that a Friday the 13th reboot is being planned. In other words, they’re not planning on continuing from the original Friday the 13th series or even from the 2009 reboot by Marcus Nispel, but instead are planning on starting over a second time. One of the problems with the 2009 remake in my opinion is that unlike the very first Friday the 13th film in 1980, the 2009 reboot did not include much of Mrs. Voorhees (Jason’s mother), the woman who started it all. The film makers assumed that Friday fans just wanted more Jason, and we do, but if you’re going to start all over, you have to honor the genius of the original film.
What made the original 1980 Friday the 13th so brilliantly ironic was that the most graphic, brutal, and creative murders that most American audiences had ever seen at the time were being committed by an apple pie baking all American mom (Mrs. Voorhees) played brilliantly by Betsy Palmer. The fact that her son would go on to become one of the most prolific and brutal killers in the history of fiction, only added to her legend.
No one could ever replace Palmer in that iconic role, but a good remake is not about recreating what’s already been done, but creating an alternative version. The new Mrs. Voorhees should be similar in some ways, but also bring something new to the table.
Enter Sarah Palin. Who better to play the mother of the hockey masked forest dwelling Jason than the self-described Pit Bull-like hockey mom from woodsy Alaska. Like Mrs. Voorhees who wanted Camp Crystal lake closed because of the poor supervision of her disabled son, Palin is also an advocate for special needs children, and like the ax wielding bow and arrow shooting Mrs. Voorhees, the outdoor hunting and fishing enthusiast, and rugged bootstrapping conservative Palin, looks like she could find her way around a campground, hunting socially liberal pot smoking sexually active teenagers who lack Republican family values.
This may sound like a joke but I’m deadly serious. Palin, with her trademark Alaska folksiness, against a dark forest lit only by full moon, could be horror gold. They may need to put her in a couple padded sweaters and high heel boots to make her look more intimidating, but she could be perfect in the role, and casting the most admired conservative woman in America as a homicidal maniac would create buzz for the franchise, not to mention bring Palin a whole new non-political fan base. But if Palin’s not interested, I suspect lookalikes Tina Fey and Julianne Moore might be.
Directed by Paul Fox, The Dark Hours is a haunting tour de force. It’s the type of film you watch while curled up all alone on the couch with a thick cup of hot chocolate on a cold Canadian night. It’s a film you just get lost in, hypnotized by the slow pace, atmospheric score, and eerie, original, non-linear storytelling. The film oozes with atmosphere and is superbly well cast and acted.
The story revolves around forensic psychiatrist Samantha Goodman (Kate Greenhouse) and her troubled relationships with her low income husband, parasitic sister, very stupid party crasher (Dov Tiefenbach) and her terrifying patient, Harlan Payne (Aidan Devine), a tall bearded epileptic charismatic gay ax murderer. Greenhouse is uncannily believable in the part, reminding me of every hyper-educated woman I have ever known. There’s a familiarity about all of the characters. We learn just enough about each of them to know the type and recognize them as people we’ve fleetingly known. Dov Tiefenbach (who Friday the 13th fans will remember from Jason X) gives one of the most fascinating performances I have ever witnessed.
Slasher fans may be disappointed by the film’s slow pace and artsy ambiguous narrative structure and some viewers feel confused or even cheated by the time it ends. Aside from one gratuitously disgusting scene involving a finger, and a stylishly bloody scene involving a nail, the film is much more a psychological thriller than a splatter film, and unfolds like a group therapy session.
But there is evil in this movie. Not of the demonic otherworldly variety, but the darkness of human nature.
I previously blogged about how Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers was largely inspired by Henry Lee Lucas and to a lesser extent Otis Toole. It’s interesting to note that Lucas had an IQ of 87 and Toole had an IQ of 75. Averaging the IQ’s of the two men who inspired the character gives an IQ of roughly 80, which sounds believable. An IQ of 80 implies Myers was brighter than about 10% of Americans, but duller than 90%. Historically IQ was measured in children by dividing one’s mental age by one’s chronological age and then multiplying by 100 to remove the decimal point. So an IQ of 80 implies that 10 year old Myers had the mental ability of an 8 year old (8/10 = 0.8 * 100 = 80). Nothing 10 year old Myers did seemed beyond the mental capacity of an average 8 year old.
