Andi Hamilton's Videogame Newsletter - Issue #38 [Halloween 2022 - Splatterhouse]

It's the final horror themed newsletter! The last of four horror games, each one can be finished in a couple of hours tops and each one is very, very easy to get running under emulation on pretty much anything you have in your house, should you wish to play along with these this Halloween. If you need any help or advice in getting these games running, hit me up on Twitter, slide into my DMs or just reply to this newsletter (which sends me an email, and I'll fire you a reply!) and I'll try and sort you out.

While the rest of the arcade world was about to push the beat 'em up genre's literal boundaries by expanding on the concept of multiple plane movement shown in Kunio-Kun and Double Dragon games (and in doing so, absolutely explode in popularity), Namco dropped a game that sits very much in the old school style of the genre. One single plane of movement, travelling from left to right knocking several shades of shit out of whatever gets in your way. Splatterhouse brings little special to the table in regards to actually playing the thing - hell, it's probably even more simplistic than a lot of similar games released at the time, due to only having one attack button and a jump button - but Splatterhouse is memorable for many other reasons.

The 80s spawned so many legendary horror movies and Splatterhouse is one big tribute to all of the gore-filled, big character led slasher flicks from the era. Obviously, with lead character Rick sporting a the Voorhees-esque 'Terror Mask', Friday the 13th is a big influence - Rick is basically modelled after big Jason but there's plenty more subtle influences throughout the games' seven levels.

Rick and his girlfriend Jennifer go to visit a Doctor West (there's your Re-Animator reference) at his mansion, only for Rick to get knocked out and Jennifer kidnapped. When Rick awakens, the Terror Mask has - somehow - grafted itself to his face. It grants him superhuman strength and can communicate with him and is basically his only hope of saving Jennifer from the horrors within the mansion... but at what cost? None of this is actually communicated in the game and a lot of Splatterhouse's story has been extrapolated from the game by fans, but this setup is at least written in the manual and shown in this brilliant advert for the game. Note the red Terror Mask, but we'll get onto that in a bit.

You know you're going to be playing a good one when within five seconds of starting the game you pick up a hefty meat cleaver and can start chopping enemies in half at the waist. The noise it makes, a big CHOP that sounds like a baseball being hit in an echo-y warehouse, stands out a mile. It has that classic arcade audio mix where the treble is super fucking high so this simple sound carves through the cacophony of a busy arcade full of other cabinets. Shortly after, you find a big wooden plank that splatters (of course) enemies against the back wall of the stage. The enemies on level one are largely these shambling, rotting corpses so when they hit the wall they pop like someone shooting a watermelon with a shotgun. It's beautiful. THWACK.

The end of level one has you in a room full of flesh being feasted on by boreworms, who attack you en masse. It's a fairly easy boss - you can just crouch in the far right corner and kick away to kill any boreworm that gets near you. There's usually an unpleasant surprise when you kill a boss in Splatterhouse and in this case, the stomach enemy that is strung up by its neck in the room, seemingly nothing but scene dressing, bursts open and a final boreworm comes flying out at you. Always be ready.

Level two is more of the same - you're in a big, grotty dungeon full of things to leather before making a detour through the sewers beneath, eventually finding yourself in a small dining room where you take on the stage's boss. The boss being the furniture in the room itself! Cutlery, chairs, a painting that flies off the wall all attack Rick, controlled by an invisible force. Smash up everything, punch a few knives out of the air and, of course, watch out for the chandelier falling at the end to avoid a surprise death. It'll kill you regardless of how much health you have remaining! Oh, and for those paying attention, that your clear Poltergeist reference.

You're then tasked with making it through a festering swamp, where you find a satisfying shotgun (great noise, good sense of impact, turns the top half of the enemy into several scattered pieces while the legs crumple underneath, top stuff) before you meet the next iconic boss - the brilliantly named 'Biggy Man'.

In what is probably one of a few references to The Evil Dead and a sprinkling of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Biggy Man has two chainsaws grafted onto his arms as hands, giving him great range and damage. He's a big rotten, humanoid lump with a bag over his head who takes a real kicking, unless you've managed to juggle the shotgun you get earlier in the stage into the fight, where ten well-placed hits will take him down.

