2026-09-15 05:49:02
Last year, as part of my hype/optimism for the Steam Hardware announcements, I wrote a post called My Hopes for the Steam Frame. The digest version: I was optimistic that Valve’s VR headset and “Steam Deck For Your Face” combo could help undo the damage of the Metaverse mentality, by encouraging more weird, smaller, and sustainable projects in VR.
A lot of that was based on the same underlying assumption: that the headset would end up costing in the $700-$800 range at most, and you’d be able to get it bundled with the Steam Machine and controller for in the ballpark of 1600 bucks. As we’ve seen, that did not happen. The Steam Frame is priced similarly to the Steam Machine in the US, at $1059 for a 256 GB model.
But it also feels like the Steam Machine sticker shock ripped off the band-aid, and so the higher-than-hoped-for price for the Steam Frame isn’t met with a gasp of surprise, but a sigh of resignation. Turns out that handing the global economy over to a bunch of sociopathic grifters has its downsides.
More surprising to me was Scott Stein’s review for CNET, where he approached it as somebody who’s not primarily a PC gamer. He found it less capable as a standalone device than a years-old Steam Deck — fine for running the games that you’d expect to run well anywhere, but more limited than the “let’s just try it and see if it works” method that generally yields surprisingly good results on the Deck.
That probably shouldn’t have been surprising, for a couple of reasons. First is that this hasn’t been the focus1 of Valve’s marketing: it’s pitched as a streaming device first and foremost. I was actually surprised to hear that they’re releasing a version of Half-Life: Alyx — which again, is in my opinion the best VR experience ever made — that runs natively on the Steam Frame, instead of having to stream from a more capable PC. It sounds like it’s a downgraded experience from the PC, but I’m more surprised that it’s even possible.
Which is the second thing: my experience with the Steam Deck has been mostly one of “I’m surprised this even works at all.” Mine is almost permanently docked to my desktop monitor at this point, since I keep running into examples where it works great not as a handheld, but as the quiet, always-on, jump-in-and-start-playing desktop gaming PC that I never knew I wanted. And that’s a reminder of how much work has gone into it, from both the Valve side and the developer side, to delivering the promise of games that can be mostly hardware- and OS-agnostic and just run wherever you want them. Which means that potentially, the apparent limitations of the Steam Frame’s native game support might be a software issue that can be improved over time.
That’s the opposite of how I’ve always thought of computers and software, for about as long as I’ve been using them. They’re supposed to only get worse over time, as developers keep adding more and more stuff that eventually overpowers the hardware and forces you to buy a new one. It’s a side effect of so much work being put into the translation layer(s), and actually a different mindset from companies that are trying to put all the focus on a specific combination of hardware and OS, to lock people into a platform that they control. And obviously, it’s in Steam’s best interest to pursue this philosophy, since they’re uniquely positioned to be able to profit from cross-platform software.
And all of that indirectly gets to why I’m still optimistic about the potential of the Steam Frame, despite the wet blanket of the price, and the reminder that it’s not actually a 1:1 equivalent to a Steam Deck running on a huge virtual screen. Because I’m still convinced that people have had the wrong expectations of VR, and have been chasing the wrong thing. I still strongly believe that the near-future of consumer entertainment VR is in sustainable weirdness.
I keep throwing myself at and into VR headsets, ever since I was first shown a demo of the HTC Vive and saw Valve’s The Lab. It was essentially an extended tech demo, showing people what you could do with the hardware. But more significantly to me, it showed what you could do with a combination of hardware and Valve’s Portal/Team Fortress 2-era sensibilities. What happens when you emphasize creativity, variety, and most importantly, a sense of humor, with technology that shifts your relationship to the environment and the ways you interact with it?
That first experience in VR felt like such a lightning bolt of an epiphany that it’s still lingering, even after a decade plus of lowered expectations and signs that the entire medium has dead-ended into stagnation. And over the years, I’ve come to the simple conclusion that people first experiencing VR have one of three main takeaways:
I’ve never been a fan of Facebook/Meta, but I feel pretty free to be even less tactful now than I’ve ever been: that company buying its way into becoming the de facto stewards of VR is the worst thing that could’ve happened to the medium as a whole.
