Three Excellent Examples of Horror Anime: Another, Moryo no Hako, and Shiki

The face of madness revealed in Moryo no Hako.

As someone who lives in a country where animation is overwhelmingly aimed at children and general audiences, I'm fascinated by the amount of freedom that animation has over in Japan. In particular, I'm still amazed at how anime is used as a means of telling serious horror stories, something that you'll never find here in the U.S. In this post, I will look at three horror anime series--each of which are based on a novel--that are great examples of how hand-drawn monsters, murders and mysteries can chill the soul of even the most jaded horror fan. Read on ...

Title: Another

Year of Release: 2012

Number of Episodes: 12

Plot Summary: In 1998, teenager Koichi Sakakibara moves into a new town while his father is away teaching a college in India. When his fellow students begin to die under unusual and shocking circumstances, Koichi learns that his class at Yomiyama Middle School has fallen under a bizarre curse that has haunted the school since 1972. With the help of his friend Mei Misaki, he sets out to uncover the secret behind the curse before his entire class dies.

Comments: Another is kind of like a slasher story in the sense that almost all of the potential victims are teenagers. However, unlike most American slasher stories that characterize teenagers as sex-crazed, booze-binging jerks, the teenagers in Another are likable, hard-working and normal (for the most part). Even in cases where the teenagers are abusive towards each other, they are often doing it out of fear of the curse; understanding that the kids are just trying to make the best of a bad situation, trying to survive a curse that's as inexplicable as it is deadly, makes it easier to sympathize with them and thus adds to the shock every time the body count goes up--and boy howdy, does it go way, way up.

Some horror fans might be frustrated with the amorphous, elusive nature of the curse. While there are some inconsistencies in the curse's mechanics (i.e., who dies and how, who goes insane and who doesn't, etc.), I thought that curse's unpredictability made it so much more intimidating and added to Another's vivid, Gothic atmosphere of dread and disorientation.

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Title: Moryo no Hako (a.k.a. Box of Goblins)

Year of Release: 2008

Number of Episodes: 13

Plot Summary: In post World War II Japan, a failed attack against teenage girl at a train station serves as a prelude to a series of grisly murders involving severed body parts placed around the countryside in boxes.

Comments: Moryo no Hako is a brilliant mashup of pulp mystery, sci-fi and occult horror. Both stylish and well-written, it travels through a wide variety of subjects--extortion, demonic possession, transhumanism, religion, ancient folklore and so on--as it tells a story about killer's obsession with perfection and immortality. Curiously, Moryo no Hako approaches the familiar plot device of "mad science" from a unique perspective. Usually, the term "mad science" is shorthand for destructive scientific research that has run amuck or has originated from a mind of questionable sanity; in Moryo no Hako, we see a science that is so ghastly and morally bankrupt that it has the capability of pushing people to madness--even people who appear outwardly rational.

Of the anime series listed in this post, Moryo no Hako is most demanding of its viewers. Some segments are shown out of sequential order, so you'll see many things in the early episodes that won't makes sense until you get closer to the end. Furthermore, for as grotesque and depraved as this series can get, many of the episodes are thick in dialog exchanges, something that may bore some horror fans. However, this is neither pointless discussion nor exposition-heavy posturing; the dialog is loaded with crucial detail and each segment contributes something interesting and essential to the mystery. Between the out-of-sequence snippets and well-scripted dialog, watching the numerous threads of Moryo no Hako coalescing into a final revelation is like watching a flower slowly unfolding, petal by petal, into a disturbed, perverse blossom.

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Title: Shiki

Year of Release: 2010

Number of Episodes: 24 (22 in the original broadcast, with an additional 2 as part of a subsequent video release)

Plot Summary: During a hot summer in the '90s, a small town in a remote part of Japan named Sotoba comes under attack by a family of vampires.

Comments: Based on the plot summary, Shiki sounds like anime's answer to Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot. While that's not an entirely inaccurate assumption, there's more to Shiki than that--much, much more.

Between its large cast of distinct characters, a well-paced narrative, and soulful commentary on the nature life and death--as well as what it means to be forsaken and what it means to be free--Shiki is a top-notch terror yarn that most vampire fans will enjoy. Even though some of the story is told from the vampires' perspective, these vampires are monsters, both deliberate and unintentional, with no attempt to romanticize them (Twilight this isn’t). Furthermore, killing the Shiki vampires is not a quick, simple task where the undead suddenly turn to ash; no, the staking, beheading and sun exposure of these vamps involves plenty of effort and buckets upon buckets of blood.

Great Moments in Video Game Licensing History: Alligator People and Planet of the Apes for the Atari 2600

Since early days of their history, video games have been used like any other form of merchandising--as the recipients of licenses for popular characters, movies and TV shows for the sake of making money based on name recognition. It didn't matter how limited the graphics and game play options were in early video games; as long as gamers were willing to associate vague shapes, garbled noises and repetitive tasks with famous characters such as Buck Rogers, Dracula, Popeye and Superman, entertainment companies were willing to add video games to their vast inventories of licensed merchandise.

