“It watches,” he added suddenly. “The house. It watches every move you make.”

“We have grown to trust blindly in our senses of balance and reason, and I can see where the mind might fight wildly to preserve its own familiar stable patterns against all evidence that it was leaning sideways.”

Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959)

Conspiracy is the ur-language of the internet. I first thought about this in the context of art when writing about the documentary Room 237 (2012), Room 237 is probably the best documentary illustrating conspiracy + art fused together. It’s a film about an online community of people who believe that The Shining (1980) has secret meanings that director Stanley Kubrick intended for them to decode—including that Kubrick had helped fake the moon landing in 1969. It’s a good example of treating art as a puzzle to be solved or beaten and a good example of art interpretation as a literal project of decoding to find consciously intended hidden meaning. Which is something I am not down with. But I am interested in art that creates a sense of disorientation and uncanniness, especially in art forms that generally have not. And so I am interested in the recently uploaded Doom II (id Software, 1994) mod, My House.WAD. But I am even more interested in a documentary about the mod and about playing it, MyHouse.WAD: Inside Doom’s Most Terrifying Mod (2023) by Jack Nicholls, aka, Power Pak on YouTube. MyHouse.WAD: Inside Doom’s Most Terrifying Mod is the most personally affecting found footage horror I’ve seen and a good documentary at the same time. I think Nicholls’ documentary is worth watching regardless of whether you have played Doom, have played that mod, or, possibly, even like video games.

MyHouse.WAD (hereafter, “My House”) is a recently uploaded map mod for the first person shooter horror game Doom II. A mod or modification is any kind of additional content a player programs. Players often share these mods online for other players to use and enjoy. In this case, My House recreates a player’s house as a playable level. In March, 2023, someone named Veddge posted this mod on the Doom World forums, along with some additional files—journal entries and images. Veddge shared that a good friend died in August, 2022. At the friend’s funeral, they received a box of the friend’s possessions, including a floppy disc that contained the unfinished My House mod. Veddge decided to finish and share the map as a tribute to their friend. 

Veddge wrote on the Doom World forum that they added some “modern amenities,” but Veddge, whoever they are, added much more to My House, creating a strange work of art crafted with the particular forms of Doom II and the online world. As Nicholls relates, My House is far larger than most similar mods—in fact, My House is larger than Doom and Doom II combined. As Nicholls plays, he realizes that there is something strange about the game. The more he plays, the more disorienting and uncanny the game becomes—from graphics that shift slightly and music that seems just a little bit off to rooms and architecture that should be impossible not only in the real world, but in Doom’s world. The game starts to include references to works of art, including Mark Danielewski’s novel House Of Leaves (Pantheon, 2000) and Jared Pike’s digital liminal spaces. My House also contains mundane things–a Pepsi can, a dog, a shifting set of paintings–that might be keys to understanding a personal story of love and grief.

My House is a perfect candidate for the online world’s penchant for art criticism as decoding and a kind of conspiracy theorizing. It’s a game. It’s a puzzle—or rather a bunch of puzzles—with a payoff at the end that might or might not share a true story of someone’s life–the life of a gamer, like us. My House is very much a creation and creature of the online world, using and created from elements of the internet—shareable files, forum posts, a shared online experience. It also contains clues that appear to be more than Easter eggs. And it presents players with mysteries beyond the beatable map presented, not only of what My House means, but of who Veddge is and how they relate to the people revealed in the mod and its related materials. All of this is nearly irresistible to internet denizens and fans alike, tempting everyone to deploy the default analysis of the internet: decoding, cataloging, mining and archiving lore, sharing discoveries, and finding significance in every element and detail. Internet fan culture–internet culture in general–prepares us all to analyze exactly this kind of mystery, whether in fiction, or, with more potentially disastrous results, in the real world. 

