the incoherence of dread

Little Skellig — Immortality — Signalis — The King in Yellow — El Paso, Elsewhere — Isle of the Dead — Stories of Your Life and Others / Arrival

15 min readJul 12, 2024

Little Skellig — Ireland

In the distance, far from shore and shrouded in fog and mist and a light rain, the island of Little Skellig looms large and shadowed both in reality and in my mind’s eye.

Jet black and angular set against a greying sky; violent waters crash and swirl and spray foam and mist across the sheer cliffs. Birds crowd overhead like little white angels set against the dark; like flies swarming a ravaged corpse torn open.

Dread reverberates from this place in unspeakable ways. In its presence: I find myself unable to do anything but stare, endlessly; I’m drawn in and transfixed, frozen in place inexplicably.

In a local photographer’s gallery sometime later, a monochrome capture of the island lies framed and up close before my eyes. I hear the waves crash, the rocking of the waves underfoot, the mist and salt sting — as if I’ve been transported back again.

Possibility and coherence unravels, there is no reasonable explanation for it.

I am afraid / I feel dread

This sensation is cathartic, comforting, familiar yet unsettling

And maybe only now, after so many years, I’ve learned to live with it.

SPOILER WARNING: all the games / books / movies that appear here also include pieces of the central conceit / reveal / conclusion, read at your own risk

IMMORTALITY

Half Mermaid’s IMMORTALITY is an achronological full-motion video game traversing a film library of various snippets from the planning, creation, and shooting of three separate fictional lost movies: Ambrosio, Minski, and Two of Everything. Tracking the short-lived and mysterious career of one Marissa Marcel: the fictional lead actress in all three; the footage is a mix of table reads, rehearsals, behind the scenes, and finished edits. Each is set and shot in a distinct style representative of three iconic periods of cinema history (as Sam Barlow puts it in his 2023 GDC talk):

Throughout, the player can scrub back and forth through the footage — the physicality of tape and film made tangible through mouse or finger gesture. Time and light are captured and manipulatable at a simple flick; a satisfying skeuomorphic tumble of simulated film tape.

At any point, the player can click on an object or face in the scene to perform an instantaneous match cut: the same actor or a similar prop within a new piece of footage, sometimes from a completely different movie altogether. Cut-by-cut, scene-by-scene, the player unravels the content and context of the films. Extracted from chronology or plot or sequence, the only way to traverse and uncover the library of footage is by means of our own curiosity. Common threads begin to emerge, and then something unexpected occurs:

an ominous tone groans from the rewinding of tape, as motion slowed-in-reverse is drowned out by an overbearing sense of dread.

The footage flips and the hairs of your skin stand in uncertain apprehension as an alternate sequence plays instead of the original scene. The communion with the Other, the Dead, the Immortal, has begun, and you have no idea where it will lead.

From this moment forward, the realization that any clip might have a “b-side”: a scene diverged where the Other assumes control; expands the possibilities before you. Suddenly every scene holds a nesting doll of rabbit holes, of questions within questions just out of reach, if only you’re willing to brave the discomfort of uncovering them. In each hand, Immortality holds forth both curiosity and dread, and asks the question: how much self-inflicted pain are you willing to tolerate to find the answers you’re looking for?

This tightrope balance of providing narrative beats as reward for the player’s curiosity and dread tolerance doesn’t come easy. Conor Carson uncovers the “magic” of the match cut as lead programmer on the project: there’s no magic at work in Immortality at all. Instead, a ton of work was dedicated to tag every scene, weight the narrative impact of both “a-side” and “b-side”, and tweak the match cut algorithm with purely the player experience in mind. There is a specificity of intention; of desired experience; a guiding hand to it.

In a world increasingly flooded with AI generated content devoid of life and meaning, overflowing with hallucination — Immortality achieves: through non-linear means but still reflective of our desire to understand; a conjuration of dread that feels authored and personal. We feed the machine our morbid curiosity to see not what an algorithm tweaked with obscured motivations will return to us, but how the team wished to guide an experience uniquely tailored to the questions we wished to ask. Through eventuality and persistence, a story emerges from incoherent uncertainty: the tangible fear of being forgotten, of being alone; the desire to leave something behind to mark our existence. This dread is exhumed through our own questions, but haunts each and every one of us the same.

