If there's anyone in pop culture who has an insatiable fascination with hell, it's British horror author/director Clive Barker. I saw his first feature film, Hellraiser, as a clueless teen in 1987. I expected to be scared ... and I was. Out of my wits, in fact.
Fast-forward 21 years, and little has changed. Though Barker's latest endeavor is a first-person horror shooter called Jericho—not a book or a movie—it bears blood-drenched witness to his ongoing engrossment with hell, torture, dismemberment and the occult.
Last year, the horror impresario said of his attraction to video games, "Maybe if games hadn't existed, I would have said, 'Make it a movie,' but I prefer the idea of having 20 hours to play this world, to enter this labyrinth."
But what a macabre, malevolent labyrinth it is. My gaming colleague Kevin Simpson and I would like our 20 hours back, thank you very much.
Fury of the Firstborn
Jericho puts players in command of a top-secret, seven-member team of Army chaplains especially equipped for "covert occult warfare." Or, as one of them quips, "witches with guns."
Their task? To restore a spiritual barrier deep beneath the ruins of the ancient Middle Eastern city Al-Khalid that has kept a powerful entity known as the Firstborn from exacting its brutal vengeance on humankind.
According to the game's literature, as well as voiceovers and cut scenes, the Firstborn was God's original creation, an "entity [that] was neither male nor female, dark nor light; a singular being that was both beautiful and terrible to behold." Barker's "God" was so disturbed by what He'd created that He sent it into the abyss "forsaken and unloved." Then He started over with Adam and Eve.
Naturally, the Firstborn wasn't content to remain exiled, longing instead to wreak havoc on the creatures that had displaced it.
Six times throughout history the Firstborn has sought to break free, insists this game. And a dark prophecy predicts the wrath-fueled entity will be successful on the seventh. To prevent that from happening, the Jericho team is dispatched, traveling both deep underground and back in time through the six previous ages as they draw ever nearer to their confrontation with a spiritual being so powerful even God, we're told, could not destroy it.
From Spirit to Flesh ... Lots of Flesh
That backstory might share some superficial similarities with the story of Satan's rebellion against God as described in Scripture. But once gameplay gets underway, any spiritual parallels (intended or accidental) take a back seat to blood, guts, blood, guts, more guts ... and did I mention the blood?
As the Jericho team fights through each level, the soldiers are beset by monstrous creatures loyal to the Firstborn and bent on mortally impeding their progress. From start to finish, the dank, dark worlds they encounter are smeared and smudged with crimson. Barker exhibits endless morbid fascination with bodies and blades—the latter alternately fused crudely into the flesh of tormentors, Frankenstein-style, or thrust through the flesh of unfortunate victims.
In one scene, we see pictures of a vile villain who's about to consume a headless, armless, legless torso that's skewered on a gigantic fork. Another retch-inducing moment involves an unspeakably horrific impaling. Add to that gaping wounds, dismembered limbs, scores of crucifixions, all manner of torture and freely flowing bodily fluids—including vomit and excrement.
Given the environment, gameplay is surprisingly linear and predictable. Automatic weapons are the first line of defense. And each team member's occult power becomes increasingly important the longer you play. One character is a healer and a telepath. Another, a so-called "ninja blood mage," uses her own blood to cast spells and wards. A seer employs astral projection, and a priest has skills in exorcism (shouting, "The power of Christ compels you" as he goes). A telekinetic sniper can control bullets in flight, while another character is a "reality hacker" with the power to alter time and teleport supplies.
If those spiritual problems combined with the game's viscerally graphic imagery weren't enough for me to have already concluded this review with an exclamation point, harsh profanity, including f- and s-words, as well as various misuses of God's name, flies almost as frequently as bullets. There's also passing reference to the possibility that one female character is a lesbian, and another female team member wears a very revealing outfit. (The sides of her breasts are basically bare.) Other sexual content includes a discussion of how one of these women was abused incestuously by her father.
Without question, Jericho's coders have outdone themselves when it comes to translating Barker's gory story to the video game screen. To call it a mess—both visually and theologically—is the understatement of the year.
Taking the Wrecking Ball to Religion
Barker clearly has superficial familiarity with certain aspects of the biblical narrative. He knows the lingo. But make no mistake: His imagination is mostly fueled by apocryphal and gnostic texts blended with ideas cobbled from a variety of ancient religions. It's a syncretistic amalgamation that—no surprise here—is plainspoken heresy.
In the final analysis, though, articulating spiritual truth is hardly the point of Jericho. It's about blood and guts, pure and simple. Clive Barker's distorted fascination with pseudo-Christian jargon merely affords him a creepy canvas on which to smear his visceral visions of eternal suffering.
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