Now inside the mansion, stage four is where things really kick off. There's multiple routes through this level, so if you fall down one of the holes you drop into a different route. There's really cool sequence where you walk down a hallway full of mirrors, with reflections of Rick smashing through them to attack you, using your own move set against you! After that, you face the stage boss and it is now time to talk about a little thing called censorship.

The US home port of Splatterhouse for the TurboGrafx-16, although a pretty damn good port in of itself, has a couple of changes from the original arcade/Japanese releases. The most obvious is the Terror Mask itself - Namco presumably thought that a white hockey mask was going to get them a cease and desist straight from the Paramount legal team, so they've made it a lovely maroon colour, like one of those beanies you see on everyone at Outbreak Fest. The second change is in the level four boss fight. Rick finds himself in a small chapel, battling against the incredibly metal boss that is a giant inverted crucifix, surrounded by decapitated demon heads. Needless to say, America wasn't up for this at all, so the background is darkened so you can't tell it is a chapel and the crucifix is replaced with one extra demon head in the middle. Decapitated heads are fine, blasphemy is not - remember that, folks. My personal favourite bit of all of this is when you finish the fight, Rick finds an altar and some vaguely angelic music plays. In the US version, this still happens, only the altar has been removed. JUST the altar, so the candles that were on top of it remain, floating in mid-air. Good work, everyone.

Onto level five, where Rick has to deal with holes filled with dismembered, re-animated hands that flip you the bird and cause havoc when you're trying to jump over them (another Evil Dead reference, right there) but this level is, like many others, really known for the boss fight - for my money, a really great twist. You find Jennifer and as you approach her, she screams out as her skin is torn apart and she transforms into a horrid, wild monster. It's one of the more grim looking enemies in the game and, during the battle, will periodically transform back into Jennifer, who begs Rick to kill her! It's that classic horror trope - the one you loved is still inside that... thing, only they're absolutely powerless to the evil urges they now have. You kill the boss and Jennifer dies in Rick's arms. There's no happy ending in Splatterhouse - its a genuinely horrific moment and one that, sadly, is robbed of some of its power by the almost non-existent in-game storytelling.

The last couple of levels have Rick fighting his way to the 'womb' of the house (and presumably the mother of all these monsters) and then escaping as the mansion burns to the ground, battling one final, giant monster called HELL CHAOS. A lone grave is found at the end and a ghostly face rises up from it, with fans speculating that's the spirit of Dr. West. The mask explodes and Rick is free to leave - alone - with the mask coming back together for one final jump scare right at the end. It's all done in about half an hour, a solid arcade classic that throws the kitchen sink at you during its short playtime.

The reason I love Splatterhouse is because it taps into one of my favourite elements of the horror genre - cheering for the killer as they slaughter their way through the movie. Freddy, Jason, Michael Myers, they all started as genuinely terrifying entities but as their respective series' continued, they ended up being kind-of antiheroes. You don't watch those films in the hope that anyone gets away, you watch them to see what creative, horrific ways the famous antagonist uses to dispatch them. There's a sick sense of humour to it all, seeing how far these killers go, taking a murder from horrible to almost absurdly funny. Hell, I was watching the recently released Terrifier 2 and, although full of horrendous gore and some nasty kills, I wasn't invested in seeing these victims escape alive - I was practically cheering supernatural killer clown Art on as he dismembered the cast of horror movie clichés. Rick is that killer antagonist. You get to play as one, inflicting maximum, crunchy, bloody but ultimately satisfying and borderline hilarious violence upon everything that gets in your way. The sequels really ramp this up, with even more violence, even grimmer bosses and, surprisingly, much more in the way of storytelling - fleshing out the story behind the mask and giving Rick a reason to keep coming back, to keep fighting and killing. The underrated PS3/360 reboot of sorts is a campy, crude and extremely gory action game that riffs on the classics that gets far too much flack for simply being a fun if fairly by-the-numbers action game at its core. It's a series that has seen its fair share of controversy but seems almost tame in comparison to violent games in 2022. With games like Dead By Daylight and the Friday the 13th glorifying the slasher killer with great success, there's clearly people out there with the same bloodlust I have and I'd love to see Rick come out of what seems to be permanent retirement for one last killing spree.

THANKS FOR READING.

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