Signalis

Rose Engine’s Signalis is a top-down horror shooter reminiscent of Resident Evil 2, “taking place” after your deep-space exploration vessel crash lands on an unknown world. You: as Elster, an android “LSTR” unit; go in search of your assigned human commanding officer / one-way travel companion / lover: Ariane.

And then you crawl into an uncomfortably small hole in the ground that looks like raw meat, read “The King In Yellow” in a bunker, and shit gets weird.

Where the fuck do I even start here?

Signalis’ structure manipulates our senses, manipulates us: sequence-to-sequence, it’s never clear whether we’re traversing physical space or moving through someone else’s memories. As names, faces, and the memories of our predecessors bleed into our own reality, physically and temporally impossible places are woven together:

the snowy unknown celestial body we crash land on (perhaps outside the solar system)
the deep-space mining facilities of S-23 Sierpinski
the moon-colony of Rotfront in orbit around the in-universe equivalent to Jupiter (Ariane’s childhood home)
the unexplainable meat dungeon (no clue where this is)
retreading of past locations overgrown with tumorous growths and uncomfortable walls of flesh (this is gross)

Throughout the experience, we’re incomprehensibly transported between first and third person view; between space and time ostensibly planets and lifetimes apart; we both inhabit and observe Elster from within and afar. Signalis uses this incoherence of sequence and perception to convey dread, to put us in an inexplicable position of loss and confusion and pain: in the environments it presents and then pulls the rug out from under; in its refusal to give us any grounding in reality; in its questioning of our senses, our motivations, and our actions; in our seamless traversal of time, space, and being. Sequences read like vignettes of memory stitched together as mottled patches of mismatched skin on a Frankenstein-ed corpse. And when we stand in the mirror and behold who, or when, or where we are — the face that stares back carries a sort of uncertain familiarity.

Amidst this hostility of experience: from every shot that rings out from an ever depleting supply of bullets — to every narrow escape and the unsettling relief of a blood-hued saferoom; we long for some reprise, some means of coping with the dread that clings to our skin. But regardless of the context, what remains constant and what pushes us forward is our devotion to find the person we’re looking for. Our refusal to give up or give in culminates into a final conclusion, manifested through our play.

The decision Signalis poses is not a multiple choice option given at an arbitrary turning point, but instead a cumulation of our actions — in our minute-to-minute deliberations and expressions of play under the tenseness it presents us with — and how those ripple out into long term consequences. In the wake of every death and defeated enemy; every moment lingered or sprinted through; every journal entry or conversation uncovered or left unread; we have no one else to blame but ourselves for the result wrought by the literal numbers crunching behind the scenes; a metaphor for a relationship or life lived as a cumulation of small actions.

Because too much time has passed. No matter how devoted or dedicated, how safe or ruthless we are, this was always a one-way trip.

Despite the atemporal presentation, we can’t run away from time and consequences. And in attempting to cope with the stress and hopelessness of the situation, I find myself fixated on the implied and imagined time in between: grasping for moments of happiness and levity when the eventual end is so bleak and yet heartbreakingly bittersweet; so inescapable and inevitable.

The ache in my soul that Signalis leaves behind is dread manifested before our very eyes, but not shied away from. Instead it’s embraced, knowingly, fatedly. We made a promise, and we intend to see it through.

The King in Yellow

Robert Chamber’s 1895 collection of short stories loosely revolves around the titular fictional play in text form. Throughout, we watch, to our horror, as the trainwreck unfolds; as the textual “The King in Yellow” drives its readers to unspeakable ends.

In one such short: “The Repairer of Reputations”; Hildred Castaigne becomes convinced that he is the successor of the long lost kingdom of the King in Yellow, and pursues the death of his cousin and loved ones to “secure” his supposed crown.