Usually, I try to take a glass-half-full approach. As much as I dislike the company, they have poured a lot of money into funding developers and encouraging people to make new stuff for VR. And they did get the technology into a ton of new people’s hands, giving them their first experiences with VR, by pricing the Quest and Quest 2 at the level of an impulse purchase.2
We’ve seen how the company’s big bet on the “Metaverse” fizzled out, and now the company seems to be saying something like “No no when we said ‘metaverse,’ we really meant AI and pervert glasses the whole time.” I haven’t used the Quest 2 in a least a year, and had no interest in the Quest 3, so I can’t say for certain, but I certainly get the impression that the company has decided to let it stagnate if not outright abandon it. It sure sounds like they’re treating it as the consumer tech equivalent of a dead mall.
For consumers, it set unrealistic expectations for how much these things “should” cost, based on a company that was aggressively subsidizing them in order to build a new platform. And for developers, I think it set unrealistic expectations for the business model of VR games, based on a company that was aggressively funding development in order to build a new platform.
And overall, I think maybe the more pernicious side effect is that it set unrealistic expectations for how big a market there should be for VR. I’ve been lumping Facebook/Meta and VR devs into category 2 above, thinking that I can at least sympathize with the sensation of trying a VR headset and genuinely believing that it’s got the potential to change everything. But I think the reality is that category 1 is the largest group, by far. Most people simply aren’t ever going to be that excited about headset-based VR and AR.
I can remember trying out Apple’s Vision Pro for the first time, with a small group of co-workers, because there was the hugest disparity in reactions to technology that I’ve ever seen. I was sitting there thinking that it was one of the most magical things I’d ever experienced. A co-worker absolutely hated it. It was uncomfortable. The video pass-through was disorienting. You had to keep making weird gestures. It felt isolating. She actively avoided putting it on, at the same time I was marveling that I could keep it on while doing other stuff, after years of having VR development meaning taking off and putting the headset back on over and over again every few minutes.
I still think that the biggest limitation of the Vision Pro wasn’t actually the price, but the whole idea of pitching it as a lifestyle device for normal people. You kind of have to be a weirdo like me to put one on and think “this is going to change the world.”
Steam’s marketing of the Steam Frame has emphasized the diversity of its target market. It shows a wide range of ages and genders using the headset in different environments, a reminder that the idea is inclusivity and accessibility. Apple did something a little similar with the Vision Pro, trying to emphasize its appeal beyond the type of people you would expect to get much use out of a big head-mounted display. But all of their imagery had models in their beige, tastefully-decorated homes, lounging on a couch or preparing dinner or on the beach (?!), pointedly not showing any nerds or weirdos.
I like Valve’s approach better, though, because they do include the stubbly white guy in a dark room surrounded by computer screens. The vibe isn’t “no weird nerds allowed,” so much as “anyone can be a weird nerd.”
So I actually agree with all of the takes I’ve heard, saying that if anything could’ve taken VR into the mainstream, it would’ve been the Quest 2.
But while that’s mostly used as an example of how VR is dead in the water, I just think that it’s an example of how headset-based VR isn’t mainstream. The trick, as I see it, isn’t in figuring out how to get it more widely adopted, but in figuring out how to make something sustainable without ever expanding beyond a niche market.
Which some people would see as being the equivalent of dead in the water, since it’s targeting a market that has little potential for growth. From the opposite end, some people would see it as a lack of ambition, giving up on the idea that you can create something that will be so appealing that it can’t help but take off to a much wider audience.
Those takes could be right, and I can’t possibly be objective about it. I’m also not invested in it, more than the cost of the previous headsets I’ve gotten which are now sitting in a box somewhere, and the cost of the Steam Frame, which I’m almost certainly going to get.
I don’t think it’s going to have anything approaching the same demand as there is for the Steam Machine, and I don’t even know how much demand there’s been for the Steam Machine. But I do think that it’s going to occupy a similar space. Hardware that isn’t necessarily a huge breakthrough on its own, but just capable enough that it can provide some good experiences. And the bigger appeal is that it’s an open platform, which means we can break from the dominant tech companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Facebook/Meta, in favor of the tech company that we’re still allowed to mostly like.
I still haven’t finished Half-Life: Alyx, even though I love what I have played, mostly because I don’t want to use a Meta product. Is that worth over a thousand bucks? Obviously not, but I’m hoping that it becomes more justified when I see more of the stuff that’s been made over the past few years, but that I’ve skipped because I never want to use the Quest 2.