Yet as with most things in the entertainment industry, some oddities were bound to surface in what would appear to be a straightforward system. Case in point: unreleased games based on The Alligator People (1959) and Planet of the Apes (1968) for the Atari 2600. I can understand why Atari, Intellivision and Coleco were looking for new game content to promote their respective consoles in the early days of home gaming, but using licenses as obscure as Alligator People or in decline as Planet of the Apes to develop games doesn't make much sense even by today's standards. Read on for more details about these strange artifacts from video game history.

How Alligator People and Planet of the Apes wound up on the production list of video game developers during the early 80s is not entirely clear. Both are owned by 20th Century Fox, but the reasons why Fox licensed these particular titles out for video game development have been lost over time.

As a movie, The Alligator People was a ripoff of The Fly and was produced to be shown on a double bill with Fly's first sequel, Return of the Fly. It was produced during the later half of what has since become known as the "Atomic Age" of horror--namely, when horror stories depicted atomic radiation either awakening a prehistoric monster (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) or creating a new kind of monster from a pre-existing animal (Them!) or from people (The Amazing Colossal Man). Atomic Age horror films would provide ample amounts of material for video games from the 90s onward, games such as It Came From the Desert and Zombies Ate My Neighbors; however, the unfinished Alligator People game would have been one of the first video game nods to Atomic Age horror cinema had it been released.

A reproduction box for The Alligator People (photo courtesy of RetroGamesShop).

So what is The Alligator People game about? According to the description provided by AtariAge, "You are lost in the deepest part of the jungle. Six of your friends have fallen under the spell of the Alligator People. They are slowly being transformed into alligators and you are the only one in the world who can save them! ... To stop this transformation, you must inoculate each of them with a special antidote that you gather throughout the swamp. You don't have a lot of time! Not to mention, the alligators are chasing you as you attempt to gather vials of the antidote! The longer you wait, the more antidote you need to reverse the effects of the Alligator People!"

Whether the excitement of the game's description carries over to the game itself depends upon how you feel about retro gaming. While the idea of fighting off horribly malformed human-alligator hybrids sounds like a great idea for a horror survival game, the Atari 2600 Alligator People game has players controlling what looks like a giant hypodermic needle to find doses of antidote and shoot attacking alligators. The game's difficulty can be adjusted to add a constantly shifting maze that hinders the players' movements. Click here to read a profile of Alligator People on the AtariProtos site, and you can see an example of game play in the video window below.

For its time, Planet of the Apes was the premiere sci-fi franchise; Star Trek was still building its fan base during the 70s and Star Wars wouldn't appear until 1977. Even though Apes has appeared in movies, novels, comic books, Saturday morning cartoons and toy lines, this franchise never had much success in the area of video game entertainment. The first official Apes game was released in 2001 as a tie-in to the Tim Burton remake; however, if 20th Century Fox hadn't closed its video game unit, the first Apes game would have appeared either in 1983 or 1984 for the Atari 2600. (Then again, it also didn't help that the Apes franchise was largely dormant during the 80s and 90s, the decades where video gaming began to catch on as a viable market for home entertainment.)

A fan-created depiction of an Atari 2600 Planet of the Apes video game box.

In the Planet of the Apes game, players guide an astronaut who is stranded on the titular planet through different locations until they reach the final screen, the remains of the Statue of Liberty. Three types of apes are in the game--Chimpanzees, Orangutans and Gorillas--and they can shoot at, capture and kill the astronaut. Since this game was programmed for the Atari 2600, each location in the game consists of multiple screens and players have to figure out how the screens for each location connect to each other in order to make it to the final screen. Click here to read about the game on the Planet of the Apes Wikia site, and you can see an example of game play in the video window below.

Given how pop culture shamelessly mines older media brands for the sake of making money from nostalgia, producing games based on The Alligator People and Planet of the Apes for today's market would barely raise an eyebrow. Yet to know that these titles were under development as far back as the early 80s, the fledgling years of home gaming, provides us with a glimpse as to how developers were experimenting with using films from previous decades to create fresh content for what was then a new kind of home entertainment.

Alien Abductees Get Even in Altered (2006)

As movie monsters go, filmmakers have gotten plenty of mileage from the concept of extraterrestrial threats. There have been countless movies about high-tech alien invaders (War of the Worlds, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers), parasitic alien biology (Alien, The Thing), and too-close-for-comfort contact with an alien intelligence (Fire in the Sky, The Fourth Kind). In the midst of this crowded field of alien terrors is Altered, a 2006 creature feature that was directed and co-written by Eduardo Sánchez, co-writer and co-director of The Blair Witch Project.

Altered is about four men who were abducted and tortured by alien visitors when they were teenagers. After years of unsuccessfully coping with the trauma they endured, three of the men decide to hunt down and capture one of the visitors as an act of retribution; yet once they capture an alien, they're not completely sure of what they should do next. To make matters worse, their alien captive isn't quite as helpless as he looks and he has some sinister plans of his own ....