I began to speak very calmly: "Dr. Archer, having by some means become possessed of the secret of the Imperial Succession, attempted to deprive me of my right, alleging that, because of a fall from my horse four years ago, I had become mentally deficient. He presumed to place me under restraint in his own house in hopes of either driving me insane or poisoning me. I have not forgotten it. I visited him last night and the interview was final.”
…
Then I told him how they would find Dr. Archer in the cellar with his throat open, and I laughed in his face when I thought of Vance and his knife, and the order signed by me.

The otherworldliness of these character’s actions and the alienness of their thought processes depicts incoherency as a manifestation of horror, an unknowable-ness that is beyond explanation, beyond reason, but unrelenting, determined, and utterly convinced that it is just, that it is right all the same.

In the second half, the collection diverges from the fiction of the “The King in Yellow” and instead revolves around artistic protagonists living in Paris and the uncertain tragedy of their relationships.

In “The Street of our Lady of the Fields”, Valentine, a Parisian local, mourns the romantic pursuits of Hastings, an American-born transplant attempting to court her.

I am almost afraid of him — afraid he should know — what we all are in the Quarter. Oh, I do not wish him to know! I do not wish him to — to turn from me — to cease from speaking to me as he does! You — you and the rest cannot know what he has been to me. I could not believe him; I could not believe he was so good and — and noble. I do not wish him to know — so soon. He will find out — sooner or later, he will find out for himself, and then he will turn away from me. Why,” she cried, passionately — “ why should he turn from me and not from you?”
Clifford, much embarrassed, eyed his cigarette.
The girl rose, very white. “He is your friend — you have a right to warn him.”
“He is my friend,” he said, at length.
They looked at each other in silence.
Then she cried, “By all that I hold to me most sacred, you need not warn him.”
“I shall trust your word,” he said, pleasantly.

While not horror in its traditional form, the romance short stories here impart a similar sense of dread about the unknown. Of sensing impending tragedy before we know it’ll occur, of melancholy-tinged fate: familiarly inescapable and inevitable.

Placed together, it contextualizes love as a similarly otherworldly force, defying reason, sense, and rationale. Incoherent and inexplicable in a similar way as dread, heeded without question, yet deserving of apprehension all the same.

El Paso, Elsewhere

El Paso, Elsewhere is Strange Scaffold’s homage to Max Payne games of yore; a fatalistic trip towards self-destruction. James Savage knows he only has one option: kill his ex, Draculae, to prevent her from ending the world via primordial sacrifice; and likely, himself, in the process.

Level by level, encounter by encounter, James’ snippets of memories come through, drip fed like a parasocial hit of dopamine, a window into his fucked up life and the fucked up relationship he had with Draculae. In the incessant shooting; in the swarming groans of enemies; in the ceaselessly irreverent soundtrack; these moments of quiet honesty punctuate and juxtapose the loudness of everything else that’s going on; James’ words are a solace in the middle of a storm.

The rambling, exhumed emotions and questions, bleeding forth as James himself is bleeding out and falling apart, emanate exhaustion and weariness. The incoherence of their order or reason leaves us to fill in the blanks: what refraction of a memory triggered this here, in this moment, specifically? We can only guess: imagining the horrors Draculae enacted on him; clinging to the hints of fondness and moments in-between.

El Paso, Elsewhere’s incoherence mirrors the incoherence of our own existences, the way memory fails us or can’t seem to escape those moments which seems most poignantly painful. The way it can linger on those fleeting moments of bliss and gloss over the day-to-day agony of existence; the way it can peek through unexpectedly through the overwhelming stimulus of the everyday.

Unexpectedly, deja-vu tinged trauma strikes: we’re reliving James’ nightmares; the horrors of dread and pain intertwined with love, knowing these things will never be disentangled from each other, or from him.

Impending tragedy hangs over every step, every ragged breath is drawn as if its his last, knowing: whether he succeeds or not; this is the end.

**Isle of the Dead (Die Toteninsel) — New York City**

In New York, a version of Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead is on display in the MET’s Rodin and European Painting Gallery, a busy hall where few stop for a second glance. Instead, amidst crowds circumventing me like diverted streams, I’m transfixed. The other versions Böcklin painted over his lifetime: hosted in other museums around the world: flip before my eyes the same way the player experiences them in Signalis. The pixelated depictions converge with the real before me — flashes of blood red tumor-ed flesh shimmers in my periphery.

