Castlevania has to be the most aesthetically accomplished series on the NES. It probably would still be if the first game somehow never got popular enough to spawn its many sequels. The confidence in its audiovisual presentation is evident on every screen, which is even more remarkable considering it was released at a time where most developers were still struggling to create clearly recognizable, let alone coherent, sprite work for their games. There certainly wasn’t much holding together the visuals of jumping plumbers, question mark blocks, walking mushrooms, green pipes, fire flowers and turtle kings in 1985, except that each of them clearly communicated their in-game function to the player. Jump forward only one year and here is a game whose imagery is so tightly interwoven that even the background sprites follow a distinct dramaturgy throughout the adventure. For example, the tower where the final showdown with Dracula takes place already appears for the first time at the very start of the game as a looming silhouette on top of the distant castle behind the entrance gate of his estate. It then repeatedly returns as a mysterious destination on the map screen between each level, seemingly suspended in thin air, only to resurface in the background of the third level as you reach the roof of the castle, its shape now slightly closer and partly illuminated by the moonlight. Moonlight from the same crescent moon that was also already shining in the first screen and becomes visible again at the very end in the sky during your final ascend to Dracula’s chamber. Every game that came out today would be praised for this level of detail.

There obviously was a lot of talent involved in the making of this game, but I think the main reason why Castlevania succeeds so well aesthetically has to do with where the team took their visual inspiration from. Konami had to work with the same technical limitations as everybody else at the time, but they chose a frame of reference that arguably translated the best into 8-bit graphics: Gothic horror, or, more precisely, Gothic horror as envisioned by the Universal Monster Films of the 1930s. These films already translated the classic literary works of gothic fiction into a highly codified visual language that was instantly recognizable for a mass audience. In fact, these filmic adaptations where so successful that they were quickly serialized into what one could now call the first Cinematic Universe, including everything like crossovers, cameos, or parodies. Looking back, it seems almost absurd that in the opening credits of Frankenstein from 1931, the name of the actor who plays The Monster was explicitly not revealed because ever since the release of the film, our cultural imagination of this creature has become pretty much inseparable from the face of Boris Karloff. You might have never seen the original Frankenstein, Dracula, or The Mummy, yet your idea of what these characters look, sound, or move like is still almost certainly shaped by these films. They definitely were the basis of the virtual counterparts that you encounter in the game.

Castlevania never tries to hide its cinematic influences. If anything, the game makes them overtly apparent, from the title screen that is designed like a film strip, to the pun names of real filmmakers and actors in the end credits. It gladly uses every single monster or character that already has a strong enough cultural representation to ensure that their sprites are instantly recognizable. As a game based on trial and error, memorization, and repetition there is almost no sense of horror of the unknown here. Castlevania offers plenty of surprises, but it always ensures that you know the evils you are facing off against, since this knowledge is ultimately your best weapon to defeat them. It is as much a celebration of every popular form of horror fiction that came before it as it is an exciting experiment in what that tradition can become when translated into a new medium.

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