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Billionaires rarely make for very interesting fabulists – they have people for that sort of thing – but in their obsession with securing a legacy, they do necessarily spend a lot of time in the realm of make-believe. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the shape of luxury apocalypse bunkers, all of them perfect settings for horror games.<\/p>\n
Some of these enormous, aureate hideaways are new builds; many are conversions of old mines, missile silos and wartime shelters originally built for national leaders. Take The Diefenbaker in Canada, a Cold War refuge turned \u201celite sanctuary\u201d that allows residents to \u201cmaintain an elevated lifestyle no matter what happens outside\u201d. Once intended for prime ministers and generals, it now offers an enclave of fortified \u201cwellness protocols\u201d and gourmet dining \u201cwhere great minds come together to shape a more certain and prosperous future\u201d.<\/p>\n
Image credit: The Diefenbaker<\/span><\/p>\n The marketing language around these structures is amusingly all-enveloping. An Instagram post from Californian bolthole-builder Vivos walks us through a list of possible global catastrophes, some worryingly likely, some ridiculous: \u201cthe Biblical predictions of Armageddon, or the prophecies of Nostradamus, the Third Secret of Fatima, the visions of Edgar Cayce, or all of the current signs of attack by Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, WW3, another pandemic, an EMP power outage, Yellowstone’s eruption, the increased threats of an asteroid collision, Nibiru\/Planet X…”<\/p>\n It could be a joke in the vein of Winston Zeddemore’s job interview from the Ghostbusters, if they weren’t charging millions for the punchline. The Bibical Armageddon doesn’t belong in the same category of ruin as a nuclear blast or a pandemic – the last two could be averted by humans with sufficient means and optimism – but the Vivos pitch folds them together like carpet samples. They all amount to the same thing when depicted on a wallscreen in the depths of your AI-powered rumpus room. The catalogue of evils suggests a class of people who have given up on society to the point that they no longer have the energy even to distinguish between the forms of its downfall. Vivos generously remove the need: the luxury bunker holds up a mirror to them all. <\/p>\n Image credit: SAFE<\/span><\/p>\n Predictably, the architecture and interior design of these bunkers reek of denial. In short, the bunker must never appear to be a bunker. The occupants need to feel real grass beneath their toes, even in the catacombs. They need to preserve a sense of ascendancy, even as they burrow into the bedrock \u2013 hence the contrived vertigo of the \u201caeries\u201d built by SAFE, referring to the nest of a bird of prey. \u201cThe pool will feel as if it is perched high in the air,\u201d gushes a piece in Forbes, \u201cwhen in reality, it could be 20-plus stories underground in a full-on nuclear-proof shelter, 200 feet below the surface.\u201d <\/p>\n All of this opulence is supposedly in the name of sanity. \u201cPeople have to not only survive, but psychologically survive,\u201d Vivos CEO Robert Vicino notes in an LA Times editorial, adding \u201cwe don\u2019t create fear. We resolve it\u201d. But the scenes of gaudy dislocation generated by such desire feel like a recipe for slow derangement. The company plan to recreate an entire medieval church inside one of their larger bunkers, its august vaulted ambience \u201cperfect for whiling away the hours whittling wood or playing chess\u201d, though seemingly not for prayer. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The wealthy need to be able to keep their treasures, of course: Vivos are making space for archives of Grecian sculpture, bejewelled fonts and oil paintings of bewigged Renaissance intellectuals, a sunken payload of dessicating Dan Brown clich\u00e9s. It does, again, often read like the company are taking the piss out of the very magnates they’re trying to fleece: there is a cheeky mention in the sales pitch of a “zombie apocalypse”.<\/p>\n Image credit: Vivos<\/span><\/p>\n SAFE’s slightly more sombre designs for \u201caeries\u201d include robot massage parlors with a starlit alcove for the visitor\u2019s supine skull, as though you were bathing your brain in constellations presumably deleted by volcanic ash clouds, or chased away by Nibiru\/Planet X. There are glossy prototype images of medical bays, blazing with bodyscans that have no apparent referent – no figure in the MRI machine or on the operating table. There are “war rooms” that look like they’ve been cribbed from a Justice League comic, with holographic globes and gratuitous banks of monitors. Throughout it all, there is a strenuous need to disguise the fact of absolute containment, and inflate distances by means of mirrors, textured facades, and hidden bulbs expressive of an unseen sun, rising somewhere behind the bevel of a smart TV.<\/p>\n I\u2019d be surprised if there weren\u2019t former videogame designers working on some of these bunker projects. Every 3D videogame playspace is some kind of bunker, I think: an enclosure that abounds in optical tricks, cultivating the impression of a larger, livelier world beyond all the stupid things you have to do to reach the next cutscene.