The Dread Built Into Ordinary Rooms [Podcast]

I talked with three people who build dread out of ordinary rooms. Sophie Winqvist Loggins shot Aniara, Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja's adaptation of Harry Martinson's poem about a passenger ship knocked off course on its way to Mars. Max Friberg is creative director at Housefire, the studio behind the surrealist horror game Eclipsium. Johanna Kasurinen co-founded Wrong Organ and leads art and narrative on Mouthwashing, its game about a freighter crew stranded after a crash. This is the second of Killscreen's Cross-Conversations: Horror, free talks presented with MUBI that put people who make horror films and horror games in the same room.

Johanna explains why Mouthwashing opens on the crash, with the player at the controls, and how cutting the story out of order lets a game pull off a smash cut. Sophie describes turning a ferry between Sweden and Finland into a spaceship, and Max walks through the impossible spaces of Eclipsium, including a church whose interior is a slaughterhouse.

Then the dark. Sophie on shooting with the lenses used on The Godfather and hanging black cloth outside the windows to make space on a low budget. Max on a princess who stands in for the sun and a player who only shines by her reflected light. We close on bodies under pressure: how a camera moves with a crew coming apart, and why Curly, the bandaged pilot of Mouthwashing, has to read as a person first.

Links

• "When You Go Into Space, You Go Into Your Own Dark", my feature on the conversation
• Space and the Body: Aniara, Eclipsium and Mouthwashing, the event page
• Aniara (2018), shot by Sophie Winqvist Loggins
• Eclipsium on Steam, from Housefire
• Mouthwashing on Steam, from Wrong Organ
• Critical Reflex, publisher of both games
• The Killscreen Horror Collection
• Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on MUBI, 30 days free

Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music: "Dark Cinematic Space Pads Loop" by IdoBerg from Pixabay.