Web Animation / Emesis Blue

"It's eternity in there."

You ever get the feeling like you're being watched?

— Jeremy / BLU Scout

Emesis Blue is a fully voice-acted Team Fortress 2 Surreal Psychological Horror Film Noir Machinima created by Fortress Films, more specifically by Chad Payne as writer and director, and Anton Pelizzari as producer. The feature-length Source Filmmaker video was released on February 20, 2023 on YouTube, and has since received critical acclaim by the game's fanbase for its dark reimagining of the usually-comedic source material.

On Halloween Night of 1968, a high-ranking executive of the Builders League United Corporation mysteriously vanishes in Mortem, New Mexico. A private detective and a washed-up war veteran team up to find him, yet the man they hunt is more dangerous than they can possibly imagine.

At the same time, the patient of a local doctor is abducted from his home, his mother having been brutally murdered by an unknown assailant. The doctor searches for him on his own, only to find himself caught up in a conspiracy that he may or may not be involved with.

When their paths cross, terror and death ensue, brought about by a horror that challenges the sanity and true natures of the characters involved.

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Provides examples of:

• Adaptational Backstory Change: In Team Fortress 2, Soldier/Jane Doe is a deluded pretend-soldier who never served in the military, and went on a killing spree in Poland long after World War II was over. Here, however, he seems to have actually served in the US Army during WWII, was a medal-of-honor recipient, and may or may not have known the tenth class from the war.
• Adapted Out: There's no mention of the Administrator, with Jules Archibald largely taking her place in the story as a third party who's intentionally prolonging the conflict for their own personal benefit. Similarly, there's no indication that Gray Mann exists despite the Mann Brothers showing up to Archibald's funeral.
• Ambiguous Situation: Almost nothing is explained about the supernatural events that take place during the video, or even if they were real or a drug-induced hallucination.
  • By the end of the film, nothing is actually revealed about who or what the Undertaker is or where he came from. It's implied at various points that he's either a split personality of Ludwig's, another one of the Slaughterhouse mercenaries, or both.
  • The RED Engineer, Dell Conagher, is implied to be a pivotal figure in the behind-the-scenes events of the film, but his role is never revealed.
  • When Jane Doe comes across the room with his clones and sees a picture of Archibald executing one, it's left ambiguous if the Jane Doe in the picture was the original or just another clone.
  • It's unknown whether Ludwig's third and final onscreen death will result in his Resurrective Immortality kicking in again, or if he has passed away for good.
• An Arm and a Leg: Cyclops (the RED Demoman Soldier finds) is missing an arm.
• Arc Symbol: The letter M is painted on the wall in various spots throughout the film, most notably in Jeremy's home after he's kidnapped.
• Arc Words: "It's longer than you'd think." and "It's eternity in there."
• Artistic License – History: Early in the film, Fritz Ludwig is shown to have quite the VHS collection that spills out onto the floor. Said VHS tapes shouldn't actually exist however, as Emesis Blue is set in the late 60s, whereas VHS tapes only became available to the public in 1976.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Jules Archibald is an unrepentant Corrupt Politician who aided the Manns in their Forever War by conducting horrible experiments on dozens of death row prisoners in order to perfect the Respawn Machine so they wouldn't have to hire new mercenaries and he discretely executes anyone that he has deemed a dissenter. With that sort of rap sheet, it's safe to say that no-one's crying when the Detective blows out his brains with a revolver near the end.
  • The Detective isn't any better, as he's The Dragon of Jules Archibald and when ordered to execute treasonous BLU mercs with the promise of a promotion, he feigns hesitation so that he can get something more than just a promotion. It gets worse when he ends up being immolated and covered head to toe in burn scars, at which point he completely sheds any pretense of caring about anyone other than himself by gunning down Archibald, forcing Jane and Ludwig to play Russian Roulette and trying to frame Ludwig for killing Jules. Needless to say, Ludwig coming back to life and repaying the Detective with a bullet to the head was earned.
• Badass Boast: Soldier directs one at a recording of Dr. Ludwig over the phone in Chapter 3.
  Ludwig: Who is this?
