Tag Archives: survival horror

When the Familiar Turns Savage: Siege Horror and the Fragility of Civilization

Posted on by Arleigh

“He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Survival becomes a moral problem when staying alive threatens to destroy the reasons for living together. That dilemma gives siege horror its enduring power. Characters must confront not only an external threat but also the possibility that fear will turn protection into exclusion, cooperation into domination, and necessary violence into cruelty. James Herbert’s The Fog, Jack Ketchum’s Ladies’ Night, Richard Laymon’s One Rainy Night, and Brian Keene’s The Complex explore this pressure through outbreaks of human brutality. Their attackers are disturbing because they retain recognizable bodies while violating the expectations that make human contact possible.

A siege need not confine its victims to one building or require them to defend a fixed position. Its boundaries can encompass a town, a city, or an entire country where danger lurks around every corner. Characters may remain free to move while having nowhere reliably safe to go. Streets become hazardous corridors, shelters offer uncertain protection, and escaping one confrontation exposes them to another. The defining condition is entrapment: the inability to leave the field of danger behind.

Across these novels, that condition tests civilization as much as physical endurance. Social order can restrain violence, conceal it, or help manufacture it. Catastrophe likewise produces more than selfishness: it can create obligations between people who previously felt little responsibility for one another. The question is not simply whether humanity becomes primal under pressure, but which human capacities the struggle to survive encourages—and which it threatens to extinguish.

James Herbert’s The Fog: A Siege Without a Secure Perimeter

In The Fog, an earthquake opens a fissure beneath an English village, releasing a substance that drives exposed people into destructive madness. Environmental investigator John Holman survives the initial catastrophe and becomes central to efforts to stop the spreading threat. Herbert alternates his continuing narrative with episodes depicting the fog’s effects elsewhere, expanding the disaster beyond any single survivor or refuge.

This structure makes survival a problem individual toughness cannot solve. The threat moves through the atmosphere, turning the environment itself into an unstable boundary between safety and exposure. Characters can travel, but movement does not necessarily mean escape. The siege follows the spreading contamination rather than remaining organized around one defensible location.

Herbert’s scattered episodes transform ordinary life into a succession of violated expectations. Familiar people occupy recognizable settings while abandoning the behavior that previously made those settings intelligible. The world remains physically familiar while ceasing to operate according to recognizable social rules.

The fog’s man-made origins sharpen the contradiction. Its connection to military experimentation implicates organized authority in the destruction of the society it supposedly protects. Technical sophistication does not stand apart from barbarism; it creates the means through which barbarism spreads. Civilization becomes dangerous because its capabilities have become detached from responsibility.

Nevertheless, contamination is not straightforward proof of an authentic savage self. The exposed have been altered against their will. They become perpetrators while remaining victims, and their conduct cannot establish what they secretly desired beforehand. Holman’s recovery makes that uncertainty central: the defender has crossed the boundary separating ordinary humanity from destructive madness.

Survival consequently requires understanding as well as resistance. Eliminating dangerous individuals cannot resolve the catastrophe. Herbert exposes institutional failure while preserving the necessity of coordinated action, suggesting that civilization must answer for its abuses without becoming something humanity can simply discard.

Jack Ketchum’s Ladies’ Night: Intimacy as Enemy Territory

Ladies’ Night concentrates its crisis within relationships. A chemical spill causes exposed women to become violently predatory, turning the antagonism suggested by the phrase “battle of the sexes” into a grotesquely literal nightmare.

Where Herbert destabilizes the wider environment, Ketchum attacks the assumptions permitting physical closeness. Familiarity and attraction ordinarily encourage people to lower their defenses. Here, that access becomes dangerous. The siege is intimate as much as architectural: its boundaries run through trust, desire, and bodily proximity.

Its scattered encounters also make clear why leaving one location cannot necessarily end a siege. When danger is distributed throughout the surrounding community, the next street or doorway may offer another confrontation rather than refuge. Movement becomes a negotiation with uncertainty.

Defending oneself may require recoiling from someone previously associated with affection or pleasure. The transformed person remains recognizable, yet recognition no longer reassures. Ketchum makes the destruction of intimacy inseparable from the threat of bodily injury.

The premise is forceful but ethically troubling. Men become vulnerable to people they may have underestimated or treated carelessly. The attention to insensitive and unfaithful husbands gives some attacks an uncomfortable connection to existing grievances. Yet chemical compulsion prevents the violence from functioning as freely chosen resistance or coherent justice. The women’s agency has been destroyed, not liberated.

Like Herbert, Ketchum complicates the claim that contamination reveals an underlying truth. Imposed murderous behavior does not prove the earlier personality was fraudulent. His gendered division also exposes a danger in survival thinking: immediate threats encourage rapid judgments that can harden into collective suspicion.

Compared with Keene’s improvised solidarity, Ketchum makes mutual recognition painfully difficult. His novel’s power lies in turning intimacy against its characters; its limitation lies in the risk that women become interchangeable embodiments of male fear. That tension belongs at the center of its moral examination.

Richard Laymon’s One Rainy Night: A Town Already Compromised

In One Rainy Night, black rain falls on Bixby, California, turning those it touches into violent attackers. Laymon follows several threatened groups, including a babysitter protecting a child, adults trapped in a restaurant, and a police officer attempting to safeguard others. The immediate objective is clear: remain dry and prevent the transformed population from entering shelter.

Laymon combines localized defenses with a town-wide siege. Roofs, doors, windows, and exposed ground acquire urgent significance, but individual shelters exist within a larger hostile environment. Leaving a threatened building may mean exchanging one danger for another. The town becomes a network of temporary refuges separated by hazardous spaces.

The attackers’ ability to cooperate increases that pressure. They are not simply an obstacle to be avoided; they can actively threaten the structures protecting those who remain unaffected. Shelter postpones confrontation without necessarily resolving it.

Yet Bixby’s violence does not begin with the storm. Maxwell Chidi, a Black teenager, has already been murdered, his tortured body burned on a school football field. This atrocity prevents the town’s earlier normality from becoming an image of innocence. Extreme cruelty exists before the rain makes brutality pervasive.

Laymon thus challenges the idea that civilization reliably suppresses primal behavior. The community possesses institutions and routines, but these have not prevented racist murder. The storm does not introduce savagery into a humane environment. It magnifies a capacity already present.

Survival cannot therefore mean restoring the previous order and declaring victory. Bixby’s earlier condition already demands scrutiny. Preserving a community is not the same as proving everything about it deserves preservation.

The protective relationships nevertheless resist universal cynicism. Caring for a child or accepting responsibility for another person makes compassion an active survival practice. Laymon’s extreme physicality distinguishes violence as domination from violence as protection. Both can be brutal, but their purposes differ. Bodies are not merely opportunities for spectacular injury; they are vulnerable lives someone may choose to defend.

Brian Keene’s The Complex: Surviving Through Other People

The Complex gives the siege its most concentrated residential setting. Naked, armed killers descend on the Pine Village Apartment Complex, forcing neighbors who barely know one another into collective resistance. Its ensemble includes a depressed writer, a Vietnam veteran, an elderly woman, a young trans woman, a mother and child, and a serial killer known as The Exit. Initially unexplained violence leaves little time for understanding before action becomes necessary.

The apartment setting distinguishes proximity from community. Its residents share space, but that does not mean they share trust or obligation. The attack forces them to discover whether neighbors can become more than strangers separated by walls.

Keene also complicates the apparent security of familiar geography. The complex contains separate residences and spaces through which the characters must navigate. Knowing the setting does not mean controlling it. A familiar route can become dangerous, and a private refuge can prove inadequate.

Where contamination destroys established bonds in the other novels, Keene’s siege creates relationships that previously did not exist. People understood through superficial impressions become potential rescuers. Survival depends partly on revising assumptions through which the residents have judged one another.

Social respectability does not reliably predict competence or compassion, while marginalization does not determine weakness. Yet emergency does not make everyone good. Cooperation requires incomplete knowledge, dangerous compromises, and dependence on people whose motives remain uncertain.

The Exit embodies that discomfort. A serial killer’s abilities may become useful during an assault, but usefulness does not establish virtue. His presence separates the capacity for violence from the purposes giving violence its ethical meaning. Necessary cooperation does not make its participants morally equivalent.

Compared with Herbert’s institutional catastrophe, Ketchum’s destroyed intimacy, and Laymon’s compromised town, Keene emphasizes civilization as something actively constructed. It exists through shared danger, mutual recognition, and the refusal to regard vulnerability as expendability. Survival requires other people without making trust easy or uncomplicated.

Shared Foundations and a Continuing Legacy

These novels share siege and survival DNA with other forms of horror. Romero’s Dead films make external attack and internal disagreement inseparable, while Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 forces unlikely allies to defend an isolated refuge. Slasher series such as Friday the 13th and Scream concentrate similar pressure in pursuing killers. Different threats create narrowing options: escape becomes difficult, assistance unreliable, and resistance unavoidable.

Their relationship to later extreme horror involves thematic kinship as well as contribution, rather than a simple chain of direct influence. Keene’s The Rising contributed to the modern literary zombie resurgence through intelligent, possessed undead capable of turning human knowledge against survivors. The Complex concentrates related anxieties within a smaller setting.

Comparable concerns animate the Rage-infected of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Days Later and their return to that world in 28 Years Later. These films extend entrapment across a national landscape: the ability to travel does not guarantee an exit from danger. Rob Jabbaz’s The Sadness, influenced by Garth Ennis’s controversial comic Crossed, pushes recognizable humanity toward deliberate sadism.