I'm recommending Altered to creature feature fans for many reasons. It's a well-made film that takes a unique approach to both alien horror movies and modern alien abduction lore. It effectively uses practical effects to bring its alien menace to life (no CGI here), and it also does an excellent job at balancing the horror with some bits of clever humor. Some scenes feature inventive examples of splatstick humor, and there are a few bits of redneck humor because the abductees in this movie are working class southern white men. However, this is not Tucker and Dale vs. Evil--Altered is a tale of terror at its core. In fact, some of the concepts and visuals in this movie reminded me of Scanners and The Fly, two classic "body horror" films by David Cronenberg.

Because most horror films feature characters who are being stalked by and defending themselves from a monster, the movie's story about men who search for and capture a monster makes it very different from most other films of its kind. Even though Altered is a horror movie, the pacing of its story reminded me fatalistic pulp crime dramas that begin with a major event (e.g., a bank heist gone wrong) and then subsequently unravel as the protagonists attempt and repeatedly fail to cope with the events they set in motion. The film also lets you understand the characters and the bitter motivations behind their actions. While hunting extremely deadly monsters sounds like something only a fool would do, you come to realize how the abduction left the main characters so broken in their adulthood that alien hunting has become the only meaningful thing left for them to do with their lives.

Altered ranks alongside Abominable and Alien Raiders as one of the better low-budget creature features to be released within the last ten years. It's everything that big-budget alien movies such as Signs and Dreamcatcher should have been but weren't, proving that some of the best horror films out there are the ones that never made it to national movie theater chains.

Four Tips for Building a Better Alien Video Game

In the many months since of the Aliens: Colonial Marines video game, Gearbox attempted to fix a few of its many errors in the game by releasing a stream of upgrade patches and downloadable content (DLC). The latest DLC, which was released on July 24th, has been titled Stasis Interrupted and it is a complete campaign that depicts how Corporal Dwayne Hicks escaped the grim fate that was depicted for him in Alien 3. Click here to see a post on the AvP Galaxy site that features video clips that cover the entire campaign.

From what I've seen in the video clips provided, Stasis Interrupted really is the kind of story that Alien franchise fans were hoping for when Colonial Marines was first announced. It's not a perfect story, but it's a significant improvement over the original game's plot and mechanics. The cast of characters in Stasis Interrupted are much more interesting than the ones in Colonial Marines, the Aliens behave more like the stealthy, calculating threats that they're supposed to be, and returning Aliens cast members Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen are given much more interesting things to do with their respective roles. Sadly, the fact that Gearbox has treated Stasis Interrupted as an insignificant afterthought by quietly releasing it six months after the release of the main game is just another line item to be added to the extensive list of everything Gearbox did wrong with its contribution to the Alien franchise. Click here to read my original post about the disastrous release of Colonial Marines.

With that in mind, here are a few suggestions that I have for game developers who will be developing whatever Alien games are commissioned in the future. For all of its improvements, Stasis Interrupted still treated the Aliens as nothing more than moving targets that are meant to be shot. Read on for four Alien attributes that game developers can utilize to make a superior video game experience.

1. The Alien is extremely resilient. As the franchise has depicted on many occasions, the Alien is ready and able to survive in even the harshest of environments. Thus, an Alien game could put players in a situation where they have to survive against an Alien onslaught while stuck in a hostile environment (e.g., a toxic atmosphere, frequent incidents of extreme weather, a lighter or heavier gravitational pull, etc.). Here's where developers could learn something from The Thing video game that was released back in 2002: In addition fighting against attacks from the titular Thing monsters, players also had to frequently find shelter from the relentless Arctic cold before they froze to death.

2. The Alien can rapidly evolve to meet changing environmental demands, such as new kinds of hosts and prey. As it was hinted at throughout the franchise and directly addressed in Prometheus, the Alien has a genetic plasticity built into its parasitic reproductive process that allows it to assume new shapes, behaviors and abilities. For example, the deleted cocoon scene in Alien suggested that the Alien could function as a solitary predator, while the hive present in Aliens suggested that the Aliens could organize themselves into a social hierarchy for the purpose of overtaking a large population of hosts/prey in a short amount of time. A future Alien game could take place on worlds with forms of life that produce a very different kind of Alien, or it could introduce a new Engineer artifact that would greatly influence the evolution of the Alien.

Imagine what an Alien video game would be like if it were set in the Avatar universe.

3. The Alien has acid blood. When considering what is known about the Alien, video games that are built around it should provide fully destructible environments that can be damaged by the Alien's acid blood. In most Alien video games, the acid blood that erupts from shooting an Alien at close range may damage the player, but it doesn't eat through floors, walls or other surfaces like it does in the Alien movies; thus, these games emphasize the shooter aspect of game play while ignoring one of the Alien's most distinct characteristics as a movie monster. When fighting a horde of Aliens in an enclosed space, shooting them by the dozens with a machine gun will be the last thing you want to do, since their blood would compromise the structural integrity of the building, space station or space craft that surrounds you. Thus, an Alien game should allow players to use alternate forms of weaponry--weapons that shock, cauterize and incapacitate rather than puncture, shatter and explode--which will put a greater emphasis on strategy and survival than firepower and marksmanship.

