WoW Moviewatch: Curse upon Stormwind
by Michael Gray 
Oct 7th 2009 at 12:00PM
Halloween is approaching, which makes it a perfect time for dark, moody machinima to start haunting the scene. Curse upon Stormwind by Aronyie is a great example of a seasonal piece that comes along at just the right time. While it's a pretty good horror vignette for any time of year, I feel that its themes and genre fit October best.
Unfortunately, I had a bit of trouble following the plot. The actual narrative itself wasn't clear to me, but I suspect some of that might have happened because I'm not familiar with the tropes and memes of horror films. However, the imagery and general cadence of the movie is fantastic. I thought the models used in the video convey a sense of unease and then a sort of grotesque revulsion.
Aronyie obviously did a lot of morphing to WoW's basic character models, as well as pulling in the farmer model from somewhere else. This high level of care and production speaks favorably of Aronyie. If this video is any indication, we should definitely expect great things in the future.
Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an e-mail at machinima AT wow DOT com.Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Moviewatch
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Seaborn Oct 7th 2009 12:06PM
Decent video. I have been looking forward to Hallows End since early in the year.
Thon Oct 7th 2009 12:16PM
Um... What?
That was definitely not one of my favorites. Blocky animating, weird music and an extremely uncomprehensible story. He get's his house gassed while he's out working and suddenly Stormwind is attacked by corpses and is on fire? I'm sorry, you lost me there.
If I must say something positive about it though, I guess the "transformation" from happy face to undead or whatever went kinda smoothly. I rarely see machinima I dislike as much as this one. Rate me down all you wish, but that's just my take on what I saw.
snowleopard233 Oct 7th 2009 12:22PM
I tend to agree. The animation and pacing just felt slow and there was hardly any semblance of a plot. It just felt like a lot of creepy clichés thrown together.
jared.daniels Oct 7th 2009 12:22PM
/agree
Andrew R. Oct 7th 2009 12:45PM
The farmer goes around calm as can be, nonchalant and all of a sudden he's cursed? Wait...what?
Alverian Oct 7th 2009 12:47PM
I guess they are trying to say the kid got gassed and spread the undead curse through Goldshire and Stormwinds but damn it is to botched up and hard to follow.
ixidane Nov 6th 2009 2:30PM
No, farmer.
You are the demons.
And then farmer was a zombie.
Scourgewolf Oct 10th 2009 12:08AM
I KNEW the ending looked familiar!
Oh, and yeah, that farmer is a rare human model in wow, and can be seen in Old Hillsbrad I believe.
Erunno Oct 7th 2009 1:36PM
The farmer model was not taken from another game... Its an unused model still present in the main .MPQ, named something like humancitizenlow under the Creatures list.
As for the movie itself... WoW is not a really good game to make horror machinima. Or at least, I haven't seen any WoW horror flick that would "scare" me.
I will have to agree with the other commenters that the animations were really too slow. And the whole video could use some more color "manipulation". But thats just my personal taste.
Drow Oct 7th 2009 2:13PM
It's obvious. The guy comes into town and gasses the daughter as a start, then the farmer goes inside. When he's out, everything is destroyed! Then he is able to walk through SW, and even the other undead don't attack him. Why? It's all done like this to throw us off until the end. The reason the place is destroyed is because he went inside, and fought is daughter who attacked and bit him, knocking him out. She ran out to cause trouble with the other undead, and he laid there. He then woke up, but is now able to transform into an undead when he wants like his daughter. So, he was able to walk through SW un-harmed because he was already one of them.
Jonathan Oct 7th 2009 2:22PM
I liked it. I think the author did a great job. My first impression was that it was a nightmare sequence and I was waiting for the farmer to wake up in a cold sweat. Here is how I interpret things.
Farmer heads to work in the fields while his daughter stays home and plays. A mysterious undead visitor shows up and releases a curse at the threshold. The farmer returns from his days work to find evil has occurred, his daughter is transformed and he is horrified. He apparently gives chase to his daughter, or perhaps he flees the house seeking help, and finds his neighbors dead outside with his daughters shadow racing away. He continues the chase finding the nearest town in ruins. Continuing on to the capitol, it too is in ruins. Finally he catches up with his daughter, she remains transformed. Flashing to the farmer we find that he too has become cursed.
mike Oct 7th 2009 2:44PM
I do like the morphing work, it was well done..
However, (start rant) I have fallen into this problem before in a previous movie.. When you plan out a twist at the end of the movie sometimes you can get so caught up in it that the story up to that point becomes very convoluted and hard to understand. Instead of worrying about whether or not your audience will understand where you're going, you're worrying about the huge payoff of the twist at the end. In short, you're only focusing on the ending instead of how to get there. The problem is, the end product looked like so much time was spent on the morphing transformations that everyone else was put by the wayside. This includes, story and animation. I'm not saying that's definately what happened, but because so much attention was paid to the morphing (eventually the reason there is a payoff with the twist at the end) it seems like everything else was lost in the mix
Katalliaan Oct 7th 2009 2:54PM
I was expecting something to do with Varian with that title...
Veranilla Oct 7th 2009 4:51PM
I really enjoyed this movie. Just because there's not a linear storyline or dialogue doesn't mean there's no story behind it. It's surreal by design -- if you've ever seen the movie Phantasm and its sequels, I bet you enjoyed this one as much as I did. The little girl blinking in and out in the room like that was an allusion to Ringu, a J-horror movie, and its Americanized version which I hope everyone knows, The Ring.
This was actually quite refreshing, a nice change of scenery from the usual Wow movie fare.
Veranilla Oct 7th 2009 4:57PM
That was the first guild episode I gave up on halfway through. It was just awful... not funny, disjointed, and all-out boring. I think that's it for me. I don't even have the interest anymore to give the next episode a shot when it comes out. Season 2 was disappointing; season 3 has been even worse.
It's too bad too cause I loved the first season.
Veranilla Oct 7th 2009 4:58PM
Oops, MT.
Echohunter Oct 7th 2009 8:45PM
the ghost phasing thing looked like it was stolen from the show supernatural. 2/5
Tri Oct 8th 2009 2:41PM
Creepy girl is creepy