Mining: The taking of Deborah Logan

Fezzypug has been recommending this movie to me for a while. The taking of Deborah Logan is yet another horror movie in the found footage/housecam style, with an exciting twist, that is it is actually good. At first it seems like another possession haunted house movie, with the schtick being that the person being possessed is an Alzheimer patient, but as the movie goes on it unwinds a cool backstory with plenty of spooky schlock to liven up a game. I'm not going to avoid spoilers, so if you are a horror movie fan I recommend skipping the blog for now and adding it to your netflix. So here we go in no particular order.

1. Putting the bad guy in the body of someone close to the PC's. One of the main characters in the taking is Deborah's daughter. The fact that she is fighting to save her own mother pushes into many extreme situations. In many rpgs players tend to get into kill it with fire mode quickly, this is a lot tougher when the monster is an innocent person that needs to be saved.

2. Using a hospital as a setting for session. Players are often hurt, bad guys get beat up, there are plenty of reasons for players in a modern game, or even a historical one to end up in a hospital. What if after the a big showdown with a major villain, where the players barely make it through and everyone took damage, you open with the players still wounded in the hospital. Perhaps another foe of the party decides to make a move against them while they are down, maybe the big bad wasn't really killed. The players might have to overcome the obstacle of doctors not believing them, the players being drugged or restrained, at the very lest the players will have no gear to speak of and have to improvise with all the dangerous implements a hospital setting provides.
3. Old ladies that can teleport, have snake venom and are graphically shedding bloody skin all the time.
4. A ghost from the past possessing someone to complete an unfinished ritual. The players get to research and find out what the ritual is. Use that information to figure out the final uncompleted step and race against time to stop it.
5. The bad guy working against herself to help the players. What if your bad guy is fully aware that what they are doing is evil, and actively brings the players into the situation to stop themselves. A conflicted bad guy ties into number one as well.
6. A strong visual theme to go with your evil occult thing. Instead of generic otherworldly scripts and pentagrams tie a strong theme to an occult ritual or plan. In case of the Taking that theme was snakes, but it could be anything. Nobody remembers a generic crazed cultist, but what if the cultists explode into snakes when you kill them? Or if they remove their own hearts and put them in clocks, and put clockwork hearts in their chests instead. Or if all the cultists have to drown themselves to join, and their lungs are perpetually filled with seawater and goo? Almost anything can work here. In a movie something like this could come off as cheesy, but rpgs are allowed to embrace cheesy in a way that serious movies can't.
7. There is no seven.

It is October the time for scary movies, so don't be surprised if you get more of these. I also just watched Blade 2, and that movie is ripe for mining!