Quarry and Archive

I recently finished a co-op playthrough of The Quarry, a cinematic, choices-matter horror videogame in the vein of classics like Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain. By drawing heavily from eighties camp slasher flicks and using VHS as a visual reference point, The Quarry fits perfectly into the throwback genre: a loving homage to horror of days (and media) past.

The Quarry makes use of a number of horror movie tropes and clichés, but unlike self-critical horror — Scream or Cabin in the Woods, films whose goal is to analyze and deconstruct the genre — the well-worn archetypes and patterns of The Quarry exist to promote the notion that choices really do matter. Choices can save the characters who, classically, are doomed to die gruesome deaths. By the same token, the choose-your-own-adventure of gore and mayhem can give you the chance to play as a killer of sorts, making all the wrong choices and dooming everyone, perhaps even the game’s Final Girl, to a grim demise.

Meanwhile, to mark the beginning of the Halloween season, I tried to watch the original Scream on Amazon Prime, but in a surprise twist, the new Scream played instead. I’d been skeptical of Scream without Wes Craven, but then, let’s not get too caught up in fan attachments; after all, it’s a psychotic devotion to franchise fandom that turns out to be driving the latest iteration of Ghostface. The killers are trying to return the fictional Stab franchise — a film series within Scream based on the events of the films — to its roots following its perceived shark-jumping. This is a not-so-subtle jab at fandoms that tend to resist evolution and fetishize the past (often in racist, sexist fashion).

Both The Quarry and Scream 5 illustrate the joys and pitfalls of history and homage. That same generic structures that bring life to their respective films can result in stagnation, or, in Scream as in The Quarry, death. The old tagline of Scream was, “Someone has taken their love of scary movies a step too far”; the membrane between fiction and reality can be surprisingly permeable. If The Quarry is an example of loving homage, Scream 5, indeed all Scream films, are a reminder that such homage can be taken too far.

At issue is the question: how do we process our archive? Case in point: the work of Bill Morrison. Glenn Kenny at The New York Times called him “the poet laureate of lost films”, and that title is not undeserved. Morrison’s film Dawson City: Frozen Time details the literal excavation of hundreds of reels of lost silent films from beneath Dawson City in Canada. At once a history of film intertwined with the history of a singular mining town, Frozen Time is a study in how we document and retain that history. Among the most tragic moments in the film are those in which we learn that massive quantities of film were destroyed, sent either down the river or up in flames.

A contrasting take on film history comes from Peter Jackson. If you believe his film They Shall Not Grow Old, then World War I was the first modern war because it was captured on film. Jackson, unlike Morrison, uses technique and technology to transcend the material and chronological limitations of archive. Dawson City: Frozen Time, by contrast, thrives in the incompleteness and flawed nature of the historical record. For Morrison, the missing is as interesting as the found.

Film distribution company Vinegar Syndrome recently hosted a sneak peek at its new physical location in Colorado, and I was lucky enough to attend. Fittingly called The Archive, the store showcases a cornucopia of physical media befitting a company whose goal of restoration and preservation contrasts with the approach of mega corporations for whom film is a commodity to be discarded at the most expedient moment. The increasingly digital and online nature of film distribution and exhibition is scarcely aligned with those of us who see films as works of art and works of history. Like the films destroyed in Dawson City, at a time when few thought of or cared for the future of a medium in its infancy, the digital environment predisposes films to be lost or locked away by companies for whom certain films have more value in vaults than on screens.