The Mothman is my favourite cryptid. I am always willing to drop everything and make the case for him. I love the way Mothman wears the tattered grey shrouds of the most funereal of insects, and the way it offsets this with blazing red eyes. What does a Mothman smell like? The tomb, of course, and he is at home in forests, like Bigfoot, but also in the post-human spaces of abandoned factories and dried up industrial towns. Mothman seems drawn to the craters and wreckage of great dreams.
I have more, alas! The Mothman Prophecies is my favourite cryptid book, because it takes a bunch of sightings of shadowed beasts and UFOs and lights and what-have-you, and it just screws with them from page to page, a truly rangy postmodern text, playfully twitching at the fore-edges of belief and our sense of a shared reality. The movie, which I saw one rainy Sunday afternoon back when it came out, almost undone by a throbbing migraine, turned out to be the perfect movie for rain, for Sundays and migraines – again, taking the idea of horror films and extra-terrestrial investigations and turning it all into something where the detailing lines up and points towards a deep psychic wrongness. Look at this beautiful bit of business with a de-synchronised mirror. It takes a horrible kind of love to create that.
Anyway, finally Mothman gets the game he deserves. And guess what, it’s weird and playful and unexpected. At times it lapses into being pretty awful, but its awfulness is brief and never enough to destroy my love for it. I love this game, because more than anything it takes the player back to a really odd place, or rather two really odd places. Back to 1966 and the woods of America where strange sightings are spooking the locals, sure. But also back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when schoolchildren would cluster round the weird hulking shapes of early PC monitors and play bizarre games with lurid colour schemes, the best of which completely defied genre, because genres themselves had not yet been ossified.
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