And the potential for new, weird stuff that developers might try to make, not because they want to make a ton of money by cornering the market with a game that’s a more immersive Halo clone, but because they played Alyx and thought “if Valve can make something like this, what can I make?”
When I was first getting excited about VR, it was mostly glorified tech demos, smaller games riffing on a single idea or a limited set of possible interactions. And like a lot of people at the time, I assumed that these were just a hint of greater things to come. Longer, full-featured games that could “compete” with the AAA productions and have you fully immersed in an experience for hours and hours.
Now, I’m fully convinced that those were the great things to come, and the problem came from assuming that they were too small or lacking in ambition. I mentioned it in my other post, but one of the many things I like about Half-Life: Alyx is that it’s divided into chapters with clear divisions. Even I can play through a chapter in under a half hour, and then take the headset off and take a break. A lot of the focus in VR headsets has been to try and make them smaller, lighter, more comfortable, and less isolating, so that we can wear them for longer and longer. I think the real answer is the simplest one: design experiences so that you can get something interesting, satisfying, and novel in a shorter time.
I think it’s long past time for those of us interested in VR are going to have to shrug and acknowledge that if/when this stuff ever takes over the mainstream, it’s going to be more in the form factor of eyeglasses instead of head-mounted displays. I think it’s also past time for us to acknowledge that really useful versions of that technology are still a long way off, and they’re currently being developed by businesses with the worst agendas and with no consideration for privacy, security, or hell, basic human decency.
Personally, I’m a lot more content to stick with a big screen strapped to my face, with no mistaking the fact that I’m isolated inside my own little world, and which I can use for maybe an hour maximum without wanting to take it off. Which is fine, because I’ve got a variety of interesting stuff to do, which delivers something satisfying in well under an hour.
Can that ever be a viable business model, even taking into account the idea that VR is inevitably going to be a niche market? Don’t ask me; I’m just an ideas guy. But I do know that for the first time in a long time, after repeatedly feeling disappointed and dispirited about the potential of headset VR, I’m feeling inspired to try making something short, weird, and unlike what I can get from a flat screen.
2026-09-14 05:44:28
On the same day that I was thinking of Battlezone as being the exceedingly rare example of a “let’s throw everything in there!” game design that actually ends up working, I was reminded of No Man’s Sky.
It’s just passed its 10th anniversary, and it’s celebrated with yet another free patch. The new one is called Cosmos and promises to have more exploration opportunities in space, instead of just hopping from planet to planet.
For the last several years, No Man’s Sky has baffled me, since they’ve just kept on adding more and more stuff, and it’s all included as a patch on the game I’ve already bought. It’s reminded me of those shops you see along the main street in tourist towns, the ones that are so boutique that you can’t understand how they possibly manage to stay in business, and if you’re at all cynical-minded, you have to conclude that they’re some kind of cheugy money-laundering scheme.
I know nothing about what’s actually going on inside Hello Games, and to be clear I’m not actually accusing them of money-laundering or anything nearly as nefarious. I think it’s just as likely that they’ve sold metric shittons of the game, and it was such a success that they’ve managed to fund it as a decade-long master work. I’ve even got multiple copies, since I bought it for at least one console, on top of my Steam copy.
That doesn’t seem unlikely or naive, either, since that first teaser video for the game made it seem absolutely miraculous. A literally infinite number of planets, with varying biomes, and an infinite number of creatures and plants living on them, of varying sizes and behaviors from skittering insects to dinosaur-sized behemoths. And at any moment, you could hop into your (completely customizable) spaceship, launch into space, and fly to an entirely new planet, or jump to a completely different solar system.
Just the teaser made it seem so ludicrously impossible that they had to be lying. But we bought the game and immediately realized that no, they’d actually pulled it off.
It is a gorgeous game, a 1980s-era science fiction novel cover brought to life. It’s like exploring a combination of your formative science-fiction memories and a prog rock album. You keep finding yourself in the middle of one of the most gorgeous and evocative alien vistas you’ve ever seen, and the fact that it’s mostly procedurally generated drives home the feeling that you really are seeing something that no one else has ever seen before.
