The crossover between horror and games is something I’ve always been interested in as a long-time genre fan.
Quite a lot of horror enthusiasts are gamers, that shouldn’t surprise anyone, and with gaming, you can be the one hunting the zombies, or fighting your way through a horde of them, making the genre even more interactive than before.
Going to see a horror film in a theater is also an interactive experience in that the audience becomes part of the movie, and makes it come to life by screaming, yelling back at the screen, and nervously laughing off the scares.
So again, it’s also not a surprise to learn that for Grasshopper Manufacture, the biggest game in the company’s history is the horror game Lollipop Chainsaw.
As MCVUK reports, Grasshopper’s other games include No More Heroes, another horror game called Shadows of the Damned, and Killer7, but Chainsaw has indeed been their most popular title, hitting 700,000 shipments worldwide. The game was not as well reviewed as with Grasshopper’s other titles, but in another interesting parallel, it looks like horror games, like the movies themselves, are also critic proof.
And of course, sex always sells, and with Lollipop, the protagonist of the game is a sexy chick in a skimpy cheerleader outfit with her bloody chainsaw at the ready to cut through the living dead. The game was created by James Gunn, who penned the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, and is also up to direct the movie adaptation of Marvel’s Guardians of the Universe, which is due on August 1, 2014.
Some reporters like Ben Parfitt at MCVUK feel this is going for the lowest common denominator in gaming, but maybe with horror games you shouldn’t go too hyper-intellectual like David Cronenberg’s work.
Psychological horror is great in the right hands, and perhaps in the right video game it can be very effective as well. But in the case of Lollipop Chainsaw, sometimes a babe that looks like a stripper version of Buffy ripping through everything in your path really does the trick.