Such connections underline the continuing relevance of the four novels. Extreme horror becomes most unsettling not simply through graphic injury, but through the separation of intelligence, intimacy, and imagination from compassion. Those capacities can sustain solidarity—or make cruelty more inventive.

What Survival Preserves

The four novels offer different accounts of what threatens coexistence. Herbert exposes protective institutions producing catastrophe. Ketchum makes intimacy inaccessible. Laymon reveals atrocity beneath communal normality. Keene examines solidarity among people who lack reassuring reasons to trust one another.

Whether the enclosure is an apartment building, a town, or an expanding contaminated landscape, survival does not settle the moral argument. Remaining unaffected does not guarantee goodness, and resisting an attacker does not justify every action taken in self-defense.

The deepest question is what staying alive preserves. If survival requires treating every vulnerable person as a burden and every stranger as expendable, the survivors risk reproducing the world their attackers embody. Civilization endures when they resist that logic—when protecting life still includes recognizing why another person’s life matters.

Horror Book Review: The Complex (by Brian Keene)

Posted on by Arleigh

“The only thing they have in common is the unstoppable horde that wants to kill them.” — The Complex

Brian Keene’s The Complex takes a simple horror premise and gets a lot of bloody mileage out of it: a group of apartment residents suddenly find themselves under attack by naked, homicidal strangers, and surviving means trusting people they barely know. There’s no comfortable adjustment period, no time to assemble the perfect team, and certainly no guarantee that being decent will keep anyone alive. It’s a nasty, fast-moving siege novel whose biggest strength isn’t just its willingness to get vicious. It’s the way Keene turns an ordinary collection of neighbors into people worth worrying about before putting them through absolute hell.

The setting is Pine Village, an apartment complex in rural Pennsylvania. It’s the kind of place where people live close together without necessarily sharing much of their lives. Everyone has private problems, personal baggage, and assumptions about whoever lives nearby. Then a mob of crazed attackers arrives, and those everyday boundaries become meaningless. Suddenly, the person on the other side of the wall isn’t just background noise or an occasional annoyance. They might be your only chance of making it through the next few minutes. That shift gives the book a strong foundation beneath all the violence.

What makes the setup effective is how little preparation the characters receive. Keene introduces the residents as the situation starts unraveling, moving between apartments rather than spending ages establishing a normal world we already know is about to collapse. The present-tense narration adds to that feeling of being trapped inside an unfolding emergency. There’s a useful bluntness to the approach: people notice something wrong, try to understand it, and discover that understanding is a luxury they don’t have. The novel is at its strongest when it keeps that gap between recognizing danger and reacting to it painfully narrow.

The attackers are particularly unsettling because they occupy an uncomfortable space between recognizable human beings and something much harder to process. They have the relentless aggression associated with zombies, but describing them that way doesn’t quite capture their menace. Their nakedness removes the ordinary visual clues that help people categorize strangers, while their weapons and savage behavior turn the familiar human body into something threatening. Keene doesn’t need elaborate creature designs to make the situation grotesque. The horror comes from people behaving in ways that make ordinary social expectations completely useless. There’s nothing to negotiate with and very little time to hesitate.

Then there’s the Tick Tock Man, a hulking attacker whose mechanical head movements and incongruous Hello Kitty tattoo make him stand out from the surrounding chaos. He’s the sort of horror image that works because the details don’t comfortably belong together. The tattoo is almost absurd, but that absurdity makes the violence more disturbing rather than less. Amid a largely collective threat, he gives the terror a memorable individual presence. A murderous crowd can become anonymous after a while; one bizarre, recognizable figure gives both the characters and the reader something specific to dread.

Still, the residents are what keep The Complex from becoming an extended exercise in creative dismemberment. The ensemble includes a suicidal horror writer, a single mother, an aging veteran, an elderly woman, a transgender woman named Stephanie, and a serial killer known as the Exit. That’s a potentially overstuffed lineup, but the shared emergency gives these very different people a reason to occupy the same story. Their usefulness to one another doesn’t necessarily correspond to how respectable, stable, or approachable they might appear beforehand. Keene gets considerable tension out of that mismatch between someone’s social identity and what they can actually contribute under pressure.

The Exit deserves particular attention because he isn’t just another colorful addition to the cast. He’s a recurring figure in Keene’s fiction, appearing in the connected stories “I Am an Exit” and “This Is Not an Exit,” collected in Jack’s Magic Beans. His presence connects The Complex to Keene’s wider body of work, but you don’t need that background to appreciate what he brings to this nightmare. Having a serial killer among the survivors changes the usual siege dynamics: someone who would ordinarily be the threat becomes a potentially invaluable ally against something even worse. His familiarity with violence gives the residents an advantage while making their dependence on him deeply uncomfortable. They aren’t simply cooperating with neighbors they’ve overlooked; they’re benefiting from the abilities of someone they would otherwise have every reason to fear. It adds a nasty moral wrinkle to their survival without turning him into a conventional hero.

Stephanie also gives the novel room to explore the difference between how someone understands herself and how other people see her. In a story built around strangers becoming unwilling allies, that distinction matters. Survival requires the residents to recognize one another as people rather than settle for whatever category seems easiest. The book’s human element isn’t separate from its horror machinery; it’s part of what makes that machinery work. Violence forces everyone into proximity, but cooperation requires something more. That’s a more interesting emotional basis for a siege story than simply dividing the cast into obvious heroes and disposable victims.

Keene’s handling of action is another major selling point. The novel has a cinematic quality, but not merely because it’s easy to imagine the blood on a screen. Its central situation produces immediate, understandable objectives: get away from danger, find shelter, stay together, and figure out whether escape is possible. The apartment setting keeps those goals close and urgent. There isn’t much room for the characters—or the narrative—to wander off. For readers who enjoy horror that keeps applying pressure rather than pausing for extensive explanation, that concentration is a considerable advantage.

The downside is that the same stripped-down approach can leave parts of the experience feeling underdeveloped. The dialogue sometimes has the efficiency of movie dialogue, delivering what a scene needs without always sounding entirely natural. Likewise, an ensemble this varied invites curiosity that a relentless survival plot can’t always satisfy. The character concepts are compelling, but the book’s commitment to forward motion limits how long it can sit with them. Whether that feels like a flaw depends on what you want from it: a sustained nightmare benefits from momentum, while a richer character study would need more breathing room.

The ending is likely to be the biggest dividing line. Keene doesn’t provide a tidy explanation for the outbreak, and the conclusion leaves substantial questions unanswered. Its abruptness recalls the ending of his zombie novel The Rising, which similarly split readers between those who appreciated being left hanging and those who felt the story stopped just when it needed to deliver a payoff. The comparison isn’t exact—The Rising received a direct continuation in City of the Dead—but the potential frustration is familiar: after becoming invested in the characters’ struggle, some readers will want more closure than Keene gives them here. There’s still a strong argument for leaving things uncertain. People caught in a catastrophe wouldn’t automatically discover its cause, and withholding answers preserves the sense that the world has become incomprehensible. But uncertainty and satisfaction aren’t interchangeable. The book works better as an immediate survival experience than as a mystery promising a fully worked-out solution.

For all its bloodshed and relentless action, The Complex works best when it makes you care about the people caught in the middle. Its viciousness matters because Keene gives the endangered residents enough individuality to make their situation more than a body-count exercise. The gore is plentiful, the central threat is unnerving, and the unlikely alliances provide an emotional thread through the carnage. Some dialogue could be smoother, and the unresolved ending won’t satisfy everyone, but those limitations don’t erase the effectiveness of the ride. This is lean, mean survival horror with a human center: an ugly night shared by people who never expected to need one another quite so badly.

Horror Book Review: The Fog (by James Herbert)

Posted on by Arleigh

“You’re waiting for something else to happen, aren’t you?” — John Holman

James Herbert’s The Fog treats civilization like something that can come apart in a single bad afternoon. That’s what gives this 1975 horror novel its kick: the sense that ordinary life, with all its routines and reassurances, is much less sturdy than people would like to believe. Release something poisonous into the air, strip away the usual restraints, and suddenly familiar places become killing grounds. Herbert isn’t subtle about any of this, but subtlety isn’t really the attraction. The book works by taking a straightforward nightmare and following it into increasingly ugly territory, until a local catastrophe starts looking like the beginning of a much larger collapse.

The story opens with an earthquake tearing through an English village and releasing a strange fog from underground. John Holman, an investigator for the Department of the Environment, survives exposure and eventually recovers, making him unusually valuable once the authorities begin investigating. The fog drives people toward madness and extreme violence, and it doesn’t remain conveniently confined to the place where it first appeared. As it moves across the countryside, Holman becomes involved in the effort to understand and stop it. Herbert gets the essentials moving quickly, establishing both the immediate danger and the uncomfortable possibility that nobody is equipped to handle it.

What makes the premise effective is how easily it turns the everyday world against itself. The threat isn’t simply a mysterious cloud you need to avoid. It’s the person who has already walked through it, carrying violence into a setting that seemed perfectly ordinary moments earlier. The distinction between danger and safety becomes harder to maintain when people themselves are the instruments of destruction. Herbert repeatedly returns to that instability. Homes, workplaces, and public spaces offer little protection once the behavior everyone takes for granted disappears. The familiar surroundings don’t soften the horror; they make its arrival feel more invasive.

The episodic structure is particularly good at showing that breakdown. Herbert regularly leaves the main investigation to introduce people whose lives are about to collide with the spreading disaster. Some receive only a brief sketch before things go wrong, but that quickness can be an advantage. You recognize enough of their circumstances to understand what’s being destroyed without needing a lengthy backstory. Before long, every new introduction carries an unpleasant little question: what’s going to happen to this person? Herbert turns that expectation into a reliable source of tension, even if the pattern eventually becomes easy to recognize.

