Splatterhouse is a horror-themed
video game released by the Japanese developer Namco in 1988 and later ported to
the home console Turbografx-16 in 1990. Heavily influenced by films like Friday 13th (1980), The Evil
Dead (1981) and Re-Animator (1985), the plot follows students Rick
and Jennifer as they seek shelter from a storm in the mansion of Dr. West, a
missing parapsychologist. Because of rumours connecting the mansion and its
inhabitants to weird, terrifying experiments, Dr. West’s gothic pile is known
locally as the ‘Splatterhouse’. Despite this reputation (and in the tradition
of the finest horror film decision-making), Rick and Jennifer prefer to be in
the Splatterhouse than out in the rain. Upon
entry, the door slams shut behind them and the pair are plunged into darkness.
Jennifer screams, Rick passes out. When Rick wakes up Jennifer is gone and he
is different. Rick has been possessed
by one of the entities in the house, a sentient ‘Terror Mask’. Fusing itself to
his face, the Terror Mask transforms Rick into a monstrous Jason Voorhees-type
figure. Enraged and guided by the mask, Rick sets off into the endless
corridors of the Splatterhouse to rescue Jennifer. Along the way pummels into
oblivion all the demonic creatures he encounters. This – rather than the rescue
– is the main task of the game: it is, after all, a side-scrolling beat ‘em-up.
In the event Rick doesn’t rescue Jennifer, but instead destroys hundreds of
creatures and burns the mansion to the ground.
Rick’s fascination / entanglement with the mask is an apt symbol for the appeal of the game. Lurid and often grotesque, you shouldn’t like it, but you do. As with most beat ‘em-ups there’s queasy satisfaction to be gained from the endless carnage you can mete out to enemy after enemy. Thanks to this graphic content the game was one of the first to receive a parental warning. Like Doom (1993) and later Carmageddon (1997), Splatterhouse holds a particular place in video game history. It marks the point at which games started to get harder, not just in terms of difficulty but also in terms of what they were prepared to show. Splatterhouse and these others, as well as drawing on cult cinema of the early-to-mid 1980s, also paralleled the return of various ‘video nasties’ to the high street across the later-1980s and 1990s. Companies like VIPCO had done a VHS re-release of Lucio Fulci’s The House by the Cemetery (1981) in 1988, and if you watched that along with their 1992 version of Michael Pataki’s Massacre Mansion (1975), you’d have more than enough content to put together a hypnagogic version of Splatterhouse: The Movie. There are better side-scrollers than Splatterhouse, of course, but few in my view that better manage to crystallize up the very particular collision that occurred in 1990s popular culture between horror movies and video games.
Recently I came across a (very overpriced) copy of Splatterhouse 2. I was infernally tempted to buy it. Like Rick with the Terror Mask, I felt myself drawn to it. It would, however, have been a distinctly talismanic purchase. I would not have been buying it for the dubious pleasures of the game alone. I wanted the cartridge because it would have conjured something else. It would have brought back my memories of the first Splatterhouse; not a memory of the event of the game, - the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of it, the actual playing of it, but more like the ‘when’ and the ‘where’ of it: the place in which and the time at which I first came across it. To be more specific, buying the cartridge, I thought, would have brought into sharper focus a memory of encountering the original game in the mid-1990s, by way of an old arcade machine in the foyer of the Unit Four Cinema in Brierfield.
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Brierfield is a town just outside Burnley in Lancashire. According to H.J. Hill, writing for the website cinematreasures.org, Brierfield Cinema was the first “purpose-built cinema” in Burnley. It opened on 15 July 1915 with a capacity of around 600 seats and continued trading as a cinema until 1959. From there the building went through a series of changes:
In April
1959 it opened as a sports hall; that failed. It then opened as the Rockin’
Shoe Disco on Sunday 21st July 1961; that too didn’t last. It opened on 15th
December 1961 as the 77 Club: cabaret and gambling. That went well until
changes in the gambling laws affected business and it closed in November 1967.
From here the building re-opened as Unit Four Cinemas in
July 1969 before the Apollo Group in took over ownership in 1989. My family and
I started going to Brierfield just before the handover, first to see Crocodile
Dundee II (1988) and then The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).
The latter gave rise to my earliest attempt at film reviewing – trying to tell
my horrified primary school teacher about this film I’d seen at the weekend
that involved torture, decapitation and the screeching, skull-faced figure of Death.
Later on, my father and I went there to see Judge Dredd (1995) and Mortal
Kombat (1995). I was not quite fifteen. No matter. One of the many great
things about Brierfield was that they would let you in for anything. This was mainly
because during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, footfall was low (or so it
seemed) which had the effect of making any visit akin to a private screening.
