Netflix’s gleeful horror-comedy Dead Talents Society wears a lot of its influences out in the open. Writer-director John Hsu talked with Polygon earlier this month about how YouTube streamers, ’90s Taiwanese pop music, Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers, and real Asian urban legends like “the little girl in red” helped inspire his manic movie about the capitalist grind of the afterlife. In Dead Talents Society, ghosts endlessly chase viral fame as haunting superstars, while one new ghost, The Rookie (Gingle Wang), deals with the humiliation of being an incompetent scarer.
During that interview, Hsu also mentioned that he’s an avid gamer, which has heavily influenced his career: He learned to script and edit while making World of Warcraft machinima videos and posting them on the AFK PL@YERS YouTube channel, and he went on to direct the 2019 film adaptation of the 2018 horror game Detention.
“Since I’m such a huge gamer — they realized it might be a good idea to have someone who’s familiar with gaming culture make that film,” he told Polygon. “It’s not that I’m particularly interested in horror or history, but it’s because of the fact that I’m a gamer that I got that job.”
With so many different references on the screen in Dead Talents Society, Polygon figured it was worth asking whether there were any game inspirations we missed in the movie. The answers were… really unexpected.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: Did any particular games affect your planning on Dead Talents Society? Or are there games you think people who love this movie should play?
John Hsu: There are so many of them. For example, Katamari Damacy.
I… would not have guessed that from this movie’s bloody, horror-driven humor.
It’s not a direct influence, but I really enjoy the wackiness of the game. Every time when I’m nearing the end of the game, I get really emotional, because it’s like — I can roll up something really big, and everything becomes one, to just one purpose. It’s like Tokyo Godfathers or Little Miss Sunshine — [movie characters’] goals can be super stupid, but they’re doing it anyway.
To me, Katamari Damacy is like, you’re always rolling something and getting it bigger. It might not have any kind of meaning, but you do it again and again. You are making the ball bigger and bigger, but what’s that for? And then you send it to the sky to become a star. It’s kind of meaningless and also so meaningful at the same time.
You’ve compared the horror elements of this movie to Sisyphus being doomed to eternally roll a rock up a hill. This sounds similar.
Yeah. We did a lot of research in terms of Albert Camus’ work. Everything is meaningless, so you should just enjoy the process. That’s the conclusion we have in the film.
In terms of other games, a lot of inspiration we had with Dead Talents Society came from indie games. For example, The Beginner’s Guide. It’s an indie game from the author of The Stanley Parable. And it’s about this game developer who made The Stanley Parable suffering from impostor syndrome. He found some kind of mystery — another game developer who’s been anonymous for quite some time. He would upload random games that don’t even sound fun to play, but it’s like he was trying to say something, but it’s so anonymous, no one knows who it is. So the protagonist, who is the game developer of Stanley Parable, is trying to find this guy.
And when the protagonist gets closer to that mysterious game developer, he’s warned not to get even closer. Weird things happen, but at the end of the day, it’s about, Why are we making stuff? Why are we creating stuff? What are we trying to do? Are we trying to connect to other people? Are we trying to be understood? Are we trying to be seen?
There’s a scene in the game when your game gets super famous — there are a lot of people with cameras, taking photos of you, and their heads are blocked, saying “Press.” It’s a scene to describe unwanted attention. Because if you are creating something, in the beginning, at least, you must be creative because you thought it was fun. But at a certain point, when it’s becoming your job, when you have an audience, when you have other people to satisfy, it gets more and more complicated.
And the creative process can be toxic sometimes, because we have to satisfy a lot of people, which is also impossible. And that influences your self-value and identity in certain ways. And that’s the core of what we want to talk about in Dead Talents Society. So that game had a lot of influence as well. Me and my co-writer Tsai Kun-Lin both played it.
Image: Everything Unlimited Ltd. via Polygon
There’s another game called Before Your Eyes. It’s also an indie game, where when you blink, time will pass. So the camera is your eyes, and how you proceed the story. You get to see this protagonist’s whole life. And sometimes you really don’t want to miss the stuff you’re seeing, but you do because you have to blink. That’s the point of that game — time is fleeting. And what was actually the essence of your whole life after your death?
The protagonist is so similar to our protagonist. He had a musician mother, always pushing him to become another musician. And he was so ill as a child, so he thought he wouldn’t satisfy his mother’s expectations. So it’s exactly like The Rookie in Dead Talents Society. When I played the game during the writing process, I was so surprised at how similar it was.
Dead Talents Society is quite personal to me, in terms of the Rookie story arc. I was forced to play piano when I was 10 or something. One of the songs I really had trouble practicing is a song that the character in Before Your Eyes is playing. So it’s such a coincidence for me to realize that actually, there are a lot of people suffering from the same situation — either confusion about your self-value or about your identity when you’re taking too much account of other people’s opinions. It leads to impostor syndrome.
It fascinates me that none of these are horror games, that you were more influenced by various games’ philosophical elements. Are there any horror games that have been meaningful for you?
Oh yeah. Silent Hill 2. Definitely. I am a big fan of that series. I think the Silent Hill story is at its best in 2. When we were making Detention, we had a lot of influences and references from Silent Hill as well, because the game Detention also had a lot of influence from Silent Hill. I also quite enjoy Doki Doki Literature Club. I thought that was so clever — it’s so meta. And using meta elements to scare people is the best.
Dead Talents Society is streaming on Netflix now.
