Slitterhead and Kowloon
“Nevertheless [the Walled City] still feels like an enclave within a city, extra-territorial and even slightly unreal. It is a frightful slum. No vehicle can enter it — there are no streets wide enough — and its buildings, rising sometimes to 10 or 12 storeys, are so inextricably packed together that they seem to form one congealed mass of masonry, sealed together by overlapping structures, ladders, walkways, pipes and cables, and ventilated only by fetid air-shafts. A maze of dank alleys pierces the mass from one side to the other. Virtually no daylight reaches them. Looped electric cables festoon their ceilings, dripping alarmingly with moisture. It is like a bunker. Sometimes you seem to be all alone, with every door locked around you. Sometimes the lane is suddenly bright with the lights of a laundry or a sweatshop factory, and loud with Chinese music.”
That is how Jan Morris, Welsh historian and travel writer, described Kowloon Walled City in her 1990 book Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire. By the time of publication, the strange, chaotic mess of mismatched, interlocking buildings in which 35,000 people carved out lives across just six and a half acres of space was barely hanging on to life. Three years prior, the city’s fate had been sealed in a joint Sino-British declaration on Hong Kong’s future which contained a plan to demolish the slum and replace it with a park. Despite a compensation program to relocate residents amounting to a total of 350 million dollars to be divided up among the displaced, many had refused to leave.
For decades, the area — left largely alone by both the occupying British government and the Chinese administration which still claimed nominal control over it — had been something of a no-man’s land right in the heart of the dense urban sprawl surrounding it on all sides. Ruled by a loose conglomeration of organized crime and volunteer community groups, Kowloon was largely self-governed for much of its existence. Its labyrinthian maze of dark streets had grown so tight that it nearly ceased to be a collection of separate buildings, becoming instead a massive, organically growing conjoinment of amateurly made structures fused together in an unpredictable, disorderly whole. At the Walled City’s peak, one could cross the entire town from north to south without once touching the ground. Buildings shared staircases, passages, and skybridges like organs linked by veins and tissue. Inside could be found any number of small factories, shops, opium dens, bars, brothels, restaurants, and shrines. For years, Kowloon Walled City was Hong Kong’s premiere pit of sin and vice not just for its extensive selection of off-the-books thrills but also for its reputation as an easy place to flee the law.
Still, there were those who clung to it as home, preventing its destruction by refusing to leave. “Outsiders always feel that the Walled City is mysterious and frightening but, for us, it’s the place where we grew up,” said one friend of Leung Ping Kwan, a journalist who covered the city’s final years.
“For many years, these brightly lit shops had been the primary purveyors of white powder [heroin]. Prostitution, gambling and drugs; all had their niche here. Not far away, around a few corners, was the place where my friend played as a child — a happy and free place. Here, prostitutes installed themselves on one side of the street, while a priest preached and handed out powdered milk to the poor on the other; social workers gave guidance, while drug addicts squatted under the stairs getting high; what were children’s games centers by day became strip show venues by night. It was a very complex place, difficult to generalize about, a place that seemed frightening but where most people continued to lead normal lives. A place just like the rest of Hong Kong.”
– Leung Ping Kwan
In Kwan’s words, life in Kowloon Walled City was a “life in the cracks.”
It was not until March of 1993, with the last few holdouts evicted, that demolition began. Residents and spectators gathered to watch as a giant wrecking ball swung into the city’s side, beginning the process of destruction. As the work continued, the once densely packed slum — with all of its countless factories, noodle shops, convenience stores, barbers, dentist offices, handmade balconies, cramped homes, rooftop hangouts, and drinking dens — was reduced to rubble. A park now stands in its place, a bronze statue of the city at its center.
It is in the interim between the foretelling of the city’s demise and its eventual fall that Slitterhead takes place. Though the game’s setting is fictionalized (set not in Kowloon but its fake counterpart Kowlong) its inspiration is obvious. Everything from the cramped, debris-ridden corridors to the rumble of commercial jets passing overhead at dangerously low altitudes to bank into Kai Tak Airport is here, all rendered in a densely atmospheric pastiche of 1990’s Hong Kong cinema. Though there are levels inside the slum’s walls, the game frequently explores the bustling streets just outside as well. There, wide-open thoroughfares are covered in a canopy of bright, glitzy neon signs advertising all manner of business as throngs of people move to-and-fro on the sidewalks and overpass bridges. The glowing facade of a night-club contrasts with the cramped corridor, lined with shuttered businesses and puddles of leakage, one must traverse to reach it. Elsewhere, prostitutes chain smoke in an alley behind their brothel as passersby make their way home from work. Though the horror theming of Slitterhead and its grotesque, body-snatching monsters is somewhat familiar territory for Toyama given his past work on Silent Hill, Slitterhead departs substantially from that previous work by eschewing the isolation it traded in. Gone are the desolate, empty streets of Silent Hill, replaced here with huge, ever-present crowds and busy, downtown roads. Just like Silent Hill was, itself, a central character, so too is Kowlong.