Naturally, the answer is often something horrible. The notorious school sequence demonstrates how readily Herbert turns an institution associated with order into a scene of grotesque disorder. The shock comes from the violence, but also from seeing familiar roles and expectations completely overturned. Still, this approach has its limits. There are passages where sexual violence and extreme cruelty feel less like necessary developments than attempts to raise the stakes through sheer offensiveness. Herbert can make the collapse of restraint terrifying, but sometimes he seems a little too eager to show just how far he’s willing to go.

The expanding scope helps distinguish The Fog from later novels working with similar ideas, particularly Jack Ketchum’s Ladies’ Night and Richard Laymon’s One Rainy Night. Ketchum uses a chemical spill in New York to unleash murderous violence, while Laymon subjects a town to strange black rain that turns people into killers. Both keep their principal action relatively localized, emphasizing survival within a particular area. Herbert lets his threat travel. Instead of remaining one community’s nightmare, the disaster spreads into something increasingly apocalyptic. Getting out of one place isn’t much comfort when the next place could soon become just as dangerous.

That difference matters because it removes the reassuring possibility of a safe world somewhere outside the story’s boundaries. Those boundaries keep expanding. Individual atrocities become signs of a broader emergency, and the authorities’ struggle to respond suggests how quickly events could overtake them. Herbert also varies how he presents the destruction. Reports, discoveries, and glimpses of aftermath imply horrors beyond the scenes he directly dramatizes. That’s important in a novel this graphic. Relentless explicit violence could become numbing, but uncertainty allows the reader’s imagination to do some of the work and makes the larger catastrophe feel harder to measure.

Holman gives all this destruction a necessary center, although he’s more convincing as someone enduring an awful assignment than as a particularly layered character. His recovery makes him useful without making him invulnerable, which preserves some tension around his involvement. The more personal material is less successful. His relationship with Casey gives him something to care about beyond the immediate emergency, but it rarely feels as vivid as the surrounding horror. Herbert can make a stranger’s brief encounter with the fog memorable, yet the central relationship sometimes feels like an obligation the story pauses to acknowledge before returning to its stronger material.

The prose is similarly uneven. Herbert’s direct style works well when something terrible is happening, keeping the action clear and the pace brisk. He doesn’t spend pages decorating a scene when a sharp reversal will do the job. The weaknesses become more noticeable during conversations, explanations, and quieter emotional moments. Some dialogue sounds like characters exchanging the information required to get everyone into position. Scientific discussion and official briefings are useful to the plot, but they can flatten the atmosphere. You feel the difference between being caught inside a nightmare and sitting through a meeting about how the nightmare operates.

Those passages gradually pull The Fog toward the disaster thriller. Government secrecy, institutional responsibility, and attempts at containment give the narrative a practical direction, but they also reduce some of the threat’s mystery. Early on, the horror feels unpredictable and almost impossible to grasp. Later, it becomes something people can investigate, discuss, and potentially overcome. That shift isn’t inherently a problem, though Herbert handles the immediate terror more confidently than the explanations. The book is strongest when control is slipping away, not when people are describing how they might get it back.

Ultimately, The Fog is a rough-edged but effective horror novel whose momentum and vicious imagination outweigh its thinner characterization and awkward stretches. Not every atrocity earns its place, and the emotional material doesn’t always match the intensity of the disaster. But Herbert understands how to make ordinary life feel suddenly precarious. The widening threat gives his nastiest scenes consequences beyond their immediate shock value, suggesting that the damage might not stop with the people currently suffering. Civilization doesn’t collapse here because some grand force defeats it in battle. It starts coming apart because the people holding it together can no longer be trusted to do so.

Horror Book Review: One Rainy Night (by Richard Laymon)

Posted on by Arleigh

“A dark, warm and continuous rain falls on the town of Bixby…” — One Rainy Night, Richard Laymon

Richard Laymon’s One Rainy Night turns a town-wide downpour into a bloodbath, then spends the evening making sure nowhere feels safe. There’s no elaborate setup required to make that frightening. You just need people indoors, people outside, and enough distance between them to make staying dry a serious problem. Laymon understands the appeal immediately, delivering a fast, vicious survival story that rarely stops moving. It’s also messy, sleazy, and occasionally frustrating, with a stronger sense of how to escalate a nightmare than how to wrap one up. Whether that sounds entertaining or exhausting probably tells you something about how you’ll respond to this book.

The story takes place in Bixby, a town already shaken by the racist murder of a young Black student. Then an unnatural black rain begins falling, and anyone it touches becomes violently unhinged. Ordinary neighbors become attackers, familiar streets become death traps, and the distinction between safety and disaster suddenly comes down to a roof, a locked door, or an exposed patch of skin. Laymon follows several groups through the unfolding catastrophe, including a police officer, a babysitter and her boyfriend, people sheltering in a restaurant, and a group of young thugs whose cruelty predates the storm. That last detail gives the setup an extra sting: the rain isn’t introducing evil to an innocent community. It’s finding plenty already there.

The novel bears some basic similarities to Jack Ketchum’s Ladies’ Night, particularly in how an outside force turns ordinary people into vicious attackers and sends everyone else scrambling to survive. The big difference is the trigger. Ketchum uses a chemical spill to unleash the violence, with women becoming murderous predators, while Laymon goes the supernatural route with his black rain. Both books build their horror around the sudden collapse of familiar relationships and everyday safety, but Laymon’s approach gives the mayhem the feeling of a curse rather than a toxic disaster. His storm makes the whole town feel subject to something malicious, not merely caught in the aftermath of an accident.

What works best is the way Laymon turns the weather into a practical problem. Rain is usually background atmosphere in horror, something rattling against windows while the real threat approaches. Here, the weather is what makes almost every possible escape dangerous. Staying inside might protect you from the downpour, but it also leaves you trapped when the people outside decide they want in. Going somewhere else means risking the very thing you’re trying to avoid. It’s an effective little trap because the rules are easy to grasp, yet the situations they produce keep changing. You don’t need pages of explanation to understand why crossing an open stretch of ground could be terrifying.

The shifting viewpoints help keep that premise from wearing itself out too quickly. Rather than sticking with one group until its predicament becomes repetitive, Laymon cuts between different pockets of trouble. The babysitting storyline brings the vulnerability of a home invasion, while the restaurant scenes expand that anxiety into a larger siege. Trevor Hudson’s efforts to protect others give the night a more mobile perspective. These threads offer variations on the same basic nightmare without requiring the book to reinvent itself every few chapters. The transitions can feel calculated, especially when one strand becomes particularly tense, but that calculation generally works. There’s nearly always another problem waiting around the corner.

Laymon’s prose suits this kind of material. The emphasis is on action, physical danger, and the immediate question of what someone can do next. This isn’t a novel that asks you to linger over beautiful sentences or untangle layers of symbolism before anything happens. Its pleasures are more direct: an unsafe hiding place, a desperate decision, a confrontation that becomes uglier than expected. That straightforwardness gives the violence an uncomfortable closeness. Survival feels awkward and difficult rather than elegantly choreographed. The characters aren’t all equipped to handle what’s happening, and the gap between wanting to fight back and actually managing it provides some of the book’s strongest tension.

The characterization is more uneven. Laymon gives the central groups enough personal connections and immediate concerns to make their separation matter, but several people remain recognizable types rather than especially complicated individuals. Trevor supplies the protective police presence; Denise and Tom bring youthful intimacy into a situation that makes privacy and security impossible. The book is generally better at showing what people do under pressure than making their inner lives surprising. Still, that isn’t fatal to a story built around surviving a single night. You don’t necessarily need an elaborate biography to care whether someone gets a door shut in time. You do need some human investment, though, and the novel supplies it inconsistently.

The bigger sticking point is the sexual violence and the persistent overlap between lust, cruelty, and spectacle. The rain doesn’t simply make people aggressive; it strips away inhibitions in ways that repeatedly turn sexual menace into part of the threat. That makes the book genuinely unpleasant at times, but unpleasantness isn’t automatically the same thing as effective horror. Some of this material reinforces the sense of a community collapsing into predation. Elsewhere, it risks feeling like another excuse to push the exploitation angle harder. Readers comfortable with gore may still find this aspect much more difficult to take. It’s central enough to the novel that it deserves more than a vague warning about “mature content.”

The racist killing behind the story also creates expectations the book doesn’t fully satisfy. There’s a potentially powerful idea here about communal violence returning to consume the community that produced it. The presence of vicious characters who require no supernatural encouragement makes that reading especially tempting. But the novel’s main interest remains the rampage itself, not a sustained examination of racism, responsibility, or grief. That imbalance can leave the initiating crime feeling more like a mechanism for unleashing the horror than an experience given equivalent emotional attention. The premise has moral weight; the storytelling is usually in too much of a hurry to sit with it.

The ending is another limitation. After so much frantic movement, the resolution feels abrupt rather than fully satisfying. A book this relentless doesn’t necessarily need a lengthy aftermath, but it does need a landing that feels proportionate to the chaos. Here, the momentum that makes the middle so entertaining becomes a weakness: reaching the explanation and stopping the action aren’t quite the same as delivering a strong payoff.

Even with those reservations, One Rainy Night succeeds as a nasty, tightly focused piece of survival horror. Its strongest asset is the simplicity of its central danger and Laymon’s willingness to keep finding fresh trouble inside it. The result is an energetic, frequently gripping read held back by thin characterization, exploitative excess, and an underwhelming finish. It isn’t subtle, and it isn’t particularly interested in being tasteful. When it works, though, it makes the ordinary comfort of being indoors feel wonderfully fragile.

