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You know me and creepy little girl ghosts.
However, my fear didn’t come from the ghosts of the Fatal Frame series. Why? Well, I didn’t play those games first. No, no, before I touched that series (keep in mind, I didn’t touch for a few years after they came out), I played F.E.A.R. (First Encounter Assault Recon) for the PC. It’s a first person shooter/horror game. I wasn’t exactly sure who the little girl was on the cover of the box… Until I saw her in-game... By her, I mean Alma. It will be difficult to talk about Alma without spoiling her story, so I warn that there may be some spoiler-riffic material in this piece. I’ll also talk about her as she appears in the three main F.E.A.R. games, so no expansions or DLC. Alma is your example of a Western onryo, a female ghost whom was wronged by a man in life and is seeking vengeance upon the living (driving Dio’s point home further that men tend to fuck shit up sometimes). Alma’s case is unique in how she was wronged. Alma was a young girl with startlingly powerful psychic powers. These powers were coveted by forces unseen; one such force, Armacham Technology Corporation, kidnapped her and placed her in a program to breed psychic commanders for a large army of psychically receptive military clones. She was kidnapped at age 8 and kept in a coma to keep her powers at a minimum. At the age of 15, she was artificially impregnated and gave birth to two babies (two sons: one was a year older than the other); BOTH of whom were wrenched away from her after birth, despite her agonizing protests. She never saw her sons…physically. Her sons aged, were tested on, and then separated. One of the sons, the younger one, was about to be taken away for further testing when he started killing anyone that tried to get near him…violently. Turns out he was linked with his mother, Alma. One of the heads of the project, Harlan Wade, realized this and he ordered Alma’s life support (she was kept in a vault, of sorts) to be shut down, effectively killing her (she was a young adult at the time; 18-21 years old). However, Alma stayed alive a few days longer while still sealed inside of that vault. When she finally did die, the heads of the project thought that it was all over…oh god, how wrong they were.
With that back-story in mind, let me talk about her appearances in the games. In the first F.E.A.R., you play as a man called Point Man, a gifted F.E.A.R. operative with reflexes that cannot be explained by normal means. When he gets his first major mission to find and kill a man named Paxton Fettel—the commander of a group of psychically receptive soldiers called Replicas—he and a sizeable squad are dropped at an old abandoned warehouse. This warehouse is locked with a gate and the Point Man is sent to find a means to open it. When he does find it, he hears horrific screams from the rest of his squad, juxtaposed with loud gunfire. The screams and gunfire went as quickly as they came. When the Point Man (the player character, ala, you) investigate, you see dripping, bloody skeletons littering the ground…and a black mist in the center of them all. When you touch the black mist, you see the soldiers…shooting and running from a little girl wearing a red dress and dark, black hair covering most of her face. Fire is flanking her as she walks towards the soldiers. Suddenly, the soldiers start flailing about, blood dripping through their clothes and armor as they literally start melting away until all that is left is a skeleton. As you explore further, Alma tries to do this to you later on, but you escape. This intrigues her. She carefully observes you as you go through the game, watching where you go from either a distance, or from close by (at one point in time in an elevator, she’s in a corner along with you.). As the game goes on and you see her more and more, you’ll come to realize that there is a…special…connection between her and the Point Man.
For F.E.A.R. 2, you play as a different character, known as Sgt. Michael Becket. Becket has psychic powers as well, but they are dormant until after the beginning mission (in which he gains abilities similar to that of the Point Man in the first game.). Near the start of the game, you see Alma, once again as a young child. As the game goes on, however, she will start to appear to Becket as a young woman. She follows Becket around through the course of the game, but…for this game she follows a bit too closely. At some points, she will literally reach out and grab Becket, in which he will have to wrest himself free of her grasp. At one point in the game, Alma looks at Becket sort of…longingly. Yes…in F.E.A.R. 2, Becket is being stalked by Alma. Aside from her stalking, you can see throughout the game that Alma is starting to have an effect on the rest of the world. There are unexplained seismic events taking place, creating vast sink holes and taking off huge chunks of earth. There are unexplained storms brewing; the majority of them are quite violent. These unexplained disasters are ways of highlighting Alma’s pent up rage, and more than a taste at her destructive psychic abilities. F.E.A.R 3 comes along roughly 9 months after the 2nd game. By me saying that, you can probably imagine what’s going on. You once again play as the Point Man, but in this game, you are tasked with finding Alma and killing her soon to be born child. I’d say more about what’s going on in this game, but once again, I risk spoiling it, so I will continue to talk about how Alma shows up to you. The Point Man and Alma still have a special connection between them, thus you will see her as the game goes on. However, you will see her in two different forms: her adult self and her child self. When you see her as an adult, you see her with a hand on her stomach and she seems to be…caressing it. This shows that yes, she is indeed pregnant. Her younger self also shows itself to you from time to time, still observing you. However, at one point, she tries to save you from harm, but when she does, she reverts from her older self to her younger self because there is something else nearby that makes her huddle into a ball and rock herself.This means that there is something so terrifying in F.E.A.R. 3 that it scares even Alma!
The third installment in the F.E.A.R. series shows Alma’s destruction at its peak. Seismic events are happening a lot more frequently now and reality seems to be…warping. As the game goes on, she starts to give off immensely powerful psychic contractions, to illustrate that the baby is indeed coming soon. Not only that, but her influence is starting to spread among the locals…their reaction is, safe to say, not pretty.
From all three games, it can be concluded that while Alma is a powerfully, destructive, terrifyingly psychic ghost, she is also a very tragic one. She shares similarities with the three, main antagonizing ghosts in the Fatal Frame series in that though she was wronged and is currently seeking vengeance, she wants to find a way to be at peace in some way, shape or form. For her, it’s being reunited with her sons.
Despite this tragic aspect of her, though, it does not diminish her inherent creepiness and scariness. The fact that she could literally show up anywhere and stare/observe you is unnerving in and of itself.
And if she is right beside you when I finish reading this, I apologize.
Sleep well, my friends.
--Choco Thunda (10/31/11)
(Images from: F.E.A.R. wiki, horror-video-games.com, pc download station.com, wirebot.com & ign.com)
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