Angela Quinton

Werewolf House: Synthincisor is the kind of weird, wonderful werewolf game that could only exist online

An itch.io browser/mobile game styled after 8-bit text adventures? I think I’ll pass. I make corporate web applications with middling JavaScript for a living and I don’t need to be reminded of the radical shit that people have made with bad JavaScript.

But what’s that, you say? The game plunges you into an eerily synth-scored story where you play as a vaping EDM DJ who gets hired to play a gig at Werewolf House, but who has their fresh new beat blasted out of their head by lightning, and who must have “an unforgettable, Webby-deserving interactive adventure in the Werewolf House in an attempt to create a new beat before the moon is full”?

Don’t mind if I do.

This is Werewolf House: Synthincisor, the third and final instalment in writer/musician Andy Kneis‘s trilogy of absurd browser-based werewolf-laden choose your own adventure games. I haven’t played any of them for longer than 10 minutes, having only just learned about them, but they all look deeply funny in a way that blends the chunky GIF-style graphics of the point & click text adventure genre with Kneis’s beautifully slapdash/smartass writing.

I beat this computer’s haunted web site by clicking past a GIF of a werewolf labelled “sensuality”.

The first two games in the trilogy, Werewolf House Rising: Werewolf House of Wolves and Werewolf House Rising: Werewolf House of Wolves – Arbor Day Edition, seem to be single-page HTML documents stacked with wonderful GIFs, music embeds, and links that jump you around in the narrative. Synthincisor is quite a bit more involved, though.

The full moon is out and what started as a choose-your-own adventure site has transformed into a full-on interactive fiction game with a unique mechanic that lets you to add new layers the game’s soundtrack as you progress.

“The art in the game is silly and the writing is really silly,” he told the Los Feliz Ledger in an interview, “so I wanted the music to be as good as possible.”

An animation from a Werewolf House pop-up ad

The music seems quite good indeed. During my brief playthrough, I made it through the ground-level room of Werewolf House, which was just far enough to enhance the pulsing 80’s slasher flick style music with some “modem sounds” I earned by helping a (potentially evil) web site exorcise itself by banishing 2002-era pop-up ads for werewolf pills.

This is the kind of weird, wonderful, fully-committed-to-the-goof stuff that I love. I made myself click the “save” button and come over here to write this post. As soon as I hit “publish” I’m going back over to that other browser tab to resume my game. I need to recover that missing beat, play a killer set for the Werewolf House denizens, and then maybe down some werewolf pills.

Angela Quinton Oct. 23rd 2018

“Hunting the Hound of Cold Hollow” short film explores the werewolves of northern Vermont

“It’s a werewolf. It’s not like it’s some crazy monster… it’s just a werewolf.” For me, this is the take-away quote from freelance journalist J.D. Thompson’s short film Hunting the Hound of Cold Hollow.

Thompson put the 25-minute film together to capture his experience “working for Playboy on a story investigating a weird little part of America where the locals still believe in werewolves.” The premise he explores in the short film (and the article itself) is that werewolves are responsible for dozens of disappearances and deaths along the Vermont / Quebec border.

This is not a detective story and I think that’s just as well – I imagine the real causes of the disappearances are a far more banal class of evil than French-Canadian lycanthropes. Rather, the film’s focus is the nervous enthusiasm the interviewed locals have for the idea that they might have secret werewolves among their neighbours. The pervasive vibe from the subjects interviewed, and the interviewer himself, is a low-key “we all want this to be true, right?”

The article, “Werewolves Are Definitely Not Real… Right?”, was published in Playboy in October 2015. You can find a reprint on the “Cold Hollow” web site, but I recommend watching the short film first. It’s expertly made, with lots of excellent interview and location footage intercut with stock drone shots of the region’s foggy, snowy forests.

Are the werewolves of Vermont real? Thompson draws no conclusions on the matter, but he seems to say (and I will explicitly state) that many of us would be delighted if they did exist, especially if they continued to spend their full moon time chasing cars for fun, and less time murdering hikers.

Angela Quinton Sep. 20th 2018

“Creatures from Russian Myths and Fairy Tales” artwork by Victor Sukhochev

This beautiful image set of Russian monsters and myths rendered in Illustrator and Photoshop by Victor Sukhochev was part of the weekly “cool art & design you might like” email I get from Behance. For once, an algorithm got something right – my old friend the Wilkołak was front and center in the thumbnail image. Click through to see all eight creatures in one huge image (or visit Victor’s Instagram to check them out individually). My favourites are the decidedly un-decrepit Baba Yaga and a radical fellow labelled only as “Water Little Devil”.