The initial release was almost entirely about exploration, but it did have an evocative if somewhat bare-bones level of storytelling and world-building. You were an amnesiac compelled to follow mysterious signals that would take you to some kind of master intelligence at the center of the universe. It all felt perfectly in tone with the overall vibe of the game, an ominous red orb that was calling to you in dreams and speaking to you through ancient artifacts.
There’s an astounding level of artistry in this game. Not just well executed, but so opinionated and specifically evocative, and all intended to work in concert with everything else. And it vibes so much with the feel and tone that I like most in science fiction. It feels nostalgic even as you’re aware that you’re seeing things that nobody has seen before.
It’s also a showcase of the potential of procedural generation, since you can only deliver on a universe of infinite planets with infinite creatures and infinite biomes if you have ingenious ways to remix and recombine pre-generated components to create variety without breaking them. By that measure, it’s a marvel that it manages to feel so artistic and opinionated at all, since it could’ve felt absurdly empty.
But it still does manage to feel strangely empty, because procedural generation is, in my opinion, something of a dead end. At least when it’s made the focus of the experience, instead of an adjunct or something happening in the background.
The reason is that it short-circuits the most basic communication loop between the artist and the audience. Early on, I put a ton of qualifiers onto that, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve extended that to more and more. It’s gone from “in narrative-based video games,” to “video games,” and eventually to “art.” With the only qualifier remaining being the crucial “in my opinion.”
Yesterday, I was motivated to start No Man’s Sky up on the Steam Machine, because it had been a while since I’d played it, and I wanted to check out the new stuff.1 I’d thought that I’d played for a while but fairly quickly lost interest, but I saw that I had five saves already, at various levels of progress. And Steam reported my playtime as being over 110 hours.
So I’m not at all saying that the game isn’t compelling, since it obviously is. And I got sucked in again yesterday, spending almost the entire day just playing No Man’s Sky again, even though the experience felt largely identical to what I’d done before. They’ve streamlined it a lot over the various expansions, and it no longer feels as if you’re spending quite as long in tutorial mode before getting to the good stuff. Which is good and bad, since the moment it opens so many of the world, the tools, and the toys to you is the moment that it loses that sense of progression, that feeling that you’re working towards something intriguing.
These days, there’s a real novelty to being able to lose an entire day to a video game. It feels indulgent. I’m not supposed to be doing this, I could be so much more productive with my time. And No Man’s Sky is perfect for that. There’s just enough of a challenge to make it feel as if you weren’t dropped into a completely open-ended playset, but not so much challenge that you ever feel frustrated enough to rage quit.
But it also still feels empty. Even with whatever expansion it was that added the potential to run into other live players at random. Even with the potential of encountering planets and systems that have already been discovered by other players, which was technically always possible, but seemed mathematically impossible before years’ worth of players exploring everything. And even with more storylines and a few established characters, which are all well-written and thoughtful.
It still feels like the developers giving me a big play set of tools to work with to make my own story, and then mostly leaving me alone. Who am I sharing this with? What’s it for? I expect that the existing storylines have satisfying conclusions, and I just haven’t reached them yet (as far as I recall), but there’s also that feeling of an Elder Scrolls game where I’m overloaded with side quests and have mostly lost interest.
And now, 10 years later, I’ve been presented with all of these options to build elaborate bases, vehicles to travel around on the planet, huge shipping frigates, and even gigantic space stations, but there’s not much sense of it working towards something. It’s all about the act of doing it. Hopping into a cool-looking ATV to go four-wheeling around an exotic alien planet. Where are we headed? Not my problem, man, just be in the moment for once!
I don’t want to come across as too disparaging of the game, since I really do think it’s a design worthy of praise, even if it weren’t something that I’d spent so much time in that it more than justified however little I’ve paid for it. It’s remarkable that it manages to make its vision come through at all. It’s even more remarkable that it’s such a positive vision. There’s combat, but it’s pretty minimal in my experience, and you can almost always avoid it entirely. Instead, it’s a game that’s entirely about exploration and discovery. Your whole game loop is about finding new things, new beings, new places, and figuring out how to coexist with them. You’re rewarded for learning languages and finding more about the societies you encounter. At every step, they could’ve turned this into a more crass and cynical experience for the sake of chasing a stereotypical demographic of video game players, but Hello Games stuck to their guns. Mostly by not sticking to their guns.
