🩸 Demade by the Blood: Bloodborne PSX at a crossroads of horror fandoms (forthcoming)

Abstract: In early 2022, Bloodborne PSX launched to significant media and fan attention. Developed by Lilith Walther, this demake of the PlayStation 4 game Bloodborne (FromSoftware, 2015) reimagines the title as a release for the original Sony PlayStation with low-poly textures, clunky gameplay mechanics, and dated visuals. Hyped by popular gaming sites like The Verge, Polygon, and Kotaku, and the subject of a making-of documentary by YouTuber Noclip, this retro-style remake has become a nexus of two horror fandoms: Soulsborne gamers and the Haunted PS1 scene. The challenging gameplay and mysterious, macabre storytelling of the Dark/Demon Souls games (FromSoftware, 2009-2020) and their successors (such as Bloodborne) have created a niche of fans addicted to the difficulty and dread associated with the sub-genre (Theodorou, 2020; Kuzelman, 2020). While Bloodborne PSX is not specifically affiliated with it, the Haunted PS1 scene describes a community of horror game developers and fans united by their love of the aesthetics and quirks of the original PlayStation. The name comes from The Haunted PS1 collective which releases demo collections and produces nostalgia-tinged E3-style presentations for each compilation. The appeal of Haunted PS1 games appears to be less about the merits of individual titles, and more about a fetishization of the murky, blocky, and obtuse aesthetics of early 3D games. In this way, pleasure for these games mirrors the paracinematic appreciation of B-horror and trash cinema, which reveres “bad” films for their badness (Mathjis, 2005; Sconce, 1995, 2007; Perkins and Vassilieva, 2009). In the case of Haunted PS1 games, the inept acting and filmmaking are replaced by the jank and ugliness of the PS1, and the distanced, ironic viewing of 80s and 90s shot-on-video horror VHS (Benson-Allott, 2013, 2016) is also reflected in the subgenre’s recreation of CRT screen distortion. In the Haunted PS1 and Soulsborne fandoms, we see players embracing the slog, whether through paracinematic pleasure and devotion to limitations, or the Sysifean tedium and intrigue of obscure narratives. As a crossroads between two fandoms, this paper investigates the fan response to Bloodborne PSX to uncover the tensions and connections in communities dedicated to laboured gratification.

Keywords: PlayStation, the Haunted PS1, low-poly horror, Bloodborne, Soulsborne fans, horror games, paracinema, CRT, scanlines, fan labour

Please email me if you are interested in reading a preprint copy of this chapter.

Recommended citation: Bailey, A., and Dolan, P. (2024). “Demade by the Blood: Bloodborne PSX at a crossroads of horror fandoms.” In Researching Horror Fans and Audiences in the Twenty-First Century, edited by James Rendell and Kate Egan, Edinburgh University Press