I HAVE BEEN AWARE OF THE KILLER SINCE BIRTH

Last year, I played Manhunt for the first time. It's simple and to-the-point, both in concept and execution: You're a serial killer who has to kill other serial killers to survive. You start the level, sneak around and kill everyone, then you leave. You do that 20 times and the game ends.

Manhunt was, obviously, the subject of controversy. It was banned in multiple countries. It came out the same year as Jack Thompson filed multiple lawsuits regarding Grand Theft Auto III, a "murder simulator" that was warping the minds of children everywhere. Manhunt is an obvious response to that accusation: it's an actual murder simulator.

Everything about Manhunt is bluntly provocative. The difficulty settings are called "Fetish" and "Hardcore". The enemies moan about how murder makes their cocks hard. Former Rockstar employee Jeff Williams said the game "just made [us employees] all feel icky. It was all about the violence, and it was realistic violence. We all knew there was no way we could explain away that game. There was no way to rationalize it. We were crossing a line."

A screenshot of Manhunt, where the main character James Earl Cash is strangling a shirtless masked villain whose torso is completely covered in a tattoo that says "DRUG SLUT".
Yes, that tattoo says "DRUG SLUT".

Playing the game in 2024, it's pretty fucking tame. We live in a world where Naughty Dog employees watch gore videos for reference. Lara Croft moans while getting brutally impaled on rusty metal. And okay, it's not a game, but I watched Terrifier 3 last year in a Cineplex theatre; the threequel to a cult gore VFX flick made over $50 million domestically. This is the desensitization to violence everyone keeps talking about. A million lines have been crossed. The slope is slippery with blood.

A picture of Art the Clown from Terrifier 2. He has white and black clown makeup, rotted teeth, and an unnaturally pointy face. He's leaning out of a food service window, grinning, and doing jazz hands.
Don't worry, Art isn't real. He can't hurt you.

I think a lot about why I go out of my way to see gross, violent, cruel stuff. Maybe I want to prove I'm tough, maybe I want to prove I'm not desensitized. Maybe it's funny to me, maybe I get off on it. But watching James Earl Cash slice off another serial killer's head, watching Art the Clown gleefully disembowel another innocent bystander, it feels like maybe I'm catching a glimpse of something, peeking behind the curtain. Something about this impossible bloodbath feels real. It feels like proof.

"In a video game every single fucked up thing can happen and nobody cares." says an unnamed NPC in Pipey Quest, the game-within-a-game inside The Ballad of Swishy. "Other mediums try to lie to you by having things happen logically, and by forcing characters to act believably. Believability is a way to get away with something, it launders, or escapes from, all the evil and fucked up things that happen."

People on social media who think that Terrifier 3 is just a worthless disgusting gore flick for freaks (and maybe it is) were briefly obsessed with saying "but, at least it has a realistic depiction of PTSD". The movie is, in part, about how no one believes Lauren. No one believes that this girl is a victim of a supernatural clown. No one believes her that he's back. She's hallucinating, she's traumatized. But when the bodies start piling up, the curtain is pulled away. The evil is revealed. It's been there the whole time, killing people. You just didn't see it until now.

A picture of Wendy Williams on the Wendy Show. She's sitting down and addressing the audience and camera.
"I have been aware of The Killer… since birth."

One of my favourite videos on the internet is a supercut of Wendy Williams talking about "The Killer". In her mind, The Killer is a mysterious figure who is out there, always watching, ready to take you out at a moment's notice. Wendy keeps a bat from Yankee Stadium in her drawer, she avoids letting the ends of her scarf dangle. You never know when someone is secretly The Killer in disguise. We are all potential victims. We are all, potentially, The Killer. We laugh because it's fictitious and absurd. There's nobody actually waiting around the corner, not physically. But deep down we know what she means.

