Horror Lovers Challenge. Day 8: A Horror You Would Be In

I am participating in a 30-day challenge. This time it is all about horror! If you know anything about us here at the Fort you would know that we are hardcore horror fans. Each October we watch a movie each night in that we dub “The 31 Nights of Horror.”

Day 8 prompt: A Horror You Would Be In

While not a horror movie per se, it is by far the next best thing. It is one of my favorite series of all time, Black Mirror, and the most immersive piece of entertainment Netflix has ever created is finally here Bandersnatch, the newest offering from the terrifying Stygian depths of the techno-dystopian Black Mirror series, imagines a new way of interacting with your favorite content: interacting with it. The episode is modeled after classic choose-your-own-adventure stories, where the reader pages through the book and sends its characters on different journeys based on which decisions you make to drive the story forward. If you loved R.L. Stine’s Give Yourself Goosebumps books as a kid, this one’s for you. Here’s how it all works.

In Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, which Netflix describes as an interactive film, the passive viewer becomes the driving force of the action, picking choices when prompted to move the story along. Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead), an aspiring video game designer living in the prime of the ’80s, has been working on an interactive game modeled after one of his favorite books, the fictional Bandersnatch by the equally fictional Jerome F. Davies. He takes his idea to the nerds at tech company Tuckersoft, hoping to turn it into a full-fledged computer game. Back at home, Stefan’s father seems… a little bit weird. And his therapist seems even weirder. That’s about as far into it as we can go without spoiling too much of what happens.

The Bandersnatch is real — well, real-ish. It’s a monster from the nonsense word poem “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll — the same guy who wrote Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Keep this in mind.