4. The Alien is very, very weird. I'll give Colonial Marines credit where credit is due: It expanded upon the designs of Weyland-Yutani technology used by humans, but it did nothing to provide something new and bizarre from the biomechanical world of the Aliens and their Engineer creators. There's much more to Alien and its sequels and prequels than claustrophobic spaces and heavily industrialized environments; at its most disorienting and intimidating, protagonists in each film are confronted by something unmistakably alien. Game designers for future Alien games should spend plenty of time reviewing the grotesque and erotic artwork of H.R. Giger in order to take gamers further into the universe where no one can hear you scream.

Must-See BBC TV: In the Flesh

With so many zombie-themed movies, TV shows and video games on the market these days, it's hard to find a zombie story that's genuinely unique. Most follow the apocalyptic bloodbath plot that was pioneered by George Romero in his zombie films. In contrast, the BBC has broadcast In the Flesh, a three-part miniseries that has roots in Romero's work but takes it into provocative new territory.

Created and written by Dominic Mitchell, In the Flesh is about a British teenager named Kieren (Luke Newberry) who is being treated for "Partially Deceased Syndrome", or PDS. PDS is the term given to the phenomenon that reanimated the dead in a zombie outbreak that happened four years earlier. In the time since then, a large number of zombies--or "rotters" as they are called in the miniseries--have been rehabilitated through medical treatments and are being integrated back into society. The series follows Kieren as he returns to his family in the rural village of Roarton and how he and the world around him are adjusting to existence of the partially dead among the living.

While there are some brief flashes of gore in In the Flesh, it is not your typical zombie story. It takes the imagery, concepts and symbolism associated with zombies and uses them to examine modern issues such as drug abuse, mental health, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and widely-publicized diseases such as cancer and AIDS. In the series' post-outbreak world, PDS sufferers receive daily injections of a medication called Neurotriptyline and therapy to help them move on with their (after)lives, while family members of PDS sufferers can attend support groups to discuss the difficulties of caring for loved ones who are neither completely alive nor dead. Government-published posters and literature about PDS make cameo appearances throughout the series, while some survivors of the zombie outbreak are appalled at having to accept PDS sufferers--including ones they knew and cared for before the outbreak--as equal members of their community. In a sense, In the Flesh is the equal but opposite of Bob Clark's Deathdream (1972).

The plot device of rehabilitating zombies has been played for laughs many times before, such as in Shaun of the Dead, Fido, Ugly Americans and Warm Bodies. Yet In the Flesh plays it mostly straight and it works, largely due to Mitchell populating his story with so many interesting ideas, vivid details and nuanced characters. Monsters have been used as metaphors for diseases and social problems many, many times before, but it's rare to see a story like In the Flesh that takes the perspective of people who have to care for loved ones who have become "monsters" and how the newly monster-ized cope with their not-quite-human status. (For another good example of this, see my essay on the original The Fly and its sequels.) Between the strength of the script and wonderful performances by the cast, this series succeeds as a horror drama, a rare accomplishment in horror television. My only complaint is that the series runs for just three hour-long episodes; Mitchell provides so many details and subplots within his story that I'd love to see where it goes next after the third episode comes to an end.

If you're looking for hordes of zombies having a blood-drenched, entrails-splattered feeding frenzy on the living, this miniseries is not for you. Yet if you're looking for a unique, rewarding and thoughtful story about the living dead, In the Flesh is something you need to see. With the topics such as mental health, PTSD and suicide making frequent appearances in current discussions over gun violence and veterans returning from extended tours in the Middle East, In the Flesh really is a zombie tale for our time.

For more details about In the Flesh, including an annotated shooting script for the "Understanding PDS" public service video, check out the official series page over at the BBC site.

Great Moments in Body Horror Cinema: The H-Man (1958)

Growing up as I did during the heyday of VHS rentals, I noticed one recurring idea among gory, low-budget horror movies: melting people. Quite a few exploitation horror films from the 70s, 80s and early 90s, films such as The Incredible Melting Man (1977), Street Trash (1987) and Body Melt (1993), featured shocking scenes where monsters and/or victims would melt into messy puddles of blood, bones and liquefied flesh. Of course, such a plot device allowed for huge amounts of stomach-churning gore. Yet what's remarkable is that the grandfather of these films isn't that gory at all and is actually much more disturbing for it: The H-Man, which was directed by Ishirô Honda and produced by Toho Studios.

The H-Man is an Atomic Age horror movie from Japan, although it's much different than the Atomic Age kaiju movies for which Japan is largely known. Even though it's often compared to The Blob (which was released in the U.S. later during the same year), The H-Man is actually an early "body horror" movie; it was released the same year as another Atomic Age body horror movie, The Fly, and it predates David Cronenberg's first body horror film Shivers (1975) by over a decade. Director Honda did two other Atomic Age body horror films in addition to The H-Man: The Human Vapor (1960) and Matango (1963).