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Angela Quinton Sep. 18th 2018

Workplace werewolf short “Overtime” shows why you should never get too close to your coworkers

Overtime is a beautifully-shot, genuinely delightful short film from Craig D. Foster and Emma McKenna that showcases a great mix of humour, tension, and gore. After its release in 2016 it received a ton of festival accolades, and now it’s available to watch in full on Vimeo, where it became an official Vimeo Staff Pick this summer.

For an in-depth review, including background on the cast, crew, and effects team, check out this Birth. Movies. Death. post. You might also want to check out the film’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts for updates and behind-the-scenes photos, like this one of Ralph (played by Aaron Glenane) getting a manicure.

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Angela Quinton Sep. 13th 2018

Fright Rags launches official Teen Wolf shirt collection

The OG, very good, very 1980s Teen Wolf movie spawned a lot of knock-off “Dicknose” t-shirts, but as far as I can tell, it’s never had an official line of apparel, until now. The venerable horror & sci-fi t-shirt company Fright Rags has secured the official Teen Wolf license – it says it right there in the banner! – and they aren’t sleeping on it. Starting today, you can buy one of six different designs on a variety of shirt styles. I think my favourite is the cartoon-style “85” design, but the Howard’s Hardware flyer is pretty great, too.

Angela Quinton Sep. 12th 2018

New comic “The Family Graves” explores what would happen if The Incredibles were all monsters

The Family Graves is a four-issue comic series from Timothy Bach and Brian Atkins (the former wrote it; the latter drew it) that explores the sci-fi superhero adventures of a family of monsters.

Together with his dysfunctional, mismatched family of monsters, Phil Graves, an alchemical engineer recently turned unpredictably shifting werewolf, must race across dimensions to collect a set of magical mirrors in order to stop a chronal vampire from devouring the space-time continuum and destroying reality. But can the family hold together even as reality falls apart?

The Family Graves is a book for anyone who loves monsters, family, and unabashedly fun comics! Although spooky, it’s more heroic than horror, combining big sci-fi adventure with a love of classic monster movies to create lots of supernatural action.

Timothy was kind enough to share the first issue with me, and I really enjoyed it. (You can read a 10-page preview of the issue’s middle act here, but fair warning – Phil doesn’t wolf out in these pages.) The logline proffered was “The Munsters meets The Fantastic Four, with a dash of Locke & Key”, but my impression was more like “The Incredibles, if Bob Parr was a self-absorbed tech billionaire werewolf whose monster family tolerates his sci-fi bullshit while consistently outclassing him.” Phil, you need to spend less time looking at your floating orange screens and more time with your family and / or as a werewolf. And figure out your damn bloodwork!

The art has all the flash and colour of a superhero comic, but the monstrous aspects of the cast’s designs are rendered with an eye for creature-based horror, and there were a few little details that made me smile every time I saw them. There’s something very funny and good about a zombie infant with perpetual bags under his eyes.

Story-wise, I was more engaged than I expected to be, as a person who doesn’t really get into superhero comics. I was especially happy to find no explanation for why the immediate Graves family contains so diverse a cast of monsters (werewolf, gorgon, siren, merman and zombie). They’re monsters, and that’s fine. I don’t need an origin story for characters I’ve just met. Whatever happened to them doesn’t seem to be unique, either. There are plenty of supernatural creatures in background roles, which lends a pleasantly brisk in media res feeling to the story’s world.

The first issue comes out in real, tangible form on September 19th (order it from your local shop with Diamond code JUL182141). You can get all four issues right now from Source Point Press, or digitally from Comixology and DriveThruComics.

Angela Quinton Jul. 24th 2018

SDCC pop-up shop debuts limited-edition, low-appeal “The Wolf Man” shoes

If you’re at San Diego Comic Con this weekend and you have no taste and cash to waste, why not line up at the “Boodega Monstore” (701 Eighth Ave, San Diego, CA 9210) for a chance to buy a Super7 / Saucony / Universal Monsters triple-co-branded “The Wolf Man” shoe?

