For some reason, all the conversation about Cosy Game Pals’ and Blumhouse’s lo-fi horror darling Fear The Spotlight passed me by. So, when I sat down to play it earlier this week, I was immediately swept up in its sapphic coming-of-age tale. Amy and Vivian are both Asian-American teenagers trying to figure out precisely who they are in one of the most dangerous places on the planet – high school.
But instead of navigating the hallowed halls of Sunnyside High during the day, our heroines sneak in during the night to perform a seance and contact the victims of a fire that destroyed the building back in 1991. After lighting a few candles and watching the board move on its own, things quickly degenerate into otherworldly horrors as Amy and Vivian are thrown into a strange new dimension that reflects not only the past of this doomed institute, but their own.
Fear The Spotlight Is All About The Anxiety Of Embracing Your Identity
One of the only items in Vivian’s inventory – presented in the same style as PS1 classics like Resident Evil and Silent Hill – is a rose accompanied by a handwritten letter. The game won’t tell you what it contains, while Vivian’s own narration presents an anxious hesitation to share its intended purpose. So you draw your own conclusions, and given Vivian is willing to sneak into her school after dark with a cute goth girl to talk to ghosts, it doesn’t take long to assume she plans to confess her romantic feelings. It’s cute, and in Fear The Spotlight it is woven into the narrative alongside themes of parental neglect, fear of ostracization, and the unfair expectations that are put on teenagers by adults who should know better.
Fear The Spotlight is designed to look like an original PlayStation title, right down to the low detail of its character models and the warping nature of its environmental textures.
Vivian hides from a monster whose head is a literal spotlight, trying to shine on a girl who would rather stick to the shadows, achieve high grades, and leave secondary education behind. But after she befriends Amy, and they begin to develop romantic feelings for one another, they become the butt of bigoted jokes. They worry that sticking together will put targets on their backs and inevitably push them apart.
It’s a fear I felt in school as one of the few out people in my sixth form, willing to date someone of the same gender, even if it saw me receive gross homophobic insults at the bus stop or being asked awkward questions by people whose only interest was to make me uncomfortable. These feelings are everywhere in Fear The Spotlight, even if its use of conveniently placed expositional notes and audio logs isn’t very subtle. But it works because Amy and Vivian feel so real.
Uncovering Your Queerness Can Feel Like A Horror Movie
Perhaps it’s merely the lo-fi aesthetic that makes Fear The Spotlight reminiscent of a PS1 classic decades out of time, but it kept reminding me of I Saw The TV Glow. The cult film directed by Jane Schoenbrun and starring Justice Smith is all about the regret of failing to be the person that deep down you truly want to be, the idea that it is never too late in life to take steps to embrace who you really are.
It is equal parts joyful, thought-provoking, and heart-breaking, with one of the most harrowing final moments in any film I’ve ever seen. But most importantly, it talks about the fluidity of the trans experience, and no matter who you are or where you come from, taking the step is always possible, and the risk is well worth it.
Many of these retro visual features can be toned down if you find them too abrasive, while performance can be all but doubled by opting for the ‘smooth’ filter. I’m a sucker for nostalgia, so I kept everything pumped up to the max for the entire game.
Fear The Spotlight explores this spirit on a smaller scale with a more positive outcome. It feels like a Goosebumps episode with two characters who confront their inner turmoil and rise above it to become the people they want to be.
They still need to contend with demanding parents and grieving the loss of loved ones, but they have each other because they decided not to walk away, decided that their queer identities and being with someone they truly care about was worth the hardship. It’s a surprisingly sweet companion to Schoenbrun’s film that echoes the same era of CRT televisions and an underground vibe of queerness that was years away from any form of societal acceptance.
2024 was filled with independent horror gems, and Fear The Spotlight deservedly sits right alongside them. It’s an unsettlingly sincere tale of queer discovery that holds more heart than horror, but that doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.