But it’s also like another game series that I’ve sunk obscene amounts of time into, which is full of some great art and a real vision for what the experience should be: The Sims series. They are undeniably compelling, and I’d be lying not to include them as some of my favorite games of all time. But the only moments of real connection I feel with anyone else do not come from that promise of “a ghost in the machine” of emergent behavior, but from the bits that do feel hand-crafted and intentional. Otherwise, they’ve given me a fantastic game to explore and become engrossed in, and then told me that they’re not particularly interested in what I choose to do with it. They’ve put me in a room with a bunch of toys and told me to play with myself.
2026-09-14 03:38:25
On the day I’m writing this, BlizzCon is going on, which means a lot of teasers, previews, and announcements for games that make me say, “Wait, are people really still playing that after all these years?” Yesterday morning, one of the first things I saw online was a post about the teaser for the new Starcraft, the successor to Blizzard’s seminal but long-dormant sci-fi real-time strategy series.
The post simply had a few screenshots from the teaser trailer, with close-ups of a grim space marine, giant landing ships on an alien planet, and an impressive mech suit. The text said: “StarCraft announced (open world shooter) – Coming 2030”.
I assumed it had to be a parody of whatever Blizzard had actually announced. Can you even imagine a company with the definitive real-time strategy franchise releasing a new entry and choosing to make it just another open world shooter? And announcing a game that won’t come out until 2030 has to be a gag, right?
Four years is not a particularly long development time; I’ve regret to say that I’ve taken even longer than that to make fairly simply games for a 1-bit handheld platform. But it’s like how you always list a price as $999 to avoid the psychological barrier. 2030 feels like it should be so far away! The bigger problem, though, is that Starcraft is such a well-known and fiercely beloved franchise, so why would anyone want to release a successor that makes audiences ask, “How is that not just another Destiny or Halo?”
I swear that all of this is relevant to a tribute to Battlezone, released in 1998.
It was also an attempt to make a new update for a seminal game that was almost 20 years old at that point. The original was a classic vector-based tank game that was almost certainly the first first-person game that most people had ever seen. The developers also were tasked with being faithful to the original, but making something that fit in better with the trends at the time.
And the trends at the time were, well, the first StarCraft. Or more accurately, the Command and Conquer series, which had already been out for a few years. Real-time strategy games were huge. To the point that it’s still weird to me whenever I realize that they’re just not a thing anymore. Just about every month since I’ve started working in video games, I’ll see another video or essay about the Death of Adventure Games, but it’s actually more surprising to me that the RTS genre seems to have so thoroughly disappeared, considering how ubiquitous it was.
Battlezone took the first-person tank combat of the original and not only updated everything to contemporary 3D instead of wire frames, but added two more layers: a first-person shooter, and an RTS base-building and unit-management game. You could jump in and out of different vehicles and drive them around, or try (usually unsuccessfully) to take them out on foot. You could also order construction of new buildings and new units, and give them automated instructions.
It seems like it shouldn’t have worked, since there would be too much to deal with all at once. But it worked beautifully. You were constantly having to switch between the immediate, immersive concerns of a shooter; the tactical concerns of a skirmish; and then the overall strategy of where you choose to build and how you choose to advance on the enemy.
And because you could never remain completely in the realm of unseen commander hovering over the battle, sending faceless units to their doom, there was a near-constant shift in drama and immersiveness as well. You —or at least I, as a person who’s generally bad at video games — could find yourself outside of your tank and super-vulnerable on foot, deciding whether you want to be reckless and try and take on the enemy with no defenses, or scramble and try to stay out of sight while you desperately search for, or construct, another vehicle.
On top of that, there was a story campaign dealing with an alternate-history Cold War, with the US and USSR fighting for dominance of the solar system. That made it feel similar to a less-fantastic version of Command and Conquer, which to me was far more interesting than Blizzard’s pastiche of every sci-fi movie or book they’d ever seen, plastered on top of a meticulously-balanced strategy game.
