Sticking a knife in someone is the same as sticking your cock in someone. Filling them with bullets or with the steel of a blade is like filling them with cum. Sometimes what comes out is white. Sometimes, red. Said Andreas Baader, leader of the West German Red Army Faction, “fucking is the same as shooting.” It’s the power—it must be. When you fuck, you’re making life. When you kill, you’re taking it, and that’s what God does.

Killing and fucking are the same in Manhunt. When you beat or choke or hack someone to death, The Director, your director, is there in your earpiece, panting and blowing his load—”you’re really getting me off, Cash.” His cameras watch you with voyeuristic prurience, capturing each murder on recycled DV film. Sometimes it’s in a two shot, so people can see the mechanics of the whole thing: you, the other guy, your bat, his head. Other times it’s close up, so there’s your knife, his new, ragged hole and the blood squirting out. If you went to the Manhunt website back in 2003 and followed a bunch of links, you’d reach a mock up of the dark web and The Director’s own Valiant Video store, where you could ‘buy’ tapes of his snuff movies and merchandise like surgical gloves, leather masks, and zip ties. In one of the fake forums, there was a post from Ramirez, The Director’s security guy, offering a bounty to whoever found and killed the female journalist sniffing around the boss’s operations. A bunch of ‘users’ left replies. “can we eat all of her bonezz” one said.

The Director (Lionel Starkweather, surely named for Nebraskan spree killer Charles Starkweather) keeps his other snuff star, Piggsy, chained up like a gimp in his attic. Fat, naked, and brain damaged, if killing and fucking are cousins, Piggsy’s their offspring. When you start Manhunt, there are two difficulties, Fetish and Hardcore. Levels aren’t called levels, they’re called scenes. Kidnapped by the Wardogs gang, the members of Cash’s family are gagged, stripped to their underwear, and handcuffed to the wall. One of the Skinz, in the ‘scene’ called Fuelled By Hate, sits in the guard house at the scrapyard, watching pornography and holding a baseball bat.

To kill people in Manhunt, you have to lure them to you, usually by hiding in a shadow and bashing your fist or your weapon against the wall. Attracted by the sound, they’ll come over, they’ll look around, they’ll get angry that they can’t find you, and then they’ll turn their back to you, and you can creep up and seize them from behind, deciding, by holding the button down for a shorter or longer period of time, just how vigorously you want to take them. Once you let the button go, you momentarily lose control—the game cuts to a prerendered, scripted sequence where you watch Cash suffocate or bludgeon or eviscerate his victim from the point of view of one of The Director’s closed-circuit movie cameras. There’s a scream, a splash of gore, and then you’re back in control and it’s you and the dead body.

Allurement, frenzy, aftermath—this is Manhunt’s hideous fornication. In the opening scenes, your tastes are basic, improvised: a plastic bag, a shard of glass. But you soon want more. What happens if I do it with the crowbar, or the hunting knife, or the blackjack? He makes a good sound when I do it like this. That one makes a lot come out. What starts as simple choking and punching becomes more invasive, exotic—the shard of glass that once held so much wonder becomes banal, because you’ve found the hand scythe that rips their intestines out, and the machete that you can cut their head off with. Just killing isn’t enough. Fucking isn’t enough.

Eventually, it stops being about qualityand it’s just raw numbers. You used to get close, touch them, entwine, but then Manhunt introduces the guns, first a nail gun, then a revolver, then a shotgun, assault rifle, sniper rifle, and you get further and further away—less intimate. It’s nothing to do with the art of it, the carnal clash. In the final third of the game, Cash turns off the earpiece. There’s no Director. With the guns, you’re just killing, and killing, and killing. It’s all flesh piled up. Bodycount.

But then you kill Piggsy and you get his chainsaw. It’s an icon of brutal death, so exotic, the most extreme. There are two Gimmes—when you get the chainsaw and then return up the staircase towards The Director’s office, a pair of his personal bodyguards are standing ramrod still, faced away from you. Manhunt knows what you want. You want to see the chainsaw executions. In the middle, ‘yellow’ one, Cash revs the chainsaw and pushes it straight through the guard’s spine and sternum. In the ‘red’ one, he jams the entire length of the blade through the top of the guard’s head and down into his chest cavity—down his throat.

It’s like a reawakening. Killing is hot again. When Cash breaks into the Director’s office, we see it through one of the same CCTV cameras used to film all the murders. He spins the chainsaw’s blade and holds the weapon at waist height, and it comes right up against the lens, his giant dick finally back to life. Cash corners The Director and cuts his belly open, and his guts come spilling out and he tries to gather them up in his hands. With his dying words, he begs Cash to somehow save him: “I made you! I made you!” At the start of Manhunt, Cash is a convict on death row, about to be executed. The Director intervenes and gets Cash released. Albeit with an agenda, he gives Cash life. He often calls him ‘boy.’ And then Cash kills him. It’s all pretty Oedipal—it’s Saturn’s darkest premonition, being devoured by his son. Fucking and killing, same thing.

Cash’s final act is to force the chainsaw into The Director’s dead body, and he leaves it there, sticking upright. We smash cut to a short news broadcast. The Journalist reports that Starkweather’s operation has been exposed and the Carcer City police chief has been indicted on related charges. We don’t see Cash again. The credits roll. It’s abrupt. It’s empty. It’s unromantic. The excitement was back, for a moment, but even with the metaphorical father finally and gruesomely dead, there is no metaphorical mother to claim. It seems contradictory, oxymoronic, but this is how Manhunt reaches its sincere nihilism, full of conviction. Fucking and killing are the same thing, which is nothing.

***

Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Twitter handle is @esmithwriter.