Today's post is a submission for Critical Distance's Blogs of the Round Table feature. This month's theme is "Nostalgia".
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| Copyright Daedalic Games 2013 |
I was listening to an audiobook of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind
in the Willows last night (hat tip to Librivox) and I did so with some actual
trepidation. Why? I associate Grahame's book, as well as its Disney
adaptation, with my many odd and overwhelming childhood fears sprung from children's books
and films (including, for example, the concept of eternity--I'm looking at you, The Neverending Story). As a result, I've never actually read the original
text. But I took my shuddering discomfort with Mr. Toad in hand (ear?) and gave the
book's first two chapters a try.
While I was listening, I was reminded (in a somewhat
backwards fashion) of Daedalic Games' The Night of the Rabbit, a 2013 point and
click adventure game written by Matthias Kempke. The game follows the
adventures of Jerry Hazelnut, a human boy and wannabe magician, who is soon apprenticed to the rabbit of the title, the mysterious Marquis de Hoto. Jerry
is tasked to save Mousewood, a village of tiny, anthropomorphic animals (and
probably also to save the fabric of reality). The Night of the Rabbit is clearly
indebted to many Funny Animal stories, including Beatrix Potter's work and
Grahame's book. There are adorable mammals in waistcoats all over the place.
There's a frog postman on a bicycle, for God's sake.
But one of the several things The Night of the Rabbit is spectacularly good at is
capturing the creeping horror children are so similarly good at finding in children's
fiction. Underlying the beautifully illustrated world of the game is a real.
growing menace that infects the beauty of Mousewood. The threats in the game
are kept very shadowy at first and their reveals creep into the narrative. We
hear of another magician, The Great Zaroff, whose posters, tacked up around the
village and surrounding environs, exhibit a threatening stare. We eventually
meet creepy lizards wearing wooden human faces who talk of modern progress and
promise to be "the solution" for the village. It's unsettling and
it's meant to be. And best of all, the unnerving mix of cheeriness and
creepiness, to my eyes, feels so very similar to the feelings I had as a child
of reading a book or watching a movie intended for children (often colourful,
often sweet) and seizing on a particular concept to have nightmares about for
weeks.
Most of these texts, like The Night of the Rabbit, had
explicit threats, too: Mr. McGregor in The Tale of Peter Rabbit or the weasels (I think?) in The Wind in the Willows. But the particular talent of children is to find
horror in the seemingly innocent parts and characters of these stories: say,
the incongruities of size and human presence in Grahame's book, or my own fear
of the Caterpillar in The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. These personally-mined fears often
have the most lasting power in our imaginations: I can list a small collection
of excellent family films I wouldn't watch today if you paid me. Though you could certainly make an offer.
But sometimes these fears turn into fascinations--things we long for, things we miss. I
distinctly remember being terrified of the movie Labyrinth after seeing it
once, then trying to watch it a few years later with the hope of overcoming my
aversion. Instead, I found other things from the film to obsessively worry about and it
wasn't until my teen years that I watched the film for a third time and my
childhood fear of David Bowie turned into consuming lust -- but that's really a
topic for another post.
The Night of the Rabbit weaves the creepy and the antiquatedly
adorable to produce that feeling of fearing the things you're not supposed to
fear, things an adult might wave away as silly. If T.S. Eliot will show you fear in a handful of dust, Matthias Kempke
will show you the fear waiting behind each beautifully painted, seemingly
idyllic scene in Mousewood. He'll remind you how you once saw these things.
For me, one of The Night of the Rabbit's many successes is
its ability to leverage our nostalgia for childhood nightmares. Now if you'll
excuse me, I need to go hide under a blanket.
