Something Wicked: On re-watching Dagon and watching Blood Creek
More film-triggered pondering, over at Moon Design:
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This is a tale of two movies that try to do fairly similar things, one of which succeeds. Dagon is a 2001 film directed by Stuart Gordon, Blood Creek a 2009 film directed by Joel Schumacher. Now, neither of those is a name to inspire a lot of confidence-Gordon tends to do schlocky stuff that’s fun, hits a few Lovecraftian notes, and then collapses in gore and general weakness, and Schumacher has directed a whole lot of very bad films since his promising early days. But I knew I wanted to re-watch Dagon as part of thinking about gaming in Lovecraftian veins, and friends were telling me that Blood Creek is genuinely good, so what the heck.
These are both stories of people committed to each other, trying to rescue people they care about from monsters and suffering strains on their commitments and will to survive. Dagon suffers from two specific flaws that hold it down:
#1: The characters are established really poorly, with lumpy exposition, and without anything that struck me as particularly engaging about them. The struggling and suddenly successful geek could have been interesting, but didn’t really click for me, and none of the others emerge as much of anything at all. Poe and Lovecraft tended not to do personalities at all, and it’s really necessary to have personalities for some kinds of horror…but if you’re going to do them, do them at least adequately. Blood Creek has less to say about its characters, and says what it does say more compactly, so that each statement carries more weight. I went through the movie feeling I knew the protagonists and others quite a bit more, simply because they were each focused on effectively.
This is something we will want to talk about in Something Wicked: when you want to go for full-bore, detailed, nuanced, evolving characters and when you may want to go for simple personalities compactly sketched, probably with the on-the-fly method, and what to do when you feel like you’d move the level of character detail up or down. This latter in particular is something that occupies my attention, since gear-shifting is a common feature in my games and I’m a big believer in emergent properties. Leaving yourself room for maneuvering is important, I think, and I like how much HeroQuest seems to offer room for changing gracefully. But it’s still easy to get into an awful muddle and hard to get out of once some of the players feel tangled up and disoriented.
#2. The last big revelation in Dagon simply doesn’t work. Now, some of this is that the original for it in “The Shadow Out of Innsmouth” doesn’t work well, either. It’s the sort of thing that should have had seeds planted early on, and a single sentence or two would have been plenty. In the case of film, a couple family photos would have done the job wordlessly, being fodder for a quick flashback later on. Blood Creek also has a final revelation, and it does work as something that should sensibly come as a bolt from the blue to the protagonists.
Now, rolegaming is not, on the whole, a field in which it helps to ruthlessly apply Occam’s Razor to anyone’s idea for the next neat thing to bring into play. After all, we very seldom go back for second drafts, and the point is to lay out the stuff from which we build our various satisfactions. It’s almost always better to pour on a bit more and set it aside if you don’t need it than end up wishing you had more available than you let yourself have for fear of excess. But it’s generally better to have a few dangling threads to explain away after the game is over than rock a lot of suspended disbelief with thoughts like “um, shouldn’t we have heard about this 30 hours ago if it’s supposed to be that way?” More matters we’ll need to discuss.
There’s one more good thing I want to say about Blood Creek. I feel that Nazis are really, really over-used in a lot of pop culture, and in rolegaming even more so. They seem to be a lot of people’s favorite stock villains, and get used in ways that, I think, end up undercutting their real-world horror. It’s not impossible to use Nazis in ways that don’t bug me, but it’s hard. Blood Creek does it, and I like it, because I like it when I get to say “Yeah, that made it work for me!”
=-=-=-=-=
This is a tale of two movies that try to do fairly similar things, one of which succeeds. Dagon is a 2001 film directed by Stuart Gordon, Blood Creek a 2009 film directed by Joel Schumacher. Now, neither of those is a name to inspire a lot of confidence-Gordon tends to do schlocky stuff that’s fun, hits a few Lovecraftian notes, and then collapses in gore and general weakness, and Schumacher has directed a whole lot of very bad films since his promising early days. But I knew I wanted to re-watch Dagon as part of thinking about gaming in Lovecraftian veins, and friends were telling me that Blood Creek is genuinely good, so what the heck.
These are both stories of people committed to each other, trying to rescue people they care about from monsters and suffering strains on their commitments and will to survive. Dagon suffers from two specific flaws that hold it down:
#1: The characters are established really poorly, with lumpy exposition, and without anything that struck me as particularly engaging about them. The struggling and suddenly successful geek could have been interesting, but didn’t really click for me, and none of the others emerge as much of anything at all. Poe and Lovecraft tended not to do personalities at all, and it’s really necessary to have personalities for some kinds of horror…but if you’re going to do them, do them at least adequately. Blood Creek has less to say about its characters, and says what it does say more compactly, so that each statement carries more weight. I went through the movie feeling I knew the protagonists and others quite a bit more, simply because they were each focused on effectively.
This is something we will want to talk about in Something Wicked: when you want to go for full-bore, detailed, nuanced, evolving characters and when you may want to go for simple personalities compactly sketched, probably with the on-the-fly method, and what to do when you feel like you’d move the level of character detail up or down. This latter in particular is something that occupies my attention, since gear-shifting is a common feature in my games and I’m a big believer in emergent properties. Leaving yourself room for maneuvering is important, I think, and I like how much HeroQuest seems to offer room for changing gracefully. But it’s still easy to get into an awful muddle and hard to get out of once some of the players feel tangled up and disoriented.
#2. The last big revelation in Dagon simply doesn’t work. Now, some of this is that the original for it in “The Shadow Out of Innsmouth” doesn’t work well, either. It’s the sort of thing that should have had seeds planted early on, and a single sentence or two would have been plenty. In the case of film, a couple family photos would have done the job wordlessly, being fodder for a quick flashback later on. Blood Creek also has a final revelation, and it does work as something that should sensibly come as a bolt from the blue to the protagonists.
Now, rolegaming is not, on the whole, a field in which it helps to ruthlessly apply Occam’s Razor to anyone’s idea for the next neat thing to bring into play. After all, we very seldom go back for second drafts, and the point is to lay out the stuff from which we build our various satisfactions. It’s almost always better to pour on a bit more and set it aside if you don’t need it than end up wishing you had more available than you let yourself have for fear of excess. But it’s generally better to have a few dangling threads to explain away after the game is over than rock a lot of suspended disbelief with thoughts like “um, shouldn’t we have heard about this 30 hours ago if it’s supposed to be that way?” More matters we’ll need to discuss.
There’s one more good thing I want to say about Blood Creek. I feel that Nazis are really, really over-used in a lot of pop culture, and in rolegaming even more so. They seem to be a lot of people’s favorite stock villains, and get used in ways that, I think, end up undercutting their real-world horror. It’s not impossible to use Nazis in ways that don’t bug me, but it’s hard. Blood Creek does it, and I like it, because I like it when I get to say “Yeah, that made it work for me!”