Not only was The H-Man ahead of its time in the body horror subgenre, it was also ahead of its time in terms of melting people effects. Read on for more details about this strange and haunting Japanese horror classic.

The H-Man takes place in the streets of Tokyo during a police investigation into a drug smuggling ring that operates out of a seedy nightclub. The detectives are baffled when one their key suspects disappears in front of a group of eye witnesses, leaving only his clothes behind. As more suspects disappear and the case reaches a dead end, the police get some answers from Dr. Masada (Kenji Sahara). Masada believes that the suspects are victims of "H-Men", people whose intense exposure to atomic radiation has turned them into gelatinous, amorphous creatures that feed on other human beings by melting their flesh. After a close encounter with the H-Men at the nightclub, the police accept Masada's theory and work with local authorities to stop the monsters before they spread further into Japan.

The H-Man is a creative mix of pulp detective fiction and Atomic Age horror. Honda composes many memorable scenes in this film, from the ominous opening shots of the abandoned and irradiated Dragon King II freight ship (the H-Men's place of origin) to the closing shots of Tokyo's gasoline-imbued waterways going up in flames to kill the H-Men. Before the end credits roll, one of the characters provides a voice-over line that accentuates the endless waves of apocalyptic fire that dwarf the Tokyo skyline:"If man perishes from the face of the Earth, due to the effects of hydrogen bombing, it is possible that the next ruler of our planet may be The H-Man." Interestingly, The H-Man is the title that the American distributors gave to this film; the original Japanese title translates to the much more poetic Beauty and the Liquid Man.

Of course, what steals the show are the H-Men themselves, which appear in two different forms: a thick, green liquid that moves itself up walls and across floors, and a glowing green humanoid shape that lacks distinct features. The humanoid shape usually appears when an H-Man is faced by more than one person, as if to suggest that the sight of other people prompts the liquid creature to fleetingly 'remember' its original shape. Having the formerly human monsters' assume a glowing humanoid shape gives the movie a ghostly feel, of a past that can't be recalled completely but nevertheless refuses to go away and threatens to destroy the present.

Yet of all the elements in this film, the one that really stood out for me (and ergo prompted me to write this post) were the effects used to depict the victims as they are being dissolved by the H-Men. Most melting people effects I've seen over the years were done by a combination of detailed makeup work, fake entrails and stand-in puppets, with the end result being extremely gory. In contrast, the effects in The H-Man are much less gory than its cinematic successors yet just as effective. How can that be?

The answer is very simple: Honda's special effects team created human-shaped latex balloons that were dressed like the actors who played the victims, and then he deflated the balloons while filming them in fast-motion for later playback in the film at normal speed. Such a simple idea is expertly exercised under Honda's eerie lighting and skilled editing; it's hard not to shutter when it looks like an actor's head is collapsing into his torso, followed by his torso and legs collapsing on to the ground in a puddle of ooze. Furthermore, unlike the Blob, a monster that has to cover its victims in order to dissolve and digest them, the H-Men seem lethal simply to touch. The way the attack scenes are shot implies that the victims absorb the H-Men through the skin and thus begin to dissolve from the inside out almost instantaneously--a very disturbing concept to watch.

What’s even more shocking about The H-Man outside of its ideas and effects is the fact that it’s loosely based on a real event. The liquefied fate of the Dragon King II’s crew was inspired by what happened to the crew of the real-life Japanese fishing vessel, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, after it was exposed to and contaminated by nuclear fallout from the Bikini Atoll thermonuclear device test in March 1954. According to Mykal Banta on his the Radiation Cinema site, "All 23 crew members suffered from acute radiation syndrome, the symptoms of which include, headaches, nausea, bleeding from gums, burns, etc. Within 6 months, the chief radio operator, Aikichi Kubouama, 40, was dead from injures. At the time of the test, the ship was operating well outside the danger zone, as given in US Government warnings, but the test was twice as powerful as expected."

The special effect techniques that Honda used to bring the H-Men to life have their limitations. There aren't any direct confrontations between the H-Men and the film's heroes, since such techniques largely preclude the H-Men and live actors appearing closely together within the same frame and thus dampen the film’s tension during its finale. There’s also a scene where one of the scantily clad showgirls at the nightclub is dissolved by an H-Man that doesn't work as well as the other attack scenes. Since the showgirl isn't wearing enough clothing to hide a human-shaped balloon, animation and frozen frames are used instead to much lesser effect. Nevertheless, most of the balloon effects successfully depict the gruesome, horrific idea of physical dissolution by an inconceivable force--an idea that perfectly complements the many fears that were stirred by the rise of nuclear warfare.

For more thoughts concerning The H-Man and its place within Ishirô Honda filmography and Atomic Age pop culture, visit the Radiation Cinema link I posted above and the H-Man articles posted on the Musings of a Sci-Fi Fanatic and the Film Quarterly sites.