Combining high cost ($95), artificial scarcity (only 12 pairs per size [7 through 13] exist), and zero werewolf design aesthetics other than colours referenced from a character who debuted in a black and white film, this shoe is presumably precision-crafted to appeal to sneakerheads (maybe) and Universal Monsters fans who don’t have to justify their expenditures to anyone.

Saucony makes good gear, or so I’m told, so they’ll probably be comfortable shoes to wear, but these things are utterly unremarkable in appearance, particularly in comparison to the other Universal Monster shoes (thank you, Daily Dead) at the Boodega pop-up shop. At least the other shoes have some graphical elements. These have all the visual appeal of an overripe avocado. The high price and the artificial scarcity are in keeping with the nature of SDCC collectibles, I guess, but I just can’t imagine anyone getting excited to line up for what seems like a deeply cynical cash-grab.

I’m mad about the shoes. What an overpriced waste of an opportunity to do something new, fun and interesting with the dorkiest werewolf intellectual property ever.

Angela Quinton Jul. 20th 2018

Getting the dirt on a werewolf Presidential candidate in “Bobcat Goldthwait’s Misfits & Monsters”

Bobcat Goldthwait’s new truTV series, Bobcat Goldthwait’s Misfits & Monsters, started airing last week. Last night’s episode, “Face in the Car Lot”, takes place four decades ago but satirizes the political climate of present-day America. David Koechner plays Del Wainwright, a good ol’ boy who ends up on track to become the next president of the United States, despite having some significant skeletons in his closet.

If you missed it, like I did, you can watch it right on the truTV web site, which is where this synopsis is from:

Set in the 70’s, an uncouth car salesman with no political experience leads the presidential race, while a determined journalist is out to prove that he’s an actual monster.

Watch journalist Regina Bailey get some real dirt on Koechner in this clip, which features a very acceptable CG werewolf transformation and a great looking practical costume for the post-change shots.

Angela Quinton Jul. 19th 2018

Werewolf art timelapse – Ryan Pancoast’s “Lambholt Pacifist / Lambholt Butcher”

Here’s a video of Ryan Pancoast painting the art featured on the two sides of “Lambholt Pacifist / Lambholt Butcher“, a Magic: The Gathering card from 2016’s “Shadows Over Innistrad” expansion.

From what I understand of the game mechanics, which is very little (this is the most I have thought about Magic since the afternoon in 1995 when my uncle tried and failed to get me interested), this card’s two sides represent the same person. Even if you’re clueless about the game, the identical background foliage and the discarded cowl in the nighttime / werewolf image are lovely clues. Therefore what we’re seeing in the completed images are this mysterious woman’s binary states of existence: “I am cool with birds” and “I absolutely fucking hate birds”.

Both paintings are available for purchase as prints, because sometimes the Internet is good! You can see more of Ryan’s amazing paintings at his site and on his YouTube channel.

Thanks to friend of the site (and wonderful artist in his own right) Doruk Golcu for posting this video.

Angela Quinton Jul. 17th 2018

I finally found the Sawbones episode about lycanthropy (and other Halloween diseases)

I’ve been listening through the backlog of Sawbones, a informative and darkly funny medical history podcast hosted by Dr. Sydnee McElroy and her husband Justin. Last year they talked about the full moon and its connection to clinical weirdness, including werewolves, but way back in 2015 the show got even more lycan-specific. In the episode “Aah, Real Monsters!” Sydnee and guest host Rileigh Smirl (Sydnee’s younger sister, subbing for Justin and crushing it) discuss “the Halloween diseases” – werewolfism and vampirism.

This isn’t just a recounting of the Wikipedia entries for hypertrichosis and ergot poisoning. In typical Sawbones fashion, Sydnee presents an insightful and cogent history of lycanthropy and porphyria – including a surprisingly compassionate recap of Peter Stumpp‘s story. Rileigh provides enthusiastic and delightfully pro-werewolf colour commentary, and influences the episode’s vibe in such a way that “having a real disease” comes off as a bad situation, but “being a Halloween monster” is extremely good. That’s as fine a Sawbones conclusion as any they’ve reached in all the episodes I’ve heard.

You can hear the episode here, or find it in the Sawbones archive, available via Apple Podcasts or whichever podcasting app you like.

Angela Quinton Jul. 17th 2018