And you could play through the campaign, or play in multiplayer matches against real opponents. The existence of the latter is why I never did the former, and why I never actually played much of Battlezone no matter how much I liked it. When I worked at LucasArts, we would play in LAN matches after hours against members of the QA teams, and it was always a humiliating spectacle. Like playing against the Harlem Globetrotters levels of being so thoroughly outmatched by professionals. Even more than Counter-Strike, it was that experience that made me realize that I’m just shit at most action games, and even though I don’t care that much about winning, I still hate losing so completely and profoundly as we did in those matches.
But it’s stood out in my mind ever since as one of the most ingenious game designs I’ve ever played. The perfect example of taking on what should’ve been too much, and still managing to pull it off.
One of the most common ideas when you’re a younger fan of video games is that of the “Everything Game.” You can kind of tell how long someone has been playing games and thinking about how they’re designed, simply by how much they try to put into it. Starting out, it seems like a natural progression: if I’m having this time running around and shooting, wouldn’t it be even better if there were a ton of lore and world-building? And I could talk to every NPC? And if there were a higher-level strategy layer on top? And lots of mini-games? It’s easy to think that not being as maximalist as possible with a game design is nothing more than a failure of ambition.
Most people eventually come to the realization that that’s why we have different video games. When you have a game that tries to do everything, it’s never a “oh boy! Two cakes!” situation, even when the individual parts are done well. The elements fight with each other, often ruining the pacing, often detracting from the impact of each other, and often feeling exhausting. It’s why whenever I see a game that tries to be everything to everyone, I immediately think of it as a case of unchecked ego and out-of-control scope.
But there are significant exceptions, the games that take on more and actually pull it off. Subnautica was a recent surprise. But Battlezone makes me more intensely nostalgic, because I didn’t fully appreciate at the time how optimistic it was. There was still a belief in “let’s try it and see if it works!” Even as it was trying to do more, it incorporated all of its layers into the design; it wasn’t an open-world game simply because publishers think you have to be an open-world game to be viable with a business that’s pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a release.
And its story and setting weren’t the most original thing, but were very clever, and they showed that the developers still believed that the storytelling mattered. Even in a game that was all about the action and strategy. It reminds me a little bit of the Electronic Arts album cover days, selling a clever and self-contained idea with a novel story and design that work together. Nothing like a bloated games-as-a-service behemoth that it would be today.
The screenshot attached to this post is from Battlezone 98 Redux, which was a remaster of the game that was a modern reinvention of the original classic. And now, even that remaster is 10 years old. And I wish I lived in the alternate universe in which this game set off a trend that would define the next 20+ years.
2026-09-11 01:34:31
It seems like there’s been a spate of found footage/Zoom-based horror movies, enough to qualify as its own sub-genre, although I can’t actually think of many besides Unfriended. The consensus seems to be that Host from 2020, directed by Rob Savage, is the best one.
I have no reason to doubt that, because I watched it last night, and I loved it. I saw it on Shudder, sitting at my desk, via a web browser, which I’m assuming is the best possible way to see it short of actually being in the middle of the COVID lockdowns. And I did spend much of the runtime anxiously glancing over my shoulder, to make sure I didn’t hear something, and that no one was sneaking up behind me.
A testament to how well the movie works: I actually watched a recap of this movie on the Dead Meat YouTube channel, so I was technically spoiled for everything, but it still completely worked for me. I’m pretty sure that I watched the recap, appropriately, while I was stuck in an AirBnb recovering from COVID with nothing to do except watch YouTube. So it’s likely that a combination of mainlining horror recaps plus my general brain fog meant that I’d forgotten everything except “this is the good one.”
A huge part of what makes it work so well is how thoroughly they commit to the bit. The entire movie is presented via the Zoom interface1, from the first moment through the end credits. Apparently, this was entirely filmed during lockdown, so the need for the cast to be physically distant was fully incorporated into the production. They each filmed their parts from a separate location, with a bare-bones team at each site handling any make-up or practical effects work.
Which makes it even more impressive, since it’s clearly not a super-high budget production, but there are several moments where it’s clear that they didn’t cut corners. Part of the charm is that you expect it to be an amateurish, let’s get the gang together to make a movie! type of thing, and it is until the moments when it’s suddenly not.
The most memorable and effective moments come from taking all of the goofy aspects of Zoom calls, and then building on that and removing them from their context to make them horrific. In particular, face filters, and the trick of filming a video of yourself in your room and then using it as a looping video backdrop. It’s genuinely chilling, seeing the same mundane video play out over and over again as horrifying stuff is happening.
