It Wasn't Even Acceptable in the Eighties: Hotline Miami and Snuff Films

Hugo Gelis's article "It Wasn't Even Acceptable in the Eighties: Hotline Miami and Snuff Films" argues that Hotline Miami (2012) remediates the aesthetics and supposed production conditions of snuff films, the rumored genre of recorded murders, to create an unsettling undercurrent beneath its frantic, gory gameplay. The author contends that the game's pixelated visuals, simulated videotape artifacts, and cathode-ray-tube effects are not merely nostalgic decoration but deliberate devices that evoke how the snuff film legend circulated on VHS in the 1980s, the decade in which the game is set.

The analysis draws on Bolter and Grusin's concepts of remediation and hypermediation to show how the game borrows videotape conventions such as static, rewind sequences, and handheld camera tilts, while its chunky, aliased graphics emphasize the image's crudeness. Gelis also examines the game's quickload-style restart mechanic, which he reads as both a gameplay tool and a narrative device. The repeated restarts, along with a rewind sequence that marks a shift into flashback, mirror the repetition that defines snuff film lore, in which killings are replayed endlessly.

A central finding concerns the player's position. The article argues that the game's blurred, censored-seeming gore encourages imagination over display, and that the brief quiet moments after each massacre prompt reflection on the player's own enjoyment of violence. Drawing on Caillois's notion of ilinx, or vertigo-driven play, and on Perron's writing about horror games, Gelis suggests that the game turns the player into the perpetrator, a monstrous figure identified with the very deviance the snuff legend depicts.

The analysis is a qualitative, close reading of the game's audiovisual design and mechanics, supported by scholarship on urban legends, horror, and video game theory rather than by empirical data or surveys. Its scope is limited to a single title and its aesthetic and conceptual qualities, offering an interpretive account of how ultraviolence and glitch art together produce a sense of unease within a game otherwise built on euphoric play.