And yet the crowd melts away, the visual and audible bustle drowned out by the soundless emanations from within the frame.

A lonely isle, crowned by pointed fir trees and stark white buildings, the shape of mausoleums.

A lonely oarsman and a shrouded figure, bringing a coffin and the corpse of a presumed lover ashore.

An unspeakable dread, an inescapable fate, returning to rest.

Stories of Your Life and Others / Arrival

Arrival: Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Ted Chiang’s short: Stories of Your Life and Others; tracks Dr Louise Banks’ pivotal experience around the arrival of aliens to Earth and her work translating both their spoken and written languages in an attempt to establish communication between the two species. Her understanding of the new languages drastically reshapes her perception of time, of reality, of free will versus fate, especially in the context of the relationship she simultaneously develops with her physicist teammate and eventual father of her child.

Arrival uses the medium of film and places the affordance of editing and sequencing scenes front and center. It implies a linear story via the sequence of scenes and then defies that expectation with the narrative realization that the sequence of edits are not temporally ordered but instead meant to experientially depict Dr Banks’ changed perception of time. We see the events of her life via film the same way she’s experiencing them: discrete moments in time, diverged from chronology but woven together to form a story and a purpose in the present. We’re placed in Dr Banks’ shoes, piecing together these memories and scenes that collate a life, moments on and off the screen arranged within our minds.

How do you traverse a life / love terrified of the outcome, knowing how it may / will end?

You just do.

Arrival provides no “solution” to going about living with dread, but the depiction, rendered in solemn peacefulness and acceptance, feels raw and real and honest.

Ted Chiang’s original piece: written as Dr Banks’ words to her daughter; carries both a kind of fated detachment from time and yet a hopeful curiosity about what the future will bring anyway— that renders me to tears the same way the film does.

When you are three, you’ll pull a dishtowel off the kitchen counter and bring that salad bowl down on top of you. I’ll make a grab for it, but I’ll miss. The edge of the bowl will leave you with a cut, on the upper edge of your forehead, that will require a single stitch. Your father and I will hold you, sobbing and stained with Caesar dressing, as we wait in the emergency room for hours.
I reached out and took the bowl from the shelf. The motion didn’t feel like something I was forced to do. Instead it seemed just as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl when it falls on you: an instinct that I felt right in following.
“I could use a salad bowl like this.”
Gary looked at the bowl and nodded approvingly. “See, wasn’t it a good thing that I had to stop at the market?”
“Yes it was.” We got in line to pay for our purchases.

Chiang similarly intersperses the “present” with these interjections of the past and future. And when shackled with the nostalgia and regret of the past, dreaded fear of the future, and anxiety about today, held together, there is a clarity that seems within reach, that feels hopeful.

Working with the heptapods changed my life. I met your father and learned Heptapod B, both of which make it possible for me to know you now, here on the patio in the moonlight. Eventually, many years from now, I’ll be without your father, and without you. All I will have left from this moment is the heptapod language. So I pay close attention, and note every detail.
From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?
These questions are in my mind when your father asks me, “Do you want to make a baby?” And I smile and answer, “Yes,” and I unwrap his arms from around me, and we hold hands as we walk inside to make love, to make you.

Afterword

The vibes that loss leaves in its wake are smothering, paralyzing, yet also comforting. Do nothing, and let it wash over you and extinguish your being. For the longest time, I wished for nothing else.

In some ways, this dread: watching the life you’ve built crumble between your fingers; has felt like an inescapable hole to crawl out of.

That this fear, this inexplicable loss, is unrecoverable. That it will happen again and again, unexplained, unannounced, and devastating all the same.

Two years ago, I took a job I knew would eventually end.

A year ago, we found a cancerous growth in my Gung’s stomach that we knew he wouldn’t recover from.

Even now, as I brush a hair out of your eyes, and hold you close, I wonder if / when you’ll eventually fade from my mind.

The thought terrifies me, as it has terrified me before, and will terrify me for forever after.

The only way I’ve learned to manage this dread, these irrational thoughts, these incoherent sequences of events that make up a life, is to hold you just a little bit tighter.

At the moment, it just felt right.