You know those childhood holidays that aren’t actually holidays? The ones that aren’t exotic or warm or in the least bit interesting, and really just a week or so when you don’t happen to be at school?
Well, Splatterhouse was the high point for me of a single, sodden week on the Northern Irish coast, back in 1989. I would have been eight or nine: I went there with my best friend, Rory, and his mum. They were visiting relatives, who lived on what was probably the most geographically exposed council estate in the United Kingdom – from what little I recall of that week, we basically just stayed indoors, day after day, watching the Atlantic Ocean frothing angrily across the road. All this beneath a grey and curdled sky, slinging its filth endlessly down upon our crappy little house.
I don’t remember much else. I don’t even remember how we got to Ireland and back, and that’s odd, because it must necessarily have involved either a plane or a ferry, both of which you’d think would have some staying power in the mind of an eight year old.
What I do remember, though, was me and Rory walking to the same dingy seaside arcade every single day, and playing lots and lots of Splatterhouse.
Splatterhouse is kind of a mash-up of Friday 13th, Reanimator and the Evil Dead films. To set the scene: Rick, a prominent ‘parapsychology’ student (‘prominent’, as in ‘the world’s only’) shelters from a violent storm at the foreboding West Mansion, along with his partner Jen (who’s already traumatized, having apparently just escaped from a Whitesnake video). As this mansion is rumoured to be the site of several dreadful and unspecified ‘experiments’, the pair of them are then predictably attacked by a gang of mutant hellspawn. Rick is left for dead, whilst Jen – in her 14” heels and a clingy white dress – is carried off in a fireman’s lift by one of the monsters, squealing and thumping her little fists against its back.
It’s at this point that a battered and broken Rick notices the Terror Mask (which Namco’s legal department are keen to stress is absolutely NOT a hockey mask), the donning of which gives Rick a) superhuman strength, and b) the sudden, unexplained look of a rapist-mechanic.
Empowering Rick with psychotic strength and a ferocious temper, the mask assures him that he can save Jen, if he does exactly what he’s told i.e. progress slowly from left to right through the mansion, fending off a inexhaustible slew of weird, Lovecraftian enemies.
Splatterhouse is a sort of interactive video nasty; flimsy, grubby, wholly unremarkable really... but still somehow interesting, in a ‘ewwwwww’ kind of way. It trades on a great name (‘Splatter’-anything - that’s like catnip for pre-teen boys), and some almost imperceptibly black humour: beyond that, it’s so shallow that you could barely go paddling in it. It was – and remains - one of those games that wasn’t meant to exist beyond a couple of 50p pieces; it got converted to a number of home platforms, and fell predictably on its arse, because... well... it’s not actually very good, all things considered.
What it is, though, is very, very violent. That’s pretty much the whole point of it, and in the fog of indistinguishable sideway-scrollers that were starting to cloud the market at this point, that was enough of a novelty to warrant your attention. Violence may be the only remarkable or halfway interesting thing about Splatterhouse, but it’s a celebratory, wanton sort of violence. In 1988, it was (un)comfortably the sickest computer game I’d ever played... and probably remained thus for a good few years afterwards, certainly until the arrival of Mortal Kombat.
The ambience is superb, as the backdrop of the whole game is the floorboards, chimney-stacks, furniture and wallpaper of a very large (and formerly very normal) house. To have all this outlandishly graphic stuff happening in such prosaic environments as kitchens, hallways and a lounge creates the game’s most successfully frightening (or rather, unsettling) parts. It’s probably a complete accident, but the developers have found a way of juxtaposing the humdrum domestic stuff with nightmarish violence, which is after all one of the horror genre’s most successful and travelled concepts (think The Exorcist, Amityville, The Shining etc). It’s earnestly freaky.
The enemies are one of Splatterhouse’s biggest selling points, and central to its overarching weirdness. They’re all fantastically grim, in a messed-up ‘gun-that-shoots-other-guns / dog-that-barks wasps’ kind of way. Bloodied foetuses dangling from the ceilings, severed abdomens chained to dungeon walls, vomiting puddles of acidic puke... vast, pregnant demons, with erupting bellies, splashing lime-green embryonic fluid all over the floor... maggots and leaches crawling from piles of swollen alien crap, flinging themselves across the room... lumbering, skinless monsters, erupting against the furniture with the swing of a bat... Combine all this with the weapons on offer – baseball bats, meat cleavers, even a shotgun – and the game’s admirably creative attitude towards gross-out violence is just constantly, delightfully rank.
All this gross-out, macabre funk is lacquered so thickly on, that you’re loathe to peel back the freaky gloss and have a longer look at what actually lies beneath. And it’d be churlish to do so, in a sense, because Splatterhouse is a game that defines itself entirely on the mood it sets, on how it makes you feel, and not what it’s asking you to do; the (obvious) limitations and the rather monotonous gameplay are more than compensated by the weirdly compelling sense of unease you get from actually playing it. Namco crafted something that was genuinely unsettling – not Resident Evil ‘make you jump’ scary, but a precision blend of the outrageous and the distasteful, a pervasive currant of nightmare dread that gushes through the whole game. And it works. It props the game up on its own.
I’ll always remember it, nestling there in the guts of that dingy arcade. So just as the pioneering work of Dr Henry West begat Splatterhouse, so I thank Splatterhouse for resuscitating that one spectacularly damp week in Northern Ireland.