  Soldier: It's the voice of GOD, you son of a bitch- and I'm comin' for ya!
• Black Dude Dies First: Subverted. Though he dies of hypothermia after accidentally locking himself inside a freezer, Cyclops still manages to outlive several characters in spite of missing an arm.
• Bodybag Trick: A variant: Ludwig actually did die in the interrogation room after the Detective forced him to play Russian Roulette. However, the Detective didn't count on Ludwig's Resurrective Immortality, as he later jumps out of the coffin at Archibald's funeral and shoots the Detective in the head in the middle of his speech.
• Bookends: In the first scene, Jeremy talks about a dream he recently had where his teeth fell out while he was brushing them in the bathroom. In the final scene, Ludwig has a Dying Dream where a bloody tooth falls out of his mouth and into a bathroom sink.
• Boom, Headshot!: Many characters go out by being shot in the head. Archibald is killed by the Detective after the latter undergoes Sanity Slippage, Ludwig has a self-inflicted one after getting unlucky in a game of Russian Roulette (though he gets better), the Detective is taken by surprise with a shot to the head during Archibald's funeral and Blutarch finally meets his end when he gets in a car crash and Jane Doe shoots him several times.
• The Brute: The Russian/Stalingrad is an incredibly durable monster that can break through walls and endure grenade and rocket explosions point blank.
• Bullying a Dragon: The Creature attacks Stalingrad while the BLU mercs (and Cyclops) are in the elevator. The fact that the Creature pretty much disappears after that scene while Stalingrad is still alive does not leave many expectations about his survival.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Jane Doe is as much of a dunce as his canon self, but is very competent in combat and has excellent lateral thinking. An early example is when he accidentally listens in on police radio channels, then later uses them to help the Detective track down the hearse they are pursuing.
• Call-Back: In the beginning of the film, Jeremy recounts a nightmare he had about his teeth falling out to Ludwig. In Ludwig's Dying Dream, his teeth fall out while taking his diazepam.
  • Similarly, Jeremy tells Ludwig that "if they ever hit you with something, you hit back twice as hard." And in the end, Ludwig shoots the Smoker in the head twice, after previously having shot himself once in the head thanks to the Smoker's game of Russian Roulette. Rather sweet, in a twisted sort of way- he took his friend's advice to heart.
• Came Back Wrong: The Respawn Machine kills 90% of users it was tested on. The last 10%, the nine mercenaries (plus one that committed suicide), have a 1% chance of suffering some malformity or condition each time they use it.
• Character Name Alias: The Detective and Jane adopt detective aliases in order to investigate a crime scene, choosing Columbo and Mannix.
• Chekhov's Gag: When first getting to the slaughterhouse, Jane suggests that he rocket-jump inside with the rocket launcher he had stashed in the car's boot. He later tries to rocket-jump over a crevasse, but he's stopped by an ambulance nearly crashing into him courtesy of the Russian.
• Color Motif: The movie has plenty of red and blue imagery, which tend to appear together during scenes of conflict. The monsters tend to be associated with black instead.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: The Civilian/Jules Archibald is the founder of the Jules Archibald Foundation and the governor of New Mexico. Not only is he complicit in the conspiracy to prolong the conflict between RED and BLU, but had the Detective serve as his secret police officer to execute "traitors". His most heinous act was to use death row inmates as mercenaries experimented upon using the Respawn Machine, then selling the tech and the mercs to both sides of the war.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Scout is tortured to death with an electric drill by Zed Conagher.
• Darker and Edgier: When compared to the wacky and over-the-top tone of the source material, the film is very much this. While some of TF2's humorous elements are retained, they are incredibly sparse and take a backseat to the horror elements. The colors tend to be muted and washed out, and the weather is persistently rainy and gloomy, creating a bleak and oppressive atmosphere.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Combined with Decapitation Presentation. Scout's kidnappers kill his mom and impersonate her voice to lull him into a false sense of security, before holding her severed head to make it look like she's peeking at Scout from around the corner of the wall. Much later, Ludwig pulls this exact same trick on the Hunter with the Butcher's head.