Though the destruction of Kowloon Walled City occurred in 1993, the largest wave of evictions occurred from 1991–1992. Slitterhead, then, takes place in the very last year — possibly even the last months — of the city’s existence, long past the point of its potential future being shut off. The people still living inside know that the end is coming but, in many cases, have nowhere else to go. Trapped in something like stasis, they live day-by-day in the waiting room of history, expecting at any time the other shoe to drop. Even outside of the slum, life changes at a rapid pace. At one point in the game, a character comments that Kowlong moves so fast it might as well be a different city each year.
The player controls Night Owl, a “Hyoki” spirit of mysterious origin with the ability to possess and control humans. By holding a button, the player may at any time leave the body of their current host and assume the form of a floating camera, free to move around within a given radius and select any other body simply by pointing the camera at it and releasing the button. Mechanically, the system opens up all kinds of traversal and combat possibilities, but its real utility is thematic.
In the words of Dreamboum, game critic and streamer: “Simply put, Night Owl, the spirit, is not just your protagonist, it is the camera in search of stories to be told…the character of Hong Kong itself [is] a living world, a tapestry of lives worth experiencing.”
The use of body-hopping as a mechanic and framing device is perfect for the setting, because it makes nearly every resident caught in the crossfire a potential member of the tale. While of course the vast majority of them are wordless and unnamed, their placement still tells subtle stories. For the sake of getting into a locked building, for example, players may flit between a shirtless man smoking on his balcony, his neighbor across the way hanging their laundry, and a prostitute in her combination dressing-room and dorm at the back of a triad-owned brothel. None of them come with fully fledged stories, but all of them serve as vignettes, quick images of life in the city. Threads in the tapestry.
Somewhat surprisingly given both the moody atmosphere and Toyama’s previous work, Slitterhead is an action game. Using the possessive powers of the Hyoki, players move between hosts — some, called “rarities” with special abilities and combat styles, while others are regular people with significantly lower power in battle — to fight the titular slitterheads, a kind of body-snatching parasitic race of monsters plaguing the city as they hunt vulnerable humans, eat their brains, and absorb their memories, effectively stealing their identity. Most missions begin with one of the rarities entering a level to hunt a slitterhead that is blending into the crowd. Using various clues, (including the ability to “sightjack” the slitterhead, allowing the player to glimpse their point of view) the player closes in on the monster, reveals its disguise, and proceeds to duel it to the death.
The combat of Slitterhead is a far cry from the plodding, shambling brawls of Silent Hill. Unlike those games, the violence in Slitterhead is cacophonous. While the rarities in each mission are the player’s primary damage dealers, the game’s combat makes heavy use of Night Owl’s possession ability, seeing the point of view rapidly shift across the battlefield as the player flits between their chosen rarities and random passersby and onlookers to stay on top of the skirmish. A combo, for example, might be set up by possessing a civilian behind the monster, getting the monster’s attention with an aggro-drawing shout, and then returning to a high-damage rarity to get the drop on the now distracted slitterhead. Alternatively, a crowd of densely packed enemies can be damaged by possessing an onlooker, turning their body into a blood-powered explosive, and sprinting into the group of monsters as a living suicide bomb to be left just before detonation in favor of a different body.
Though Night Owl and the cast of characters he lends his power to are charged with protecting the city from the slitterheads, it is impossible to miss just how much their presence escalates the problem. As soon as the slitterhead hunters show up, the previously small but serious problem of a murderous monster hiding amongst the crowd becomes a massive incident wherein potentially dozens of people are thrown into the grinder as the player hunts their prey. Not only are civilians thrown at the monster like cannon fodder for the sake of gaining moment-to-moment strategic initiative, but the huge amounts of blood they spill (along with that of the enemy) can be used to heal via an ability of Night Owl’s to absorb it and turn it into life force. For that reason, there are even times where it is beneficial to beat a civilian within an inch of their life in order to steal their blood away into one of the player’s rarities in desperate need of healing.
All of this contributes to the game’s sense of dread. The further the player unravels the mystery of the slitterhead’s presence — and the extent of their infestation — the more desperate and pointless it all seems. Not only are the monsters seemingly everywhere, but many of them are leading, to the best of their ability, regular lives alongside innocent, regular humans. How can such a widespread threat be combatted, especially given that taking down even one provoked slitterhead could potentially draw dozens into the crossfire, leaving a mountain of corpses behind?
The various rarities Night Owl encounters are interesting characters in their own right — each emblematic of some slice of Kowlong’s population, from its immigrant labor force to its exploited sex workers — but each of them also serve as a different influence on Night Owl’s own feelings on the problem.
Returning to the writings of Dreamboum: “Night Owl’s growing issue of being influenced by the emotions of his rarities showcases the connection to the character of Hong Kong itself as a living world… The humanity of Night Owl is highlighted by his role as a camera, as a tool of understanding and growth.”
