A Very Moloch Christmas

Welp, it’s Christmas, so naturally I’ve got Moloch on the brain. Me and everyone else—I know, right?!

A relatively straightforward exercise in simply bringing Redshift subsurface scattering to heel using a model I found online predictably turned into a bunch of volume builder/surface imperfection/animated texture/sound edit tweaking. In the future, I will always earnestly look for ways to avoid using displacement; It looks great, but you have to ask yourself “Is it worth it?”

Is it?!

Ironically, Maxon completely reworked Redshift SSS very shortly after I had my eureka moment: They definitely simplified its use, so good on them!

More Moloch-y Goodness

I think my having recently watched the 2022 folky/investigative horror movie Moloch put the name/theme in my head. Matched my bull-skull motif, so I’m running with it.

The arresting poster grabbed my attention when it showed up in my Shudder feed. It encouragingly reminded me of some scenes in yes-I’m-calling-it-a-classic The Void, so I decided “I’ll bite”. Turns out Moloch’s not a bad flick! There are shots with atmosphere that feels straight out of a Bava film, and I’m a sucker for investigation-based horror.

Moloch (2022): Poster (left) and still from movie (right)

The ending doesn’t do much for me, but that’s true for me with nearly every folk-horror movie I see—even the good ones. The rest of the movie is pretty interesting regardless, and if you like folk-horror in general, you’ll probably like the ending better than I did anyway.

Further Reading

Here’s an image (below) of “Molech” with an “e” from one of my favorite creepy demon books, the distinguished and seminal Barlowe’s Inferno.

An interesting thing about Barlowe’s Inferno is that, despite their station in the underworld, the major and minor demons appear to suffer numerous manifestations of damnation right along with servitors and souls. A little like Hellraiser’s Cenobites maybe, though the Cenobites really seem to be enthusiastically into the things that happen to them.

In Barlowe’s Inferno you pretty firmly get the idea that, no matter who you are in its strict, 1st-edition AD&D hierarchy, shit rolls downhill and it gets on everyone. This Molech guy doesn’t have anything bull-like going on with his physiognomy, but I imagine he compensates for any damnation-related lack of mobility pretty well with his arachnidian/crustacean clavicle mods.

Moloch-related? I have literally no idea. I’m dealing with too many generations of political and corporate humanity-sellouts tirelessly chipping away like an army of termites at the structures that make democratic elections possible in the Free World and curtailing economically challenged people’s access to abortion & birth control in order to create a swelling have-not class of doomed, young disposables whose only option is to fight wars on behalf of, and work for practically no pay in order to support the lives of, a rope-ladder-pulling retirement class and like a handful of billionaires—or else get shoved through a monstrously corrupt, insidiously influential, & artificially-inflated for-profit industrial prison complex—to have time to keep up on a bunch of superstitious nonsense!

Demons, indeed!

However! Wayne Douglas Barlowe is one of the absolute all-time-great O.G. master creature-designers, making his work a fine rabbit-hole to run down if you’re the type of person looking for a nice, contrasting palette cleanser to fortify your yuletide stamina between engagements this holiday season.

Edit: Nocturne!

Holy moley, how could I forget the appearance of Moloch in one of the all-time-great groundbreaking, oddball, graphics-intensive, pre-rendered background with 3D characters, turn-of-the-millenium fixed-camera survival-horror anthology adventure games, Nocturne (1999)?!

Nocturne PC Box Art: US [left]; Europe [right]

I’ll tell you how: this gem of a game can’t be found anywhere, and it’s a crying shame! I’ve gently prodded the kind folks at GOG.com a time or two over the years asking if they have any plans to make a release of this one, but I’ve never heard any indication that it’s their intention to do so. I guess it’s just abandonware at this point, so if you want to play it on modern hardware, you have some pretty murky web-scraping & modding to do.

I played the crap out of this game when it was released, and I loved every minute of it. I’d tell you all about it, but GrimBeard, another one of my favorite YouTube heroes, will do a much better job below—in part because he somehow managed to get the game running and play the damn thing, and that apparently within the last month or so! My cold heart seethes with envy.

The character of Moloch plays a pretty interesting role in this game, as a fellow operative of Spookhouse, a colloquial name for the Domestic Supernatural Defense and Research League. The DSDRL is a United States’ Federal agency started by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, tasked with hunting, and protecting US/international citizens from, all manner of monsters and the supernatural.

In Nocturne, Moloch is an outcast demon who has ultimately sided with humanity against the powers of hell. And speaking of hell, his particular skills and characteristics make him one hell of a field agent see what I did there pretty top-shelf.

The character you play in the game, The Stranger, is a hard-line anti-monster type if you know what I mean, so there is potentially lethal friction between the two. Toward the end of the game, however, they are forced to work together to overcome a particularly vicious common enemy, and The Stranger ultimately has to admit Moloch is a pretty solid dude.

“Can’t abide their kind.”

“Aww, who’s your buddy!”

Incidentally, I noticed a couple of things as I gazed lovingly at the Euro box art:

Ed? Ed, is that you?

Wait, what?… WHAT?!

Makes me wonder who those other two guys are!

“Moloch Pyro”

…What a heady combination of words! Crazy-style! You can’t have demons and whatnot without you burn some shit up, so I rounded things out fooling around with a little new C4D Pyro. Surprisingly easy to use and looks pretty nice!

Moloch hurls flame in the faces of fools who say “The GIF is dead”!

Seamless loops or eternal hellfire!

Guys, this is the actual sigil for the actual Moloch In Real Life—I know because I found it on the internet. We’re in scary, dangerous territory here: I hope evil forces aren’t set in motion IRL because I vectored this thing up, extruded it, and set it ablaze on my website with netherworldly C4D Pyro-Power! Cue creepy modem noises and static!

BTW if that line of thinking spooks you, give Incantation (2022) a watch. The more you know the more trouble you’re in: You’ll freak like Roko’s Basilisk is coming to gitcha!

Happy Holidays! Give your family/loved ones a hug & a smooch for me! Can’t wait to open preseeeeeeeents!