Killscreen

10/22/2026

A reviewer praised the scariest scene in Weapons for playing out in total silence, with no music.

There is music there. The whole scene is scored.

Ryan Holladay wrote it, and says being told nobody noticed is the best compliment he has had. He and Jason Graves on building dread.

I ask Ryan Holladay and Jason Graves how dread gets built before the scare, and why a game score has to wait on a player in a way a film score never does.

10/21/2026

Nikima Jagudajev spent six years staging a high school that never existed — a live performance called Basically, where performers walk arm in arm, draw tarot and change clothes, and a three-ring binder in the room holds all the rules. Not even the performers know all of them.

Then it became a video game. At the opening in Venice, one of the performers sat down on the loveseat, picked up the controller, and played herself. The character was built out of years of her own performances.

https://www.killscreen.com/nikima-jagudajev-performance-video-game/?ref=facebook

10/20/2026

Game marketers keep a list of genres to avoid. Puzzle games are on it, and the reason they give is that streamers don't like being confused on air.

I think that's a bad reason to foreclose a whole lineage of games. Danny Snelson and I got into it on episode 36 of the Killscreen podcast.

Full conversation, free: https://www.killscreen.com/the-lake-was-gone-and-the-satellite-kept-talking-podcast/?ref=facebook

10/20/2026

Tomorrow at 10am PT: Space and the Body, with Sophie Winqvist (cinematographer, Aniara), Max Friberg (Eclipsium) and Johanna Kasurinen (Mouthwashing). Free to join. Register and I'll email you the link. https://www.killscreen.com/cross-conversations-horror-space-and-the-body/?ref=cc2-fb-remind

10/19/2026

Mark Essen makes games under the name Messhof. In 2010 I met him at an outdoor bar near his Brooklyn apartment and, trying to loosen up a famously taciturn interview, spilled a full glass of water over the electronic noisemakers he was building for the people who backed Flywrench. He was fine about it. The noisemakers survived.

He told me he set out to make painful games to play. He used to get sick making them, and then he got used to it. Randy Balma runs under a sickening drone. The horizon in The Thrill of Combat tilts and tumbles while you fly.

It didn't come from other games. At Bard he was watching flicker films, and a series of films of cataract surgery, which you don't watch alone, you watch with friends. That, he said, is why he started making multiplayer games.

His new one, Blood Dungeon, came out in August. Much of it was animated on a $50 tablet, in the car, waiting around.

https://www.killscreen.com/mark-essen-messhof-experimental-game-design-discomfort/?ref=facebook

10/19/2026

The Oregon Trail taught a generation how games work, not history.

That's Danny Snelson's argument on episode 36 of the Killscreen podcast. The more you played, the more you figured out how the odds were weighted. You were learning the model, not the frontier. And the real trail worked the same way, with pioneers sending knowledge back home to the next wave.

Full conversation, free: https://www.killscreen.com/the-lake-was-gone-and-the-satellite-kept-talking-podcast/?ref=facebook

Members are $55/year, locked at that price as long as you stay. It goes to $96 on 31 December.

10/18/2026

A painter who doesn't own a game console told me he spends 80% of his working time making imaginary objects feel right when you drag them.

His place in Red Hook was full of wooden things he couldn't explain. One was a shoe.

[from 2011]

https://www.killscreen.com/profile-patrick-smith/?ref=facebook

10/17/2026

When a character leaves a TV show, they're gone. When a character leaves a game, players keep looking.

On episode 36 of the Killscreen podcast I talked with Danny Snelson about why: in a world that big, it always seems possible you missed something. Aerith, Bigfoot in San Andreas, the Disco Elysium cryptid.

Full conversation, free: https://www.killscreen.com/the-lake-was-gone-and-the-satellite-kept-talking-podcast/?ref=facebook

Members are $55/year, locked at that price as long as you stay. It goes to $96 on 31 December.

[TUE 13 OCT — cross-post of the Tue 13 Instagram Reel item. Its dead 24 Sep due time has been cleared; it would have fired never. Facebook rejects notification scheduling, so this is automatic + draft: the moment you queue it, it WILL self-publish.]

10/16/2026

What does a room do to a body when there's no way out of it?

On Tuesday 20 October at 10am PT I'm hosting Space and the Body, a live conversation with cinematographer Sophie Winqvist, who shot Aniara, Max Friberg of Housefire, the studio behind Eclipsium, and Johanna Kasurinen of Wrong Organ, the studio behind Mouthwashing.

A ship drifting off course. A crew coming apart. A body that won't stay the shape it was. I want to know how each of them makes a space close in.

It's free and online. Register and I'll email you the link to join:

Cross-Conversations: Horror. Aniara cinematographer Sophie Winqvist meets the makers of Eclipsium and Mouthwashing on claustrophobia, guilt and bodies in deep space. Free and online.

10/15/2026

Holyvoid is a 168-page art book for a video game that doesn't exist. Vermis did the same thing before it.

On episode 36 of the Killscreen podcast, Danny Snelson makes the case that a good speculative book can make you hallucinate a game, and that might hit harder than the real thing.

Full conversation, free: https://www.killscreen.com/the-lake-was-gone-and-the-satellite-kept-talking-podcast/?ref=facebook

Members are $55/year, locked at that price as long as you stay. It goes to $96 on 31 December.