Slitterhead, he writes, is a story made up of those vignettes. It may focus nominally on the practical threat of monsters taking over the city, but its thematic core is more existential. It is about Julee, the young convenience store worker whose head is always spinning as the world changes around her into something unrecognizable and parts of her childhood fade into the rearview mirror. It is about Edo, the former boxing champion who lost it all and became a drunk, homeless drifter absorbed by the city’s network of back-alleys and Tri, the immigrant woman from an unnamed foreign country who labors out of sight as a housekeeper, struggling to earn enough to send her family back home enough to live on. Even the slitterheads, dangerous as they are in their full, grotesque forms, adhere to this rule. While some lurk in the shadows and control networks of vice and crime, others live in fear of themselves, trying to eke out a normal existence in the presence of people who would reject them if they were ever found out, all the while slaves to their own terrible hunger for flesh they desperately wish to reject.
The game uses a time-loop mechanic, too, having the player repeat various missions over and over with different characters or newfound knowledge until they fully unravel the secrets hidden in each moment of time and space. In this way, the structure of the game reinforces its thematic essence: Kowloon is a place too dense, too kaleidoscopic to understand from the eyes of any one person. A more complete picture — and even then a still incomplete one! — only begins to take shape when the experiences of numerous people are patched together.
The real life Kowloon Walled City was as dangerous as it was beautiful. Much like the almost unsolvable infestation of slitterheads informs the seedy underbelly of Kowlong, Kowloon was the perfect petri dish for horrific vice and exploitation to grow.
“Refugees, who did not dare leave the place for fear of being picked up by the colonial police, lived there in a state of virtual slavery,” writes Peter Popham in the introduction to City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, “penned up in cages when they were not sweating in factories.”
All the same, the city was not only its worst qualities. It’s status as a diplomatic blackhole and a largely ungoverned pocket of territory made it easy for evil to hide, but those same quirks of history made the Walled City a kind of experiment in self-administered life.
“Here you had a totally self-contained, land-locked, extra-legal community of tens of thousands of people crammed into a tiny space, each with one idea in mind: survival. Their needs were no different from anyone else’s: water, light, food and space… What fascinates about the Walled City is that, for all its horrible shortcomings, its builders and residents succeeded in creating what modern architects, with all their resources of money and expertise, have failed to: the city as ‘organic megastructure,’ not set rigidly for a lifetime but continually responsive to the changing requirements of its users, fulfilling every need from water supply to religion, yet providing also the warmth and intimacy of a single, huge household.”
– Peter Popham
Something Slitterhead nails is that, despite the poor conditions of life in poverty and the existential threat of collapse looming overhead, sometimes you just need to persevere. To create a “life in the cracks,” as each character in Slitterhead has.
Just like the impending destruction of Kowloon Walled City did in the early 90’s, a seemingly inevitable death hangs over the world of Slitterhead. (Spoilers ahead) By the game’s finale, only the immediate conflict of mass death within the next few days is solved. Despite the prevention of immediate slaughter, there is no resolution of any kind on the horizon regarding the problem of slitterheads as a whole. All signs point not just to their increasing prevalence in the world for the short term, but something akin to a global collapse in the long term. One of the final shots of the game is an airplane, having just departed Kai Tak airport, turning back around to barrel towards the slum like a missile, its pilot having been possessed by a rival Hyoki. In the final moments of our protagonist’s story, the best Night Owl can do is possess the pilot long enough to lift the plane’s nose at the last moment, barely scraping the tip of Kowlong Slum’s jumble of rooftops, preventing for at least a moment the massacre such a crash would cause.
The breaking of the game’s three day time loop cycle doesn’t come with the defeat of the slitterhead menace, but the unleashing of it. One character in the game refers to them as a swarm of locusts moving through time to devour everything. The time loop is like a cage, holding them back from continuing their invasion, but trapping everyone and everything in the crossfires of that moment in time and space, doomed to, over and over, witness the carnage as penance. Ending the loop allows time to march on, releases Kowlong from the prison of repeated slaughter and mass death, but does nothing to avert the coming — much larger — catastrophe.
The real life Kowloon Walled City, as mentioned before, was eventually evacuated and destroyed. In its collapsed rubble was buried all of the horror, filth, and evil which hid in the labyrinthine maze of the city’s hundreds of alleys, but so were all of the lives carved into its cracks. Yu Hing Wan, the muslin maker. Chan Wai Sui, the noodle maker. Cheng Koon Yiu the dentist. Lee Pui Yuen the shopkeeper.
Though perhaps good in the long-term (no-one should be subjected to such unsanitary, dangerous conditions), one can’t help but wonder about the cost. Was the compensation money enough to make up for the destruction of homes? Did all of the people — there in the first place because they were out of options — end up finding somewhere to go? Were they able to find a new life in a new crack?
Slitterhead evokes much the same emotion of uncertainty. To end the slitterhead threat (even to attempt to) requires so much bloodshed and upheaval. But to let it go on accepts something similarly awful. What can be done?
In the end, as the plane scrapes the slums’ roof, narrowly averting collision, the question is left unanswered. Perhaps, in the world of Slitterhead, there is no answer. Perhaps the situation is already well past the point of no return. Perhaps all that can be done is eke out one more day of survival, one more day of life as one more piece of the tapestry.