'Tis the Season

Erica loves October. It's the beginning of autumn, the leaves start dying, changing color, and falling off the oak trees. It's a time of mulled cider, elaborate costumes, and people giving you candy just for knocking on their doors.

Halloween is Erica's Christmas. I enjoy it, too, though certainly not to the same Peter Billingsley-like level. I don't squee with delight at the thought of hayrides (I'm allergic), haunted houses (they're too compartmental to be engrossing), and dressing up (I haven't put on a costume since spending the day as Internet meme Ellen Feiss). I prefer the deeper, more psychological horror, the kind of thing best embodied by ominous phone calls from a madman who turns out to be much closer to you than you think, or the deranged actions of a motel proprietor who isn't quite sure if he's his own mother or not.

Please enjoy the atmosphere of Halloween, complete with tense music, rustling wind, and the sounds of bones crushing, encapsulated in my favorite Halloween-themed animated short:

Season's Greetings

I first caught this piece on on The Sci-Fi Channel's Exposure before Lisa Marie set her cold, dead fish eyes on it. (Still looking for the Janeane Garofalo film Suspicious. Let me know if you find it. There's some great tension in that one.)

In keeping with the spirit of the season, I'm playing through the first Silent Hill game with Erica. She knows where to go and what to do, leaving me free to kill monsters and gather keys. Having not played this game in some time (and never getting further than Alternate Hospital, 3rd floor), I have some very strong memories of suckitude. There are games that don't do everything in their power to make you hate them, and there is Silent Hill. If the PSOne had the power to call up your mom and call her a whore, the folks at Konami would have found a way to work that into this game, too. Silent Hill does just about every annoying thing I can imagine but ask me for personal loans and strongly insinuate that I should leave the house for a couple hours to let it fuck my girlfriend.

So why do I play such a nasty, creepy, six-sided polygon hero-having video game? 'Tis the Season. I think the storyline is good, Erica's guidance keeps me from getting bored and, apparently, just after you get beyond the Alternate Hospital the game just won't stop throwing exposition at you. There's more dialogue in between Hospital 2 and the Sewer than in the Intro, Diner, School 1, School 2, Church, and Hospital 1 combined. This is great, because without exposition, you're just playing some schmuck with chunky shoes who's trying to get his daughter back by hitting dogs with a rusted steel pipe. I'm not sure how far I've gotten, but I'm quite sure I need to go back a save game or two in order to trigger the "don't get the worst possible ending" sequence. That's right. You get different endings based on who lives and who dies. (Fucking Japanese: in order to unlock extra weapons, you have to keep playing through the game over and over again.) Anyway, that is not the point. The point is that Silent Hill is a very Halloweeny type of game, and since Erica isn't going to play it by herself, someone else will.

I'm still waiting for that scene where Pyramidhead rips that dude's flesh off.