Blood, Death, Satan & Metal

The most hyped horror movie of the year! I always say that we get ONE good one per year (admittedly I'm talking about pretentious indie "Elevated Horror") and I am, for the most part right. Perhaps I'll make a list someday, who knows? I will talk only momentarily about the hype and how the film does in relation to it: I skipped the hype. I loved the first teaser trailer and when the second one that had more context and talking came out I tuned it out and avoided everything about the movie until it came out. This was the correct choice. Trailers are an art unto themselves and have a duty to do show and imply as much as they can while, crucially, not spoiling the movie, and the later trailers did not fully respect the film in that regard. The movie on its own merits is excellent. Not perfect, but satisfyingly creepy, immersive and dirty feeling. It channels Silence of the Lambs primarily, with Seven and Zodiac (more the actual historical events than the Fincher film) n...

The 2021 film The Green Knight is, in my opinion, OSR as hell. It’s a quest by an amoral/morally complex knave to confront a strange and unique foe. There is a lot of wilderness travel and encounters of all types, social, magical, and physical. It’s also not focused overly on a cohesive or “satisfying” narrative but rather the wonder and terror of the journey itself. This film has an RPG tie-in. It’s only available in physical form from the A24 studio itself as a box set styled after the famous Mentzer Red Box, and includes a single “Game Master’s Guide” booklet which houses both the rules and the adventure “Quest For Honor”, 5 character sheets for different roles, a single d20, and a color map of Britain with cryptic, post-Roman era cities, ruins and landmarks rather than more recognizable English locations. All the physical components are beautifully colored, printed on glossy paper of thick stock. There is no PDF version that I am aware of. Players beware, you should make ph...

Here comes more inspiration and recommendation. This time around, it's archetypes, films so quintessentially and obviously weird that their relevancy to Weird storytelling should leave you with a gameable idea or two almost automatically. November by Rainer Sarnet This is a slow, black & white Estonian film. I'd probably characterize it as a European Kurosawa film in many ways (no samurai though). It has humor, horror and folklore all at once in a mix both incongruous and somehow elegant (think Rashomon). It's about common folk who use magic to control servant spirits called kratts made out of junk. They sell their souls to the devil to make these things, and they go mad and kill their masters every now and then anyway. What a deal. So this movie is about people trying to solve simple problems with extreme solutions. Kind of like a Weird Magic spell! Magic, demons, plagues and ghosts are just facts of life and you work with them just like you would a...

A good Ref takes inspiration from everywhere. Books, graphic novels, video games, movies, television. What's the canon? Where is the weird? We need an Appendix N. It's pretty hard to find many films that meet the standards of the type of games we try to run. To that end, I'm going to be doing a couple of posts about some movies that will give solid inspiration for atmosphere, aesthetics, creatures, and to a lesser degree, structure (because being a slave to structure is antithetical to good refereeing, particularly in the OSR). I will avoid spoilers without warning and give content warnings where appropriate. Every film comes with my recommendation. Of course, there is no way to begin a series like this without addressing the elephantine abomination in the torture room, the most obvious, perhaps even cliche choices of inspiration for a deadly, dark and weird game. The Obvious The VVitch by Robert Eggers This is one of a few films which will instantly be brought up...