Such unintended privilege, unsurprisingly, was also the cinema’s downfall. In
1997 Apollo opened a larger multiplex closer to Burnley’s town centre.
Brierfield was given little time to compete. The new cinema opened in May 1997 and by July of that year, Brierfield had
closed its doors for good. As Hill reminds us, its last screening rota was the
remarkable quartet of Batman and Robin, The Fifth Element, Con
Air, and Beavis and Butthead in America. What a way to go. New
businesses took over the site soon after, and used it as a single storey site. Most
recently, the building was trading as a Dixy Chicken take-away and Maria’s
World Food Store.
Going to the cinema in the 1980s and 1990s involved a lot
of enticing glimpses. When you were waiting in the foyer or walking through the
corridor and the doors of a screen opened, you craned your neck trying to get a
look at one of the films you weren’t there to see. One of my earliest cinema
visits was to Accrington’s Unit Four (closed in 1990). This was about 1987 –
the time of the first Robocop – and the sheer pull of it - the thought,
when sat watching that year’s Disney film, that such sci-fi carnage was playing
out just next door - was almost irresistible.
Brierfield probably would have let you in for Robocop. All comers would have been welcome. But despite its ‘unfiltered’ approach to admission, it was also not short of the hypnotizing glimpses – its own internal otherworlds, you might say. Aside from the posters on the walls – some of which stayed up for a long time (The Adventures of Milo and Otis (1989), anyone? Cutthroat Island (1995)?), there was also an array of arcade machines in the upper foyer, three at least. All unlabelled. Black boxes that stood there like the hidden-in-plain-sight recruitment machine in The Last Starfighter (1984). These three included Splatterhouse. Playing it after seeing a film was like a grisly extension of whatever fantasy had been shown on screen. The game was not so much as task – can you beat the enemies? – as a mapping machine: how far can you go? Charging through the mansion felt like a way of extending the films – real or imaginary – while they were still in the air. Post-credits, out into the light, the game, already saturated with weird film energy offered a way to stretch the cinema into longer, labyrinthine corridors.
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In his novel The Director’s Cut (2000), Nicholas Royle has one of his characters – the production assistant Angelo – compulsively wander London in search of lost or abandoned cinemas. It’s a visionary project in which maps, film listings and architectural traces combine into Angelo’s all-consuming psychogeographic fugue. Filmmaker Chris Petit – namechecked in the novel – wrote in his classic essay ‘Newman Passage’ (1993) that finding film locations across London like Maryon Park (used in Blow-Up (1966)) and the sinister title alleyway that appears in Peeping Tom (1960), was a way of orienting himself after he had first arrived there to work for Time Out. For Petit, these visits became a way of gaining purchase; of carving out personal territory in the otherwise anonymous capital. Angelo’s project covers many of the same zones, but travels in the opposite direction towards sites of projection rather than initial recording, his guiding thesis being: “where a film is shown is more important than where it’s shot”. Angelo archives the lost cinemas via a collection of empty VHS cases, each one acting as a spatio-temporal reliquary. His ‘copy’ of Petit’s Chinese Boxes (1984) carries the note “Roxie, 9.12.86”, a cinema that closed in March 1987. The box is a pocket of the lost cinema’s air, something of the emotion the space would have absorbed, night after night, as successive films were projected there. Angelo’s Chinese Boxes, then, “is more a faithful record of [his] experience of Chinese Boxes than a copy of Chinese Boxes itself.”
The same, I believe, is true of the Splatterhouse 2 cartridge. As a container (‘cartridge’ come from cartouche, a “full charge for a pistol”) it contains more than a circuit board. It is very much not the game played in Brierfield, not even a copy of it. It is, though, a box that sparks the necessary charge of memory; a box that contains the required psychic gunpower to blow the necessary hole in reality big enough to see the vanished corridors beyond. A way of getting back there and, crucially, then. Angelo in The Director’s Cut was in search of “the Museum of Lost Cinema Spaces”: a grand cathedral of the ideal, a sanctuary away from the storm of heavy black clouds. My lost cinema space is more singular, more specific – a very particular venue that has, nonetheless, continued to carve out a territory in the mind since it closed. Seeing the cartridge filled in the remaining space in the synaptic gap. It brought it back and held out the possibility of a return, or sorts. Sometimes, when there’s a persistently resonant chamber rooted in the brain, you need the right kind of key to open it up.
Ok then: sold. I’ll buy it. I won’t play it. I’ll use it instead. I’ll use it to go back to the house.