Horror Book Review: Ladies’ Night (by Jack Ketchum)

Posted on by Arleigh

“In the War Between Men and Women the Shooting Has Begun.” — Jack Ketchum

Jack Ketchum’s Ladies’ Night takes a premise that sounds like the setup for a trashy midnight movie and follows it somewhere genuinely unpleasant. A chemical spill in New York City turns women into sexually aggressive killers, leaving men scrambling to survive a night of escalating violence. That description pretty much tells you whether you want to go anywhere near this book. What it doesn’t tell you is how effectively Ketchum can turn an outrageous concept into a tense survival story—or how often the concept threatens to swallow everything interesting about it. This is lean, nasty horror with considerable momentum and some serious limitations.

The central character is Tom Braun, a husband and father whose wandering eye gives him an immediate disadvantage in the likability department. When the outbreak erupts, his ordinary selfishness suddenly looks small beside the catastrophe unfolding around him. After escaping violence at a bar, he realizes his son, Andy, is back at their apartment with his wife, Susan, who may also be affected. Getting home becomes the story’s driving objective. It is a straightforward hook, but a strong one: surviving the streets means little if the person Tom needs to protect is trapped somewhere supposedly safe.

What works best is the collision between that intimate fear and the larger urban disaster. Tom has a specific destination, while the city around him keeps producing new obstacles. Ketchum doesn’t need an elaborate mystery to maintain suspense; he needs distance, uncertainty, and the knowledge that every delay could matter. The movement through a collapsing New York gives the book something of a nightmare journey’s rhythm. Each escape offers temporary relief rather than security. The comparison to The Warriors is especially apt because both stories turn crossing the city into a desperate struggle to get home (and, for the ancient history nerds out there, that film’s literary roots trace back to Xenophon’s Anabasis). Different circumstances, same nightmare of having a destination and far too many people between you and it.

Ketchum’s prose suits that urgency. The writing is direct, physical, and more interested in what happens next than in stopping to admire itself. That approach can look simple until you consider how easily a book like this could become exhausting or ridiculous. The narrative needs to keep its outrageous premise moving fast enough that the immediate danger remains convincing. For much of the novel, it does. The brevity helps, too. This isn’t a sprawling apocalypse with chapters devoted to explaining every institution’s response. It stays close to the panic, pushing its characters through an increasingly hostile environment.

Then there is the violence, which deserves more than a routine “not for the squeamish” warning. Ladies’ Night combines graphic injury, sexual aggression, and the destruction of familiar relationships. Its nastiness comes partly from making intimacy dangerous: attraction becomes a trap, and people who should offer comfort become sources of terror. That is more disturbing than simply putting monsters on street corners. At its strongest, the book makes the body itself feel unreliable, something that can be chemically commandeered and turned against other people. At its weakest, the same material feels like another opportunity to deliver a grotesque spectacle.

That distinction matters because the novel’s gender politics are impossible to separate from its entertainment value. Women become the threatening population, while men occupy the principal survival perspective. The setup also provides repeated circumstances in which violence against women becomes a matter of immediate self-defense. You can recognize that these women are victims of contamination rather than willing participants and still find the resulting arrangement uncomfortable. The issue isn’t simply that the book contains offensive material. It’s that its central mechanism keeps returning to a narrow, heavily sexualized vision of female monstrosity.

There is a potentially richer horror story inside that discomfort. A person being forced into murderous behavior is horrifying for the person losing control, not just for whoever stands nearby. But Ladies’ Night largely draws its momentum from the men trying to survive the consequences. That emphasis limits how fully the women register as people experiencing their own catastrophe. The book can therefore feel caught between two effects: the tragedy of human beings being transformed into threats and the lurid excitement of fighting those threats. The second is generally louder, which makes the first harder to feel consistently.

Tom adds some useful friction because he isn’t presented as an uncomplicated model husband. His infidelity puts an ugly edge on the rescue narrative: a man who has been neglecting his marriage now has to fight his way back toward his family. That doesn’t automatically make him a deeply developed character, but it gives the action a more interesting starting point than simple heroism. His concern for Andy supplies a credible emotional priority without requiring the reader to excuse his earlier behavior. The novel works better when those two judgments can coexist—he can be selfish and still desperately want to save his child.

The limitation is that momentum frequently substitutes for depth. Once the emergency takes over, there is little room for the characters to become much more than their immediate needs and reactions. That isn’t fatal in a short survival novel, but it affects how the violence lands. When characterization stays thin, suffering can become another event in the action rather than something with lasting emotional weight. Andy’s vulnerability gives the story an essential human anchor, yet the surrounding mayhem sometimes competes with that concern instead of intensifying it. The book is gripping more reliably than it is moving.

Ladies’ Night left me more impressed by Ketchum’s ability to sustain tension than by what he does with the ideas underneath it. As a fast, brutal urban nightmare, it delivers: the objective is clear, the danger keeps shifting, and the prose rarely lets the pressure ease. As an exploration of gender, intimacy, or the people caught inside its catastrophe, it is much less satisfying. Its provocations are stronger than its insights, and its nastiness occasionally feels like a shortcut rather than an achievement. Still, there is real craft beneath the exploitation premise. I’d call it a qualified recommendation for readers who enjoy extreme horror and can tolerate an ugly premise without expecting the book to fully interrogate it. It gets under your skin, but not always for the reasons that make a horror novel great.

Horror Game Review: Tenebris Somnia (by Andrés Borghi, Tobías Rusjan & Saibot Studios)

Posted on by Arleigh

“What if they aren’t just nightmares…” — Tenebris Somnia

A breakup can leave plenty of unfinished business, but fighting monsters in your ex’s apartment is a pretty extreme way to deal with it. That’s the uncomfortable territory Tenebris Somnia explores, turning lingering concern and shared history into the foundations of a supernatural nightmare. Developed by Andrés Borghi, Tobías Rusjan, and Saibot Studios, this indie horror game pairs retro 8-bit-style gameplay with live-action sequences. The combination gives it an immediately recognizable identity, but the relationship underneath keeps it from feeling like a technical experiment. Its strongest idea is that leaving somebody behind doesn’t necessarily mean escaping the life you built together.

Julia, a filmmaker, returns to her ex-boyfriend Ivan’s apartment after recurring nightmares show him being attacked by horrific creatures. Checking on him seems reasonable enough, even if revisiting their former home already promises an awkward conversation. Unfortunately, Ivan’s involvement with a mysterious cult has made the situation considerably worse than Julia expects. She becomes caught in spaces distorted by memory and supernatural forces, where their shared past is no longer something she can keep at a comfortable distance. Concern gets her through the door, but understanding what’s happening requires confronting more than the immediate danger.

Their background in filmmaking makes that history more interesting than a generic troubled romance. Creative collaboration has become tangled up with affection, ambition, and resentment, leaving Julia and Ivan’s personal disappointments difficult to separate from their artistic ones. Revisiting the relationship means questioning what they wanted from each other and how those expectations changed. Julia also has her own convictions, which keeps her from becoming a passive visitor inside Ivan’s breakdown. She has an emotional stake in the memories being uncovered, and the story benefits from treating their history as something both characters experienced rather than something only he gets to define.

That tension between recognition and discomfort carries into the presentation. During gameplay, the retro 8-bit-style pixel art reduces rooms, characters, and monsters to relatively simple forms. It’s a deliberate choice, but not one everyone will enjoy. Players accustomed to hyper-realistic CG graphics may find the chunky sprites and limited detail more distancing than frightening, especially if visual realism is central to their enjoyment of horror. The game asks you to let your imagination finish the picture. If that aesthetic leaves you cold, the live-action footage won’t necessarily make the playable sections more appealing.

For players willing to embrace it, though, the contrast does more than provide a novelty. A creature that looked unpleasant in pixel form suddenly has texture, weight, and a disturbingly physical presence. Recognizable details connect the two styles, making the filmed sequences feel like a closer view of the same nightmare. Careful framing and expressive performances help maintain that connection, with Clara Kovacic giving Julia a human presence beyond her small playable sprite. The practical and digital effects also benefit from relatively clear footage. Without artificial VHS damage constantly obscuring the image, the monsters have nowhere to hide—and neither do you.

Between those sequences, Tenebris Somnia follows a familiar survival-horror routine of searching rooms, collecting objects, solving puzzles, and managing limited supplies. The sound design reinforces the uncertainty through harsh effects and recognizable monster noises, making danger a concern before it necessarily appears on-screen. Puzzles encourage you to understand the environment rather than simply move through it. Strange connections suit a setting distorted by memory, provided the clues establish enough logic. Progress becomes less satisfying when an easily overlooked item or interaction point sends you circling the same room. Careful investigation builds atmosphere; repeatedly checking everything because one detail barely registers tends to drain it.

Combat is less assured, largely because its survival-horror intentions are more convincing than its execution. Melee attacks, firearms, and evasive movement give Julia options, while limited ammunition makes fighting a decision rather than a reflex. Removing an enemy might make exploration safer, but those bullets could be more valuable later. That’s an effective source of tension when encounters cooperate with it. The problem is that stiffness can shift your attention away from resource management and toward the basic difficulty of carrying out your plan. Instead of worrying about whether an attack is worth attempting, you can end up worrying about whether it will behave as expected.

