Why are you all looking at me like that. Oh right. It’s because [gestures at the 4 months in which I did not write a monthly newsletter]. Don’t worry about it. I’m not worrying about it. It’s a Monthly* Newsletter now.
Let’s talk about GHOSTS, DEMONS, the UNDEAD and MORE.
*Whenever I am able.
Generally I only watch around 2 films a year. If a piece of media requires my full attention and is not an interactive experience I struggle to give it the time of day due to a constant desire to fidget or multi-task. Instead I normally waste my time with video games or cartoons, but recently my only craving has been for ZOO TYCOON and all the games on my wishlist that taunt me with the words “COMING SOON”, so I figured why not. Ghost-themed film night.
SCREAM – I don’t feel like I can say this sentence in a way that doesn’t sound concerning but I’ve been getting into slashers lately. When it comes to horror I’m generally a coward but after playing DEAD BY DAYLIGHT and running some of Netflix’s slasher/mystery shows in the background during work I thought I’d try and dip my toes into the genre. So first on my film list was SCREAM, which I’m classifying as a ghost film based on the killer’s name alone.
It didn’t take me long to realise that SCREAM has a lot to say about slashers in general, considering how many visual references and film titles it slips into the script, and having seen none of its predecessors I definitely missed out on some of the film’s intended commentary. It’s done me a favour though, because now I have a great list of horror recommendations to dig into whenever I feel like having another film night, and it’ll be fun to go back and re-watch SCREAM once I’m armed with more knowledge of the genre.
Anyway everything’s probably already been said about this film, but I can tell you that A) I really enjoyed it, and B) I legitimately can’t stop thinking about how glittery the Ghostface costume was.
POLTERGEIST - POLTERGEIST is a really great film that was made before the invention of seizure warnings. It feels completely antithetical to recommend watching a horror film in a well-lit room, but I made the mistake of watching this at 2am with the lights off and spent the rest of the night teetering on the verge of a headache. Don’t make my mistakes.
I’ve been interested in watching POLTERGEIST since I saw the haunted house (flashing light warning!) created for Halloween Horror Nights 2018. I had no context for anything that was going on but I loved everything about it – it was the original inspiration for the BIOME GHOULLERY! The only other thing I knew going into this film was that it had been nightmare fuel for many people who had watched it as children. I grew up when films were starting to lean more heavily on CGI, so the effects didn’t really get a scare out of me (they mostly reminded me of GHOSTBUSTERS) but I can appreciate just how scary they would have been at the time of release.
And speaking of GHOSTBUSTERS – I was delighted to see that tech-assisted ghost hunting has barely changed since the 80s. I watch things like GHOST ADVENTURES as a guilty pleasure because there’s nothing quite like watching a guy tell you with a straight face that the Xbox Kinect™️ strapped to his arm can see ghosts, so I genuinely enjoyed the portrayal of the paranormal investigators and their big, boxy old tech that claimed to do exactly the same thing. Because I don’t actually believe in ghosts like ghost hunters do their shows often feel exploitative, so a scenario in which ghosts are real and the hunters treat the situation empathetically and without all the showmanship is very refreshing. It was probably my favourite aspect of the film, aside from the skeletons. I’m a fan of skeletons.
Before I made the BIOME GHOULLERY I made some mockups of what the POLTERGEIST house might look like
BEETLEJUICE - Here’s a fun fact: I hate BEETLEJUICE [a chorus of shocked gasps] ok well perhaps the word hate is a tad bit strong, but for a long time there was no room in my heart for this film. A friend recently pointed me in the direction of the Broadway Musical, which I had been avoiding because of my aforementioned disdain, but everything about that production was so unbelievably Casparcore that I decided to give the film another chance to win me over.
See, my original introduction to BEETLEJUICE was when my age was still in single digits and it scared the hell out of me. There’s a scene early on where a woman rips off her own face and then her eyes fall out and the small fearful child I once was didn’t really vibe with it at the time. Then there’s Beetlejuice himself, a character who barely shows up in his own film and who spends all of his screentime being an unrepentant creep who just made me kind of uncomfortable. I didn’t really like to see him.
So what does adult Caspar think of BEETLEJUICE? Well, I’ve warmed up to it because frankly I can’t stay mad at anything that has neon skeleton background characters, but also because it’s weird and strange and dark and so obviously an origin point for a lot of the tacky ghost aesthetics I love. I don’t think the storytelling does the premise or its characters any justice though - there’s a certain depth that’s missing - but I easily make peace with this by imagining that the film is a literal haunted house; colourful, spooky and with a vague but understandable plotline to give everything a bit of context. It’s fun.
