Confession... as much as I love survival horror and go so far as to consider my creative work as survival horror in written form, buuuuuuut.... um, I never played the original Resident Evil. After Silent Hill's genius and Fatal Frame's brutality, there didn't seem to be much of a point. If the Resident Evil franchise is known for anything, it's for the silliness in ridiculous plots, the dumb characters, and inconsistent tone that couldn't decide if it wanted to be gothic horror or biological horror. I took a pass. Mostly. I played Resident Evil: Revelation[...]
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1 (My series on Silent Hill 2 is on hold at the moment, but it'll return soon with part 746 of 982). Since movies became the dominate form of entertainment, nearly everything is either being considered for a movie, or was turned into a movie. Some IPs are easier to adapt for the screen than others though. Movies need action, visuals , loads of dialogue, and a cinematic universe with at least 36 interconnecting movies. The IP that keeps getting the rawest of the rawest deals is the Cthulhu Mythos. The reasons are obvious, the Cthulhu Mythos is low on action, aggre[...]
(This post contains spoilers for Silent Hill 2. You've been warned.) Yeeeeeah, I kinda hoped I never got desperate enough I resorted to writing about this one, because I'm pretty sure this will turn into a dissertation. There's been a lot of virtual ink spilt on Silent Hill 2 and honestly, I don't think there's anything I can I add to the discussion... so obviously there'll be at least three posts about the game I have to say about. Part One will discuss one meaning of the story while Part Two will look at the themes and symbolism, and Part Three will look at[...]
Dear Michael, Freddy, Jason, Ghostface (both of you), Leatherface, Harry, Mandy, Pinhead, Angela (you sexy beast), Billy, Death, Pennywise, Jigsaw, Leslie, and all the rest of you fuzzballs, You can't hide the truth from me. I know too much, seen you do your thing one too many times. Yeah, you're killers, (glossing right over that) but deep inside, you're all heart. Each and every one of you. I'm pretty sure you've got everyone else fooled, that's just how good you play your game. You've got everyone thinking you're demigods doling out punishment to those who sin[...]
This week's theme is supposed to be ghosts but since I already talked about the only game with ghosts I could think of, so I'll review a game so hard that it makes the player a ghost of themselves. Whatever. We're rolling with it. Back in 2010, the year you'll be posting about on Facebook with a picture of a USB drive and the caption of "dur, thunk kidz theze dayz kow what dis is?" as you slowly realize with growing horror that yes, you really are as boring and banal as your kids think you are, I discovered internet critic/comedian Yahtzee Croshaw, and to my[...]
Before Kim Graff and I ended up here at the The Society, we were blogging over at ya-asylum.com, but tragically as life got busier, The Asylum got pushed put further and further back on the back burner. It wasn't from a lack of desire---we simply felt that we weren't doing anything unique that helped push the genre forward. However, we didn't want to give up on the site either, we just wanted to do something that people couldn't get anywhere else. So we started a biannual e-zine for YA and MG horror short stories, Strange Far Places. Horror has one of the str[...]
And... BOOM! Look at that gorgeous cover! It's like Lana Del Rey's art director mated with the first season of True Detective at a street art convention. This one's going on my shelf where I keep the books with covers I can't stop looking at. (Special thanks to YA Book Central for letting The Society in on the fun, you can find their original reveal here (Oh hey, its a giveaway too)). It gets even better! Here's the book description: Two girls: one with a secret, one with a promise that she’d uncover it. Welcome to Rowan’s Glen—a pla[...]
Just within the past fifteen years boardgames got interesting, and then promptly entered a golden age. No more was there the blandy McBlanderson choices of Monopoly, Sorry, and Candyland (Clue, of course is amazing) of the past eighty years, and no longer did you need a math degree if you wanted to get into the more obscure stuff. Then came 2005, when the great Fantasy Flight Games released a cleaned-up second edition of an obscure Lovecraftian game from the '80s called Arkham Horror. Arkham Horror is a cooperative game for 1 to 8 players. It's the 1920s, an[...]
Nintendo recently announced that Fatal Frame V: Oracle of the Sodden Raven, a game that was until now a Japan-only release, would finally make it's way to a America and Europe later this year for the Wii U, so I thought it would be a good time to look back on this criminally ignored series. Out of the original unholy trilogy of survival horror---Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Fatal Frame---Frame Frame was by far the scariest of the three. It took the rich environments of Resident Evil and the relentless psychological warfare of Silent Hill, added in a[...]
Wow, we have two amazing interviews coming up. Today, we have Courtney Alameda, author of the amazing Shutter, and on the 10th, we'll have the fab Mackenzi Lee, of the soon-to-release This Monstrous Thing! Between the two of them, we're covering the great old ones of horror from Frankenstein to Dracula. Courtney Alameda is back with Trigger, a short story in the Shutter-verse, which you can find at Tor.com (the story will go live at 9 AM EST). Courtney's debut blew my mind into all sorts of pieces, large and small, and she was kind enough to answer a hai[...]