Cramped spaces make that friction more noticeable because there’s less room to recover when an attack or evasive movement goes wrong. Horror benefits from making a protagonist vulnerable, but vulnerability still needs consistent rules. Otherwise, the fear of getting hurt gives way to irritation about how the damage happened. Boss encounters expose those weaknesses more clearly. Their designs make a strong first impression, but some fights demand more precision and repetition than the mechanics comfortably support. Checkpoints soften failure without making every retry engaging. The creatures are often more compelling as disturbing presences than as opponents you have to repeatedly bring down.

Those shortcomings keep Tenebris Somnia from being an effortless recommendation, particularly for players who need polished combat or dislike retro graphics. Still, its relationship drama, filmmaking background, and mixed-media presentation reinforce one another in a way that gives the experience genuine personality. The monsters aren’t the only reason Julia’s return feels uncomfortable; they make an already complicated reunion physically dangerous. For horror fans drawn to atmosphere and unsettling imagery, that combination has plenty of appeal. The visit begins with concern for someone Julia once loved, then becomes a reminder that caring about a person and understanding what they’ve become are very different things.

Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival (by Saber Interactive) Horror Game Review

Posted on by Arleigh

“Your suffering has only just begun, we have such sights to show you.” — Pinhead

Hell is not supposed to be inviting, but Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival understands that the most dangerous doors are the ones that look like they might lead somewhere extraordinary. Developed and published by Saber Interactive and released in October 2026 for PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2, this first-person survival-horror action game is a new chapter in the franchise rather than a direct adaptation of any single film. It was written in collaboration with Clive Barker himself, and that involvement gives it a stronger artistic identity than most licensed horror games manage. Revival understands that Hellraiser is not merely about monsters, chains, and gore. It is about desire, pain, ritual, bodily transformation, and the unsettling possibility that suffering can feel like a doorway to something greater.

The setup is classic Hellraiser. Aidan Lynch gets pulled into a nightmare involving Cenobites, cultists, and Pinhead after his girlfriend opens the Genesis Configuration, a puzzle box that is absolutely not the sort of thing you should mess with if you value having a normal weekend. From there, Aidan has to survive, fight, sneak, solve puzzles, and eventually try to rescue her from hell. It is a simple premise, but it gives the game room to lean into the franchise’s central themes. This is not just “monster chases person through dark hallway.” It is about obsession, temptation, the body as a site of horror, and the dangerous seduction of giving yourself over to something that promises transcendence and delivers a very bad time. The story has its clumsy moments, but the relationship between Aidan and the nightmare world around him gives the campaign more emotional weight than your average survival-horror rescue plot.

Visually, Revival is often spectacular in the most upsetting possible way. The game understands that Hellraiser is not merely about gore; it is about elaborate, almost ceremonial ugliness. Flesh is sculpted rather than simply splattered. The Cenobites look like religious icons that have been left in a butcher shop for a century. Pinhead, unsurprisingly, looks fantastic, and the game clearly understands that his presence needs to feel less like a slasher villain and more like an elegant, patient force of cosmic punishment. The detailed character models, cadaver-laden environments, and Escher-like spaces are major strengths. There are rooms in this game that feel like they were designed by someone who looked at a cathedral, a medical museum, and a bad acid trip, then asked, “What if all three had a baby?”

The sound design deserves just as much credit. Chains rattle, flesh tears, distant voices groan, and the whole soundscape keeps you uneasy even when nothing is actively trying to remove your skin. That matters because Hellraiser: Revival is less interested in constant jump scares than in maintaining a low, persistent sense of dread. It wants you to feel like you have wandered somewhere you were never meant to be, and that the walls are not just walls. The atmosphere is the game’s best weapon. Even when the mechanics get repetitive or the combat turns sloppy, the world itself keeps pulling you forward.

Gameplay-wise, Revival is a first-person blend of survival horror and action, and its closest comparison is probably the classic first-person horror game Condemned: Criminal Origins rather than the usual over-the-shoulder formula associated with most Resident Evil games. You control Aidan as he explores hostile environments, manages limited resources, crafts healing supplies and ammunition, solves puzzles, uses stealth, and fights both hostile humans and demonic Cenobites. Like Condemned, it puts you directly behind the character’s eyes, emphasizes close-quarters violence and environmental unease, and makes combat feel messy, desperate, and physical rather than clean and cinematic. That said, Resident Evil has dabbled in first-person horror too, most notably with Resident Evil Village, so Revival is not operating in a completely unfamiliar space. It simply leans harder into the grimy, immediate, first-person brutality of something like Condemned than into the more polished action-horror rhythm of modern Resident Evil.

The Genesis Configuration is the game’s best original mechanic. It is not just a puzzle box you manipulate during quiet exploration; it can also become a combat and traversal tool, giving Aidan supernatural abilities that help distinguish the game from other first-person horror titles. When the game lets you use the box in clever ways, Revival feels like it has found its own identity. The problem is that those moments are not consistent enough. Too often, the game retreats into standard survival-horror routines: find key, open door, craft item, shoot monster, repeat. The environments are so memorable that you forgive some of this, but you still notice it.

Combat is where the game is at its weakest. At its best, it is merely average; at its worst, it is outright clunky. The unreliable hitboxes are a persistent problem, with melee swings and gunfire sometimes failing to connect in ways that feel unfair rather than intentionally punishing. Resource management does not help matters, because the game can make ammunition, healing items, and breakable equipment feel scarce without always giving you a satisfying reason for that scarcity. If you have played Resident Evil Village or MachineGames’ Indiana Jones game, the difference in feel will be obvious. Those games can make first-person combat tense, responsive, and physically convincing. Revival, by comparison, can feel like a slog: enemies absorb hits inconsistently, weapons lack satisfying feedback, and encounters that should be frightening instead become tedious exercises in whiffing attacks and managing a stubborn inventory. The combat is not broken, but it often lacks the weight and precision that make great horror action feel rewarding.

The game’s length, however, hits a pretty comfortable Goldilocks range. If you are mainly playing through the story on Normal difficulty without hunting down every Easter egg, collectible, or optional side quest, you can likely finish it in around ten to fifteen hours. Completionists who want to see everything the game has to offer can probably stretch that to somewhere between twenty and thirty-five hours. That feels right for this kind of experience. Hellraiser: Revival is not trying to be Elden Ring or Skyrim, and thank goodness for that. It is a contained, atmospheric horror campaign rather than an open-world time sink, and its runtime gives the story enough room to breathe without wearing out its welcome.

The ending also gives the story a little extra replay value without turning the game into a sprawling choice-driven epic. Near the conclusion, Aidan faces one major decision, and the choice you make determines which of the game’s two endings you receive. I will not spoil what those outcomes are, but the decision feels appropriately Hellraiser: it is less about picking the obviously heroic option and more about deciding what Aidan is willing to sacrifice, accept, or become in order to reach the end of his nightmare. It is a smart way to close a story built around temptation, and it gives players a reason to consider how differently the final chapter might unfold under another choice.

The enemy design helps compensate for the rougher combat. Cenobites are inherently terrifying, and the game uses them well in chase sequences and moments where you feel trapped rather than empowered. There are sections where the game pushes you to run, hide, or simply survive long enough to reach safety, and those are among its most effective sequences. The best horror games understand that the player should not always feel like an action hero, and Revival understands that better than it understands, say, melee hit registration. When a Cenobite is bearing down on you and the soundtrack turns into a wall of industrial dread, the game absolutely works.

The content warnings are not decorative. This is an extremely graphic game, with intense violence, dismemberment, nudity, sexual content, drugs, and body horror that goes well beyond standard AAA horror fare. Some players will find that excessive. Others will argue, fairly, that Hellraiser has always been about transgression, and that a sanitized version would feel dishonest. I mostly land in the second camp, though the game does occasionally mistake intensity for depth. There are moments where the shock value feels purposeful and thematically connected, and other moments where it feels like the game is shouting, “Look how extreme we are!” The strongest Hellraiser material has always had a strange philosophical seriousness underneath the flesh and chains. Revival captures that sometimes, but not always.

So where does that leave Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival? I think it is a flawed but genuinely worthwhile horror game, especially for people who already love the franchise. It is not a masterpiece on the level of the best modern Resident Evil entries, and it does not fully escape the feeling of being a very well-dressed genre pastiche. But it has something many horror games lack: a real artistic identity. It is ugly in a deliberate, expressive way. It is uncomfortable on purpose. It treats hell not as a generic demon dimension but as a place shaped by appetite, pain, ritual, and desire. The Genesis Configuration gives it a few moments of genuine originality, the two-ending finale gives its themes a fitting final test, and the atmosphere carries it through stretches where the gameplay repeats itself.

If you are sensitive to extreme gore or sexual content, this is an easy skip. If you want polished, mechanically innovative survival horror above all else, you may come away disappointed. But if you have ever watched the first two Hellraiser films and wished a game could capture that specific blend of gothic elegance and bodily nightmare, Revival is absolutely worth enduring its rough edges. It is a game that occasionally hurts to play, though not always in the way it intends. Still, for a franchise that has spent decades exploring the thin line between pleasure and suffering, that feels weirdly appropriate.

Review: Resident Evil (dir. by Zac Cregger)

Posted on by Arleigh

“I’ve only used a gun in video games.” — Bryan

Resident Evil is a smart, tense, and surprisingly faithful reinvention of Capcom’s long-running survival-horror series—not because it tries to copy a single game beat for beat, but because it understands what makes the games unnerving in the first place. Written and directed by Zac Cregger, the film uses the world of Resident Evil as its foundation while telling a new story during the Raccoon City outbreak. Its main character is Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, an ordinary medical courier whose attempt to complete a delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital drops him into the early stages of a biological disaster. He is not a S.T.A.R.S. officer, a government agent, or a pre-established franchise hero. He is simply a guy trying to finish a job and survive a night that becomes more horrifying, chaotic, and impossible with every block he crosses.