Almost all of the scares are jump scares, but that feels to me like a stylish choice more than a cop-out; it’s a bunch of friends getting together to tell each other scary stories in the dark. But it gets a surprising amount of poignance via the selfies that we use as our account photos on the platform. There’s a flash of a still photo of each person right as they’re dropped from the call, like in a Charlie Brown spelling bee, and the last thing you see is a memory of one of their happiest or silliest moments.
I especially liked how Zoom’s time limit on free calls is integrated into the short runtime of the movie (it’s under an hour). It cleverly turns the movie’s final scene into a tense countdown, almost like the final act of Aliens, as in the upper-left corner of the screen, you see a literal display of time running out.
A lot of the movie depends on the performances of the cast, and they’re all really good. Any hints of performance are accounted for, by the fact that everybody in the movie knows that they’re on camera. They have a good rapport, and it’s fun to watch them all chatting as they’re setting up, gossiping about people who aren’t yet on-screen and then acting friendly right at the moment they sign on. So much of the exposition is handled by the simple fact that they’ve all got their names displayed on screen. (The actors also all used their real names for their characters). You can quickly tell who are the close friends vs who are the casual ones, who’s got a crush on who, and so on, and it all seems to come through naturally. There’s little doubt that these people have all known each other for years.
Which is the last thing that I really like about Host, which I only found out after the fact. Looking through director Rob Savage’s filmography, I saw that in addition to the upcoming big studio production Other Mommy, he’s made several other more independent horror movies of various lengths, including Dashcam. And you see the same names pop up over and over again in the cast list; Dashcam is largely the same people as Host now playing different characters. It has the feeling of a genuine repertory troupe, cementing the idea that these people all really like each other and like making movies together.
Host is a solid, short, spooky ghost story full of clever ideas, and it succeeds entirely based on the commitment of its execution. It teaches you not to hire mediums on Fiverr, and also that independent filmmakers might just be the saviors of cinema. Or if not cinema, then at least good old-fashioned movie-making.
2026-09-10 08:08:19
The title of this post was stolen from my husband, who was maybe half paying attention to the movie while next to me on the sofa.
I first saw Young Frankenstein long before I saw The Bride of Frankenstein, so I always assumed that its amazing production design and cinematography were more modern inventions from Mel Brooks’s team. It would be years before I saw the original and realized that James Whale did it first. And that The Bride of Frankenstein wasn’t the quaint, dusty old relic that I’d expected from a Universal Monsters classic, but was actually a beautiful, surreal masterpiece.
The Old Dark House is from 1932, so in between the original Frankenstein and The Invisible Man. It’s not as big a production as Bride, but it does have a similar sense of a filmmaker who’s working from a predefined template and a well-established method of making movies, and then making it as batshit wacky as he possibly can without breaking it.
In addition to Boris Karloff as a “drunken brute” and Melvyn Douglas1 as a jovial wisecracker who ends up stealing the movie, it’s got Charles Laughton as a good-natured businessman. And it was really interesting to see him in this movie, since he went on to do something similar years later with The Night of the Hunter: what if we took a big studio Hollywood production and used it to make a bizarre masterpiece?
The premise of The Old Dark House is that a society couple played by Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart2 are driving through the Welsh countryside during a terrible storm, with their friend Penderel (Douglas) in the back seat cracking wise and singing nonsense the whole time. When their car is almost hit by a landslide, they’re forced to seek shelter in, well, an old dark house. The house’s butler is an imposing, bearded man with a scarred face (Karloff), and the residents are a fussy and frightened man (Ernest Thesiger, doing a kind of test-run of the character he’d perfect in Bride of Frankenstein as Doctor Pretorious), and his sister (Eva Moore), a judgmental religious fanatic.
“Normal people in a spooky old house filled with eccentric and possibly dangerous weirdos” sounds like a solid, old-fashioned horror movie. What makes The Old Dark House special is that nobody in this movie is “normal“. Massey and Stuart’s characters come the closest, but even they live comfortably in this alternate universe the movie takes place in, and they take all kinds of bizarre behavior perfectly in stride, and they join right in. Maybe all of this kind of stuff is considered completely normal in Wales?
