The Glow

I Glow In The Dark

The women who shape the 2D horror language are not decoration around the fear—they carry the charge. This is dedicated to them.

And the Basement is the first part of Crookwood where we introduce ‘ecto’. Wispy traces of the supernatural. The ghosts from the past that start to seep from the cracks. That start to be about you.

Make no mistake, we’re out to chill you. Freak you out.

And horror can only do that if it gives you a false sense of security.

And what could be more harmless than a 3’ Skritch wearing a skeleton suit in a colourful comic yard.

The build. It all started off with an engineering feat called the gravebox.

And creating this simple box in 3D took months because conveying all the engineering and physics behind it ran against the grain.

Polystyrene dirt that weighed and behaved like real dirt; dirt that got heavier when wet or frozen. A box that could be retrofitted with a new corpse created to resemble one of your friends you’d invited to your party.

The Gravebox was a main game loop. It contained a life. And a ghost. And this stuff called Ecto which gave the player a luminous, supernatural energy.

A Skritch’s bones went from ivory to fluoro green. And it became, well, it became somehow faster in the yard. Confident. Cocky even.

And this gravebox extended into a basement that created a dark maze from hundreds of them—slung with light bulbs called ‘practicals’—that swing—and cast slatted shadows over everything. I saw this effect in a music video directed by the great Nigel Abbott and it stayed with me.

The basement is the staging area for carnies; down here, they climb into their skeleton and zombie suits and launch attacks through the hatches.

My direction: Don’t inhabit it; possess it.

Let it breathe. The music is slow.

We build the machinery carefully enough that something impossible can possess it and invite something neither of us could reach alone.