Set Prospective
Duskmourn: House of Horror
This article is part of our community-sourced Set Prospective series. We survey Cube designers before the set’s official release to document their first impressions of new cards.
In Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, a twisted family is driven to the brink by an ominous prophecy, supernatural tragedies, and the darkened passageways of the castle they call home. The book’s subtitle, A Gothic Story, gave name to an aesthetic that haunts the West to this day:
Gothic fiction is obsessed with secrets in houses, writes Rick Worland.1 The medieval (“gothic”) castle was a strong symbol for the Victorian mansion, where rats lurked in the basement, servants eavesdropped behind false walls, electric lamps flickered like magic, and blood money from Europe’s colonies lubricated every creaking hinge. Gothic fiction dramatized this unsettled world with hauntings and monsters — secrets longing to escape and terrorize. The most influential of the monstrous Gothic archetypes are the violent Mr. Hyde, the unnatural Monster of Frankenstein, and the implacable Count Dracula.
And then came celluloid.
1922’s Nosferatu followed The Great War like panic follows nightmare.2 Count Orlok might have been a ripoff Dracula (Stoker’s widow was still alive and fiercely protective!), but filmmakers FW Murnau and Albin Grau subtly updated the myth to reflect the technological ravages of WWI. Orlok brings with him the corpses and plague rats of the trenches; his victims go numb as though in shell-shock. Horror film was ripping its way to life, updating the gothic scares of the past with the terrors of the present.3
This trend continued for decades, then metamorphosed in 1960 with Hitchcock’s Psycho. The haunted mansion has become a postwar motel, and Mr. Hyde has become Norman Bates, a handsome all-American so unremarkable his name is literally a pun on Normal.1 For the first time in American cinema, incomprehensible evil isn’t supernatural — it could be living next door. A “bad death” can happen to anyone.6
Psycho’s democratization of horror sets the stage for the slasher film. John Carpenter’s Halloween epitomizes the genre as the Dracula of the 80s: an unkillable killer who stalks independent women; a sexually charged method of murder; a grizzled monster-hunter who denounces the enemy as pure evil; and as always, haunted dwellings and the guilty secrets within.4
It is this rich history that Wizards of the Coast engages with its release of Duskmourn: House of Horror. And so WotC, not to be outdone by amateurs like Shelley or Stoker, made their haunted house as big as a medium-sized planet. (Natch’.)
Survey Results
Duskmourn: House of Horror was reviewed by 111 cubists. It’s far from popular, with 8 cards tested at the median, and only 1 card earning a high rating above 7.75. Moreover, cubeheads don’t agree on which cards are most exciting, to an even greater extent than Murders at Karlov Manor — no card is being tested by more than a quarter of our respondents.
| Card | Testers▼ | Rank |
|---|---|---|
| Fear of Missing Out | 25.2% | 6.3 |
| Chainsaw | 20.7% | 6.1 |
| Wildfire Wickerfolk | 19.8% | 5.9 |
| Insidious Fungus | 19.8% | 5.9 |
| Overlord of the Mistmoors | 18.9% | 6.4 |
| Norin, Swift Survivalist | 17.1% | 6.4 |
| Overlord of the Balemurk | 17.1% | 5.9 |
| Patchwork Beastie | 16.2% | 6.0 |
| Overlord of the Floodpits | 15.3% | 5.7 |
| Piggy Bank | 14.4% | 5.3 |
| Splitskin Doll | 14.4% | 5.3 |
| Split Up | 14.4% | 5.0 |
| Hedge Shredder | 14.4% | 5.3 |
| Balustrade Wurm | 14.4% | 5.4 |
| Withering Torment | 14.4% | 6.5 |
| Osseous Sticktwister | 13.5% | 5.6 |
| Razorkin Needlehead | 12.6% | 6.5 |
| The Wandering Rescuer | 12.6% | 5.5 |
| Clockwork Percussionist | 12.6% | 7.0 |
| Come Back Wrong | 11.7% | 5.3 |
| Untimely Malfunction | 11.7% | 4.7 |
| Silent Hallcreeper | 11.7% | 6.3 |
| Veteran Survivor | 11.7% | 5.0 |
| Enduring Curiosity | 10.8% | 5.0 |
| Floodpits Drowner | 10.8% | 5.8 |
| Sheltered by Ghosts | 9.9% | 6.2 |
| Overlord of the Boilerbilges | 9.9% | 6.1 |
| Altanak, the Thrice-Called | 9.9% | 6.1 |
| Exorcise | 9.9% | 5.2 |
