What inspired Clock Tower?

This is a Tier 1 inspiration, the kind this Library requires before a page like this exists: the creator stated it himself. Hifumi Kono directed Clock Tower as a homage to one of his favourite film directors, the Italian horror master Dario Argento, and he has described it in exactly those terms: his first original title at Human Entertainment, and one that paid homage to Argento. Kono loved horror films, and wanted his game to feel like one.

Above the filmography stands one film: Phenomena (1985), Argento's story of a schoolgirl, an isolated academy, and a killer. The borrowings are specific enough to check. The game's heroine is Jennifer Simpson; the film's is Jennifer Corvino, played by Jennifer Connelly, and Jennifer Simpson's design was modelled on her. Beyond the name, the record lists the shared signature of Argento's 1980s work running through the game: occult themes, distressed young women, and bright colours laid over a foggy setting. A mansion in Norway, a mother with a secret, twins at the heart of it: the plot machinery is giallo machinery, wound up and set walking in a point and click game.

The homage extended to how the game was made. The characters' graphics were digitised from photographs of real people, and Jennifer's movements were performed by a woman in Human's planning division, hanging from roofs and stumbling down hallways so the animation would move like a person in a film, not a sprite in a game. Kono got his wish in the verdicts, too: reviewers reached for cinema to describe it, and the sequel was praised in print as an interactive horror film.