KMD Artistry Restores Two of Hollywood's Classic Human-Insect Freaks of Nature

KMD Artistry, which is owned by visual artist Kelly Delcambre, specializes in restoring and replicating props and costumes that have appeared throughout Hollywood's history. To date, KMD projects have included replicating costumes from Universal's classic monster movies to restoring mechanical props used in films such as the original Fright Night (1985). Delcambre has also designed and produced many cosplay costumes, which are very remarkable in their own right. Yet with me being a huge fan of "Big Bug" movies, I wanted to call attention to one of KMD's restoration projects that is near and dear to my dark, twisted heart: the human-fly costumes from the original The Fly (1958) and its first sequel Return of the Fly (1959). Click below for more pictures of the human-fly monster restorations, as well as a few thoughts about how the restorations compare to the original costumes. All pictures are provided courtesy of KMD Artistry.

KMD's recreations of the human-fly monsters from the early Fly movies speak for themselves--they are very faithful to the original designs. The fly head from The Fly is closer to human proportions to accommodate the hood that concealed it through most of the movie, while the fly head from Return of the Fly is larger and more grotesque to add shock value to the sequel's lean, low-budget script.

Because KMD's fly head recreations are not meant to be worn by actors, additional details were be added to the heads and claws while others were removed. For example, David Hedison could move the fly head's proboscis in The Fly by using his mouth. As you can see from the replica produced by KMD below, the proboscis does not move because there is no one inside the mask to move it.

David Hedison in The Fly ... 

... and KMD's replica of The Fly.

The fly mask in Return of the Fly had two triangle-shaped patches of mesh fabric that were below the eyes, one on each side of the mouth. These patches were put in the mask to allow the actor who wore the mask to see and breathe.

The man-insect monster from Return of the Fly ...

... and the same monster mask on display at the "It's Alive!" Animatronics Exhibit at

the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, 2006.

Note the triangular patches on the lower half of the mask.

Since KMD didn't have to worry about an actor underneath the mask, additional monstrous details were molded into the fly head in place of the mesh patches.

 Kelly Delcambre and his Return of the Fly replica.

KMD's life-size Return of the Fly bust. 

The Delambre-Delcambre connection: Brett Halsey (who played Philippe Delambre 

in Return of the Fly) and Kelly Delcambre at Monsterpalooza 2010. 

Check out KMD Artistry's Facebook page and YouTube channel for more examples for Delcambre's amazing work. Click here for some additional commentary about the original Fly trilogy.

Giant Insects Reign Supreme in Wii's Escape from Bug Island

I'm a big fan of "big bug" movies, so it would seem obvious that I would pick up a copy of a survival horror video game called Escape from Bug Island for my Nintendo Wii, right? Well ... not necessarily. When the game first appeared in the U.S. back in 2007, it was panned by most video game reviewers. Yet with this game's drop below the $10 price point, I recently decided to give this game a chance anyway to see if the critics were right. Speaking as a big bug movie fan, they weren't.

I can think of several survival horror video games for the Wii that have better graphics, better level designs, and better stories. Even Wii's other bug-centric game, 2009's Deadly Creatures, has better production values. Yet where Escape from Bug Island really delivers is where it delivers the most: It's got plenty of big, icky, human-eating bugs ... and that is AWESOME! Read on for my complete review.

In Escape from Bug Island, you play as Ray, a university freshman who reluctantly accompanies Michelle (Ray's secret crush) and Mike (Ray's best friend) to Beelzebub Island, an isolated location that's perpetually shrouded in a thick fog, so that Michelle can study the island's insect population. After Michelle and Mike wander off from the characters' camp site, Ray goes after them and encounters the island's many monstrous residents while searching for his lost friends.

Bug Island is a basic game as survival horror titles go. The graphics lack polish and the music cues are few in selection. The game's story is simple--there aren't many characters, and there are no puzzles to solve or secret codes to remember. Even the game's time travel subplot, which has you playing some of the levels again with new weapons and unlocked areas, doesn't complicate the overall story or game play. That said, the game's dialog is written in a hokey style that openly pokes fun at the game's b-movie premise. (Case in point: one of your weapons is a can of bug spray.) Bug Island isn't the same over-the-top exercise in camp as Zombies Ate My Neighbors! or Stubbs The Zombie, but its attitude of self-mockery is impossible to miss.

The game is played mostly from a third-person perspective, with occasional shifts to a first-person perspective depending on the weapon(s) you are using. Your weapon inventory grows from simple blunt objects (a stick, a baseball bat and rocks) to more sophisticated means of self-defense (knives, swords and guns) as the game progresses, and each level consists of maze-like forests, swamps, caves and ancient ruins that you have to traverse from beginning to end. Even though controlling Ray's walking and running motions through the Wii nunchuk is somewhat clunky at times (he doesn't handle sharp turns very well), controlling the weapons through the Wiimote is both accurate and intuitive.

A giant centipede feeding frenzy.