During Britney Spears's public battle to escape her conservatorship, Wendy said the following: "How dare you, Mr. Spears. You had me fooled. And you too, Mrs. Spears. Death! To all of them." The audience gasps, shocked. We don't like this kind of impulsive, raw violence. We don't want to hear it out in the open. We don't want to believe we're all capable of thinking that, or doing that. The violence of the Spears is bad, too, but it at least had the decently to stay behind closed doors.

You may have heard about that CEO who got shot. Respectable people did not cheer for his death. Violence is not the answer, they said. They sidestep, of course, that the CEO himself committed violence on a huge scale. But it was indirect violence, it can't be proven, he's just doing his job. It's abstract. He didn't take pleasure in it. It was for a reason, a profit motive. His behaviour can all be explained rationally. It's the shooter who behaved violently, irrationally. He crossed the line.

A screenshot of Manhunt. The main character is standing facing a corner. Two dead bodies have been laid in the corner, but their torsos are hidden in the walls, so their legs are protruding from the walls and forming a V shape.
This is another screenshot of Manhunt, which I've included here to break up the text and to remind you what I started talking about in the first place. Also, you have to hide bodies in the shadows, and shadows are often in corners, so I moved these two bodies here because I thought it was funny.

When you see a villain on TV, or in a game, it's tempting to laugh and say it's not realistic. It's unbelievable, it's exaggerated, there's no one that evil in real life. I said the same thing to myself the other day, watching a show that depicts an abusive husband. Then I remembered, no, I've known someone exactly like that, maybe worse. It's nice to believe there isn't anyone like that. Until you meet The Killer, he's fictitious and absurd.

In Manhunt, the big bad guy is a film director who's gone rogue and started a snuff film ring. According to Snopes, snuff films don't exist. The idea that there is a co-ordinated network for the production and distribution of materials built on the deaths of innocent people is simply unbelievable. A conspiracy theory. Eve Sedgwick once asked AIDS activist Cindy Patton about the rumours that AIDS was invented by the government to kill gay people. Patton replied: “Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things – what would we know then that we don’t already know?”

What would a grand conspiracy tell us about the structural forces at play in America that we aren’t already aware of? What if bad things happen to good people? Does there need to be a snuff film ring, a supernatural clown, or can we accept that in less direct and obvious ways, an unbelievable number of people die brutally and horribly every day for the benefit of someone else? What if Art the Clown was president? What if The Killer is on the loose?

A picture of BOB from Twin Peaks. He as long grey hair and he's smiling evilly. He's climbing over a coffee table. He's looking at you and approaching you.
Sorry about the jumpscare.

In Twin Peaks, there's a character called BOB. He's what I think of when Wendy invokes The Killer – BOB is a vessel for, as one character puts it, "the evil that men do". Whenever someone commits an evil act, they become BOB, or are possessed by BOB, or are BOB, or represent BOB, or maybe they're just themselves and BOB is an excuse, a scapegoat for their behaviour. Sometimes the only way to cope with the absurdity of evil is to dress it up, make it a caricature, imagine that it's BOB hurting us and not someone we love or trust. We laugh because it's not real, it happened to someone else.

By the way, I finished Manhunt. It was fun. It's an elegant, minimal stealth game. It plays quite well despite being over 20 years old. It's interesting as a cultural artifact, a sort of time capsule of 2000s edginess. It's also kind of janky and tedious in places, and juvenile, and shallow. But if any of that sounds interesting to you, it's definitely worth a play.

(Note: The Steam release of Manhunt is broken, though it can be fixed with community-made patches. Someone online said that the Steam copy is broken because it's a pirated copy, which would mean that Rockstar uploaded a pirated copy of their own game to Steam. Allegedly. I think that's funny.)

Anyway, the violence in our games, our movies, our TV shows – it's all real! It's all happening right now. You aren't imagining it. It's senseless, gratuitous, and completely unnecessary to the plot. But it's happening. Art the Clown is out there. Manhunt takes place in your backyard. Maybe you can't stomach it or maybe you can. Maybe watching it is pointless because you know how it ends: a lot of innocent people wind up dead.


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