The 2010 Spike TV Awards brought with them plenty of world premiere reveals, the most cryptic of which was inSANE, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro’s first video game. Del Toro’s filmmaking career began in 1993 with Cronos, a film about a mild mannered antiques dealer who must deal with a vampiric transformation. Since then, del Toro has carved himself an almost perfect career for a filmmaker; proving his artistic ability with Spanish-language art-house films and demonstrating proficiency with action and spectacle in Hollywood.
It’s no secret that del Toro is a fan of comics and video games, and a video game collaboration has been rumored for some time. Details about inSANE are thin on the ground: there’s no word on a genre, for example, or any story elements. All we have are del Toro’s cryptic words from the press-release, “I want to take players to a place they have never seen before, where every single action makes them question their own senses of morality and reality.”
We may not know anything about the game yet, but we know what del Toro has done before. So just what can he bring to the game?
Morality and Choice
The questions of morality and choice are becoming increasingly relevant to video games as the games themselves are becoming more and more complex. BioWare has a long history of difficult moral choices in their games, while titles such as Heavy Rain have built the concept of choice into the foundations of gameplay. Del Toro is no stranger to such concepts: one of Pan’s Labyrinth’s themes is the necessity of free will, and the dangers of fascism (the absence of choice.) [Spoiler alert if you’ve not seen Pan’s Labyrinth.] The sequence where Ophelia disobeys the Faun and refuses to let him take her brother is important, as here she passes her final test, in which she must demonstrate the courage to disobey her orders where they conflict with her morals. Contrast this with Vidal and the other fascists throughout the film, as they perform horrendous acts in the name of their orders, never questioning.
It’s typical in a video game to carry out orders and follow instructions, because logically that’s what you should do in order to progress. This mode of game design has been challenged by BioShock, but perhaps del Toro can deconstruct it further with inSANE the way he does with Pan’s Labyrinth.
Monsters
The most basic and consistent aspect of del Toro’s films are the monsters. He has admitted on more than one occasion that monsters are one of his great fascinations: he carries notebooks with him at all times to note down and doodle ideas. The creatures in his films always demonstrate an incredible level of creativity in terms of their design, but there’s always more to them than that.
Take the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth, for example. He sits at a wonderful banquet while people are starving. He has stigmata in his hands where his eyes go. He eats children. Del Toro himself has suggested the monster represents the Catholic church in terms of its excesses and the uncomfortable connotations with children, and relevant to the film through Franco’s support of Catholicism. That’s not to say all monstrous creations need to have subtexts, but the very best ones do.
Horror
del Toro’s films, for all their classification as horror films, are rarely scary in a modern context. The Devil’s Backbone is incredibly creepy in places, and several scenes in Pan’s Labyrinth involving Vidal, such as the sequence in which he breaks the hunter’s face with a bottle, or when he sews up his own face in the mirror, are definitely horrifying. del Toro’s first Hollywood movie, Mimic, displayed a talent for manipulating space to keep the protagonists in danger and the audience on edge. del Toro knows horror, and it’s unfortunate that the modern definition of horror is what makes us jump, not what truly horrifies.
We’ve had genuinely scary horror games before now. Take the original Resident Evil games, or Dead Space or the recent Amnesia: Dark Descent. What’s very difficult to do in a game is to sustain the fear. As the game progresses, the player will inevitably gain the skills and equipment necessary to defeat enemies, and developers have to be incredibly creative to keep the surprises coming for the length of a game compared to the length of a movie. Perhaps del Toro can provide that creativity, and perhaps even show us something truly horrifying in inSANE that’ll stay with us.
Visual Style
del Toro has a very distinctive visual style that makes specific use of color. For example: red represents safety, while blues and greens represent unsafe places. For a very clever use of this technique, see the sequence in Pan’s Labyrinth where the rebels set off several bombs: the “real world” (with the fascists) is presented in a dull blue-grey colour, which is disrupted by the red-yellow of the explosions.
del Toro is also noticeably fascinated by clockwork machinery, baroque designs and insects. Despite design recurrences throughout del Toro’s film canon, each work is distinct. InSANE, then, should be a rich visual experience, a definite departure from many games where the aim is to replicate realism as much as possible.
The Video Game Medium
Most importantly, a figure as respected as del Toro taking on a video game production could signal an important step in the maturing of the industry. For several of his films, he is considered both an artist and an intellectual, creating provocative and imaginative works. Yet, he has found a way to reconcile this with with B-movie scares and gore, and comic book inspirations. Video games have had the latter down to a T for years, but the true provocation of thought is a rarity. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen: Games like BioShock make us question both our own role in the game and the nature of following instructions, while BioWare’s games incorporate themes as diverse as religion, racism and surveillance.
What del Toro could well manage, assuming a smooth development, is to bring us a game which truly does make us think, while simultaneously transporting us to a world filled with imagination, monsters and scares. 2013 is a long way off, but it should well be worth the wait.