Now it’s likely that he got older his IQ deteriorated because schizophrenia is known to cause acute drops in IQ. Rob Zombie said this about the mental state of Myers in RZ Halloween II:
I love the fact that he’s carrying this mask around; this mask is significant to him because he’s had it since he was a little kid. And it’s deteriorating. And in a way, we can literally make the connection between the mask and his state of mind. As the mask deteriorates, so does he. His brain is rotting away and in the sequel he’s becoming more and more insane.
Despite his deteriorating mental state, it’s unlikely that Myers’ IQ ever sunk too low, because he hallucinates his mother telling him that his psychiatrist (who wrote a book about him), got rich off of their pain. It takes a certain amount of intelligence to know when you’re being exploited and Myers, even at his most demented, still exceeded that threshold. As Zombie explained in the director’s commentary of part 2, that scene showed Myers was not quite as dumb as he appeared.
Recently I blogged about how the Friday the 13th series could be continued. My idea was to ignore the 2009 remake and pick up the story after part 4, by having parts 5 through 11 be explained as dream or hallucination by Tommy Jarvis. This would make sense because Tommy was clearly descending into madness at the end of part 4 so it makes sense that he would hallucinate, and the events of parts 5 through 11 were so incredible that they seem outside of the film’s reality. Some fans told me they would be unhappy to see parts 5 through 11 dismissed, but I think they would get over it because the real glory days of the series were the early 1980s, before Jason became a zombified body-hopping caricature of himself.
So if parts 5 through 11 never happened, how do you realistically and credibly continue the story after Tommy so unequivocally killed Jason at the end of part 4? I had suggested that Jason could have a secret son who emerges to take over, but was told that idea was cliched and unoriginal.
So here’s another idea: Jason never died. At first this sounds ridiculous because we saw the machete sink deep into Jason’s head at the end of part 4, however what people forget is that Jason is a hydrocephalic which means that his cranium is enlarged by cerebrospinal fluid, not brain mass. This makes it possible that the machete never impaled his brain and thus never killed him.
Instead Jason was taken to the hospital and after ten years in a coma, spent another ten or more years being treated by Ginny Field (played by Amy Steel), the psychology major and heroine of Friday the 13th part 2. Ginny, now in her 50s, is a psychiatrist who also does part time therapy with Tommy Jarvis (now in his 40s) where they discuss his hallucinations and nightmares (parts 5 through 11). Ginny concludes that the reason Tommy had visions and dreams of Jason becoming an body hopping zombie is because he psychologically needs to imagine Jason as a demon to overcome the guilt he has for so badly hurting Jason.
Yes, Tommy feels guilty for what he did to Jason because even though Jason is a homicidal maniac, Jason has always been mentally handicapped so he didn’t know any better and was only trying to avenge his mother’s death. Ginny feels that Tommy can make it up to Jason by helping Jason integrate into society. Ginny feels that after years of treatment, it’s now safe to let Jason out, as long as he stays away from the woods (an obvious trigger). She arranges for Jason to move in with Tommy and work at a local grocery store pushing shopping carts.
Some of the teenagers at the grocery store figure out that their mentally disabled co-worker Jason is the infamous Camp Crystal lake mass-murderer from before they were born. They are planning a camping trip on Friday the 13th and wouldn’t it be exciting to bring along Jason himself. Jason gets into the van with the teenagers and they drive deep into the dark woods to find a remote place to set up a tent…the moon is full. Can Tommy and Ginny find them before something bad happens?
In the book A Question of Intelligence, author Daniel Seligman notes that mob leader John Gotti had a tested IQ of 110. Seligman found this figure to be quite plausible because criminals average IQ’s around 90, so an IQ of 110 was enough for Gotti to climb to the top of the crime world. Similarly, Charles Manson had a tested IQ in the 109-121 range. The people who killed for Manson probably had IQ’s around 90, but Manson being about 19-31 points higher, could easily manipulate them.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Rob Zombie was asked who his favorite non-fictional serial killer was. He replied:
I love ’em all. Not, you know, as people or anything, but they all make for great stories. I think Henry Lee Lucas is probably one of my favorites.
He added:
He and his buddy Ottis Toole were just a couple of deranged rednecks. But given his upbringing, y’know, it’s just not that surprising. Some of these guys, you think, “What would make a person do something like this?” And then you read about their upbringing and you’re like, “Oh, okay, well I guess that might do it.”