As the game's title suggests, Bug Island provides an ample supply of bugs for you to avoid, squash, beat, shoot and/or kill. The bugs range in size from a foot long to human height to car-sized, as well as various points in between. They include centipedes, flies, cockroaches, spiders, crickets, praying mantises, moths and maggots. (Curiously, spiders are the only arachnids in the game--over-sized scorpions, ticks and mites are nowhere to be found on the island.) These bugs crawl on you, jump at you, fly into your face, stab at you with their claws and cut you with their sharp mandibles. They buzz, screech and make other noises that one would expect to be made by really big bugs. The only normal-sized insects are the ones that fly together in large swarms that will eat you alive in a matter of seconds if you attract their attention. Fighting off this menagerie of creepy critters will inevitably make your skin crawl, so much so that anyone who has entomophobia and/or arachnophobia should avoid this game.

If the big bugs aren't enough, Bug Island provides plenty of other monsters as well, including sharp-toothed flying fish, bear trap-like carnivorous plants, giant frogs, and King Kong-sized apes with exposed brains and glowing red eyes. There's also a selection of human-animal hybrids such as lizard women, dog-like creatures with human faces, and a delightfully disgusting human-insect hybrid that has a steady stream of maggots dripping from its abdomen.

Indeed, Bug Island has enough monsters to rival any Resident Evil game, and the scares they produce are intensified by the game's use of ambient noises and pervasive application of fog. In a practical sense, the fog hides some of the game's graphic shortcomings, but it also leaves you guessing time and time again as to what will crawl, jump or fly towards you next.

If you're a creature feature junkie like me, then Escape from Bug Island is the game for you. It's the worst camping trip that you'll love to play.

A Deviant Artist Takes a Closer Look at Mimic's Judas Breed Bugs

As anyone who follows this blog knows, I'm a huge fan of monster art. In particular, I'm an avid collector of various mediums (books, magazines, toys, and scale miniatures) that provide accurate and detailed representations of certain movie monster designs that I consider to be art. Such designs would include the mechanical shark from Jaws, the biomechanical parasites from Alien, the submersible monster suit from The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the various stop-motion puppets that Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen used throughout their respective careers in movie special effects. Such an interest becomes an exercise in frustration when I find a movie monster design that I like but I cannot find any pictures or miniatures that provide me with a clear look at the design. Case in point: the Judas Breed insects, the giant GMOs from Guillermo del Toro's Mimic (1997) and its two sequels.

As demonstrated in the behind-the-scenes featurettes that were provided in the recent Blu-ray release of the Mimic director's cut, del Toro and his Mimic crew put a lot of work into the Judas Breed, both in terms of their fictional biology and the effects that were used to bring the creatures to life. Unfortunately, even the high-resolution images provided in the Blu-ray release didn't provide any clear pictures of what a Judas Breed insect looks like in its entirety. On the other hand, the only pictures I can find of the Judas Breed online are either incomplete or murky.

Thankfully, I have just found someone online who not only has a mutual interest in the Judas Breed design, but also has the talent to produce detailed pictures of what del Toro's carnivorous and camouflage-capable critters look like, both in the original movie and in the sequels. The Mexican artist in question goes under the screen name of BlackCoatl, and he added his Judas Breed pictures to his account on the deviantART site a few months ago. Click below to see BlackCoatl's beautiful renderings of the different Judas Breed designs, as well as some additional thoughts about the designs and their changes in the sequels.

The first picture below is of an adult Judas Breed female as it was seen in Mimic. Not only is this an accurate depiction of the creature's complete design, but it is also reminiscent of the scene in the movie when Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino) has her first encounter with the mutated, human-sized version of her creation in a subway station in New York. If you take a close look at the creature's thorax, you will see where the creature's "lungs" are located that provide enough oxygen to sustain its larger size.

The second picture is of a wingless adult male as it was seen Mimic. You can see the females in the background assuming their mimicry of humans through a rearrangement of their wings and limbs; because the male lacks wings, he cannot mimic the appearance of humans at all. The lighter color of the male is a holdover detail from one of the earlier screenplay drafts, which featured a much different ending from the final cut.

The third picture is of the lone winged adult male from Mimic 2 (2001). This same design was used again in Mimic 3 (2003). While each Mimic film utilized CGI effects and life-sized puppets for the Judas Breed, the sequels also used actors in costume for tight, close-up shots. Because the sequels were produced on a much lower budget than the first film, I'm assuming that it was cheaper in some scenes to put an actor into a Judas Breed costume than to build a highly-detailed animatronic puppet. To better accommodate the actors in the suits, the Judas Breed was redesigned with a larger thorax, larger eyes, and different mandibles. So far, BlackCoatl has not produced a drawing of the winged male's appearance after his last metamorphosis at the end of Mimic 2.

A photo of a Judas Breed head from Mimic 2

(photo courtesy of the YourProps site).

A Judas Breed insect after its final metamorphosis in Mimic 2.

Click here to see all of BlackCoatl's work on DeviantART, which includes depictions of monsters from other movies such as Gremlins, Hellraiser and Pumpkinhead. The Mimic pictures can be found in the gallery folder named "Mutants", which includes pictures of other insect and arachnid horrors from movies such as Mansquito (2005) and the remakes of The Fly (1986) and Earth vs. the Spider (2001). Click here to read more about del Toro’s creation of the Judas Breed on the Monster Legacy site.

