As a horror fan, I have a soft spot in my heart for slashers. There’s nothing quite like watching an intimidating killer murder their way through a group of people in the most creative and gruesome ways possible. However, sometimes I feel like the characterization of this group of victims is an afterthought — just some annoying and uninteresting people who try, and mostly fail, to escape their deadly fate.
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This is a shame because a good cast of characters can easily become the vehicle for the film’s worldview. Take Terrifier 3, for example. Laura LaVera’s character embodies the morbid obsession that a lot of us have with serial killers and their lives, revictimizing the survivors for pure entertainment. This is only one of the many themes I find thanks to a brilliant performance from LaVera — even when its director says that the film doesn’t have anything to say about the broader world.
Half-Bear, Half-Something Else
Grizzly Man, the first entry in the new Pixel Pulps trilogy of games from LCB Studios, is an interactive adventure where you read a lot of text while looking at characters stills, select some dialogue options, and play some weird mini-games. This entry presents what looks like an ordinary killer. It resembles a mix of a man and a bear, although you’re never sure what it really is. What is beyond doubt is that it is a savage creature, brutalizing all of its victims with just one or two blows, and it doesn’t seem to have a consciousness of its own.
There’s more to discover about this beast as you progress through the story, but what caught my attention from the first scene was how most of the characters (the soon-to-be victims) are written.
Claudia, the first character we meet, is watching a couple of friends playing in a nearby lake in Alaska. She had sex with them the previous night, and now they seem to be ignoring her. Claudia reflects on why this is happening, while at the same time, she’s thinking about how far away she is from her Argentinian home. Anger takes over her mind, but there’s a note of melancholy and existential dread in what’s really going on — she is not sure who she is. Before coming to an answer, the strange beast attacks the couple and she needs to escape.
This first scene only lasts a couple of minutes — unless you decide to play the throwing stones mini-game for hours for some reason — and half of it is Claudia escaping from the killer. You know the writing is on point when it makes you empathize with a character on record time.
A Group Of People Searching For Its Identity
In the following chapters, most of the game is focused on a group of tourists on an expedition to a river. While not all of them are fully developed, we get to see glimpses of them that paint a clear picture. For example, Hanna is a filmmaker who doesn’t seem to conceive of life outside of a screen. Ethan, the stereotype of the arrogant and bully character, has a charm for crafting and telling stories — I was engaged with a ridiculous story of dozens of people sucking toads from the first line.
However, two other characters stayed with me for days after seeing the credits of Grizzly Man. The first is Johan, an old painter. One morning he’s alone, painting a landscape on a canvas. As he swings his brush, he’s invaded by thoughts about other artists’ works and the power of perspective. Johan looks anguished. He seems to be suffering with his new painting, getting more and more doubtful about what art is. He recalls a quote about being afraid that the audience won’t see what the artist means, or that maybe artists aren’t able to paint what they really want you to see.
This is another scene with a brief runtime, and yet it gives us a compelling case of an artist worrying about his craft, which we could interpret as, again, someone doubting who he really is. It’s sad that the man-bear strikes again and we don’t get to know anything else from Johan.
I Wasn’t Ready For Robert
The second is the closest thing Grizzly Man has to a protagonist: Robert. One of the older men in the group, he works as a guide and doesn’t seem to enjoy his job very much. Not because of the recent eccentric group in his care, but because his eyes look lost most of the time, thinking about his past.
As the chapters pass, Robert tries to remember where he comes from. He doesn’t seem to have memories of his childhood or teenage years. In fact, he can only think about a letter from his stepfather, who tells him about a dream and how he and his stepmother found him: lying on the ground in a forest, with a pool of blood around his head.
The nature of Robert is much more insidious than what it looks at first, and we get to fill the empty spaces with some scenes from another timeline. But I don’t care about that now. I care about how Robert is reading that letter from his father, a man who worries and reflects on the life he has given to his son. The letter ends with two heart-wrenching questions: “Did I do the right thing son? Or would you have preferred something else?”
Grizzly Man is one of those special cases where the victim’s group is as interesting (if not more) than the killer they are running away from. I can’t wait to see what surprises LCB Studios has in store for the next entries in the trilogy.
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