• Deconstructed Trope: Of Resurrective Immortality. Unlike in canon, where Death Is a Slap on the Wrist, and the mercs appear out of nowhere with no problems, Emesis Blue takes that and plays it seriously with horrifying results. In this universe, the Respawn Machine is the source of their pseudo-immortality. It recreates a person's body by resequencing their genomes, rebuilding their skeleton, and even threading new muscles before sticking their soul into their new body. It sounds great, right? Hell no. Like most machines, the Respawn Machine works ninety-nine percent of the time, but what about that little one percent where it doesn't? In Scout's (Jeremy's) case, BLU found him going through an unconscious seizure. During his post-recovery, he was left with lowered motor functions, intelligence, and schizophrenia and was diagnosed with brain atrophy. In the case of the Slaughterhouse Mercs, their bodies are malformed with horrible defects ranging from elongated fingers, pale skin, and rictus grins. Don't get us started on what happened to the Tenth Class. If that isn't bad enough, the arc words "It's eternity in there" and "It's longer than you think" imply the deceased have to wait for what seems like forever in the Respawn Machine until it actually revives them, so by the time they do get brought back, they're driven insane by the wait. Mercs like Jeremy and Ludwig were lucky enough to not remember the wait or avoid it entirely, but the Slaughterhouse Mercs didn't, which explains why most of them (except maybe Cyclops, who seems okay) went homicidal. So not only does someone risk being left with being severely debilitated or looking like a ghoul, but they might also go insane from having to wait for God knows how long until the Respawn Machine puts their soul in their new body.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: In the comics, Redmond and Blutarch Mann were stabbed to death by their brother Gray after meeting him for the first time. Here, Blutarch is shot multiple times by Jane Doe after his car crashes, whereas Redmond is run over by Ludwig while he's attempting to escape the authorities.
• Downer Ending: Governor Archibald is dead, and so are Redmond and Blutarch Mann. With Scout and Cyclops dead, Jane Doe on the run for murdering Blutarch, the Detective shot in the head, and Ludwig seemingly killed in a car crash, all but two of the mercenaries (the other being Dell/RED Engineer, possibly) are dead. Just about the only good thing to come out of the ending is Ludwig finally reuniting with Scout again in the afterlife, and even that is ambiguous given Ludwig's Resurrective Immortality.
• Dying Dream:
  • Cyclops wanders into a bar with Dell behind the counter, having mysteriously regained his missing eye and discusses the respawn machine with Dell. When we see him again, he's frozen to death in a cryogenics lab.
  • Later, Medic stops at a bar owned by Dell Conagher, where he encounters the Conagher brothers, Archibald, and Scout, who are all supposedly dead. The scene then cuts to Medic's dead body in a car accident along the roadway.
• Eldritch Location: Conagher Slaughterhouse and Dell's bar.
• Eye Scream: There are several moments in the movie where eyes are damaged in some way. Ludwig stabs Stalingrad's eye with a screwdriver, Maynard and Dell have blank walls of flesh where there should be eyes, the hallucination of Ludwig over Jeremy's mom's corpse has his eyes incredibly damaged, and at the end, Ludwig's corpse has no eyes, just bloody eyesockets.
• Facial Horror: The Butcher's face is almost completely burned off. A similar fate befalls the Detective during his escape from the Butcher.
• Faking the Dead: Dell claims to have done this, though considering the context and the enigmatic nature of his character, it's hard to say if he really did or if this is the mercs' way of coping with his death.
• Fate Worse than Death: What happens during a botched respawn. It causes deformities ranging from gaining mental disabilities to horrific mutations to disintegrating into a massive pool of blood. Worse, in other cases, most notably the Hunter and the Tenth Class, the mercenary in question had to experience a long wait for respawn. It's longer than you think.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: In his frustration, Blutarch screams at his driver to "Run all the red lights! What are they good for, anyway?!" After that statement, he's immediately involved in a collision.
• Foreshadowing: In Jane Doe's hallucination of his experiences of war, he sees the Detective get burned alive by a Pyro. Later on, the very same thing happens to the Detective in real life, albeit through his own negligence rather than by the Butcher's own hand.