| Irreverent Gremlin | 9.0% | 6.7 |
| Undead Sprinter | 9.0% | 4.5 |
| Twitching Doll | 9.0% | 5.0 |
| Screaming Nemesis | 9.0% | 5.6 |
| Unidentified Hovership | 9.0% | 5.5 |
| Fear of Isolation | 8.1% | 6.3 |
| Enduring Courage | 8.1% | 5.2 |
| Ghost Vacuum | 8.1% | 5.0 |
| Toby, Beastie Befriender | 8.1% | 5.3 |
| Reluctant Role Model | 8.1% | 6.1 |
| Live or Die | 8.1% | 6.6 |
| Cynical Loner | 8.1% | 4.9 |
| Drag to the Roots | 8.1% | 6.1 |
| The Swarmweaver | 8.1% | 4.8 |
| Trapped in the Screen | 8.1% | 5.4 |
| Overlord of the Hauntwoods | 7.2% | 6.2 |
| Valgavoth, Terror Eater | 7.2% | 6.3 |
| Enduring Innocence | 7.2% | 5.8 |
| The Jolly Balloon Man | 7.2% | 5.5 |
| Sawblade Skinripper | 7.2% | 6.3 |
| Omnivorous Flytrap | 7.2% | 3.9 |
| Innocuous Rat | 7.2% | 5.7 |
| Arabella, Abandoned Doll | 7.2% | 6.6 |
| Slavering Branchsnapper | 7.2% | 4.6 |
| Unable to Scream | 7.2% | 5.8 |
| Valgavoth's Faithful | 7.2% | 4.6 |
| Unnerving Grasp | 7.2% | 4.5 |
| Abhorrent Oculus | 7.2% | 5.4 |
The cards that are anything close to popular are the usual smattering of strong rates and Constructed contenders, but the new marquee mechanics of Duskmourn largely miss in Cube. The theme, too, was divisive among our respondents, with some lauding the big swing, and others (myself included) feeling more underwhelmed, despite WotC’s obvious reverence for the source material. Or… was my disappointment because of that reverence? How is it that homage fails to horrify?
Comforting Horror
Duskmourn is clearly a world filled with nostalgia — the reuse of past cultural images and motifs to evoke a feeling of personal connection to the past.5 Spend five seconds in DSK’s cardfile (or spend three hours with Spice8Rack’s latest opus) and you’ll find references to The Fly, A Quiet Place, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Child’s Play, The Blair Witch Project, and more. I’ve never even seen most of these and I still got the joke. Heck, I only looked at the commons!
“The art is extremely hit or miss, probably to the greatest extent I've ever seen.”
Nostalgia serves a double purpose when it concerns horror. Nostalgia is a way of using recognizability to quickly connect to the audience, yes. But the past is nothing if not predictable. We already know how these films end, and so horror nostalgia defangs the genre, creating possibility within horror for humor and parody. In short, nostalgia allows WotC to market a horror set to kids age 13 and up (much like how I argued camp functioned in MKM).
Funny horror is not an inherently bad thing.7 Worland cites Re-Animator (1985) as a strong example of horror parody, using the gothic style of classic horror (a Frankenstein story) that transgresses beyond other horror films to draw laughs.1 But taken too far, the humor begins to resemble ironic disengagement (think Deadpool humor). And, as Poole notes, it’s harder to use horror as social critique when the audience is laughing. The cumulative effect can become that of packaged recognizability, pacifying rather than terrifying.3
And that, ironically, makes me nostalgic for the time before every piece of media was nostalgia bait.
“If Magic now shows 50-year-old objects (like cassette tapes), will 2043 herald the arrival of a Magic card depicting a Magic card?”
More from Lucky Paper
- Rick Worland, The Horror Film: An Introduction.↩
- W. Scott Poole, Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror. Can’t recommend this one enough.↩
- W. Scott Poole, Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire. Somehow, this one’s even better.↩
- This idea comes from Stephen King. I prefer Rick Warland’s summary of the core fears of horror, which are, paraphrased: Destruction of the body and damnation of the soul.↩
- Another connection: Janet Leigh, the antiheroic victim of Psycho, had a daughter named Jamie Lee Curtis, who became the scream queen of Halloween.↩
- Jason Sperb in Was it Yesterday? Nostalgia in Contemporary Film and Television, Matthew Leggatt, ed.↩
- See Rhystic Studies’ recent video quoting Noel Carroll for more discussion here, or Worland’s discussion of campy horror, for more connection between horror and comedy.↩