The Spooky Shelf — Horror Games, Not Horror Films
The parcel for this cycle was left on the step after dark, which the Keeper understands is traditional for the genre. Nine panels for the Spooky Shelf, and a label in the archivist’s hand: horror games, not horror films, underlined twice, as though he expected an argument. He was right to: two of the older panels hung alongside are films anyway. He cannot be kept out of the cinema.
The Keeper is not the audience for horror. It lives in the dark between the shelves, swallows its meals whole, and has been taken for an omen by more than one archivist. It is staff. What caught its interest was the October of 2022, when the archivist declared a horror month, watched thirty-two films in thirty-one days, and played these games between screenings, the way a man eats standing up.
What it noticed, shelving them, is where the famous monsters live. Dracula, the Mummy and the Wolf Man are in the box he has bought five times as a gift. Cthulhu has been reduced to six green dice. A manor in Vermont is exorcised by a carpenter and his dog, who starts in the kitchen. The Keeper had assumed horror was where a collection kept its cruelties. In this one it is the welcome mat. The cruelty is in the small Game Crafter boxes, where the floor crumbles behind you and the dungeon is a digestive tract.
The archivist also has a habit, in this wing, of leaving things alive. A slasher called Rabbit Face has stood in one sector of a Californian town since 2021, unkilled. A Templar knight in a black robe, having killed one character, was promoted to haunt all the rest. A man with a baseball bat walks a scripted path handing praise to whoever is nearest, and nobody can stop him. In one box the players are the monsters outright, holding the castle against villagers with torches. The Keeper, which is itself a thing left alive in the dark, approves of the practice on principle.
Five older panels hang alongside: the unboxing that opened with a reading list, the Venetian siege with its corpse pile, the trash-cinema curiosity he will not let you overpay for, and the two film panels the label warned against. The Keeper has hung them without dates; the reader may guess which arrived this cycle, and will be wrong at least once.
Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:
- Village Attacks - Take a look — a co-op where you are the monsters, and a Dullahan whips with a human spine.
- Arkham Horror 3rd Edition - Take a look — a Mythos reading list first, then a hardbound rulebook with forty pages of Arkham lore.
- Walking Dead: Here’s Negan - Board Game — nobody controls Negan; his deck rewards whoever happens to be standing nearest.
- A Look at Alone Against Fear — pen-and-paper Dreamcast horror; a slasher called Rabbit Face left alive in Tulare, California.
- The Exorcism at the House of Monkton Falls - a spooky and charming co-op game — spare investigators wait outside the door, listening; the dog starts in the kitchen.
- Carnival Zombie 2nd Edition - Initial Thoughts on the agonizing choices! — flee Venice atop a leviathan; zombies that fall off the corpse pile get back up.
- Elder Sign - Scary Dice and Creepy Monsters — Arkham as a Yahtzee puzzle, with the expansions selling the theme back to you.
- The Ten Greatest (my favorite) Horror Films of All Time (IMO) — one keyword per film for the patrons to guess; a defence of Freddy vs. Jason.
- Roll-With-It: The Fortress of Terror - a solo roll-and-write adventure game system — a maze where the floor crumbles behind you and one bad die ends the game.
- Pandemonium - A few things I like about this flawed horror survival game — Chucky and Sadako under other names, in a curiosity not worth its $150 price.
- Horrified - A Perfect Game (for what it is) — bought five times as a gift; a silent-movie warning printed on the board’s back.
- Alone Against Fear - The Coming of the Dark Templars - The Tombs of the Blind Dead — eyeless Templars with claymores; lose, and they haunt every character you play after.
- The Dungeon Dive reviews 31 (+1) Horror Movies watched October 2022 — thirty-two films in a month; Barbarian a masterpiece, the new Hellraiser switched off.
- Into the Wet and Pulsating Cavernous Spaces of Devoured: Fallen Colossus — a dungeon that is a digestive tract; he fights the gag reflex on camera.
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– The Keeper
Was asked whether the horror wing unsettles it, and pointed out, not unkindly, that it is the horror wing.