• Genre Shift: The first few chapters of Emesis Blue lean more towards being a traditional Film Noir mystery film that happens to be set in the Team Fortress universe. Once we get to Conagher Slaughterhouse however, the genre quickly and dramatically lurches towards being a pure horror film.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Both Ludwig and the Detective are burned on the face at some point. Ludwig, being the (presumably) more noble of the two gets an M-shaped scar on his cheek. The Detective gets his entire face and body covered in 3rd-degree burns after he was unable to get out of a pool of burning fuel that he had set alight to kill the Butcher.
• He Knows Too Much: Scout's mother is killed and he gets tortured to death, because his plan to sue BLU for what they did to him in the experiments would have exposed Archibald's part in the scheme and jeopardized his campaign.
• Hollywood Fire: The Butcher can move while on fire just fine. Later Subverted when the fires started by the Detective, the Butcher, and Jane Doe spiral out of control with no one containing them, very quickly engulfing Conagher Slaughterhouse in flames.
• How Did You Know? I Didn't: In Chapter 4, the Soldier takes out an attacking Sniper by goading the latter to shoot him in the chest. The sniper does so, but the Soldier, who was wearing a Bulletproof Vest under his jacket, manages to grab his rocket launcher and shoot the sniper before they can get another shot in. The Detective asks:
  Detective: How did you know he wouldn't shoot you in the head?
  Soldier: I didn't.
• Humanoid Abomination: The Undertaker might be one of these, if the scenes with him and Medic were actually real and not just hallucinations. The Slaughterhouse mercenaries (particularly the Creature and the Butcher), on the other hand, definitely fall under this trope.
• Hypocrite: For all the frustration the Detective expresses with the Soldier, some of the most terrible things that happen to him throughout the film are his own fault, including blowing up his own car by messing with the Soldier's rocket launcher, and later setting himself on fire by tossing a lit cigarette into a puddle of gasoline in the room behind him.
• Hypocritical Humor: With a very dark lean on the "humor" bit. Maynard Conagher accuses his contact on the phone of being inconsiderate because they won't tell him what happened to Dell. In the same breath, he yells at a tortured, screaming Scout to shut up.
• Implacable Man: The Slaughterhouse mercenaries encountered in Conagher Slaughterhouse are unbelievably durable, able to take explosions and headshots yet still take on the BLU mercenaries. It is only by decapitation or complete destruction of the head that they stay down for good.
• Laughing Mad:
  • Ludwig is reduced to mad laughter shortly after using a cigarette to calm down when he was crying in an elevator with Demoman and the Soldier.
  • When prompted to read off a cue card at Archibald's funeral, the Soldier simply starts cackling and has to be shoved off the podium by the Detective.
• MacGuffin: Mid-way through the film, Medic takes and keeps a briefcase the Conagher brothers and the Slaughterhouse mercenaries retrieved near the start of the film. It's revealed to be a red orb, but nothing else is known about it.
• Malevolent Masked Men:
  • The Butcher and Stalingrad both wear sinister full-face masks. So does the Undertaker.
  • After suffering horrific full-body burns, the Detective wears a mask with a built-in voice changer to conceal his injuries.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: While plenty of insane events happen, some of them can be chalked up to the Weird Science endemic to the Team Fortress 2 world. The rest seems to either be genuinely paranormal or a result of the Valium/Diazepam the Medic and Soldier take.
• Meaningful Background Event: A small but potentially very significant one during the final chapter: look closely at the crowd fleeing the church after Medic bursts out of the coffin. For about a second, the Undertaker is visible outside the church, looking in at the proceedings.
• Murder by Cremation: Someone (possibly Jeremy) is locked in a coffin and fed to a crematory oven as part of some sort of ritual.
• Mythology Gag: Has its own page here.
• Off with His Head!:
  • Scout's mother has her head cut off when The Conspiracy comes after Scout for threatening to take Archibald to court.
  • When fighting against the Butcher, Ludwig uses the Butcher's axe against its owner by chopping off one of their legs and then their head.
• Noodle Incident: An unknown party informs Maynard over the phone that Dustbowl is gone, and no one knows what caused it to happen.
• Our Zombies Are Different:
  • The Slaughterhouse mercenaries range anywhere from feral, disfigured abominations (The Creature) to being almost completely human except with an uncanny appearance (The Hunter).
