The Fog- Silence is Scarier than Sound

I think that by now most of us horror filmgoers are pretty accustomed to the usual run of the mill horror monster. You know the ones- whether it's the devil, or an alien, a vampire or a werewolf, we pretty much know those monsters. But john Carpenter did something unique- he made a natural thing, a bank of fog, something scary. That's the work of a true horror genius.

The Fog tells of a small town called Antonio Bay, which celebrates its 1100^th birthday the day the movie takes place. We get to know a few of the inhabitants of the town, and we get to know of the curse put upon the town a long time ago, a curse that lays a deadly and scary fog on the town. True, the fog has some zombies in it, but they're not so scary, and the fog does work pretty much on its own as we could see with the electricity lines…

Anyway, what makes the fog so scary is the silence. It is a deadly killer, this fog, and it works toward achieving its goal, but it does all of these in silence. We never hear the fog, we never hear the zombies inside the fog (except when they knock on the doors). The fog moves silently, kills silently, avenges silently. And silence is far scarier than sound, because we know sound, and if we hear the danger we can run. But when it is a silent killer like this fog? We won't hear it come, we won't be able to run, and it will kill us.

And it can be incorporated into RPGS. Let the PCs witness this silent killer unleashes its power on some NPCs in this dreadful silence, and the players will be scared as hell. Why? Because they'll understand a simple truth- when the fog will go for them, they won't know about it 'till it's too late. And this thing is scary as hell, knowing that there's something that is ought to get you, but you won't know about its presence until it will be far too late.

But the silence isn't there only when the fog comes, it's also when the fog attacks. True, the fog knocks on the doors to announce its presence, but if one doesn't open the door, the door will be destroyed in silence, and then the fog will enter in silence, and the zombies will come out of it I silence and kill you while still don't making a sound. Silence by itself is scary and unnatural. Silence accompanied by a certain sound signaling your doom is even scarier.

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What did you think about it? And what did you learn from watching?

Inferno- Treating the Discoveries like Art

I never was one of Argento's greatest fans. True, only last Saturday I recommended Suspiria to someone, but only due to those amazing 15 minutes. Inferno, on the other hand, doesn't have this amazing quality to it which enables me to recommend it even though I don't really like the movie. Inferno is not a bad movie per se, it is just not exactly my style of horror it seems.

If I had to describe its plot in a few sentences, I would describe it as a religious kinda-slasher, with three goddesses as the slashers. I mean, there's more to that, but it will be too much of a spoiler. Let's just say that if you know what an Argento's movie looks like, you'll probably know what Inferno looks like.

And still, there are things to learn from this movie. After all, he may not be my cup of tea, but he is still one of the masters and this movie shows that. For me, the greatest takeaway from Argento's movies was always the horrifying discoveries of the bodies. Argento made them into a sick tour-de-force, showing us the monstrosity of his monsters through the way they let others see their work.

It can be said, and it won't even be too farfetched to say that, that Argento's monsters take their victims as canvases for a new painting, for a work of art. Maybe this is the reason that in some of his best movies the victims are also of artistic upbringing, as maybe they will be the ones who will best appreciate it. Anyway, though, the discoveries of the bodies are usually more sick and frightening than the killings themselves, and that's hard as they are usually presented to us almost exactly one after the other.

And this gives us a glimpse to the monsters' psyches, and adds a little bit of morbid horror, taking Shakespeare's comment that life is but a show to the extreme, up to eleven. And we can use that in our games also. We can make those discoveries like sick jokes, or like the climax of a movie or of a theater show.

Treat those discovery scenes like the pinnacle of your movie, Argento says to us, and actually it might work. It might work really-really well, if we'll give it a chance. True, most of his death scenes (and as such the bodies discovered) are pretty gory, but if we'll limit the gore to these scenes like he does… it may prove far more frightening than one would think. After all, he does know what he's doing.

And that's it for today. How about you? What did you think of this movie? And what did you learn from it?

Threads- Giving the Victims a Face

I don't really know how to start this post. I'm pretty shocked and horrified, you see. I've just finished Threads, a TV-movie made in 1984, about how a single nuclear bomb hit may affect the UK. It's suffice to say that the movie is way too realistic to go unnoticed, unremarked, to let you leave it without the urge to cry. I don't know what else to tell about it, before delving into one of the far too many lessons to learn from it. Should I say that it is not your typical horror movie? That the movie chronicles a little more than 13 years in the characters' lives? That when it was made and first broadcasted this nuclear bombing incident was a possibility, that this movie had a chance to become a reality? That society just crumbles and one starts to somewhat envy the dead?

No, I wanna go to the lesson as quickly as possible, I want to just let it off of my mind. You see, the main reason for the movie's power is that we have feelings and empathy for the victims. We identify with them, we know their normal ways of lives, and they feel real. We also see how the bombing affects them. Them and not some random people, them and not some red-shirts. We get to know the people only to see them become the victims of the bombings.