So what about the Musical? Well, the Musical is its own beast, one that knows exactly what I’ve been looking for in a ghost story and which mostly pulls it off. There’s so much I love about it that if I tried to summarise my thoughts right now you’d be subjected to a largely incoherent essay and I don’t want to put you through that just yet. Consider this a warning though.
I dress like this. I decorate like this. Also I’m gay.
BONUS ROUND: ELECTROMA – Hey Caspar, you say, this one is definitely not about ghosts, no matter how you try and spin it. You are correct. This one is not about ghosts, instead it’s about a pair of sad dance robots, and I didn’t even watch this during my ghostly film night. But this is my blog, my rules, and it has some relevance later.
ELECTROMA is Daft Punk’s weird art film from the HUMAN AFTER ALL era and it’s 15th anniversary was sometime this month, (Happy Birthday, strange robot film!). It’s eerie and dream-like, with strong visuals, no dialogue and muted physical acting. There’s a vague storyline running through the film that’s intentionally left up to the viewer’s interpretation, so this film is about whatever you think it’s about, and what the characters are thinking and how they’re feeling is entirely up to you.
Since the film exists as an extension of HUMAN AFTER ALL, it spends a lot of time mulling over emotion, identity, technology and all that good stuff in a suitably cold and minimalist style. It’s definitely less approachable compared to the rest of their more upbeat discography but if you, like me, love melancholy and heavy identity metaphors then maybe you’ll enjoy this too.
DOOM ETERNAL – I like to play DOOM with reckless abandon. If my hubris isn’t hot on my heels as I sprint head-first into hell then what’s the point? This game is at its most fun whenever I somehow overcome my own foolish mistakes and perishing provides its own comedic relief. A Marauder killed me? No. I accidentally gave the Marauder super-speed and then tripped over his evil pet dog, actually. ETERNAL wrapped up its overly-convoluted storyline back in March with the release of The Ancient Gods Part 2, so I figured it was as good a time as any to blast through both chapters back-to-back and suffer at my own hands.
Instead I suffered at id Software’s hands and now I’m in two minds about the DLC – I love the new maps, enemies and mechanics but I felt pretty let down by the boss fights and the overbearingly terrible lore. The bosses weren’t egregiously bad but they stopped being fun for their own reasons pretty fast; the Chapter 1 boss has zero breathing room and doesn’t feel worth the stress and the Chapter 2 boss gets boring as soon as you understand the gimmick. Both go on for what feels like forever. This is accompanied by unavoidably bad storytelling, the kind which ties itself into knots trying to come up with a clever twist while snubbing all of the interesting aspects of the world and its characters. But hey, I’m the fool here for expecting more from something like DOOM.
Now that I’ve finished griping about it I can say that thankfully none of the above stopped me having fun. The arena fights are intense, the environments are nice to look at, the new enemies are great additions to the combat equation and I enjoy the cruel tricks and traps scattered around the levels. ETERNAL has since been uninstalled to give myself a break but I’ll be revisiting the campaign later this year so I can warm up before putting myself through the stress that is the Master Levels.
Orb: [is held] :)
DEAD BY DAYLIGHT – Hey! I’m still playing this game! They briefly released Nemesis into the wild at the end of May for some public beta testing, so I spent that weekend running around and getting lost in the disorienting labyrinth that is the Raccoon City Police Station. He’s a really fun killer and I love to play as him, even if I am a little disappointed about the (completely understandable) lack of rocket launcher.
But while Nemesis left his explosives at home, both Jill and Leon brought flashbangs – the intention being to hinder the killer via blindness, but which more often than not created impromptu comic relief. I might be a big scary 9ft tall tyrant dressed in bin bags but sudden noise and lights are an effective jumpscare when you have questionable object permanence and constantly forget that survivors can do that now. I kicked a lot of booby-trapped generators that weekend.
My favourite interaction during the public beta was when, during a pursuit against a lone Leon player, I was blind-sided by a well-timed and disorienting flashbang. As the smoke cleared I saw that Leon had been joined by three other identically dressed Leon S Kennedys and watched them run in perfect sync towards the exit gate. I have to commend Raccoon City’s newest boyband for their impeccable teamwork and timing – Nemesis has met his match.
