Cursed Objects: making interactive horror props - EMF 2026

[applause] Cursed objects. Cursed objects. This is a circuit. Ben ET. Um, oh, what are they called? Uh, oh, the terrifying little creature animatronic things. Flurby. >> Furby. >> Furby. God, my brain is melted. The jack had to go somewhere intimate for it to work. Cursed objects. This is a fan-made Pierce Morgan collectible calendar. But what is a cursed object? Bless you. This is a curse object. This is a cursed tablet from about 100 BC. And what it was is a curse that's like indented into lead and then folded upon itself to hide the curse from the world. Inside the victim's hair would be put or sometimes herb and then it would be thrown into a grave of someone who died either a violent death or young so that it could reach the gods of the underworld. What What do I mean by a cursed object now? Well, we're really good at making them. microlastics, radiation, forever chemicals. A really good example of uh this for me is technology. I think technology is really the best vector for making an object that is cursed or indeed just straight up curses. So I'm going to go through some examples to start with of technologydriven cursed objects and curses. The Radiththor energy drink. This was very popular in the 1920s. It contained quite a lot of radium and it famously killed an industrialist by melting his jaw uh which led to the first regulatory overhaul of the FDA in America. I'd like to define cursed objects in a narrative sense as something that obeys the request. Right? This will make you feel better, but betrays the spirit of it in a cruel way. The Bindy's aqued from 2007. This was a huge scandal. These are a kinetic toy that children can use to build things. And in 2007 they were coated in a cheaper alternative chemical which when mixed with uh water or more pertinently saliva creates a very heavy seditive leading to a number of children being rushed to hospital. The cabbage patch snack time kid very fun toy has a mechanized jaw that will eat some foam chips as you feed it. Will also bite children's fingers and eat all of their hair. These were also recalled. Worms, I think, are the purest expression of a curse that exists in reality. And there are so many amazing computer worms. And given this is a hacker camp, there are many, many more qualified people than me to talk about it. But I do want to direct you to this amazing website, Malware Museum, which is a living museum of computer worms from throughout history. It's very, very cool. So why am I talking to you about cursed objects? Well, I want to give one further example of one before I go into that. Theic 25 software bug. It just Yeah, somebody knows that's amazing. So coming back to this idea of obeys the request but betrays the spirit of it. So, this was a radiation therapy uh piece of hardware that people would lie in and was computer controlled in the 1980s. And due to an invisible programming error, occasionally it would deliver 250 times the radioactive dose uh leading to a number of fatalities. This stuff terrifies me, especially after the talk earlier about uh radioactive stuff being brought to site. Um because when we design things and we make things, there can be unintentional consequences. So, hello, I am Jim. This is not me. Um this is a guy called Alex. I'm not really a technologist at all. I am a terrible programmer and I am an awful, awful electronic engineer, but I make things. And I started out making cross city zombie games. And we tooured these games around the United Kingdom to 12 cities. You'd have 500 people a night being chased by zombies who were a volunteer army. We'd ran multiple locations. We'd close down roads. And it was essentially a game of tag. Once you were tagged, you were marked with a UV pen. And when you got to the end, you were turned into a zombie by makeup artists before we had a big party in a warehouse. I learned very quickly that fear is is a design tool that has to be delivered very, very carefully. If you scare someone inappropriately, you can drive them straight into a wall or down a flight of stairs or into traffic. But one of the biggest problems we had was about creating a queue. If you make something that is too scary as a video game or as a book or as a film, really the worst that's going to happen is someone is going to put it down and they're not going to complete it. And in a sense, that's a shame. They're not completing your amazing piece of creative work. But it also adds to the mythos of the piece, right? It can help with word of mouth. It can make it something that people anticipate and heighten the excitement in a live experience. What it does is it creates a really big queue. And a big queue stops the flow and it breaks the experience and it makes it less scary. It makes it more dangerous. So how do you get people who are too scared to move to move? This was a big conundrum for us. And the solution turned out to be rewriting the narrative so that zombies couldn't really see very well. And so you could move very slowly and avoid being chased. That was permissive enough for most people to give sneaking a go until the zombie snapped at them and then they ran. Someone moving slower through our zones was infinitely better than someone just stopping. And that was a really important lesson