The movie is extremely funny, although it was never entirely clear to me how much of it was intended to read as “light-hearted” vs whether they were going for outright comedy. An early example: brother Horace (Thesiger) clears a space on the sofa for his new guests by picking up a vase and a bouquet of flowers, explaining that his sister had been trying her hand at flower arrangements. He then promptly tosses the entire bouquet into the fire. No one comments on it.
Like most of the “horror” movies from around this period, especially “gothic” ones, I didn’t find anything in The Old Dark House scary in the least. But I was still transfixed the entire time. All of the characters are bizarre and just plain delightful. Every choice the actors made — from the heroes, to the house’s residents, to the other members of the family revealed later — was simultaneously the weirdest and the most perfect choice possible.
And while much of it is filmed like a stage play, there are lots of perfect cinematic flourishes throughout. A camera pushing through a doorway into an impossibly huge master bedroom. Shots down a long hallway with a storm raging outside. And one bizarre dinner sequence, with frequent close-ups of the characters with often inscrutable reactions.
I realize it’s easy to over-romanticize older movies, but it really does feel like this movie puts the modern fixation on rigid genre definitions to shame. How much of it is intentional vs inadvertent? Is it a horror? Or a thriller? Or a comedy? You get the sense that The Old Dark House would treat the whole question as absurd. “It’s a movie.”
2026-09-09 10:21:42
The whole topic of generative AI has been a lot on my mind for the past couple weeks, even apart from just having to sigh and say “this sure sucks.”
I’ve been meaning to write a follow up that goes deeper into a couple of ideas, but like everybody, I’m kind of tired of it. So I’ll take advantage of the fact that it’s Tuesday and I can give the digest version.
First up is Missy Elliott asking “Is it worth it?” on “Work It.” I’m pretty sure that she wasn’t talking about considering the real costs of technology, but it seems apt now. There’s not a lot that we as individuals can realistically do to push back against harmful tech being used irresponsibly, except to refuse to use it ourselves, and to refuse to do the billionaires’ work for them by evangelizing it.
I think a lot of people still using it and defending it believe that they’re taking a reasonable middle ground. Especially in the realm of code generation, I’ve heard several examples along the lines of “I didn’t believe the hype either, until I used it! It’s incredibly powerful!” Some of it, I’m sure, is an earnest attempt to benefit the people who have rejected it, on the assumption that we just haven’t used it recently. Or that we have inaccurate assumptions about how well it works, based on higher-profile examples of stuff like chatbots comically failing to answer the most basic questions.
That’s why I believe we’re at (or more accurately, well past) an inflection point, where we’re more obligated than we’ve ever been to consider the full cost of everything we use. Everything has been allowed to run unchecked and barely regulated, and if it weren’t abundantly obvious before, it’s crystal clear that the people who have spent the last couple decades hoarding obscene wealth aren’t going to be the ones with consciences.
We have to look at everything we use and seriously consider how much it costs beyond what it costs to us. Stop thinking of it as how much you (or your employer) have to pay for tokens, or how fast and/or accurate it is at giving you a result. Instead, think of the cost in terms of everything that goes into training the models and handling the queries, and how that cost has manifested itself in the real world. You’ve got to ask yourself, “is it worth it?” without automatically appending “to me?”
The other aspect is how increasingly I’ve seen people entreating us all to be more open-minded, civil, and respectful when talking to or about people continuing to use and defend tech that we’re vehemently opposed to. The idea that it’s one thing to see some dipshit deep in the throes of AI psychosis going off on rampages, but we need to be more open-minded if we’re going to sway people on the fence.
But do we, though? I’m reminded of the Beatles song “We Can Work It Out.” I’m no longer the Beatles fan that I used to be, but I’ve been repeatedly surprised by just how poorly their songs have aged. And I blithely listened to this one for years before really paying attention to what it was saying.
On the surface, it sounds like a pleasant and positive little song about compromise and cooperation. But it’s actually just a guy saying, repeatedly, that he’s right, and you’re ruining everything by not seeing it his way. The closest he ever gets to genuine compromise is saying “only time will tell” whether he’s right or wrong. In other words: stop being obstinate and just listen to me.
I think it’s a good reminder to pay attention to what actual compromise and open-mindedness looks like. You can be civil, pleasant, and even catchy, while still saying garbage.