He also said:
I’ve read so many books about these guys, I start confusing their backstories. But with Henry and Ottis, I remember it was pretty horrible. Stripper moms, alcoholic dads, I think they were both forced to dress up like girls at some point. Henry killed his mom and raped her corpse, and Ottis had a thing for arson and cannibalism. They were into some really perverted stuff, like having sex with dead animals and that kinda thing.
So we can see several similarities between Zombie’s Michael Myers and Henry Lee Lucas. In addition to both being serial killers, both were deranged rednecks with stripper moms and alcoholic father (figures) and both were emasculated by a parent figure. Henry was made to dress like a girl by his mother and Michael’s mother’s boyfriend mocked Michael for seeming gay, predicting Michael would cut off his penis and change his name to “Michelle”. It’s unclear if Michael ever had sex with a dead animal, but his sister joked about him having sexual relations with the pet rat he killed.
It is tempting to conclude that a terrible parenting causes one to become a serial killer, but it could be that the children of terrible parents become serial killers for genetic reasons. If psychosis and psychopathy are genetic, then the parents of the criminally insane would be expected to manifest these same traits though to a much lesser degree, but the bad genes, and not the bad parenting, may be to blame for their kids becoming serial killers.
Although Zombie focuses a lot on Michael’s bad upbringing, he ultimately explains in the clip below that bad upbringing was not responsible for Michael’s cold, robotic, merciless nature. Michael was just born that way as Lady Gaga would say. His brain was wired differently.
Yesterday I blogged about my weird idea for a sequel to Rob Zombie’s Halloween II. An IMDB poster named “barhoumhuneiti” felt it was unrealistic and not enough about Michael Myers. Well, it’s difficult to make it about Michael Myers when he was unequivocally killed off at the end of Halloween II, but here’s another idea: Michael has an identical twin, separated at birth.
Michael’s mother (Debra) was a struggling single mom with a deadbeat boyfriend. It was hard enough raising Judith so when Michael and his identical twin were born, Debra figured she didn’t need both of them since they were exactly the same, so she gave Michael’s identical twin up for adoption. The twin was raised in a middle class loving perfect family.
When some psychologists discover that Michael had a secret identical twin who grew up in a good home they track the twin down to do some tests on him. Although the twin is a weirdo and a freak, the psychologists are disappointed he’s not yet a killer like Michael was. They want to prove that despite his good upbringing, he is just as evil and psychotic as Michael so that they can become famous for showing that nature trumps nurture (genes trump environment). They tell everyone in his small town that he is Michael Myer’s identical twin brother in the hopes that ruining his life will drive him crazy. Little by little, the twin becomes unhinged, just in time for Halloween…
I don’t know if there are any plans for another Halloween movie let alone a sequel to Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, but I think it could work. How can you continue Rob Zombie’s storyline when almost all the main characters have been killed off? Here’s how:
The perfect family is having breakfast in a beautiful mansion. They are concerned because their adopted teenaged son never comes out of his dark room and just watches horror films all day and all the classmates and teachers at a special school he attends are afraid of him. His adopted parents don’t understand how a boy with such a great upbringing could have turned into such a freak, and he just keeps getting worse.
One dark stormy night the adopted mother discovers a book her father (Dr. Loomis) was in the process of writing before he died. The book explains Loomis’ obsession with determining whether Michael Myers was just born genetically evil, or if he was driven to evil by his dysfunctional home life. To answer this question, Loomis conducted an experiment. He collected dozens of sperm samples from Michael and used them to impregnate 40 female patients at the mental hospital Michael was in. When the babies were born, he made sure that 20 of them were adopted into perfect families, and the other 20 were adopted by white trash. This allowed him to compare the effects of nature and nurture. None of the families knew they were adopting a Michael Myers child.
Upon learning that their adopted son is one of Michael Myer’s biological children, they are so creeped out that they start plotting ways to get him to live somewhere else. Overhearing their conversation, Michael’s son gets an axe from the garage and kills them. He then use’s Loomis’ unpublished book to search the country for his 39 biological siblings. Some of them are already confined to mental hospitals for strange or violent behavior, but most are not and the free ones help the institutionalized ones escape. Once all 40 of Michael’s children are together, they each put on their Michael Myer’s mask and plot to all visit Haddonfield on Halloween and kill every single person in the town.
