This month I released two horror games. MÆRE II and Stay Indoors. Both received a really positive response and I’m extremely happy about that! Horror is one of my favourite genres and I thought I’d take some time to share some of the horror media that influenced and inspired these games.
Ghost Watch
Ghost Watch was a British TV movie that was made to look like a real live broadcast. This was before Blair Witch had come out and made the concept of found footage was widely understood. The plot is that recognisable British TV presenters at the time are filming a live investigation on Halloween night into a reportedly haunted house in a British suburb, only for the ghost to wind up being both real and extremely dangerous.
Ghost Watch’s strength for me is that it’s a haunted house movie set in a very typical British home rather than a mansion or some other location.
When the movie first aired in 1992 it triggered a bit of a War of the Worlds moment and the BBC were hit with thousands of complaints because viewers believed the events were real. Apparently my wife's step mother even called the cops when it was on trying to get them to go over to the house in the movie she was so convinced that people were in real life danger.
One of my favourite things about the movie is how they explain the increasingly horrific events. A character figures out that all of the people watching at home are feeding the ghost energy through their fear. Originally I wanted to do something like this with Stay Indoors. I wanted to give the impression that this haunted game finding its way onto the internet has resulted in the entity behind it becoming more powerful as players playing the game was serving as a global séance. This would be conveyed by having the game become more and more distorted and disturbing in the week’s run up to Halloween before ultimately on Halloween night the game was essentially set in Hell.
However because it was for a game jam I didn’t really have the time to implement this, or figure out how to make the audience understand that they should keep coming back for the full experience without giving the game away. Perhaps next year after I've bottomed this out a little further I’ll revisit the concept for Spooktacular 2025!
Suspiria
This is one of my favourite movies. Its about an American ballet student who gets accepted into a prestigious dance academy in Germany and finds that the academy is a front for a coven of witches. The 1977 version is best but the 2018 version is a good movie too and equally worth checking out.
Paranormal Activity
When it first released, and before they watered it down with about 10 shitty sequels the original Paranormal Activity was a terrifying experience. It wasn’t afraid to make the audience wait for things to happen and to me this is scarier than constant pay offs as horror is in the anticipation. Paranormal Activity gave me the confidence to allow the MÆRE games to be as slow as they need to be.
I think the studios completely destroyed this movie with all the sequels delving into the lore and the new ending they added in (The alternative ending on the DVD was the original ending I believe, since its the one I saw at a festival before the film got picked up for wide release). I learned from this that sometimes its best to leave some questions unanswered or you risk taking away what makes them interesting in the first place.
The Nightmare (2015 Documentary)
This is a documentary about sleep paralysis. When I was younger I had an experience with this myself that really shook me. This movie helped me to understand what exactly I’d gone through when this had happened. The movie reenacts people's accounts of sleep paralysis and the entities that they meet in these episodes. The documentary examines how many people's experiences are similar. This was another major influence on MÆRE.
I-Mockery – www.i-mockery.com
Ok this isn't a movie, but when I was first getting into horror I would basically get all my recommendations from the articles on here. They’d do deep dives into more obscure movies and had articles highlighting their favourite scenes. The site really showed me the fun side of horror and I think I’ve watched basically every movie they ever featured at this point. Thanks for the education @Mockery !
To a lesser extent, Yahtzee from Fully Ramblomatic used to do a lot of articles on slashers before he became the Zero Punctuation/Second Wind guy full time. This was also a big education for me for horror movies.
The Nightmare (Painting)
This is a 1781 oil painting by Henry Fuseli. Looking at this painting was I think what gave me the final idea for MÆRE and where the title comes from. The painting shows a demon sitting on a woman's chest whilst she sleeps. This demon is called a Mære, a malicious entity in Germanic folklore which walks on people's chests as they sleep bringing on nightmares.
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If you read this far then thanks for reading! I hope you’ll check out some of the movies I listed above and if you haven’t played them yet check out the games I’ve made. These were only some of the major influences on my work but there will be a lot of other things that I learned from.
I’ll be making some more horror games next year so be sure to follow if you’d like to stay informed of what I’m working on. I’d like to tackle the slasher genre at some point soon, as I’m a big fan of that. It will be a big undertaking but I have an idea for a sandbox slasher game. Sort of like Hitman meets Friday the 13th. It’ll be the biggest game I’ve made so far.
Which of my two games released this month did you prefer? MÆRE or Stay Indoors?
Also what kind of games, of any genre, would you like to see more of on Newgrounds? I’ve been thinking a lot about this as we get closer to the end of the year.
