Deep Red

Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched a lot of Italian giallo movies. Giallos tend to be quasi-thriller, semi-slasher, kinda-horror films, stylized, exploitative, and way over the top.

If nothing else, the genre offers up a wealth of fun titles: All the Colors of the Dark. Kill, Baby, Kill! Hatchet for the Honeymoon. The House With the Laughing Windows. The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears. The Perfume of the Lady in Black. The Red Queen Kills Seven Times. Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key.  

The best-known giallo to U.S. audiences is probably Suspiria, Dario Argento’s dizzying supernatural thriller. Suspiria makes its mark with a hypnotic (or just repetitive, depending who you ask) soundtrack and a blaring oversaturated color palette. Anytime anything happens, the screen is drenched in color. Why be subtle when you can just light entire scenes bright glowing red? The genre already showcases stylized, over-the-top violence, so why not go nuts with the visuals to match? It may not be good, strictly speaking, but it’s definitely memorable.

But never mind Suspiria (and definitely don’t mind the terrible po-faced 2018 remake, unless you enjoy watching a film zoom straight up its own ass on a rocket blast of bombastic self-importance). Suspiria is usually classed as more of a horror film, for its supernatural aspects. 

But the same director also made what might be the ultimate pure giallo film, Profondo Rosso, a.k.a. Deep Red. Deep Red hits every giallo formula note perfectly, cogs clacking like a roller coaster climbing to the top. It’s also a thriller so strained and tissue-thin, it almost becomes a comment on the genre. 

I’m going to spoil almost the entire plot of Deep Red now, in the sense that I’m going to tell you what happens in most of it. But at the same time, I can’t spoil this plot for you any more than I can spoil a bowl of alphabet soup. One is about as coherent as the other.

Continue reading Deep Red

the one who disagrees

I’m the one dentist in five who disagrees. My thick carapace is festooned with the broken harpoons of those who came before you, trying to change my mind about chewing gum. Try your luck, oh fool, and I’ll bury you in Poseidon’s flower bed.

The Signal: EP167

The Signal: EP167 – Exactly 45 minutes of the sounds I’m listening to this month. I mean.. not ALL of the sounds, but a representative sampling. We’ve got dreamy pop, French fuzz, psychobilly and garage rock from Austria, beats from around the world, cumbia, a touch of vaporwave and revival tent charlatanism… and more!

Download by clicking on the link (or image) above. The file is available only for a limited time. If you’re interested in the tracklist, it’s in the mp3 itself, in the id3 tags. There’s a mailing list as well but I’ve taken it off its old platform, so for now I have no idea how you’d join without contacting me directly. Mailing list members, The Tuned In, are among the first on the planet to know when a new mix is posted, and they get a permanent archive link and the entire playlist, delivered to your inbox. Must be nice.

The Quick and The Grave: a rules-light RPG

Hey! I wrote a little game about grave robbing! It’s fun! Unless you can’t get past any moral hang-ups you may have against grave robbing!

The Signal: EP166

The Signal: EP166 – Exactly 45 minutes of songs for when the world is sick and fire. We’ve got some bass and beats, some theremin-infused dub, a reggae cover of a 90s Pumpkins hit, German disco, rock from Sudan, Japanese-infused hip-hop from India, doo wop and roots country. There’s going to be something you love.

Download by clicking on the link (or image) above. The file is available only for a limited time. If you’re interested in the tracklist, it’s in the mp3 itself, in the id3 tags. Or, if you sign up to be a member of our mailing list, The Tuned In, you’ll be among the first on the planet to know when a new mix is posted, and you’ll get a permanent archive link and the entire playlist, delivered to your inbox.

The Signal: EP165

The Signal: EP165 – Exactly 45 minutes of tunes custom-suited to Plagueworld 2020 living. The perfect soundtrack to whatever four walls you’ve spent too much time looking at. Good songs for the hanging-by-a-string crowd.

This time out we’ve got some reggae, some no-wave, some beats, some acid, some Hungarian Nu-Disco, some Turkish-inspired Bollywood funk… and more!

Download by clicking on the link (or image) above. The file is available only for a limited time. If you’re interested in the tracklist, it’s in the mp3 itself, in the id3 tags. Or, if you sign up to be a member of our mailing list, The Tuned In, you’ll be among the first on the planet to know when a new mix is posted, and you’ll get a permanent archive link and the entire playlist, delivered to your inbox.

