I miss the ghost story vibes of the old Killer bios

I feel like a lot of modern bios go into a bit too much detail about the character entering the Entity’s Realm. For the licensed Killers, I kinda get this. For the original Killers, though, I think it kinda ruins the mystery a little bit, even if we know it’s always the Entity making them disappear.

There’s also something to be said for length. Ghost stories are typically not that long. Nobody wants to hear you recite an entire novella by the campfire. Modern bios, by and large, go over a Killer’s entire history and often their personality. For the old ones, though, they keep it very brief and to the point-a broad summary of who they were before they were taken, and then about when they disappeared.

My personal favorite example of this is the Hillbilly’s bio. The Thompsons had a horribly disfigured son who they were ashamed of, never so much as named and kept hidden away from the world in a bricked-up room, fed via a hole in the wall. One day, the boy escaped, killed his parents, and took his anger out on the animals. The bodies of the boy’s parents were never found, but the mangled animals were. The lands Coldwind Farm sat atop of were split up and sold off, but never the farmhouse.

After this comes my favorite line in any character’s bio, which pretty much summarizes my point:

“Perhaps it was the sound of the chainsaw you could hear throughout those hot summer nights.”

The Hillbilly’s bio ends not on some tangent about how great it is for him in the Realm and how he can kill people forever now, but on a far more ominous note. I think this is how the bios overall made Killers feel: Ominous. Where modern Killer bios make you feel like you’re playing a villain, older Killer bios make you feel like you’re playing a legend.