It’s College Students vs. Plant Monsters in Wii’s Obscure: The Aftermath

As far as I know, the cinematic narrative formula of teenagers versus monsters has been around since the 1950s, when movie producers realized that teenagers had enough disposable income to spend on movies. Early examples of this type of horror movie include Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), Earth vs. The Spider (1958) and The Blob (1958). This kind of teen-centric horror subgenre earned its notoriety during the 70s and 80s, when its films began to include heavy doses sex, nudity and gore. Yet for as well known as this narrative formula has been in horror movies for over 60 years, it hasn’t had much of an influence in horror video games. This brings me to my review of Obscure: The Aftermath, which was released for the Nintendo Wii back in 2008.

Unlike other horror video games, Obscure: The Aftermath takes many of its themes and plot points from horror movies that are commonly associated with the teenage demographic; in fact, as I played the game, I found myself reminded of such films as Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981), Return of the Living Dead (1985) and Night of the Creeps (1986). While it’s not the best horror game that’s available for the Wii--or for any system, for that matter--the willingness of Aftermath to tell a of story that’s become commonplace in horror films but rare in horror games kept a horror fan like me entertained and curious about where the game would go next. Read on for my complete review of this unique entry in the genre of survival horror games.

Obscure: The Aftermath is the sequel to Obscure, a game that was released back in 2004. Obscure was about horrific, disfiguring experiments that were secretly performed on students at Leafmore High School; Aftermath takes place two years later, when two survivors of the Leafmore experiments have moved on to college at the nearby Fallcreek University. As the game begins, a strange flower has been blooming all over the Fallcreek campus, a flower that’s similar to the one involved in the Leafmore experiments. Aftermath focuses on a group of college students--the survivors of Leafmore and several new characters--as they fight for their lives against a horde of homicidal human-plant hybrids that appear to originate from the black spores emitted by the mysterious flowers.

Even though Aftermath is not very cinematic in its overall presentation (as opposed to Dead Space: Extraction), it feels like a standard horror film/sequel that revolves around a cast of teenage or young adult characters. Surviving characters from the previous story mingle with new characters, leaving you to wonder who will live and who will die by the end of the sequel. Characters wander away into dark, dangerous places, seemingly oblivious to the obvious risks of doing so. You’ll encounter a variety of clues—a newspaper article here, a cryptic line of dialogue there, an old photograph somewhere else—that do not make sense at first, but become clearer as the story progresses. The game begins with a nightmarish dream sequence that provides symbolic hints about the story that has yet to unfold. There’s even a just-when-you-thought-it-was-safe false ending, just before the real ending. Seasoned horror fans will recognize these plot devices, and I thought that they translated quite well into the context of a video game. I would even go so far as to say that if you are not interested in seeing a horror story that relies upon these familiar conventions, then you probably would not enjoy Aftermath.

Aftermath was also released for Playstation 2 and Microsoft Windows, but the version that was produced for the Wii takes ample advantage of the system’s motion controls. You’ll use the Wiimote and Nunchuk to operate flashlights, aim guns, swing blunt objects and chainsaws, control machinery, row the oars of a boat, turn valves, pick locks and hack computers. The diversity of situations, puzzles, tasks and environments keeps you challenged and intrigued, while the game’s gloomy visuals add a foreboding, chilling atmosphere to the game play.

There are a total of eight playable characters in Aftermath, and each scene involves two characters. You can either play with a friend, or you can let the computer play the other character. Each character has his or her own unique ability (one can solve puzzles, one can move heavy objects, one can hack computers, etc.) and each ability plays a part in progressing through the game. Not only does this feature allow for co-op play--which itself is a rarity in survival horror games--but it also makes the game feel more like a movie, switching back and forth between different characters at different locations. While not giving too much of the game’s plot away, very few of the playable characters survive through the entire game. Such a high body count feels right for a survival horror genre, although gamers might be somewhat frustrated to see characters that they fought so hard to protect get bumped off during a cut scene.

Aftermath is a very difficult game to play, especially by yourself. The computer-controlled characters are not very bright, which forces you to protect them from monsters or else they will die quickly and the game will end. (The computer-controlled characters can handle guns, but they’re useless when they run out of ammo and have to use blunt objects as weapons.) Even though the controls allow you to do many different things, they are not always the most helpful when it comes time to defend yourself from attacking monsters. The monsters’ attacks are fast and fierce, which leaves you with little time to aim and use your weapon correctly. Adding to this problem are the characters’ health levels, which drain quickly and there are very few items that are available in each level that you can use to heal the characters. I had to resort to using cheat codes through the Homebrew Channel so I could make it thought the entire game.

I recommend Obscure: The Aftermath to fans of horror movies and to fans of horror survival games who are looking for something different. Even if you have to use cheat codes like I did, Aftermath provides a fulfilling experience that appeals to gamers’ familiarity with horror movies.