The bombing itself occurs about 35-40 minutes into the movie. Up until that moment we got to know about 10 characters pretty-pretty well. We watched the Kemps banter, we watched the Suttons say their last goodbyes, and we watched the love story of Ruth and Jimmy who are going to have a baby and so decide to marry. And after we got to know them, the pain is so much stronger, so much more close to home.

But it is more than that. Because we know of people who feel for each other, we feel their fears for their loved ones. We feel for Mr. and Mrs. When they cry for not being able to save their children, but also we cry for them when they only fear it. We cry for Ruth who fears of her baby being deformed, and we hope for Ruth to find Jimmy when she goes out to try and find him.

We also see how they change, how they become quite monstrous themselves when they have to commit crimes in order to survive, how they change to the "dog-eat-dog" mentality. It's the feelings than we have for them that enable the movie to touch us on so many levels, on so many emotions (from the d'aaw in the beginning to the "oh-my-god" of the ending and all those feelings in the middle).

And we can also use it in our games. When we want the players to fear for a city, or to feel for a kingdom, we have to get the players and their characters to know the people there. To know and feel they human-ness in them. Bring those faces out and show them to the characters and to the players who play them, and when the city will be under threat, or when the country will be under a nuclear threat, the players and the characters will do their best.

How about you? What did you learn from this movie? And even more important, how did you feel afterwards?

God Told Me To- Stop Worrying and Embrace the Good Enough

The streak had to be broken, right? My seventh movie in the project wasn't that good. It wasn't that bad also, but… it was okay. Just okay. Nothing spectacular, nothing to fancy about, nothing worth remembering from, one of those movies that you just watch and 5 seconds later you don't remember anything about it or from it. God Told Me To was a watch & forget nothing more and nothing less.

It is a movie about a cop who investigates a series of murders committed by unconnected and too ordinary men. Slowly but steadily he learns that there's far more to it than what meets the eye. Yeah, even the plot is a big cliché, but at least the director knows how to do it. ;-)

And after this movie I did learn something. I learned that not every session has to be perfect, or great. In order for those really great sessions to feel great, they have to feel unique, well above the rest in terms of their level and all. If the rest of the sessions are nice, good and enjoyable, the campaign is in good hands.

And for me, that was kinda new. I learned to accept bad days, or sessions that were almost perfect, but sessions that are just nice- that was inconceivable. I expected from each one of my sessions to be at the very least almost perfect. And the sessions just took too much energy from me, and there were days that I came from the sessions depressed because they didn't live to my expectations.

And I don't know, maybe it is just a certain stage in my GMing career that had to come. And yet, this movie ranked better than some perfect movies like Cronos. And it says that maybe, just maybe, sometimes a nice and no spectacular session is better than the most perfect session imaginable. Sometimes "nice" is just enough.

How about you? When did you learn this truth? And what did you think about this movie?

Invasion of the Body Snatchers- When Knowledge Destroys the Fear

I think that by now it's three great films in a row, if I include this last movie I've seen. And I have to confess, I expected a lot more of the campy side of the genre in this project. I don't know, some of the names sound so campy, like Braindead (which was) and I Walked with a Zombie (which wasn't), but I guess that that's the beauty of it all, right? But today I watched, or should I say finally watched, the movie "Invasion of the Body Snatchers". True, it was the 1978 remake, but I haven't seen the original also (yeah, I know, shame on me). Anyway, let me just say that I was amazed.

To those who are like I was, this is a movie about a deputy health inspector of San Francisco who finds (with the help of one of his workers, and some accidents…) that some creature from space has come to Earth and it starts to spread in the city, creating duplicates of the townspeople. A lot of conformity and paranoia ensues. I didn't do it justice here, but honestly I didn't want to. You just have to watch it yourself.

The movie is great, and one truly becomes paranoid at a certain point (quite early, I must say), and some of the moments are just heartbreaking or utterly terrifying. But the first part of the movie is the most effective part of it, if you ask me.

You see, in the first part, all we have is a few crazy people, and the lead heroine, telling us that something is amiss (we also have a little feeling ourselves that something is amiss, but they pretty much dispute anything like that in the first hour of the film). We slowly begin to understand that there's something bigger in here, something far more horrifying than we thought, and the sense of conspiracy grows. We get the most effective fear of all- that the world itself is evil. As the film goes on, we start to get some info about how and what are those things that do the body-snatching job.

And that's the problem of the film. It shows us the monster, and it will ever be far less terrifying than what we have thought about. True, it gave us hope and then smashed it in the last scene of the film, but even so, it was less effective because at this stage we knew how those aliens work.

And that's a mistake that we can avoid in our games. In horror games, if you don't have to show and explain the monster- just don't! And if you have to explain it? It might be wiser to change the monster to something that you don't have to explain, that you don't have to describe. Because glimpses of something bad, just like we had in the first half of the movie, will be far scarier than any monster we can create ourselves, far more dread-inducing than what our players can devise. Because no one knows how to scare someone else than that someone and this person only needs some glimpses to get the engines to start rolling and to scare himself/herself.

