One of the most amusing fights is when a whole torrent of Alien-like chestbursters leap from the stomach of a seemingly dead girl, only for her to get up and walk away, seemingly without a scratch, when they're all defeated. Many of the scenes are parodies of famous horror scenes - in the first stage, Dracula comes out from a stage and puts on a dance number similar to Michael Jackson's Thriller there are references to The Fly, Poltergeist, and The Burning Rick, with his hockey-like mask was always a reference to Jason in Friday the 13th but there are even more allusions here and it even brings in characters from other Namco games, like Kai from Tower of Druaga and Tarosuke from Yokai Dochuki. In turning it into a Famicom game, obviously much of the gore had to be removed, but it's still fairly violent, even if it's presented in a comical manner. That result is Splatterhouse Wanpaku Graffiti ( Wanpaku means "mischievous" and graffiti, at least used here in Japanese, means something like "doodles"). So Namco took a different route and made a parody of itself, turning the undead mask-wearing hero Rick into a super-deformed hero, and giving the rest of the series' conventions a cutesy makeover. But while the series found a home on the TurboGrafx-16 and Genesis, its terrifying visuals wouldn't really fly on the NES, which was still primarily aimed at kids.
While fundamentally a simple Kung Fu-style beat-em-up, the grotesque monsters and gory visuals made it stand out among the crowd, and still today it's viewed as a masterwork of pixel artwork. Namco's Splatterhouse is one of the first true horror arcade games.
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