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This would be an obvious place to bring in Bioshock, the archetypal triple-A tale of the Great and the Good seeking a future below. Or Fallout, an open world’s worth of nuclear redoubts. But the sheer ghoulishness of the images above puts me strangely in mind of Frictional’s Amnesia: The Bunker, “a grim yet refreshing horror bottle episode”, set inside a tumbledown World War 1 tunnel network that has become the hunting ground for a terrible creature. Even prior to the Beast’s emergence, the resident soldiers entertain few illusions about the charm of bunker life. \u201cThey want a grand subterranean hub of courage, steel, and intelligence,\u201d reads one soldier’s letter. \u201cWe both know what they will get: a rancid, stinking pit. A void, a hole. Full of men, scared and confused. Then they will proclaim it a success and issue a new order: dig again. Deeper this time.\u201d<\/p>\n Image credit: Frictional Games<\/span><\/p>\n Amnesia: The Bunker is no satire of overweening tycoons, but there is much here that is fun to read against the syrupy imagineering of Vivos and SAFE. There’s an underground church that has certainly played host to some “whittling”: the confession booths overflow with viscera. And for all the gloom, grime and utilitarian proportion of the environment, there are scenes that recall the decadent false skies of SAFE’s Aeries.<\/p>\n The Bunker’s pillbox, for example, is effectively a wallscreen with a nasty surprise. It offers the illusion of spaciousness, then punishes you for falling under its spell. Climbing up the ladder into the pillbox is your first breath of ‘open air’ since the prologue. Closing the hatch, you raise your head and are treated to a dark and golden view of silent, ruined earth, with a few miraculous trees beneath a creeping sun.<\/p>\n Image credit: Infamous_Gur_9083<\/span><\/p>\n The warzone appears somehow Arcadian, burnished and at ease. The pillbox\u2019s wide window configures the landscape into a canvas, and that is effectively what this is, of course. The ground outside is ‘No Man’s Land’ in many senses, an entirely ornamental dimension, fading into fog. Still, it’s hard not to stare, after hours of cowering in cupboards, listening to the slither and roar of the Beast. It reminds me of reaching Anor Londo in Dark Souls: the shock of some majesty, after the relentless undeath of the parish beneath. There\u2019s a whole world up here waiting for you! And then, the bullet.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If Amnesia: The Bunker has an equivalent for the figure of a self-interred fat cat, slowly losing their marbles amid their marble busts, it could be Toussaint Beaufoy, the only other soldier to survive the Beast’s onslaught. By the time you wake and begin your search for an exit, Beaufoy’s mind has been tainted by supernatural forces. You find a letter that recounts a recurring nightmare of sex and gore, \u201ca terrible whirl of horrors, bloody and twirled, that make the charnel pit of the war seem like mere play\u201d. Beaufoy is revolted by his visions, but also enticed. \u201cThe worst part, at the end of every day, I want to be asleep,” he writes. “I want to go back to that place.\u201d<\/p>\n Beaufoy adores the word \u201ctwirl\u201d. It’s his centre of gravity as a character. He toys with it further in an anti-war poem, jotted down a few days before you wake, during a fateful excavation of a Roman mithraem – a buried, pillared temple that harbours shrapnel-clouds of interdimensional rock and a host of clutching phantoms. \u201cWe whirl the world, the world we whirl, it all gets lost in a terrible twirl,\u201d Beaufoy drones. \u201cCan\u2019t see the sun for all the smoke, can\u2019t see the ground for all the dead folk, can\u2019t see the ocean, can\u2019t see the trees, so I stay here down on my knees.\u201d<\/p>\n Image credit: Frictional \/ Fandom<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s hardly a brilliant piece of verse, but it is nicely vicious. The singsong barrage of alliteration and assonance perform some mocking equivocations, slurring and compounding the terrible war into the twirling world. It suggests a mind softened by the centrifuge, smeared around the rim of the rhyme. It muddles the object of Beaufoy\u2019s earlier dream. The twirl no longer describes any vile and invigorating Bacchic orgy: it has become monotonous, a widening gyre that extends beyond the war\u2019s \u201ccharnel pit\u201d to a life of shuffling quotidian entropy. \u201cA snarl in the dark, a sad day in the park, a stone reminder, a horse’s dirty blinder, a child’s empty hand, a friend’s stained armband, the news of the day on the stand\u2026\u201d <\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s not just the brute attrition of the frontline that burdens Beaufoy, in the end, nor any dreams of getting his freak on with the Maenads. He has fallen into a more general nihilism. The universe is dreary and enervating and doomed, its moments interchangeable, spinning away regretfully. I hear the echo of that thinking in the inventory of armageddons offered by Vivos, as they seek to persuade the uberwealthy to move underground. Nostradamus, Fatima, Edgar Cayce, Russian nukes, superbugs, rogue comets\u2026 So tiresome to recount. It all gets lost in a terrible twirl.<\/p>\n Better, indeed, to shun the sky and reel through subterranean fantasy, among the stern faces of old emperors and those picturesque shivers of floating stone. Better to reign down here on your knees. When you actually meet Beaufoy in the Roman tunnels, he has renounced the surface world entirely and carved out his own eyes, in order to see and not see what torments him. He wanders the luxuriant ruin with shotgun in hand, singing his poem to the statues.<\/p>\n