That basic setup proves to be one of the movie’s smartest choices. Resident Evil has no shortage of iconic protagonists, from Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine to Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield, but Bryan gives the film a fresh perspective on its apocalypse. He is not entering Raccoon City with a gun, years of training, or inside knowledge of Umbrella. He starts as someone who does not understand why parts of the city are suddenly locked down, why emergency rooms are overwhelmed, or why ordinary people are behaving with terrifying violence. That makes him a natural audience surrogate, but he is not just a blank stand-in. Austin Abrams gives Bryan a nervous, tightly wound energy that fits someone constantly trying to keep pace with a situation that has already moved beyond anyone’s control.

The decision to center an everyman is also a strong way of translating the vulnerability of the games. In a great Resident Evil game, the player might eventually find a shotgun, healing items, and enough ammunition to handle a dangerous enemy, but the first hours are defined by instability. There is never quite enough ammo. There is never a guarantee that the room ahead is safe. You learn the layout of a location because you have to, not because exploration is relaxed. Cregger’s movie cannot reproduce the exact tension of an inventory screen or the anxiety of deciding whether to use a green herb now or save it for later, but it captures the emotional logic behind those mechanics. Bryan makes choices with incomplete information, moves through increasingly hostile spaces, and keeps going even when every instinct tells him to turn around and run.

What makes the film especially interesting is that it does not adapt any one game in the series. This is not a straight retelling of the Spencer Mansion incident from Resident Evil, Leon and Claire’s first night in Resident Evil 2, or Jill’s escape from Nemesis in Resident Evil 3. Instead, Cregger uses the games as backdrop and inspiration for an original story set in the franchise’s universe. The film takes place alongside the Raccoon City outbreak associated with Resident Evil 2, but Bryan’s journey is separate from the established storylines that fans already know. That may disappoint viewers who want an exact cinematic recreation of every familiar character and location, but it is ultimately the movie’s greatest advantage.

A strict adaptation would have to navigate an almost impossible set of fan expectations. If the movie directly followed Resident Evil 2, viewers would be waiting for the exact arrival at the Raccoon City Police Department, the exact early meetings between Leon and Claire, the exact role of Ada Wong, the exact appearances of William Birkin and Mr. X, and the exact descent into Umbrella’s underground facilities. A direct version of the original Resident Evil would carry the same burden with the Spencer Mansion, the S.T.A.R.S. team, the laboratory, and the Tyrant. That approach can quickly make a movie feel less like a story and more like a checklist. Cregger avoids that trap by taking the series’ atmosphere, visual identity, rules, and mythology, then building a new nightmare around them.

That freedom restores a sense of uncertainty. Even viewers who know Resident Evil 2 inside and out cannot assume they know where Bryan’s route will take him, who can be trusted, or when the next threat will appear. The film can nod toward familiar Resident Evil concepts without making them feel like obligatory fan-service stops. A locked facility, an Umbrella insignia, a contaminated corridor, or the emergence of a more elaborate biological threat carries weight because it serves the story first. The pleasure comes from seeing the franchise’s DNA interpreted in a fresh way, not from watching the movie pause so the audience can recognize a collectible reference.

Umbrella is treated as much more than a logo or a few bits of background lore. The company remains the central force behind the horror, and that gives the film a more specific personality than a typical zombie outbreak story. Umbrella is terrifying because it represents private power with no moral limit: a corporation able to hide experiments, manipulate information, weaponize biology, and treat ordinary people as expendable collateral. Its infected victims and bio-organic weapons are not random monsters wandering into the story. They are products. Someone designed them, approved them, tested them, and determined that whatever potential value they offered was worth the risk. That is the darker edge of Resident Evil: the monsters are terrible, but the systems that created them are worse.

Cregger understands that this corporate horror needs to feel physical. A zombie is frightening because it is a person reduced to a violent, decaying shell. A more advanced creature is frightening because it reveals experimentation that has pushed life beyond recognizable limits. The body horror works best when it does not feel ornamental. It should make the audience imagine the research process behind the mutation, the human cost of the experimentation, and the awful combination of arrogance and indifference that allowed it to happen. Resident Evil does not need to constantly escalate into larger monsters merely for spectacle. Its creatures matter when they feel like increasingly disturbing evidence of what Umbrella has been building in secret.

Cregger’s background makes him an unusually strong fit for this material. Barbarian worked because it transformed a familiar location into a space of escalating dread. The house at the center of that film is not just a setting; it becomes a trap, a maze, and a place with its own buried history. Cregger knows how to make architecture feel dangerous. He understands that a corridor, a basement, an unlit stairwell, or a locked door can generate more tension than an explosion if the audience believes something might be waiting just outside the frame. That is basically the visual language of Resident Evil.

The games have always relied on locations that feel compromised. The Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil, the Raccoon City Police Department in Resident Evil 2, and the ruined streets in Resident Evil 3 turn places that should represent order, security, or civilization into traps. A police station becomes a fortress that cannot protect anyone. A hospital becomes a source of infection. A laboratory becomes proof that the disaster was not an accident. Cregger’s film channels that environmental fear well. Bryan’s path through Raccoon City is not just a string of monster encounters. It becomes a worsening descent through spaces that are failing one after another, with every new location offering a possible route forward while also revealing another level of the catastrophe.

The basic premise involving Bryan’s medical delivery gives the movie a focused sense of movement without spoiling the larger story. He has a practical objective, but each step toward completing it pushes him deeper into Raccoon City’s outbreak. The film lets the audience learn alongside him through half-understood warnings, panicked strangers, sealed-off areas, fragments of information, and signs that the official story does not add up. Cregger does not rush to explain every piece of Umbrella’s involvement immediately. He lets the mystery build around Bryan’s immediate need to survive, which is exactly how the strongest Resident Evil games turn scattered notes, hidden rooms, and locked pathways into part of their storytelling.

The influence of Weapons is especially clear in that willingness to let confusion and dread hang in the air. Cregger has shown an interest in narratives where the audience slowly pieces together a larger horror from incomplete perspectives and disturbing details. Resident Evil applies that instinct to a world built around secrecy. Umbrella does not announce itself with a complete explanation. Its presence is felt through the consequences: infected civilians, closed facilities, experiments that have slipped into the open, and the growing realization that Raccoon City’s crisis has roots much deeper than a random medical emergency. That approach turns exposition into suspense. The audience wants answers, but it also understands that every answer is likely to lead somewhere worse.

The film’s tone is another area where Cregger’s sensibility helps. Resident Evil should be scary, but it should not pretend that the series is grounded, ordinary horror. The franchise has always mixed genuine survival dread with B-movie science fiction, action-movie intensity, melodrama, and moments of pure, glorious weirdness. The same series that can make a player afraid of opening a narrow hallway door can also introduce giant mutant reptiles, insects, experimental super-soldiers, and outlandish biological mutations. Cregger seems comfortable operating in that space. Barbarian showed that he can move between dark humor, disgust, shock, and legitimate tension without flattening the experience into parody. That balance is crucial for Resident Evil, which should be intense without becoming embarrassed by its own pulp imagination.

The film is strongest when it lets the strange material land through the characters’ reactions rather than making a joke of it. Bryan does not become an instant action hero who dispatches monsters with effortless confidence. His fear, exhaustion, and disbelief help ground the increasingly bizarre developments around him. When the story introduces threats beyond the initial infected, those moments work because they feel like the next horrible stage of Umbrella’s hidden program rather than a required entry in a franchise encyclopedia. Cregger understands that a recognizable monster or concept only matters if it changes the stakes for the character in front of it.

There is also welcome restraint in the scale of the movie. Raccoon City’s outbreak is huge, but Resident Evil keeps the experience close to the ground. It is not mainly about elite military units, globe-spanning conspiracies, or invincible heroes fighting through armies of infected. It is about one man trying to get through a city that has become a death trap. A blocked street becomes a serious obstacle. A working car becomes a lifeline. A few infected people can be overwhelming when Bryan has limited ammunition, no clear escape route, and no way to know who has already turned. That survival focus lets the film preserve the essential question behind every good Resident Evil scenario: not “How can the hero kill everything?” but “How can the hero make it through the next room?”

Cregger’s narrative choices will probably alienate a certain segment of the fanbase, and that is understandable. Some viewers will want a movie built around Leon, Claire, Chris, Jill, or another established character. Others will want a cleaner adaptation of a specific game, with its canonical set pieces, key relationships, and familiar story beats intact. Those are reasonable desires, especially because Resident Evil has such an enormous cast of beloved characters and such a rich backlog of stories that have never been adapted faithfully. Cregger’s movie is taking a chance by prioritizing an original protagonist and a separate narrative over direct adaptation.

But that risk is also what makes the film work. Fans who go in with open expectations may be surprised by how naturally it fits inside the Resident Evil universe. It does not need to repeat every event from the games to understand their identity. The movie has the oppressive spaces, the escalating survival pressure, the corporate conspiracy, the infection-driven horror, and the feeling that any new revelation will only lead deeper into a nightmare. Bryan’s story feels like a side route through Raccoon City’s catastrophe—a story that could exist in the margins of the games without contradicting the dread, danger, and bizarre biohazard logic that define them. The film asks fans to accept that it is not trying to replace the games they love. It is trying to tell another story that could only happen in this universe.