for me for how you scare someone safely and how you can design to scare people across many different thresholds. If you talk to anyone about their phobia, I know people who are scared of butterflies. I myself am terrified of wasps. Being scared is different for each person. And so how you design a broad set of criteria for that is quite complicated. And so that's what I'm going to talk to you about. My company is called Storm. storm jar. Um, you'll see me wearing this a lot over the next few days because these arrived just before I left and they were the only clean laundry I had. Um, so I'm going to be easy to find. We've been working on this idea for the last few years of content-driven attractions of trying to create these really immersive, engaging experiences that extend into Discord where there is a full online community of people that can essentially roleplay and come back to our experiences time and time again. And the way we're trying to do that is through connected devices. Partly because building a very large performance show like something like Punchrunk where you have hundreds of actors is very very difficult and very financially challenging. And secondly, because until very recently it was just my myself and my wife. So very small team. So trying to deliver scares through technology that's safe is a problem. [sighs] If it's too scary, people won't pick it up and interact with it. But if it's not scary, then it's a disappointment. Our debut show was called The Static Sea. It was on Flatmol Island, which is off the coast of Cardiff. It's a fairly remote island, about the size of EMF Camp, to be honest. On it is one warden. He's the only person who lives there. the tiniest pub in the UK, a lighthouse, and a series of underground tunnels that connect up various old gun pits and historic ammunition sellers. We had the opportunity to run an experience there, but you can only land 12 people a day onto the island. This is a problem. As a result, we ran a lottery. We got many people there over the course of a week as performers, but we could only have six winners and a few people from media and press, but we didn't want to run a show for just six people. That didn't feel that exciting or fair, even via lottery. And so our intention was to build a device that connected between these two worlds. The digital online world where we could build and engage a community and the IRL uh world on the planet on the planet on the island. So I want to talk very quickly about what our needs from tech are then. So, we define immersive in Stormjar as you need to cross a threshold into a story. You need to be able to leave your world at the door and have the opportunity to be a different version of yourself. The story has to happen to you. Now, you can be following a story about other characters, but your experience is the dominant narrative. And we learned this the hard way with the zombie game. I would spend a lot of time trying to write a show that was very ornate, lots of like twists and the characters were doing stuff and there was a big reveal at the end. But ultimately the actual story for the player was my girlfriend pushed me in front of a zombie. I shouldn't have eaten that kebab. I haven't run since I was a child. Oh my god, I've got a stitch. Wow, I look great as a zombie. That's the real story at the heart of it. So when we build these immersive experiences for us, we're constantly thinking about how does this happen to you? And that means our objects and our technology have to be something that is happening to you, not telling you about something that happened to someone else. We also need the technology to help us build an affordable world, something that we can afford to develop to showcase. So before I go into how we did the right uh kind of objects, um I want to talk about the wrong kind of cursed objects. And I've touched upon some of them earlier with things like horrible machinery that can kill you and computer worms that can destroy your savings. This isn't as bad as that. It doesn't look great, though. So I really want to emphasize this was by accident. So, this was a kind of a breakthrough piece of work for us. We were testing some ideas and so we developed this idea for wouldn't it be cool if we could make almost like a choose your own adventure horror experience that happened in an old 1920s telephone, a really cursed looking object, really beautiful. And it was a field telephone. So, you like open up the thing and you pull out the handle and it rings and it knows you're near. And I was like, wouldn't it be great if there was these fingers that were sticking out of it and each finger had a ring on it and each ring was different? And when you touched that ring, that allowed you to make choices about the kind of person you were on the phone to who was like an evil entity. So, the problem is when you 3D print a finger or fingers and they don't move and they're not on a hand anymore, they kind of look like something else. They kind of really look like something else. And then other design decisions like in order to start the experience, you have to put your finger in that hole. They're not scary. That's really silly. Furthermore, being on a phone chatting through with these spirits and whatnot who are communicating with each other actually just