And that's it for today. How about you? Have you watched this film? What did you think about it? And what did you learn from it?

Cronos- Making the Curse Feel Like a Curse

There are those horror movies that you see and immediately forget, and there are those that you'll take with you onward and maybe even forever. Cronos is one of them. A debut feature film by Del Toro, yet you wouldn't feel that when watching it. It is made with so much thought, devotion and emotion that you can't find anything bad to say about it. It is one of those movies that one hardly could make any better.

It is a story of an old man, who owns an antique shop, and becomes a vampire. It is a story of the relationship between a young girl named Mercedes and her grandfather. It is a story of the fear of the death, of the price of eternity. It is a film about life and living. It is mostly sad, sometimes even a little bit terrifying. I can't find the words to describe this film, to do it justice, not in English nor in Hebrew. It is this good.

And to find something to learn from it is so hard and so easy, takes so much energy and so little an amount. Watch it because it is a good movie, and then watch it again to analyze it. I don't know what else to say.

Right… lesson! I think that the moment in which I understood that I was watching something unique was the bathroom scene, the scene in which our vampire drinks blood from the bathroom floor. It is so powerful, so sad, and so pitiful. From this scene I knew that I was in good hands.

And this scene can teach us something about our games. Quite a lot to teach, actually, but I'll focus on a single thing. In most personal horrors games, the characters are very powerful, very strong and tough, with a lot of magical power. They call this state of theirs a curse, but here it usually ends. This scene can remind us of what it means a cursed state. This vampiric state of his made him do so many heartbreaking things, from drinking the blood from the bathroom floor to almost drinking his granddaughter's blood. And this can happen in our games too.

It is not enough to describe the life taking moment, the enjoyment of the act. It is not enough to say "you bite him, his blood is drawn to your bloody, his heart starts to beat faster and faster, and then slowly picks down the pace. The blood starts to run day, but it doesn't matter, the feeling is wonderful, amazing, and good like you've never felt in your life, better than the feeling of seeing your first child born. And when he dies, and the feeling's gone, you know that you just want more." No, it is not enough, not even close to it. Because it doesn't feel like a sad thing, like a sad act. Maybe it's better to not do it both ways at the same time, but by reminding the players that this is a curse, we help to bring the horrors back. We help to make them want the pain away, the feeling gone, and the horror will use this moment to strike.

Because there's another type of personal horror, besides "oh, what have I done"? This other type of personal horror is so close to the known one, yet so different from it. It is the type of "oh, what did it make me do? To what state have I been drawn?" And by reminding the players that this state is a curse, we bring them closer to the second type's embrace.

How about you? Have you watched this movie? What did you think about it? And what have you learned from it?

"I Walked with a Zombie"- The Power of the Voice over

Sometimes I start to think that maybe, just maybe, this genre isn't for me, that all those horror movies that I really like- it is all an accident and nothing more. And then comes a movie like this. I Walked with a Zombie might have a really bad name, but truth is that this is a descent movie, a good movie, even outside of the horror scope. It is even respectful for the minorities, considering that it's a 1943 movie, but even today it is far more respectful to the Voodoo than most movies today.

It is a movie about a nurse, who comes from Canada to an island in order to try and help to cure a woman who is in a coma. She tries her best, mainly because she's in love with that woman's husband. But the woman is far from being sick- she's a zombie, made like this because of a combination of voodooist magic and a desperate mother-in-low.

Like most Lewton movies, though, we don't really remember the director. Lewton's movies had such a distinctive style, and they were that good, that they surpassed the campy names given to the movies by the RKO studio executives.

But enough general movie talks, let's look at the movie, and especially what we can learn from it, shall we? For me, the main magic of the movie is the voice-overs in the beginning. They have dreamlike vibe to them, they're as mesmerizing as can be and they present has the character of Nurse Betsy Connell quickly and effectively. And I think that it can be useful in RPGs too.

Think about it for a sec- a scene has just ended, and before moving to the next scene, we have a break and one of the players gives a monologue, in voice over, showing what goes in his/her character's mind. Wouldn't it be wonderful? This opens to us a new world of possibilities for reflection scenes.

But it can be driven further that this- a character is facing a moral dilemma. Instead of just choosing, the player can do a voice-over, detailing the way that the character thinks, showcasing the thinking-machinations in the character's head. It can be used to explain changes of thinking, growth of characters and so much more.

I don't know, maybe I'm just optimistic, but if there is one thing that this movie showed me, is that it can be made in any stage of the game, and it carries so many benefits as a way to present characters, to showcase them, to create identification with them, to understand them. Most films during those times used voice-over to present motives, not to convey feelings, after all…

How about you? Have you considered using voice-overs in your games? How did it go? And what else have you learned from this movie?