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I got a bit curious about what makes some people react to various horror media, be them horror games, horror movies or even horror stories. So I decided to sniff around a little bit and ask a few people what gets them all kinds of creeped out when it comes to works of horror. This’ll be a multiple part article, so expect some interesting perspectives!
The first person I asked was our own Decon, Jimmy. This is what he had to say:
“Thinking about what things actually scare me in media is quite difficult, because I react to horror media with excitement and intrigue usually. Bile Facination, I’ve heard it called. But there certainly are things that get under my skin, and usually it’s stuff not found in more traditional horror games. And I’m using games specifically here because the level of immersion, and in some cases open ended nature makes the terror much more personal than any other medium.
Perhaps the best example I can provide is a game by one of my personal heroes, Goichi Suda, called Flower Sun & Rain. FSR isn’t at all a horror game, and is in fact largely lighthearted with bits of pathos and the requisite Suda51 weirdness here and there, so quite par the course. But should you ever check out the game yourself,
take note of every single bit of dialogue in the game- absolutely nobody speaks like a human being. At any point. Every line of dialogue in the game is like something said by a distorted figure of someone you recognize in a fever dream. Now that’s not to say it doesn’t make sense, because it does (sort of… with Suda51, you’re always second guessing), and there is a semi coherent story being told, but it’s the choice of words and the way the characters structure their sentences that make everything seem too alien. It gives the game a very hazy and drunken atmosphere and makes it quite creepy yet absolutely fascinating.
That’s the kind of thing I crave in many works, but especially in horror, where it can add another dimension to an already unsettling work if done right, and it doesn’t have to be done specifically through dialogue; creating a fever dream-like atmosphere can be done visually, thematically, any way you choose. killer7 achieves it with it’s graphical style, weird camera angles, and increasingly unhinged narrative heavily layered in metaphor and
populated almost entirely by wholly unlikable yet compelling caricatures that only passingly resemble real people; Silent Hill achieves it by having it’s protagonist be largely inconsequential to a much larger story you never really get all the answers to, and making him a guest in another persons broken psyche on a metaphysical level; Eternal Darkness achieves it by meshing the reality of the game and the nature of its status AS a game and having the Sanity function serve to mess with YOUR head more then the player character; Earthbound achieves it during it’s endgame by having the villain that’s been built up as an evil mastermind that brought the world to its knees turn out to be an almost pitiful and stupid creature with no defined existence, who’s very movements themselves cannot be explained or even perceived, and that cries out repeatedly and increasingly disturbing things.
Sweet Home achieves it by presenting the house almost as if it’s a different dimension entirely, with it’s own set of heinous rules and a veritable pantheon of deadly inhabitants, and from a gameplay standpoint shows that your failure to protect your avatars will have dire consequences; and finally, using two film examples, Candyman and
Jacob’s Ladder, though both different in intent, genre, and execution in many ways, have at least the common factor of continuing to mess with your perception and keep you questioning where reality begins and the dream (or nightmare) ends, all the way until they give you the answers. There are certainly other examples definitely, but these are the more memorable ones that come to mind from my own experiences.
I love any and all forms of horror across all mediums (and even its use in works that aren’t strictly horror) because of the fascination it inspired in me- even the cheesy schlock- but the things that gets under my skin the most are the ones that keep me questioning. The stories where truly anything is possible, and the odds are stacked against the good and the just. The stories where absolutely everything feels unreal, unnatural, and most importantly, wrong.”
Images are from Flower, Sun, and Rain, Killer 7, Candyman and Earthbound. Sourced from blog.gamer20.com , www.hardcoregaming101.net, whatspikelikes.wordpress.com, and earthbound.wikia.com
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