This is another evolutionary line of steam trains.
In 1942 in England, a Christian pastor named Wilbert Audley used his favorite "steam train" as the theme and created a set of "anthropomorphic" paintings for his son Christopher who was recovering from measles. "Take" the train as the protagonist, telling the story of the society at that time and the people living around the railway.
Three years later, this set of stories was printed and published in the form of a children's picture book, and was named "The Railway Series". It began to be compiled at a rate of almost one volume per year. Because the story told is full of plots and characters that children love, it also shows the real situation of British society at that time from the side, making it quickly become one of the most popular children's picture books. The protagonist of his second picture book, the steam train "Thomas", was successfully transformed into one of the most important British animated protagonists in the subsequent animated series.
The first work in the series, "Three Trains," was published in 1945.
I don’t know what will happen if Wilbert sees that these characters, which originated from his love for railway culture and family, have finally become the most “horrible” existence on social networks after more than half a century. What an expression.
Just at the beginning of this month, when domestic players were enjoying their hard-earned vacation, the release of a promotional video for an independent horror game exploded on foreign social networks. As of the time I wrote this line, its relevance The video has been played millions of times. For a little-known independent horror game with almost no additional publicity resources, this result can be described as the "best in the show" during the "Tokyo Game Show".
This game has a very cute name - "Choo-Choo Charles".
"Charles the Little Train"
According to the content in the promotional video, we can probably understand that this is a "horror survival game". Like most games such as "The Forest" and "The Long Night", players need to collect what they need for survival in a closed wild environment. resources and survive dire "threats". However, what is chasing the player here is a "train" with spider-like joints and a devil's face - Charles. The ultimate goal of the player is to collect enough resources, drive his own train, and have a fierce "final battle" with Charles.
"Charles Train" was developed by an independent studio called "Two Star Games". Its founder Gavin Eisenbetz is only 20 years old and is a typical horror game enthusiast. He has previously Four works have been launched on the Steam platform. Although they have all received very good reviews, they did not create any waves because the genre and picture style were too niche. For Gavin, although "Charles the Tank Engine" adopts the more popular graphics expression methods, it is at best just a simple personal attempt. The enthusiastic response from the players not only encouraged him, but also became a Extremely heavy pressure.
Sometimes, reality just doesn't make sense and is unfair.
You know, for a horror game with "continuous pressure" as the main gameplay, nothing can improve the selling point of the game more than an "impressive" monster, even if sometimes she is not very scary. .
Around this proposition, game developers and artists from all over the world have racked their brains. In this way, in terms of the appearance of the old enemies of horror game players, even game industry giants like "Capcom", after groping all the way from the original "classical horror", eventually had to succumb to "gothic porn". During this time, no one knows how many "triangle heads" passed by.
But looking back at the "birth" of "Charles", it seems that there was a golden key in his mouth from the beginning. After all, you should also know that the source of its image is the British national animation star "Thomas the Tank Engine" and the "secondary creation trend" that has swept through some Internet communities in recent years.
Today, "thomas horror" has become a unique information entry
Although there is no very favorable evidence, when we conduct a simple trace of the origin of "Thomas" in the subculture circle, we will find that the video game circle may actually be really different in associating Thomas with "horror elements". It played a big role.
If you are a player who often comes into contact with "The Elder Scrolls", "Resident Evil", "Grand Theft Auto" or other mainstream games, and you continue to care about them, then you will definitely be familiar with such information sentences:
"Thomas becomes XX in the XX game."
Moreover, the "××" here are often horror or action games. The characters played by "Thomas" with the help of various MODs are usually dangerous characters representing terror and death.
In 2013, "The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim" was in full swing, and countless MOD makers who used love to generate electricity began to think about doing it themselves, and Kevin Block was also one of them. When his friend dug out a Thomas the Tank Engine model from a shoddy mobile game, he got the idea to stuff it into Skyrim.
This process took an hour, and Bullock easily replaced the dragons headed by "Alduin" in the game with colorful and cute steam trains. Watching them spitting flames in the wilderness made many players who were tired of playing serious MODs laugh. Bullock himself also became famous among the player community because of this simple hour. More importantly, the chaos and dramatic effects it ultimately displayed made "Thomas MOD" a carnival celebration for gamers.
When Kevin recalled this incident in 2019, he admitted that while he received attention because of this MOD, he was also forced to get into too much trouble. Mattel, the copyright owner of "Thomas the Tank Engine", has used legal means against him more than once. In Kevin's opinion, Mattel really hates him and wants him to "die".
In this way, after players got "happiness" from Thomas for the first time, things became more and more out of control: in "Resident Evil 2: Remake", it was the "tyrant" who broke out of the wall; In "Grand Theft Auto V", it is the unstoppable death train in Los Santos; in "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice", it is a giant snake writhing up and down. Most players who see them will, after staring at their soulless eyes for a second, leave a very cooperative comment: "It feels scarier than the original version."