Yes! I made a few things. I’ve been busy with some other work recently which limited my free time and energy, so I decided to explore some skills I don’t normally work with, just for fun.
There’s a particular scene in ELECTROMA (the sad robot film mentioned earlier) that I couldn’t stop thinking about. It’s not the part where the robot explodes. It’s the White Room, a sequence that occurs about a third of the way into the film that follows the robots as they undergo some kind of medical procedure in a blank void filled with buttons and dials and switches. It’s got some of the strongest visuals in the entire film, (most promotional material uses stills from this scene), and it’s unique in that it’s the only sequence without an accompanying music track, which brings all the sound design to the forefront.
It was those sounds that made the physical tech on display all that more appealing and I realised that I could probably create an interactive version in Unity quite easily, and therefore satiate my need to fidget with all the miscellaneous buttons and controls. It would require opening BLENDER, something I haven’t done in years out of fear, but it was obvious that this endeavour was the excuse I needed to dive back into 3D modelling.
I started by taking some screenshots and painstakingly recreating the consoles based on what I could see and how the actors interacted with them, before connecting them all together in a rough mimicry of the original film’s sequence of events. I never got around to adding sound effects, but it was still pretty satisfying to play.
I promise you that 90% of these consoles are clickable
At first I was only going to make the consoles and the room they were situated in, but along the way I convinced myself that this would also provide some good character modelling and rigging practice. Neither the robots or the technicians have faces or hair or any of the features that trip me up due to inexperience, so I could focus on remembering how human topology and bones work without getting lost in the details. (If you know how this scene plays out you’ll know that the robots do eventually get faces and hair…but I was not thinking about that. That was a problem for Future Caspar.)
The great thing about the technicians is that they only exist in negative space so there was absolutely zero concern over texturing or UV maps, and the robots wear identical outfits so I only had to worry about modelling and texturing one robot body and attaching the helmets later. I spent a lot of time experimenting with how my 2D art sensibilities could be translated into 3D space, and I’m pretty happy with how everyone turned out.
I never got around to animating them. It’s fine. 🧍🧍
To recreate the look of the film I decided to use unlit materials on everything – but there’s a problem with that. There is a brief shot where the robots emerge from a dark corridor and their helmets are ridiculously and unavoidably shiny. I didn’t want to bother with shaders at this point so I made various workarounds – black planes at varying opacities create a great shadow effect as models pass through them, and layered, scrolling textures based on the angle between the actor and camera made for a decent chrome effect. Figuring out ways to avoid doing things properly is pretty fun by itself.
Eventually this project succumbed to the curse of my drifting attention. I have some other things I want to start working on and I had my fun playing in this space, so this is it for now. Halloween calls to me and these robots are not bright green, nor are they funny little skeleton guys. But now I am armed with the power of ‘understanding BLENDERS’s UI’, so thanks for that.
I finally reached my limit with the cursed website that is known as Twitter. I already had a long list of reasons to avoid using it but at some point this year I stopped looking at it altogether. It’s been nice. I’ve managed to shake off some of the weird mindsets that social media encourages and now my brain feels like it has more room to focus on enjoying things again.
It does make it a little more difficult to keep up with cool projects and artists and the transient nature of Twitter means that I’m definitely going to end up missing a lot of stuff, but I have come to terms with this arrangement. It’s a price I’m willing to pay in return for a functional attention span. In the future I’ll probably end up using the platform in an extremely limited manner but for now disconnecting is doing wonders for me and I’m not about to change that.
Unfortunately the games industry is inexorably connected to Twitter and it’s the easiest way for people to get in touch, so I’ll be sticking around even if I am refusing to make eye contact with that terrible little blue app icon. If you need me you can still DM me – I’ll make an exception for those, but for everything else I’ll be keeping my internet presence to this website, because I actually like to be here.
When I came up with the idea of writing a monthly newsletter I wasn’t thinking about how long each post would take me to write…The good news is that I didn’t miss any of the previous months due to anything bad – I’ve just been busy! I’ve had to choose between spending my free time making things, relaxing or writing this post, and I’ve had enough experience with burnout to know when I’ve reached my productivity limit. Thankfully this is something I do for fun and I refuse to waste my time worrying about being punctual, so with that being said, my next post will probably be either July or August! See you then.
this is foreshadowing. see you next time.
Caspar 👻