felt like you're on hold on an automated call thing because the most real world analogy to this experience is being on hold to someone you really don't want to talk to who's wasting your time. So, it actually wasn't fun. What's more, in terms of making it, I didn't follow the feeling in making it that I wanted people to happen. I was thinking about how we solve the technology. And it sounds really cool. It's called Ring Ring. What a great title for this thing. It's going to have fingers coming out of it. It's this old cool box. But it isn't delicious. It sounds delicious. It's like that thing on the menu that really catches your eye, but then is a disappointment. I did not design this for repair, so fixing it was a nightmare. There were no spares. I ignored I wasn't working full-time on it and it required full-time. The time frames were terrible. It looked really nice in parts. That was quite a big win. I hadn't done prop design before, but I didn't recognize that till long afterwards. It wasn't simple. It was very complicated. It was very crunch orientated. And I thought, maybe I'm cursed. Maybe I'm cursed. And there's a few objects that I brought with me to EMF camp which really do to be honest reinforce this thesis. But it's not that I'm cursed. It's that I hadn't really put a proper design framework in what we were doing. We didn't have additional budget or time, not just money, but time to like master the object to really think about what would make it excellent. It was the first draft went straight out. I love this. It was I'm quite dyslexic. I just got it wrong one day. But protoshite instead of prototype. If you're not embarrassed to show it, you've worked on it too much. And that's something I need like tattooed under my eyelids. Building stuff out of easy to find things. Thinking about what success looks like and writing it down. Testing it with a target user before it got installed. Um, yeah, no discovery phase to think about what that feeling might actually be like. And the final thing and the biggest crime in a sense was it was just very unkind to us to make. It was a miserable thing to work in and it was a very hard thing to build and it technically worked and was a disappointment. It's kind of worst case. So we set ourselves a criteria. We want the things we make to be dynamic. I don't want to make something that's like an automated telephone thing. I want it to feel like it's alive. I want it to still be good in 20 years time, which is a very difficult thing to do with a lot of technology because it ages so quickly. I want it to be accessible. We know horror is like sound is such an important thing. So, we pivoted into focusing on sound technologies. We wanted it to be joyful so it could be easy to debug, reliable, repairable, extendable, cheap, modular potentially. Think about environmental friendliness. That wasn't something I was thinking about. Really, the phone didn't happen to the audience. You were just listening in. And we wanted it to be scary. And I also wanted it to be safe. I want to build things that don't force people into a curb or isn't someone jumping out at you with a chainsaw because although that's very effective, it's not very controllable. So, this is how we approach making the right kind. How am I for time? Yeah, thumbs up. That's vague. Okay. >> [laughter] >> Coming back to the island. So, we needed a conduit between our six players on the island and the people online in our Discord. And for that, we built this. So, this allowed the players to ask questions in Morse code. One thing I forgot to tell you about the island is it was the first place that radio was broadcast over water. Um, so it has this like real heritage of radio technology. So, we built a radio pirate station, a pirate radio station. I am quite warm. And we scattered radios all across the island, literally about I think 50 to 60. And they acted as our way of delivering the soundtrack across the whole island and also clues that came in from the Discord. And so what it allowed people to do was broadcast Morse code into the Discord to ask for help. And then the people in Discord could respond and solve puzzles online working together and then um that would be broadcast over the radio which would inform all the players across the island at once and we ran that as a live game and that was really exciting but there was something so magic about approaching this thing and opening it up. Our story was about ghosts. So this is the skull of one of the main characters. So, whilst you're interacting with it, the skull whispers in the voice of the ghost that you've already met. That was a really lovely kind of interaction that wasn't a horrible jump scare, but was definitely deep and creepy. This is another example. This is just a puppet. But originally in my head, I was like, I really want to make this really amazing animatronic thing, and it's going to be so cool. I can't build an animatronic. And I was like, oh, it's going to be an amazing puppet thing, and it's going to be really cool. I'd never made a puppet before. So, under sage advice from the wonderful people at Air Giants, um, they really forced me to make it simple. This is the fishmonger. He has one arm and the arm is a knife. And it meant I had to perform. And that made it so much easier to make