One is an Internet legend who frightens nerds across the world, causes memory loss, and keeps leaving his damn notebook in the woods. The other is a TV chef who is best known for poisoning people through his experimental cooking at his restaurant/laboratory, The Fat Duck. While the differences between Heston and Slenderman are vast, any casual observer will note that they do look rather similar.
So, if you are confronted at night by a ropey humanoid bastard, how can you tell the difference? Should you run away, or defend yourself with liquid nitrogen? It’s difficult to know when in a fight or flight scenario, but with these handy tips, you’ll soon be able to distinguish between these two in a heartbeat.
Which of these featureless orbs is Heston?
You know its Slenderman if:
You begin to feel sick, dizzy and nauseous in his presence.
He disappears if you have all 8 pages of his notebook.
You drop your camera on the floor and it automatically lands upright, facing Slenderman as he slowly meanders towards you.
His pinstripe suit doesn’t have blancmange on it.
He is sabotaging your student film project with visual tearing, and inserting loud buzzing noises over all footage, even when he’s not on camera.
You happen to be near a set of swings.
He is surrounded by an eerie mist.
Some of your friends have recently started hanging out in the woods with a video camera, and have repeatedly shown you grainy footage of a smartly dressed man in their homes.
You know its Heston if:
You begin to feel sick, dizzy and nauseous after eating his food.
He disappears if you have all 8 pages of his recipe book.
He tries to feed you a Roasted Duck Eyebrow.
His pinstripe suit has blancmange on it.
He arrives straddling a giant chocolate sausage, declaring it to be a “traditional English breakfast with a twist”. The sausage will then explode in a shower of edible midgets.
He is surrounded by eerie liquid nitrogen.
He cries if you try to enter a Little Chef.
Now that we have established the difference, you’ll know just how screwed you are if you encounter either of these after dark. If you are exceptionally unlucky, there’s a chance that you might run into Moby. If this happens, I’m afraid there’s nothing neither science nor religion can do to help you. Good luck out there!
Welcome to the dark side, where up is down, time is no time at all, and jelly babies are now jelly teenagers and won't come out of their rooms for a family meal. That's right, you've reached the Twilight Zone of the Internet, and once you've changed your underwear after that frightening first sentence, we're going to explore the scariest business that the electronic format can provide. Namely, creepy video games.
Anyway, while there are plenty of frightening games out there, sometimes developers will throw a curveball into an otherwise happy, child friendly game. I want to discuss those video game moments that are either unintentionally upsetting, or just outright jarring. Below is a small selection of utterly horrifying gaming moments that quite simply shouldn’t be.
The Gameboy Camera Faces
Back in the late 90’s, Nintendo released a camera peripheral for their wildly popular Gameboy. The idea was that you could take photos, edit them, and print them out for your friends. The last thing that Gameboy camera owners expected to see was this:
The image is actually an error handler. Rather than displaying an error message if something goes wrong, Ninty thought it would be a lot more child friendly to display disfigured faces with the rather menacing phrase “WHO ARE YOU RUNNING FROM?”. Considering that one of the main causes of this error was by selecting the Run command, which hadn’t actually been programmed, this often seen error screen caused many childhood nightmares.
Most developers would have either just removed the Run command or displayed a generic error message, but Nintendo decided to opt for this frankly baffling picture. Perhaps they thought it was a joke, but either way, it was poorly judged on their part.
Sonic CD
Oh what fun! Here’s a game where you leap around as a little blue hedgehog and free tiny animals from robots! This game will be completely suitable for my children and guaranteed not to scar them for life:
Oh.
This was a sound test easter egg put in by a development team who had spent the first half of eternity in hell. Of course, an eyeless freaky Sonic is a perfect image to show the kiddywinks! They’re going to enjoy seeing their cutesy hero wearing a threatening mask while he leers at you through those soulless sockets. What makes this even worse is the music associated with it. Seriously, watch this on YouTube for the full effect:
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Mario Galaxy was one of the biggest hits on one of the most ubiquitous console of recent years, The Wii. If you’ve ever played the game, did you ever get the eerie sense that you were being watched? Well you should have done, largely down to these little folks:
Yes, there are mysterious shadow figure overseeing the events of Super Mario Galaxy. Who are these secretive beings? Can they feel love? Who on the art team thought to include them? Chances are, with this being a tiny speck of the background that has been magnified, one of the artists included this as a joke. What’s more surprising is that someone even noticed this in the first place.
Fallout 3
There are many horrors that an irradiated wasteland can offer up, but none quite compare to the skinless floating muscle people that occasionally pop up in Fallout 3.
During the game you can quite easily blow enemies to pieces, quite literally, spreading their organs and guts across the ruins of DC. But occasionally, a bug in the game causes those pieces to reform into a character. Sometimes they'll mysteriously float around aimlessly, others can be interacted with, but all are freaky as all hell.
Half Life 2
Okay, Half Life 2 is intentionally creepy in a lot of places, but this one is a particularly freaky easter egg that everyone will have come across without knowing it. Specifically, the zombie headcrab noise:
Yes, those people are screaming "OH GOD HELP ME", which is a nice unsettling touch added by the developers there.
Anyway, that's all I have to share with you today. I figured that the blazing sunlight and longer daytime hours of July would make an ideal backdrop to discuss scary stuff, rather than waiting until Halloween like a walking cliché. Regardless, do you have any unintentionally creepy gaming moments to share?
