If you're not familiar with Jack Chick, it's hard to adequately grasp the reach of the evangelical cartoonist's work: If the figures on his website are accurate, he's the world's most widely published cartoonist, with 750 million minicomics sold in dozens of languages. "Chick Tracts," as they're known, span evangelical hot topics from the End Times to the dangers of Catholicism, but perhaps none is as dearly loved (albeit ironically) as the anti-roleplaying screed Dark Dungeons.
Dark Dungeons first saw print in 1984, amid a sea of Dungeons & Dragons scare media. Novels and movies like Mazes & Monsters warned that gaming was a one-way route to psychotic breaks and steam-tunnel suicides; Dark Dungeons went a step further, claiming table-top role-playing games were gateways to demon summoning and dark magic.
In the 30 years since, the 22-panel tract has become a cult classic among gamers—a Reefer Madness for the dice-and-pencils set. (In high school, a friend of mine printed up T-shirts that read "I don't want to be Debbie any more. I want to be Elfstar!" an inversion of the comic's climactic scene.) And now, it's getting an official, licensed film adaptation.
Chick is notoriously reclusive. He's never granted an official interview (true to form, his office never responded to our requests for comment), and there are fewer than a half-dozen photographs of him in circulation. Until now, there's never been a licensed adaptation of his tracts, although a handful of filmmakers have produced unofficial animated and live versions—most notably 2007's Hot Chicks, a compilation of tract adaptations from independent filmmakers.
JR Ralls, the man behind the Dark Dungeons movie, is much easier to get in touch with: He meets me in a coffee shop in Portland to talk about the film's improbable history. "Making this movie has been a dream come true," Ralls tells me. An aspiring teenage filmmaker, he ended up bypassing film school for "a much more practical master's degree in history." Now, he works in Internet sales.
In 2013, Ralls won $1,000 in the Oregon lottery. "I was a middle-class middle manager, and while $1,000 is nice—do not get me wrong— it wasn't going to change my life," he says. "So I started thinking: What is something I can do with $1,000 that is going to be awesome? And I remembered that, back in college, I'd come across a comic called Dark Dungeons."
Ralls had hoped to make a film of the comic in college, but the project never came together. This time would be different. Armed with his winnings, Ralls wrote to Chick, asking to buy the rights to Dark Dungeons. "Dear Mr. Chick," he wrote, "I won the lottery ... I have decided that the best use of the money I won would be to film and distribute a live-action version of your tract 'Dark Dungeons.'" To Ralls' surprise, Chick responded—and offered the rights for free.
Ralls was ready to move forward on the project. The problem: He was a novice filmmaker, with a working budget of $1,000. So he turned to Kickstarter.
"I didn't really know much about crowdfunding, so I researched how best to run a Kickstarter," Ralls says. "But my general rule is 'until you're an expert, do what the experts tell you to do,' so I did every last thing they said you should do when you start a Kickstarter campaign." Ralls ended up raising over twice his initial goal of $12,500.
The campaign caught the eye of a handful of production companies. One of them, Seattle-based Zombie Orpheus Entertainment, especially impressed Ralls. ZOE is best known for Journey Quest, a fantasy web series raising funding for its third season, and for its association with the Gamers movies, an indie trilogy (so far) of affectionate satires of tabletop gaming and the culture around it.
"They had produced a number of films that look amazing when you consider their budget," he says. "They had a distribution network that would reach the type of people who would most like to hear the story of Dark Dungeons."
So what's a staunchly pro-gaming company like ZOE—one populated and run by die-hard gamers, with professional ties to multiple tabletop publishers—doing producing Dark Dungeons? Playing it straight, it would appear. ZOE's goal, producer Ben Dobyns says, is to present the other side of the gaming debate as honestly as possible by staying true to the original source material and its intentions. Dobyns is an avid gamer, but emphasizes that he's done his best to leave that bias at the door. (Ralls says he isn't willing to discuss his ideological relationship to the subject matter, and director L. Gabriel Gonda describes himself as a "neutral third party," with no ties to the gaming community or Chick's evangelical base.)
Dobyns isn't the only one involved with Dark Dungeons who has a past with RPGs. Actress Tracy Hyland—who plays Mistress Frost, the sinister dungeonmaster who seduces students Debbie and Marcie into the dark world of dice—grew up with the same cautionary tales of the dangers of table-top RPGs. "When I was a pre-teen," Hyland says, "someone took us to a church in the city where we all learned about role-playing games and the traps that you could fall into—that games were basically a pathway to the occult."
The screenplay, not surprisingly, drew her in: "When I read it, I instantly identified with it, because I thought, 'I know this story. I've heard this story before.'" Dark Dungeons, she says, has been "a really great adventure—a fun creative opportunity to go into that world [of high-stakes good-versus-evil]."
Hyland's performance is, hands down, the highlight of the rough cut WIRED saw. She approaches the role with both remarkable sincerity and scenery-chewing relish that's de rigeur for Chick's larger-than-life villains. It's a good barometer of the film as a whole: funny and campy, while still nailing the over-the-top drama of the original tract.
Is Dark Dungeons serious? Yes, and no. The filmmakers set out to present an on-the-nose interpretation of Chick's perspective on gaming, and that's exactly what they did. Save for a few gamer-friendly easter eggs for gamers and cameos by ZOE regulars, the movie is carefully faithful to Chick's world.
The thing is, Chick's world is insane. Gaming is a seedy, bacchanalian underworld one step short of an orgy, where players learn to cast spells alongside their characters. The movie, like the tract, ends with a book burning ("Luckily, because of our relationships with some gaming companies, we were able to get the rights to burn certain gaming books," says Dobyns). If Ralls had set out to parody Dark Dungeons, he almost certainly would have failed, because it is made by people who believe that Cthulhu is real and coming for your soul. You can't satirize something so far out of touch with reality.
In fact, the resulting movie is entertaining precisely because it's not a parody. In staying true to the spirit of the original, Ralls, Gonda, and company have captured its bizarre, campy charm. And it may not have convinced me to start a bonfire with my sourcebooks—those things are expensive—but as far as Dark Dungeons: The Movie? I'm definitely a convert.
Dark Dungeons premieres in August, at GenCon; you can see the full trailer above.
Disclosure: I have a prior professional relationship with Zombie Orpheus Entertainment, as editor of Pwned: A Gamers Novel.