something that was a good experience for my audience rather than making something that was just a way of interesting me and being something that I would love to make. I would love to make automter. I am not the person who should make automter. I have brought something with me that you're very welcome to come up and try. And I wanted to play with these themes of cursed objects. This is the Paraggo. It's uh so cursed I couldn't get a photo of the screen. Uh it doesn't refresh fast enough to take a photo of. It's a Tamagotchi knockoff that has parasites. The more you feed and look after this using the conventional interactions of a Tamagotchi, so cleaning it, putting it to bed, feeding it, the more worms start to ripple in its body and it gets bigger and bigger until the the software shifts and all it wants to do is be fed to get as large as possible. It then fakes out that it's running out of battery to get you to plug it into a computer. And when you do, it delivers a payload. In this instance, all it does is open up our website. But I thought it'd be really fun if it could install one of these on your computer. I'm not that good. I don't know how to do that. But that was a nice way of getting to a very simple loop. And I if you come and see how terrible this case is, how truly god awful it is, but how the core mechanism is quite joyful. You can see we're like slowly starting to learn and take on board our own own lessons and design philosophy. So come try this guy. He's he's he's good fun. Wow. >> Wow. Okay, fair enough. Uh what we're up to now, so we discovered that sound is really our best friend. So a lot of the tech stack that we're using is looking at um using rainbow which is a type of max um which can run on a Raspberry Pi 2 W and above which allows us to make very dynamic objects. It's not about completing an object like you might escape room. It's about picking up an object like a skull and it whispering to you and it doing that in a very dynamic way or picking up a ship in a bottle and as you tip it you hear the screams of the sailors. It's all about adding intrigue and diamondism and unexpected little thrills and creepiness. However, in the background, we're amping things up. So, with the help of the wonderful Sam Underwood, who has designed loads of amazing installations? Has has some been here? I presume so. >> He was here last time. >> He was here last time. He's not here cuz he's cycling around the world and he very very kindly lent us his strange setup for making horrible deep noises. And we're in the process of building this giant Doom instrument that produces infrasound and modulates and screams like a creature. And the next show we're developing is an adaptation of Aljenon Blackwoods The Willows, which is a 1907 novela. You can read it on Project Gutenberg. It's fantastic. and it's going to be like a dark ride. So, you won't see this, but you'll feel it. And that has all stemmed from this idea of like how do we want people to feel? Well, we want to feel like there's a God in the room. And that is what is going to help us get there. I've got a couple of closing things. Am I okay for time? >> 7 minutes. >> 7 minutes. That works. First of all is bones. It's very hard in our world. Does anyone here make immersive or has thought about making immersive? I actually can't see hands, so give me like a little whoop. Hell yeah. Okay, great. There isn't like a tool for like writing and developing and testing and failing. And so immersive can be very expensive to fail. It can often involve actually trying to build the thing outright and then test it and you've run out of money. So, we've been developing this tool to write our own show. It's free. It's called Bones, and it allows you to build out the skeleton of your show. It allows you to write it like a traditional script if you want. You can do a back of the cigarette packet. We call it dirty maths financial plan for your show. You can put your tech stack in, your cues, you can put in costume and props and tag them all across um the interface, which makes it nice and easy to project manage. And you can have teams working in it. But the most valuable thing is you can generate a link of your show and you can send it to someone and they can play test it and they can put feedback at every kind of major milestone within that story or bone as we call it. And that can generate a heat map that gives you a really good sense of feedback from very very early testing. And we think it's going to be very helpful to get as much testing as early to fail fast and follow the fun. Um, so this is what this tool has been built for. And then very finally, this is contact stuff and stuff. Um, I wanted to ask who here is from Bristol, Bath, North Somerset or South Gloss. Great. So um there's 25 million pounds that's come to the creative industries over the next three years in that region. There are six regions across the UK but each one's being delivered differently. I'm advising on creative technology. Come and find me. Tell me what your needs are as a business or as a freelancer because the objective of that is to support uh the growth of the region and it'd be really wonderful to hear your thoughts. So that is me. Thank you very much for listening. It's a real honor to be here and thank you for joining me. [applause]