Writing Questions for TROPHY DARK

A few thoughts about question design for Trophy Dark incursions:

Done well, a question for your players does 3 things:

  1. It affects the narrative
  2. It illuminates the inner world of a character
  3. It contributes to world-building (i.e. it provides details for the setting)

The best questions can’t be answered with a single word or short phrase. “What did you drop?” “My sword.”

Compare this to: You realize that you’ve misplaced the one thing you swore you wouldn’t lose track of. What was it, and how do you convince yourself to swallow your grief, so you don’t panic at the loss or turn back?

Don’t be afraid to make a question define something about a player’s character. If it doesn’t work, the GM can skip it or the player can modify it.

Ask questions that let the players volunteer complications for their own characters. After all, we’re playing to lose. Let people choose which flavor of doom excites them. “As the torches fail, who in the group takes advantage of the darkness to slip away?” The obvious next question to write might be “What do they want to do in the dark?” but it’s more fun to make this a trap: Once someone says “My character will slip off. They want to do X.” So you design a follow-up question: “What do they encounter in the darkness that makes them wish they had remained with their friends in the light? Does their pride allow them to call for help?”

Ask questions that, like Moments, echo your theme.

A question can be an invitation to collaborate. Give a little with the question. Let’s say you want the players to volunteer a monster they would find scary. Don’t just ask “What’s the creature you encounter look like?” Give them some attributes to build with. “A creature descends from the ceiling with milky eyes. By what name did your people call this thing and why did you hope you’d live a full live without ever encountering one? Which of your relations barely survived a run-in with one?” etc. etc. How did they survive? What is its most terrifying weapon?

Your questions can give the player a framework (and more importantly, permission) to help build the story without putting the entire burden on them to create something from scratch.

The same trick works for traps, for areas… for anything. “When you enter room what about it fills your character with awe/fear/wonder/greed?”

“A set of symbols run down the thing and only one of you can read them. Where did you learn this language? Do you tell the other that it says something-something?”

I hope the above all helps demonstrate my first point: You don’t have to describe everything for the players. Your questions open a door and invite them to join the GM (and you) in creating a unique incursion experience that is customized to the characters they created.

The Signal: EP164

The Signal: EP164 – Exactly 45 minutes of tunes custom designed to bring back cassette tapes from wherever they’ve been. On a mountain top retreat? At the bottom of the ocean? Fiji? This time out we’ve got some brand new old school drum & bass, bass-heavy reggae, spoken-word retro-80s something from the UK, Croatian rock, Mexican dreampop and more!

Download by clicking on the link (or image) above. The file is available only for a limited time. If you’re interested in the tracklist, it’s in the mp3 itself, in the id3 tags. Or, if you sign up to be a member of our mailing list, The Tuned In, you’ll be among the first on the planet to know when a new mix is posted, and you’ll get a permanent archive link and the entire playlist, delivered to your inbox.

5 more inspirations

6) Darin Morgan – The guy wrote a few episodes of X-Files and Millennium and while he wasn’t prolific, just about everything he wrote simultaneously embodied the best elements of the show and skewered/undercut/recontextualized them as well. They demonstrated a deep knowledge and an irreverence that were just amazing, but a lot of the times, the guy wasn’t really putting much out. I’ve always been inspired by the sniper-type writers who laze about but when they do go off, they go off. In part because it gives me some hope that my slow output is still “okay” according to some vague, externalized authority. (There is no such authority.)

7) Kanesha Bryant’s monster designs and detailed world-building

8) Neuroscience and philosophy, in general. How much of the world can we actually understand, considering that we are forced to understand it with imperfect tools and a brain that uses shortcuts to create a living fiction just so we can navigate? Like: The optic nerve at the back of our eyes has no rods and cones, so our field of vision should have black holes in the middle. But they don’t ’cause our brains just estimate what should be there. We’re out of the loop.

9) Aphex Twin. Radiohead. I listen to a lot of music. Been making music mixes for over a decade of whatever stuff I’m finding new & interesting.

10) The moment when the pain of not-creating outweighs the pain of creation, may its orbit ever tighten.