Ultimately, Zac Cregger’s Resident Evil succeeds because it recognizes that the franchise’s appeal is not limited to familiar names, costumes, creatures, or Umbrella logos. It is about the sickening feeling of being trapped in a hostile place with too little information, too few resources, and no guarantee that the person beside you will still be alive—or human—by the next scene. By making Bryan an ordinary medical courier caught in an outbreak, Cregger gives the audience a vulnerable and compelling guide through Raccoon City. By using the games as inspiration instead of adapting a single title word for word, he gives the story space to surprise viewers who already know the series inside and out.

As a fan of the games, the film more than hits the mark of what a Resident Evil movie should feel like. It has the oppressive locations, slow-burn conspiracy, grotesque biological horror, corporate corruption, and sense of escalating hopelessness that define the series at its best. More importantly, it captures the survival-horror tension that has always been at the heart of the games: the dread of stepping into an unfamiliar room, the suspicion that supplies will not last, and the sinking realization that every answer leads deeper into Umbrella’s nightmare.

As a horror fan, Resident Evil also confirms that Zac Cregger is one of the best filmmakers currently working in the genre. After Barbarian and Weapons, this makes him three for three. Each film has its own identity, but all three display the same gifts: command of suspense, strikingly unsettling imagery, a feel for dark humor that never entirely breaks the danger, and the confidence to take an audience somewhere more disturbing than it expects. Resident Evil turns Raccoon City into a living maze of infection, secrecy, and panic, where every locked door feels like it might lead to an escape—or to the worst possible decision. It is not merely a strong video-game adaptation. It is another major win for Cregger, and a reminder that the right filmmaker can make even one of horror gaming’s most familiar worlds feel frighteningly new.

Review: Send Help (dir. by Sam Raimi)

Posted on by Arleigh

“We’re not in the office anymore, Bradley.” — Linda Liddle

Sam Raimi’s Send Help is a nasty, funny, and surprisingly romantic little pressure cooker that strands two archetypes—the mousy doormat and the smug rich kid—on a desert island and then slowly turns the screws until the film’s “eat the rich” satire curdles into genuine horror. It is neither the triumphant, all‑timer comeback some fans might crave nor a lazy retread, but a confident mid‑budget horror‑comedy from a director who still knows exactly how to make an audience wince and cackle in the same breath.

Raimi and writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift build Send Help on a simple but potent premise: Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), a meek corporate strategist and survival‑show obsessive, has been promised a promotion by her former boss, only for the new CEO—his son Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien)—to hand the job to his frat‑bro buddy Donovan and try to shuffle Linda into a dead‑end role. He finds her embarrassing and even comments on her smell; she swallows the humiliation until a company plane trip to a business summit ends in a violent crash, leaving Linda and Bradley as the only known survivors on a remote island in the Gulf of Thailand. Out here, Linda’s years of reality‑TV survival fandom and wilderness prepper skills suddenly matter, while Bradley’s only proven talents—golf, networking, and cruelty—are exposed as useless.

The first act, set in the office and on the doomed flight, plays as Raimi’s version of workplace horror, pitched somewhere between Drag Me to Hell’s moral fable and a nastier episode of The Office. McAdams leans into Linda’s awkwardness without turning her into a caricature, sketching a woman who has internalized decades of minor humiliations and found solace in parasocial survival fantasies. O’Brien, meanwhile, riffs on the archetype of the tech‑adjacent finance bro, weaponizing charm into something brittle and mean so that every “joke” lands like a micro‑aggression. Raimi shoots these early scenes with brisk, unfussy energy, reserving his more flamboyant camera moves for moments when Linda’s resentment starts to spike; the tonal hint is clear that the island will be where his signature style truly erupts.

Once the plane goes down, Send Help shifts into a survival thriller that gradually becomes a duel, and this is where the film finds its most compelling rhythm. Linda wakes up, builds a shelter, secures water, and—crucially—chooses to help the injured Bradley despite every reason not to, only to be met with the same entitled barking as in the office. She abandons him for days to bake in the sun and dehydrate, only to return at the brink and ration out water on her terms, turning what could have been a straightforward revenge fantasy into a looping series of power reversals. Raimi milks the island setting for physical comedy—failed fire‑starting, slapstick injuries, disgusting food gags—before undercutting the laughs with sudden spikes of cruelty and violence that remind you someone could easily die out here.

Raimi’s direction is where Send Help most clearly announces itself as his homecoming to horror. Even without demons or supernatural curses, he brings back the aggressive visual language: lunging crash zooms, canted angles that seem to tilt with Linda’s shifting moral compass, and kinetic tracking shots that whip around the camp as arguments turn into physical scuffles. The gore is heightened but not constant—geysers of blood appear at key turning points, functioning as exclamation marks on the escalating class war rather than wall‑to‑wall splatter. You can still feel the Three Stooges in the staging; even the nastiest beats often end on a punchline built around bodily fluids, improvised weapons, or the absurd indignity of almost dying because you slipped on a fish.

Tonally, the film walks a provocative tightrope between screwball rom‑com and survival horror, and your mileage will depend on how much whiplash you are willing to embrace. There are scenes that play almost like a twisted date movie—Linda cooking up makeshift dinners, trying to build a semblance of “home,” Bradley begrudgingly softening—only for the dynamic to swerve back into emotional manipulation or outright brutality. The film clearly flirts with the tradition of 1930s battle‑of‑the‑sexes comedies, but here the gender and class politics are sharper, and the potential for lethal violence never disappears. For some viewers, this constant oscillation will feel thrillingly unstable; for others, it may make the film’s ultimate stance on these characters’ relationship and culpability feel muddier than intended.

Narratively, Send Help borrows its class‑flipped survival template from the kind of satirical, wealth‑skewering stories where workers suddenly control the only skills that matter. The formerly “lowly” employee—in this case Linda rather than a bathroom janitor or ship’s cleaner—suddenly dictates the terms of existence, upending the old hierarchy once the corporate infrastructure is gone. Where broader ensemble satires linger on systemic critique, Raimi narrows the focus to a two‑hander and uses genre excess to explore how vengeance, desire, and survival blur together when the rules are erased. This narrower scope sometimes makes the class commentary feel schematic—you can spot each new reversal coming like a story beat in a screenwriting manual—but it also gives McAdams and O’Brien ample room to shade their roles.

Performance‑wise, McAdams is the film’s anchor and secret weapon. She charts Linda’s evolution from shy, apologetic office drone to ruthless island operator without losing sight of the character’s essential decency, so that her darker choices land as both cathartic and unsettling. O’Brien has the flashier arc in some ways, modulating Bradley from cartoonish jerk to scared, dependent man‑child and, eventually, something more morally ambiguous as he learns how to play the island power game himself. Their chemistry thrives on friction; the film is at its best when it lets them volley insults, bargains, and threats in long, increasingly twisted negotiations over food, shelter, and the possibility of rescue.

Where Send Help falters is largely in its final stretch, where Raimi has to decide just how far he’s willing to push the “eat the rich” fantasy and what that means for Linda’s soul. Without spoiling specifics, the climax leans into brutal spectacle and a last‑minute moral turn that some may read as a cop‑out and others as a necessary corrective to pure revenge porn. The thematic through‑line—that capitalism warps everyone it touches and that power corrupts even the formerly powerless—is coherent enough, but a few late plot contrivances and cameo‑style appearances from supporting players feel more functional than organic.

Ultimately, Send Help plays like a spiritual cousin to Drag Me to Hell: a small, mean moral tale about how a single workplace injustice can metastasize into something monstrous once the trappings of civilization fall away. It may not reinvent survival horror or class satire, and viewers hoping for the wild supernatural invention of Evil Dead II or the operatic sweep of Spider‑Man 2 might find it comparatively contained. But as a brisk, roughly 100‑minute showcase for Raimi’s enduring flair, anchored by a terrific McAdams performance and a gleefully ugly sense of humor, it is a welcome return to the genre that made his name—and a reminder that sometimes the scariest demons are just your coworkers, stripped of HR and given a machete.

Horror on the Lens: Alien Isolation (Dev. by Creative Assembly, Published by Sega)

Posted on by Leonard Wilson

Alien-IsolationThere’s a quote from one of my old White Wolf books – I think Richard Dansky wrote it in Wraith:The Oblivion – that goes like this:

“The other aspect of horror is its sense of finality and the inability of a character to change it. If terror is the moment when the monster charges down the hall, horror is the instant you discover your feet are rooted to the spot.” 

Everyone who’s seen Ridley Scott’s Alien remembers the scene where Lambert is cornered by the Alien. Yaphet Kotto’s Parker is yelling at her to get out of the way so that he could use his Flamethrower, but she replies, crying..”I can’t!” I always thought that all she had to do was just kind of jump down and crawl or roll and then Parker could blast the damn thing. The movie would end. There’d be a gaping hole of acid in the Nostromo, but our heroes would get in the lifeboat and leave.

And yet, in playing Sega and Creative Assembly’s “Alien Isolation”, I found myself in almost the exact same position, huddled inside of a locker minutes after being introduced in the Alien and utterly terrified to move. Even worse, I’ve had situations where it appeared and I’m frozen in place, completely drawing a blank on my next move. I owe both Brett and Lambert an apology, rest their characters souls.

In the game you play Amanda Ripley, daughter of Ellen Ripley in the Alien films. In the special edition of James Cameron’s Aliens, there’s a brief scene between Burke and Ellen Ripley mentioning her daughter. For you trivia fans, the image used in that film was actually Sigourney Weaver’s actual mother. Anyway, It’s been 15 years since the disappearance of the Nostromo and Amanda is searching for any kind of clue that will help her find her mother or find out what happened to her. Supposedly, the flight recorder for the Nostromo was recovered and taken to Sevastopol station, a ship of roughly the same size. Basically, it’s a starship the size of Hogwarts. After finding herself separated from her crew, she has to both get her answers and find her way out of the station.