It's no secret that Hollywood is on it's arse, both creatively and financially. That's why we at Muppets for Justice occasionally like to suggest new ideas for movies. Anything to break up the formulaic tedium unleashed by the current slew of film studios. So, focussing on horror movies, we had a bit of a think tank with a certain undesirable section of society. Basically, we asked several serial killers to tell us what scares them the most. If it scares them, it's guaranteed to petrify the likes of you and me, right? Anyway, here are the results:
Ted Bundy:An old man who has had his eyes replaced with a dog's eyes.
Fred West:How about a child with a jack in the box full of poisonous wasps?
Charles Manson: A haunted toaster that turns itself on when it's unplugged. It continues trying to toast even when there's no bread in it.
Rose West:A woman in a window brushing her hair, but when you look again she's not there and SHE'S BEHIND YOU - OH GOD!
Raul Moat:An abandoned hospital staffed by ventriloquist dummies in nurse uniforms. The admin is done solely by clowns.
Ian Huntley:A ghost that has died and become a ghost's ghost.
Anders Brevik:Uncontrolled immigration.
James Egan Holmes: A group of hooded men stood around chanting, and when you look closer, they're...AHA! Gotcha!
Seung-Hui Cho: A leech the size of a hippo.
Jack The Ripper:An enchanted flute that summons the chupacabra.
Ed Gein:A woman who turns around and her face is a skeleton's face. Her boobs are also a skeleton's boobs.
Thomas Dillon:A child on a swing that is on fire but he keeps swinging anyway. He probably started the fire himself.
John Allen Muhammad:Moss growing on an old woman who has sat down for too long. Aileen Wuornos: Some children go into the woods, but are possessed by a wizard who makes them eat all sorts of disgusting things like worms and slugs and puppy dog eyes. He creates a banquet of grizzly foods and forces them to finish the whole thing. Also, they kill their parents. Nathaniel White: A school kid with long hair over her face and she's sepia-tinted. Scott Williams: A man in a restaurant rapidly eating his way towards his credit limit, and not giving a fuck.
I can't watch...is it over? Phew. I'm sure we can all agree, that was probably the most frightening collection of ideas ever committed to the Internet. Let's hope that a bigwig film producer gets hold of these ideas and incorporates them all into a Halloween blockbuster. Let's also hope that he pays me, handsomely.
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In other news, eccentric son of the Internet Rob Z Tobor, has kindly given me this accolade:
This certifies that I am a Radical Abstract Thinker, which gives me something else to put on my CV underneath Secret Lemonade Drinker (if you get that joke, you're too damn old!). Anyway, if you sometimes think radical abstract thoughts, perhaps you would consider reading his Blog. He's been popping up on my Sexy People feed on a daily basis for months, and now you've got no excuse not to visit. Do it now!
This is the first of two posts about things that creep me
out on this A-Z challenge, although I’d class this one as more of a
phobia.
That’s right, I’m scared of eyes. That doesn’t mean I can’t make eye contact
with anyone, or force a pair of aviators onto the face of every person I meet,
but I can’t stand the thought of things touching eyeballs. I’ve looked this up, and apparently this is
known as Ommatophobia.
I understand if you don’t want to be associated with a
wussy, spaghetti-armed manchild like myself anymore. It’s alright, I don’t want to be associated
with myself either, and I am formally attempting a legal separation from my own
eyes. I understand that seeing will
become something of a difficulty after this, so I’m going to have them replaced
with webcams. Perhaps I’ll have Kinects
for eyes instead, so I can mimic someone’s dancing exactly and forge a
successful street dancing career, jiggling around onstage like a trendy version
of Johnny 5 behind Lady Gaga.
Daydreaming aside, I become physically repulsed by people who touch their
eyeball with their finger. My girlfriend
enjoys winding me up in this manner, and she’s lucky that I don’t vomit all
over her in disgust, thus exacerbating her emetophobia. I also hate the thought of having eye drops in. During one particularly pollen-filled summer,
I decided to try some eye drops to alleviate the symptoms. Let’s just say most of the fluid ended up
streaming down my own face instead.
This came up when I typed in "finger touching eye"
In the same way that many people are nervous of going to the
dentist, I am much more nervous of going to the optician. As I have a face which glasses wouldn’t suit
(i.e. my face already looks like a smashed packet of Smash), contact lenses
would be the best option when it comes to my appearance. However, I would literally die, be
reincarnated, then instantly die all over again if I tried to put in a contact
lens.
I’ve considered laser eye surgery, but then decided
against it when I found out what it entails. I used to believe that they just shine a beam
of magic light in your eye and you suddenly have the ability to view the moon
landing site in HD from the comfort of your own back yard. Then I found out the sickening truth behind
the procedure. They take a scapel and
detach the lens of your eye (whilst you are awake). As your world goes dark, they blast that lens
with death rays from a parallel dimension of damned souls, and pop it back on
30 seconds later as though it’s perfectly normal. Afterwards, you will be able to see the acne
scars on your co-worker’s chin from 5 feet away and compare it to the moon
landing site. I’m sorry, but that
doesn’t seem like a fair pay off to me.
If I’m paying a few hundred pound to be tortured, I’d expect a
knighthood at least for the ordeal.
Luckily for me, my eyesight is perfectly fine at the
moment. Nothing appears blurry to me,
except for the quantum theory of black holes and its relationship with matter
consumption in spacetime, but I don’t think corrective lenses will clear that
up. Anyway, I’ll keeping my fingers
crossed that my eye sight doesn’t deteriorate further. In fact, I’ll be keeping my eyes crossed too.
