The upcoming release of Magic: The Gathering’s new set, Duskmourn, introduces players to a brand-new plane of the multiverse contained entirely within a sprawling haunted house. Filled with untold horrors, personified phobias, and ragtag human survivors, the set captures the spirit of Halloween and gamifies the spooky season. Looking through the new cards from the set, some of them feel oddly familiar. The names, art, and mechanics tug at vague memories of late-night horror movies I caught channel surfing on the family television when I should have been asleep.
Magic’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast, remains tight-lipped on any specific inspirations that went into designing the new cards and world. But at least for this horror fan, these preview cards come as a welcome reminder to revisit some of the genre’s most beloved masterpieces and cult classics. Like the perfect glass of blood-red wine to enjoy with your bowl of spiders and eyeballs, here are five horror movie pairings to savor alongside Magic’s most horrific expansion yet.
The Gate with Clammy Prowler
In the 1987 supernatural horror film The Gate, a pair of 12-year-olds named Terry and Glen accidentally unleash a horde of demons through a hole in Glen’s backyard. The climax hinges on Glen’s attempt to stop a massive serpentine demon with a toy rocket launcher (more like a model rocket than a bazooka, but definitely a projectile that no 12-year-old should be playing with).
The Gate is a pretty forgettable movie, yet I was reminded of it when I saw the art on Clammy Prowler. The hole in Glen’s backyard glows with a similar magenta hue just before a small army of tiny demons emerge and attack the film’s cast of kids. And the prowler itself, with its large claws, spiky head, and tiny extra hands, feels reminiscent of the giant final demon Glen has to defeat with his toy rocket.
The Wicker Man (1973) with Wildfire Wickerfolk
If you haven’t seen the 1973 British folk horror classic The Wicker Man, you might recall the 2006 remake of the same name starring Nicolas Cage. Both films tell the story of a police officer visiting a remote island in search of a missing girl. As the protagonist of the film explores an unfamiliar setting and its unusual inhabitants, he eventually uncovers a deeper mystery tied to the island dwellers’ pagan rituals around failing crops (or in the 2006 version, dwindling honey production).
Unfortunately for the cops in this story, their arrival to the island was part of a larger plan, and they are eventually trapped in a massive wooden effigy, the eponymous wicker man, and ceremoniously burned to death as part of a sacrificial ritual.
Not only does the art on Duskmourn’s Wildfire Wickerfolk call back to the wooden effigies central to both films’ climaxes, each made of wicker and clearly on fire, the additional Delirium ability gives the creature an extra perk when enough other cards are in the graveyard. Like the sacrificed policemen in these haunting films, Wildfire Wickerfolk needs to have additional “dead” cards in the graveyard to see its own in-game potential.
The Shining with Unsettling Twins and Break Down the Door
In Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 1980 adaptation of Stephen King’s The Shining, Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, a struggling author who moves his family to an empty hotel so he can focus on overcoming a pesky case of writer’s block. But as his wife and son, Wendy and Danny, soon discover, the hotel has a sinister influence on Jack’s mental health, and he eventually goes on a homicidal spree targeting his wife and son with an ax.
The film has contributed to tons of classic images that have made their way into contemporary pop culture, including a fan-favorite Simpsons parody in “Treehouse of Horror V.” More than 40 years later, some of those unmistakable images have made it onto Magic cards in Duskmourn.
The characters on Unsettling Twins might not resemble the girls in blue dresses that Danny encounters while riding his tricycle through The Shining’s Overlook Hotel, but the flavor text on the card is unmistakable. “Come play with us,” Danny hears, followed by startling images of the girls’ gruesome fate.
The art on Break Down the Door similarly evokes one of The Shining’s most iconic images, of Jack bursting through a door with an ax during his final psychotic break. It remains unclear whether the character in the art is chasing a terrified Shelley Duvall or an MTG character that’s more prepared for the fight.
The Ring (2002) with Cursed Recording and Haunted Screen
Duskmourn introduces television to the world of Magic, which is an odd thing to do some 35 years into a franchise. Regardless, some of those cards brought to mind how horror movies play on the fear of screens, and none does so more memorably than The Ring.
In 2002’s The Ring, an American remake of a 1998 Japanese film also called Ring, a haunted videotape curses people to die seven days after the tape is viewed. The victims die by initially mysterious causes, which later turn out to be a tormented spirit that emerges from a TV screen to essentially scare its victims to death.
Perhaps what makes the allusions on Cursed Recordings and Haunted Screen feel particularly satisfying is that The Ring’s inspiration can be felt in the cards’ mechanical design as well. Like the videotape in The Ring, Cursed Recording challenges you to win the game as quickly as possible because it will eventually deal 20 damage, often enough to kill you, after you’ve cast seven instants or sorcery spells.
Haunted Screen, on the other hand, takes its inspiration a step further. Not only can the card tap for black and white mana, you can pay with your life total for it to provide extra colors. Eventually, you can even make the Haunted Screen into a threat altogether by investing seven mana to turn it into a 7/7 spirit creature — easily big enough to kill your opponents with just a few attacks if they don’t concede out of fear beforehand.
Children of the Corn (1984) with Orphans of the Wheat
Another adaptation of a Stephen King work, 1984’s Children of the Corn tells the story of a rural Nebraska community that’s taken over by a religious cult of children who’ve sworn allegiance to a false deity and sacrifice the town’s adults to ensure the success of the community’s corn crop. They’re orphaned by their own actions, and the film captures the community’s eventual collapse when a pair of travelers stop in the town and end up burning the very corn field that houses the evil presence that’s been influencing the kids.
Between the name of the card, its art, and even its ability, Orphans of the Wheat bears an unmistakable likeness to Children of the Corn.
In the film’s opening scene, a boy named Isaac Croner peers into a town diner as adults keel over from drinking poisoned coffee. His ghostly stare, immortalized in the film’s promotional art, bears a frightening resemblance to the characters depicted on Orphans of the Wheat. Even the card’s text feels thematically connected. Like the film’s children, who grow stronger as the town’s adults are killed, so do the orphans, who are pumped during in-game combat for each other creature that the card’s controller taps down during attacks.
And don’t get me started on the card’s name. Structurally. Phonetically. The only other name that might have been more on the nose was Kids of the Crop, but thankfully Magic’s designers were more creative than that.
Duskmourn arrives in local game stores on Sept. 27 following pre-release events that kick off Sept. 20.