Easier said than done, of course. This game knows no mercy, even on it’s easiest setting.

The lighting effects are wonderful in next gen (especially PC). That molotov will only make the Alien mad.

The lighting effects are wonderful in next gen (especially PC). That molotov will only make the Alien mad.

The first rule of Alien Isolation is knowing that there are no safe places. Where most games have mechanics that allow you to take a breather to gear up and plan ahead or pause to get out the right weapon, Isolation will keep flowing as you take action. In Metal Gear, your game pauses when you use your backpack to look through your weapons. In Resident Evil (at least the earlier renditions), you had areas that were designated Save Rooms, places where the monsters couldn’t get at you. Alien Isolation does just the opposite.  Unless you’re checking your map for your next location, the game doesn’t pause. I’ve died while reading information on a workstation. I’ve died while rewiring a door. I’ve even died while putting myself in a locker and walking away from the console for food. It’s a strange kind of game design that forces you to keep one eye on what you’re doing and the other scouting around you to make sure you’re not being stalked. You essentially become a meerkat, poking its head up and going..”Did you hear something?”

And the sound is downright fantastic, especially where the Alien is involved. This is where the true horror lies. Anyone who is familiar with the Alien franchise knows what a Xenomorph looks like. We’ve seen so many of them over the years that they’ve lost that fear factor. The horror doesn’t come from having it charge you, but knowing how close it can be before everything gets to that point. There are tons of playthrough videos out there, and it’s great to see the reactions of players as they navigate this. If I worked at Creative Assembly, I’d chuckle at some of them with pride.

Case in Point: In one area, I open a door to a hallway. It’s clear, but I hear something behind me, causing me to duck behind some boxes. Taking out a noisemaker, I figure I can throw the noisemaker out the way I came (before the door closes) and quickly make my way towards my objective. As I slowly step backwards and to my left ready to pull a Romo-like pass, I just happen to turn to look at the direction I need to go.

The Alien is right there in that entraceway, standing at full height and is peering into the room behind me. There’s a collective “Holy shit!” from everyone in the room I’m in, and I freeze. It must have shot up a vent and came down a vent behind me somewhere. The Xenomorph doesn’t see me, and goes into the room it was looking at. This frees me to make my way down the hallway I need to travel, leaving a trail of fresh urine in my wake.

Heavy footsteps echo in the dark, and when it moves from the ground to the vents, there’s a distinct difference. The game begs to be played either on an extreme surround sound system or noise canceling headphones. If you even more courageous, you can enable your Xbox’s Kinect or PS3/4’s Camera – the microphone in both will pick up the sounds of your room. So, if you’re hiding in a locker with the Xenomorph outside and a friend yells out…”Are we ordering Chinese tonight?!”, the Alien will assume you’re a tender morsel dipped in duck sauce and take you out.

From a control standpoint, Alien Isolation is simple enough that you might not forget what to do when in a panic. For the more complex acts, like lighting a flare and throwing it, you’re given on screen instructions to help you follow through. This becomes a hit or miss at first. While you’re learning that action, there’s always a chance you’ll find yourself under attack by the Xenomorph. A training room feature would be nice here, but at the same time, you’re figuring out what to do with these items just as Ripley does. You’ll find yourself scouting safe areas (and by this, I mean under a table somewhere for a minute) ahead of time to craft different items out of the spare parts you find. At your disposal are flares, medkits, EMP’s, Noisemakers, Smoke Bombs, and more. Of course, before these items can be made, you’ll have to search around for the actual blueprints (which can be anywhere). The game will thankfully teach you how to use items as you get them (if you pay attention). Eventually, you’ll get Molotovs and Flamethrowers, but the Alien understands the nature of fire. To quote Newt, “It won’t make any difference.”

As Ripley turned the corner for a bite to eat from the lunchroom, she suddenly lost her appetite.

As Ripley turned the corner for a bite to eat from the lunchroom, she suddenly lost her appetite.

Saving the game can also be a nuisance at times. Rather than having an autosave, the system incorporates the added task of having to find Save Stations disguised as phone booths to save your progress. Just as with everything else, you have the ability to die if any enemy happens to be near. It can become annoying if you’re in an area where you have a large task and find yourself all the way back at previous place once you die. It’s a drawback, indeed, but it also inspires the player (or it did for me anyway) to treat these stations like an oasis in the middle of a long stretch of desert. You’d think you were playing Ninja Gaiden sometimes, without all the flipping.

Navigating Sevestopol is done in a Metroid / Metal Gear like fashion. Basically, some areas will be locked to you without the right tool. Once you find it (be a blowtorch or a wrench), you can come back to that area. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about this just yet. It’s not exactly linear in that sense, but at the same time, I stopped playing Metroid Prime for almost the same reason. If it works for you, you’ll love it. If not, you might find yourself groaning in agony. If you’re lost, your handy Motion Tracker will help you find your nearest objective by way of a marker on the outside of your display.

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Even in Space, the Alien can hear that beep. Put that Motion Tracker away if you have it in your line of sight. Note the marker on the outer edge telling you where to go.

Alien Isolation is slow. I mean………slow. Not in the story so much, but in the movement. You’ll want to run from point A to Point B, but with the enemies around, you’ll will sneak around for nearly the entire duration of the game (from what I’ve played so far). Don’t even bother sprinting, especially on the hardest difficulty. If you feel you’ve enough patience to play the game in this fashion, it’s a treat. If you’re hoping for something more Splinter Cell / Metal Gear like in that you’re stalking prey, it’s not happening here. Alien Isolation may have On Site Procurement of weapons, but you’ll find these are to be used sparingly, either due to the lack of ammunition / fuel, or from the echoing boom from firing the weapons. In using them you’re indirectly screaming “Hey! I’m right here on the southwest corner of the 3rd floor, kill me now! Do it!! I’m Here!!”

There are other threats on Sevastopol. You have the remaining humans on board who are just trying to survive, synthetics that can swarm you (like Bishop or Ash but not as technologically advanced), but these are enemies that can be defeated depending on what you have on you, and even then, they’re formidable. The Xenomorph, however is an 8 foot beast who delivers a one hit kill to you every time. Its presence will have you hiding in a locker frantically checking your motion tracker – but note that even enemies can sometimes hear the beep coming from it. You may even contemplate how long it’ll take for you to adjust to living in said locker for the rest of your days. According to Creative Assembly, the Alien was built with an adaptable AI that changes on the fly. I’ve had strange interactions in my experiences:

The Alien has no set patrol patterns as far as I can tell. You can watch it walk into a side room from a hiding point at the other end of the room, only to find it double back to the next room you enter. Despite how slow or silent you can be, the doors you move through still make noise, so as you progress, you never really “lose” the Alien so much as you throw it off for a minute or two.

The senses on this thing are creepy. If you are walking fast enough to hear your own feet on the floor, I absolutely guarantee you the Alien knows, too. Again, the Motion Tracker is your friend when it’s at a distance, but it’s also a problem if you’re close. My rule of thumb is that if I have a visual on it, the Motion Tracker isn’t necessary. Even then, use it sparingly to find where you need to go.

Vents. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve had a chance to escape via a vent and chose a closet or death over it. I’m told you can use these to move around and escape even, but I haven’t even bothered.

Visually, I’ve played this on both the PS3 and the PS4. There’s nothing wrong with the PS3’s version of the game graphically (which is amazing), but if you have access to one, the lighting engines are just better on the next gen consoles. Shadow affects are nice between the two, but there’s a better gradient on the PS4’s newer hardware and smoke / fire effects are that much stronger on that system. Also note that the PS3 runs the game at about 720p, while the PS4 easily handles a 1080p playthrough. I am told that there can occasionally be some glitches where in crawling, you can fall through a room, but I have yet to run into these.

Renderings of the Sevastopol feel like they’re taken right from the first Alien film, as Creative Assembly was pretty much given as much access as they could get to 20th Century Fox’s archives. If you ever wondered what it would feel like to walk those dark halls of the Nostromo with a giant man sized Bone Dragon at your heels, this is the game for you. From the title sequence alone, you get an idea that CA were fans of the first film, and tried to design a game that does its best to immerse you into that universe. It doesn’t get everything right, but it does present the player with a sense of fear and stress unlike anything I’ve played before. Perhaps it’s just me.

In terms of drawbacks, one of the problems comes in the renderings of humans. They don’t seem to have the same sense of care that the Alien gets, most of them walking around with “dead eye” syndrome (like in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). The voice acting is okay, but isn’t particularly memorable. It’s like watching a Friday the 13th film. Do you really remember Kevin Bacon’s last lines before he was killed? Maybe, maybe not, but you do remember how he died.

ps4_online_preview_screen001_copy

If this is what you see from your Point of View, you’re probably already dead.

 Part of the soundtrack is built off of Jerry Goldsmith’s original score, and the same also features that weird “space wind” sound occasionally, which is so damn eerie. This may actually be (despite it’s flaws) the best movie tie-in/adaptation I’ve ever played. Most movie related games are either rushed projects (I’m looking at you Gearbox. I love Borderlands, but I remember the bad taste of Aliens: Colonial Marines) or fail to completely capture the feel of the movie. I’m very eager to see what Creative Assembly does next, Alien related or not. I’ve truly had fun with this game, despite it being as frustrating as Dark Souls.

Overall, Alien Isolation is a solid game for any fan of the original film. It’s the closest you’ll get to experiencing that universe (or at least playing the ultimate version of Cat & Mouse), even though the slow pace, saving mechanic and unforgiving AI may prove frustrating / unexciting to some.