I am sure there are members of the Doom fandom even now tracking down leads to corroborate facts about elements in My House and especially to prove or disprove the identities of the people and places presented in the mod and its accompanying materials. I am equally sure that this began within minutes of someone completing the levels and I wouldn’t be surprised if people hadn’t established most of the now commonly held facts within days of My House being uploaded. But to me, this is the least interesting aspect of art and art criticism. If Veddge wants to come forward they will. And maybe they will have some interesting things to say about My House or their process in making it, but, in general, the most interesting thing an artist has to share with us all is their art.  Even from the bits shared in the documentary, it is clear that Veddge is not creating naïve art. Veddge is consciously, carefully and deliberately crafting their art. And in my experience, even in the most personal seeming art—perhaps especially in the most personal seeming art—the artist is not always where they appear to be. Art might use facts, but it does so in tricky ways that might not be what they appear or mean what they appear to.

I appreciate Nicholls’ approach in his YouTube documentary about My House. He does not try to determine Veddge’s true identity or the factuality of the story presented. Instead, MyHouse.WAD: Inside Doom’s Most Terrifying Mod focuses on the art at hand—the mod itself. The resulting documentary is enthralling. It is, like so many of the best documentaries, the story of his encounter with something mysterious. Nicholls uses recorded gameplay, narration, some dramatic readings and music, but there are no added spooky elements. Any performance involved is Nicholls’ performance as he himself is made uneasy by the game. Nicholls’ narrative style echoes the style of protagonists in the novels of, say, Shirley Jackson or HP Lovecraft, both authors who have written about wrong houses and narrators driven mad by them. Or perhaps his narration mirrors that of the characters in House Of Leaves, a book that Nicholls argues is a profound influence on My House.

Veddge might have wanted to create a sense of disorientation not only in the game, but outside it, by uploading their mod and the journal entries as a kind of found footage or analog horror. In playing My House’s levels, Nicholls found something that subverted his sense of reality, even if momentarily, even if it were something as seemingly minor as how the mechanics of Doom should operate and what is possible in player-created game modifications. And like the mod, Nicholls used the tools and forms of the internet, in particular gameplay videos, to recreate if not transmit this sense of wrongness about reality itself. He managed to recreate it for someone who has never played Doom at all:  me. I have to say, it is rare to watch a documentary and feel like you are watching a horror movie. Nicholls’ documentary made me feel a bit woozy in a way that I haven’t before as I thought, “Wait, what? Is that real?” 

In a world of online trolling, bullshit, deep fakes, humbuggery, and conspiracies,* I didn’t exactly trust what I saw without verifying it. And so I did. I did see the documentary before I knew about My House. I think I watched it shortly after it was uploaded in May, but don’t remember for sure. So it’s possible that the documentary would not have had as strong an effect had I already known that the mod was a real thing. But watching it again for this piece, it still weirds me out. The difference here, for me, is that MyHouse.WAD: Inside Doom’s Most Terrifying Mod is actually a documentary about something real even if it feels for a while at least, vertiginously unreal. This sense of disorientation is something that so much horror strives for, whether in epistolary novels ostensibly recording events as they happened (Dracula, for example) to contemporary found footage and analog horror. Found footage and analog horror work hard to create this feeling in part, because they have to work against the fact that the audience knows they are watching fiction and hope that the viewer is good at suspending their disbelief. I think this disorientation is also a part of the thrill of watching all those conspiracy videos on YouTube and TikTok where a guy promises to reveal the truth that makes the world so much more exciting than it is and why people chase that feeling.** It is also why so much horror and science fiction leans into the forms of conspiracy. But again, the mod exists. 

The ending of the documentary and mod’s final ending reminded me of a line from another book about another, though more malevolent haunted house, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (Viking, 1959), “Journeys end in lovers meeting.”*** The love stories in both My House and Hill House, are tragic ones, but strangely enough the one in the game where players shoot monsters is happier and more peaceful. As Nicholls reminds us, you have to fight for the happy ending. And it might sound trite, but love is something to hold onto in disorienting times.

*Not that I do not enjoy bullshit myself, I am just thinking about it more carefully after the last 5 or 10 years.

**Did you know the earth is hollow? Did you know that Obama visited Mars? Do you know how to keep Slenderman away? There are, of course, much more insidious and dangerous online conspiracies, but I am not doing that here. Let’s just leave it at Bigfoot and hantu pocong.

***Yes, this is also Shakespeare, but I am thinking of poor Eleanor.

~~~

Carol Borden is a disorienting and uncanny experience.