If we say that for gamers, what they want to pursue is a kind of happy "chaos" that transcends the original game. Then, when the image of Thomas breaks through a single medium and once again integrates into the majority of young people, it will inevitably undergo a punk-style deconstruction. For many players, if you want to play game MODs now, then the second thing to play is Definitely "Thomas the Tank Engine," and the first one is the various "nude patches."
In this way, more and more netizens began to "re-examine" Thomas and his friends, and then they discovered that the cute image they were familiar with when they were young became a little weird after changing the angle. Especially when you are stared at by its lifeless eyes.
In 2015, the Japanese mechanical modeling artist "Y_NAKAJIMA" decided to start a real-life "Frankstein" experiment based on the lifeless smiling face of "Thomas". He removed "Thomas"'s face separately and began to build a new "wasteland style" body for him. The most famous one is a "killing machine" with six arthropod-like mechanical legs that can emit "killing rays".
Y_NAKAJIMA also created a specific background for the birth of this "Thomas": In the apocalyptic war, Sir Topham Hatt (the manager of the railway in the "Thomas" animation) fell into madness because he lost everything, so he turned the once kind-hearted Thomas, transformed into what it is now. And this is not the end. Led by the six-legged robot, Y_NAKAJIMA has also successively produced "Thomas the Drone", "Thomas the Submarine", "Four-legged Thomas", and the "Thomas Face Robot" that can be attached to the wall and move. "etc., it's quite a bit like the human-cyborg weapons in the 2013 horror movie "Frankenstein's Army".
By the way, these Thomases were all designed with eyes that could move, and the image of his "spider legs" indirectly influenced a number of entertainment works, including the original "Charles the Tank Engine".
Although it won't kill people, this "Thomas" can indeed emit heat rays
From this point of view, the face is where the weird soul of "Thomas" lies. While it rigidly blocks all expressions and psychological activities, it is also erratic on the red line of the "uncanny valley effect".
In 1984, when the British ITV first started to produce "Thomas and Friends", because it used actual train models and combined them with stop-motion animation, it was impossible to make real-time changes in the expressions of the trains. Such a dull expression will inevitably make the current audience feel inconsistent and strange.
The original author of the visual novel game "Super Horror Story DS: Blue Chapter" and the ghost story novelist Yumeaki Hirayama once wrote in his book "The Structure of Horror" about the emerging horror symbols in modern pop culture. A very straightforward interpretation:
"Human beings are naturally afraid of things that look human but are not human."
Although "Thomas the Tank Engine" is not mentioned, the book uses clowns in American culture and Ichimatsu dolls in Japanese culture as examples, and many examples prove that the collective images of the two are getting more and more deviated in modern people's psychology. , and at the same time, almost everything with a human face was victimized.
"Super Horror Story DS: Blue Chapter" (2010) is adapted from the short story collection of the same name.
As the Thomas variant becomes more and more influential in the horror cultural circle, many creators of "Creep Pasta" (a type of online horror literature) with the theme of "Lost Episodes" are also eyeing this land. Prior to this, they had just "destroyed" the childhoods of "Sonic", "SpongeBob SquarePants", "Mickey Mouse" and any European and American viewers. In the lost episodes of "Thomas and Friends", almost all of them were accompanied by human beings being driven crazy. Trains, crushing bloody scenes.
On the other hand, under the influence of Y_NAKAJIMA's "six-legged robot", many people thought, why not simply combine Thomas's "train machine" with the spider's "biological organism" and let it directly become a robot? What about a brand new terrifying creature? Like Slender Ghost, or Siren Head.
Among these weird works, the version created by CG artist Tom Coburn in 2019 is the most famous. He gave Thomas six legs like a spider, and at the same time, his head could also be extended, and he had an extra spider-like butt. Compared with the original "Thomas the Tank Engine", he looked more like some kind of inhabitant. Alien creature in Locomotive. When NFT art trading was popular in the early days, he also created a number of dynamic themed works using the image of "Thomas".
In fact, there is an episode here. Just two days after the release of the trailer for the game "Charles the Tank Engine", Tom Cobain himself forwarded the relevant news on social networks and said that the monster named "Charles" in the film looked familiar. , seemed to be alluding to something, but it didn't attract much attention.
"Thomas the Tank Engine" by Tom Cobain
In 1896, the Lumiere brothers screened a silent short film of only 50 seconds in Paris, France. This was also one of the first short films in human history. However, it was these 50 seconds that made the world famous at that time. The audience screamed and ran away in fright, which earned it the title of the world's first "horror film". The short film was called "The Arrival of a Train" (The Arrival of a Train).
Wilbert Audley, the creator of "The Railway Series", is an out-and-out "railway fan". He grew up beside the railway, loved railways and steam trains and other outstanding achievements of the industrial revolution, and made great contributions to the protection and development of local railways in Britain. But while he was obsessed with railways, Wilbert never forgot the "potential threats" brought about by technological development. "Railway Stories" was originally reconstructed from railway accidents around the world for warning and educational purposes. Children's picture books by Yu Le.
You see, when you think about it, these monsters called "Thomas" don't seem so scary anymore, right?
