In case you didn’t know, IT’S HALLOWEEN!!! Grab your costumes, candy, and skeleton leggings and have a frightful time! Watch a spooky movie, go to a haunted house, or play a scary game where you are being hunted by your friends.

The best example of that is “Friday the 13th: The Game”, a multiplayer-only experience that perfectly captures the spirit of the movies. Matches have eight players, seven camp counselors and one Jason Voorhees. The player who controls the hockey mask-wearing hunk is randomly chosen, while the other seven players fight to escape.

As the counselors, you search the camp for weapons, keys, and parts to ensure your survival. There are several ways to escape: fix the car, fix the boat, call the police and wait for them to show up, or just wait out the night. Teamwork is key and if you don’t have a microphone, you’ll probably end up being called a variety of profanities by the other players. If everyone works together, your chances of survival are dramatically higher. Say one player finds the keys to the car and another finds the engine parts and gas. They can radio each other and meet up at the vehicle to escape before Jason even notices.

While all of this is happening, the Jason player stalks the counselors with increasing intensity. He starts off pretty weak, but as the match progresses, he gains the abilities to teleport and bust through doors. Counselors barely stand a chance when going up against him. They may be able to briefly stun him with a flare or fireworks, but it only delays the inevitable. There is a way to kill Jason, but it requires the maximum amount of teamwork and cooperation among the seven survivors.

There’s more bugs in “Friday” than a Waffle House kitchen. Counselors float through the woods, Jason phases through walls, and characters faces turn hideously pixelated. But this adds to the charm and even makes the experience more faithful to the shoddy movies.

What’s great about “Friday the 13th: The Game” is the way Jason players get to scare the pants off of everyone else. It’s not the first multiplayer horror game, but it is the most popular.. Most horror games scare the players, but here, players scare players. It’s modern horror entertainment.

And that’s what History of Horror was is all about. It took us through the generations, showing how horror has evolved over the last century. We started in the silent era of films with Frankenstein (1910)  where horror entertainment was still blooming. Then, we traveled through the black and white films with Universal Horror (1931). We saw the birth of zombies with Night of the Living Dead (1968), and the slasher films like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980). We brought you all the way through the ‘90s with Scream (1996) and The Blair Witch Project (1999).

In the modern age, we shifted our focus to horror video games, a medium where more immersion brings more scares. We saw the beginning with “Resident Evil”, the scariest of them all with “White Day”, and the saddest of them all with “Silent Hill 2”. We saw the renaissance of horror games with “Dead Space” and “Amnesia”, and we finally ended up in 2017 with “Resident Evil 7” and “Friday the 13th: The Game”. It has been my pleasure to take you on this terrifying trip. I hope you learned something about your favorite movie or game, or even better, that you are interested in seeing/playing them for the first time. Until next October, stay spooky, my friends.