  • A spawn room in the upper floor of Conagher Slaughterhouse contains far more conventional zombies, as they take the appearance of the official Voodoo-Cursed Souls from Team Fortress 2, shamble around slowly, and shrug off injuries as long as their head is intact.
• Professional Killer: The Detective, also known as the Corporal or the BLU Spy, acts as Jules Archibald's personal agent and hitman, executing dissenters and rescuing Archibald whenever he is in danger. To a lesser extent, this also applies to Jane Doe due to being the Detective's partner, much to the Detective's aggravation.
• Resurrective Immortality: Dr. Ludwig possesses this ability, though its origin is never explained. He comes back to life twice, before seemingly dying for good in an exhaustion-induced car crash at the end of the film.
• R-Rated Opening: The beginning of the movie is an almost Analog Horror-like sequence of the Respawn Machine being tested on the Tenth Class, with more and more gruesome effects every time it is tested.
• Rule of Symbolism: The shot of Jeremy hearing the Butcher's whistling prominently features a chessboard, with a single blue pawn surrounded by red enemy pieces. It's foreshadowing just how hard the odds are stacked against Jeremy - even if he had stuck with Ludwig in the slaughterhouse, there's no guarantee that he'd stand a chance against any of the other monsters in there. Even if he managed to escape, he'd still have to worry about his condition eating away at his brain, or of The Detective trying to coerce his cooperation as he did with Jane Doe. No matter what choice he made, he would have lost the game.
• Russian Roulette: Jane Doe and Ludwig are forced to play this with the Smoker. Ludwig loses the game, although given his Resurrective Immortality, he knew that even if he lost, he wouldn't stay dead.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Signs of Disrepair: The Cyclops is lured by a flickering sign into a bar... only for the rest of the letters to flicker on after he enters to spell out "Laboratory."
• Slasher Smile:
  • The Hunter has a frightening one of these, as his entire jaw seems to be permanently locked in a rigor-mortis grin with too-sharp teeth.
  • The Medic/Ludwig delves into this trope as well - once after he revives for the first time and kills the Conagher brothers, and once in a vision of him murdering Scout's mother.
• Sound-Only Death: Scout's death by electric drill is not shown - we only see him get dragged away by Zed before we hear him screaming as the drill bores into him.
• Stable Time Loop: Medic and Soldier encounter time anomalies in Conagher Slaughterhouse that causes them to trigger small events from the past.
• Theme Naming: Purgatory Street, Mortem New Mexico...
• Tied Up on the Phone: Ludwig uses a telephone's cord to strangle Maynard Conagher. This backfires on Ludwig though, because the cord is short enough that Maynard reaches for the telephone's base and bashes his head with it, freeing him from it.
• To Hell and Back: Chapter 6: Katabasis, appropriately, is focused entirely on this trope.^note Katabasis is a Greek term referring to a story in which the protagonist embarks on a journey to the underworld. Soldier jumps into a bottomless pit of corpses in order to escape from Stalingrad, and finds himself trapped in a strange, nightmarish underworld filled with dead bodies, fire and brimstone, and distant screams. After battling Stalingrad, Soldier continues to fall further and further down this nightmarish pit, until he finally manages to find a ladder and climb back up to the surface.
• The Tooth Hurts: Stuff just keeps happening with teeth in this movie. Jeremy has a dream of his teeth falling out, the hallucination in the Respawn Machine has Ludwig's teeth all broken and damaged, Ludwig's tooth falls out after he downs the Diazepam, and one of the final shots in the film is Ludwig with his teeth all gone.
• The Unreveal: The film ends with the camera zooming in on a red orb within the briefcase the various parties were hunting, but its function is never revealed.
• White Mask of Doom: The Butcher wears one for most of the film, as does the Detective at Archibald's funeral after his face was burned off.
• Who Shot JFK?: It's implied through dialogue that Archibald and Blutarch had some hand in the assassination.

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Bartender/Dell: When they figured out how to bring us back... some of us would tell stories 'bout what we saw on the other side. We saw old friends...family...mostly strangers. I spoke to my grandfather. [beat] He's been dead for thirty years.
Cyclops: What'd he tell ya?
Bartender: [extended beat] "It's eternity in there."

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