In this most spooky of months, I've been thinking about the horror genre in gaming. I remember a time when horror in videogames was a simple affair. Jump scares, grotesque monsters and oppressive environments were the tools of the trade. I'd jump when zombie dogs burst through a window in Resident Evil, and the creaks and groans of a foggy town were enough to keep me on edge in Silent Hill. But as I've gotten older, my relationship with fear has changed. The horror that truly gets under my skin now is more subtle, more cerebral. It's less about what's lurking in the shadows and more about the unsettling ideas that burrow into my mind and trouble my sleep.
Cosmic Horror and Existential Dread
Gone are the days when I'm solely afraid of the big bad or boss monster. The idea of being utterly insignificant specks in a cruel and pitiless universe ruled by indifferent elder gods doesn't scare me much now but it did back in the day. Games like Eternal Darkness on the Gamecube nailed this feeling though by making you feel completely alone against forces beyond human comprehension. More recently, The Call of Cthulhu game on PS4 that I played and completed also perfectly captured the idea of a terrifying cosmic mythos with devout followers. However, games like Alan Wake and Control, the Remedy-verse if you will, played with the idea of cryptids, blending them with the everyday to make the world feel less stable. Another, more recent example, was in the game Still Wakes the Deep, where the protagonist tries to escape a malevolent creature that is accidentally disturbed as the seabed is dug by an oil rig. While trying to escape the inevitability of his fate, the protagonist finally decides to sacrifice himself to save the world by ensuring the creature never makes landfall. The last action is 'Let Go' which was a bold thing to ask in a videogame where agency is the medium's main draw.
Surprisingly, one of the most potent applications of cosmic horror was in Night in the Woods. The game started off as an introspective look at a returning figure who left under a cloud and turned from a simple story about ‘finding your people’ and evolved into a poignant cosmic horror about the slow death of small-town America and its effect on the soul of the people that remained. Wow! It made me look at my leaving my old town of Barking differently - not that I've seen sights of any cosmic horror, just gentrification which I’ve been told is not the same thing.
The close cousin to cosmic horror is existential dread which often asks the biggest, most terrifying questions about our existence. Soma was a masterclass in this, forcing you to grapple with what it truly meant to be human and whether consciousness was tied to the body or something else entirely when it is revealed very early that you were a mind inside a robot body and your consciousness had been uploaded.
As a gruff, but less buff, older dad, The Last of Us and God of War (2017) tapped into the parental fear of loss of a child and the weight of past decisions. For a similar reason, The Walking Dead Season 1 was so impactful as it was about the fear of dying and leaving a (surrogate) child unprotected in a cruel, uncaring world. Even seemingly whimsical games like Zelda: Majora's Mask were built on the foundation of existential dread, as the moon was constantly about to crash and end all life. Finally, Nier Automata took this to a whole new level with its philosophical, suicidal robots, forcing you to question your purpose in a machine-driven world.
Non-Euclidian Spaces and Strange Liminal Places
There is something deeply unnerving about a space that defies logic. The mind rebels against a world that doesn't follow the rules it knows, and this is where Non-Euclidian Spaces and strange liminal spaces come in. In the videogame Kairo, I wandered through cyclopean buildings with bizarre geometry, which created a sense of being lost and disoriented. The repetition and alterations of the same space was effectively mined by Mark Z. Danielewski in his masterful book House of Leaves and Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima effectively looked at this concept further with PT, where the corridors around you changed in an unsettling way. More recently and importantly, more accessibly, Control used the uncanny nature of the Oldest House to great effect, linking strange, unsettling spaces to our everyday world. Even older games like Zelda: A Link to the Past's Forest of Time or the Haunted Mansion in Super Mario World played with this concept on a more basic but subtly unsettling way.
Corporate Indifference
As an older statesman, I’ve found a new fear in the cold, uncaring nature of large corporations, oligarchs and tech bros. It’s the idea that your life, your very existence, is a mere byproduct of a grand machine that doesn’t care about you at all. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs and Alien: Isolation captured this perfectly, treating you as a mere cog in the mechanization of labor, all in first person. Meanwhile, Bioshock was a cautionary tale about a fallen utopia built on a foundation of corporate greed and indifference. Finally, the much underrated Tacoma told the chilling story of astronauts who are simply given up for dead by corporate bigwigs. It was a subtle but deeply unsettling horror of realising that you would die and that no-one above you in management cared or ever did.
Body Horror, Gore Porn and Real World Violence
Some fears are just primal. The gut-wrenching feeling of being trapped in a confined space with something horrifying, as in Dead Space, is timeless but that eyeball scene in Dead Space 2 was a masterclass in making you squirm in your seat. The horrifying transformation in Inside, where you become an amorphous blob, tapped into our deep-seated fear of losing control over our own bodies in hideous Tetsuo-ness. However, the greatest use of real world violence was when a knife was thrust into my right hand in VR in Resident Evil 7. My friends and I were grossed out and the effect was terrifying as it happened within the first 30 minutes of the game which gradually escalated the violence.
However, as I get older, I find myself more afraid of other people than I am of external, existential terrors that most probably don't exist. The monsters exist, and they are often human-shaped, wear suits and hold positions of responsibility and respectability. Games like Decarnation, Haunting Ground, Clock Tower and Silent Hill 2 explored the horrors of violence against women and entrapment. Deadly Premonition and Year Walk delved into the ritualistic and folk horror that can be rooted in very real, very human traditions and doctrines.
Confronting individuals or groups who are so utterly convinced of their own righteousness and destiny when they cannot be reasoned with is terrifying. They believe that their path, often involving self-destruction, violence, or the annihilation of others, will lead to a higher state of being—a 'cosmic bliss' reserved only for the select few.
Elden Ring had an example in Dominula, the Windmill Village, where the people were dancing around maypoles covered in beautiful pink flowers and there are crosses scattered around. I remember being really scared of this area as it felt creepy and otherworldly, like Summerisle in The Wicker Man or other folk horror films; I was a trespasser and did not belong in this land.
The horror of the eschaton - the belief in the end of the world as a necessary prelude to a new, perfect one - is more common that we might think. Real world examples of those who sought cosmic bliss are available and easy to find through the myriad cults and extreme belief systems that still persist. When people actively seek out the end times, they are no longer passively afraid of a coming apocalypse but they become active participants in bringing it about through whatever means possible.
We live in interesting times but those who are actively seeking the end-times are the scariest creatures of all; these are not fearful, unknowable cosmic creatures but Man. Man’s evil against his fellow man are reflections of the darkness that can exist within us.
How do you reason with a belief system that sees the world and the people in it as mere obstacles to be removed or sacrifices to be made on the road to utopia? Now there’s a conundrum…anyways, I’m off to play Pacman. Wish me luck against the Inky, Blinky and Clyde. Nite!
LINK: Decarnation: Videogames As Art
LINK- Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties- Book Review (and Some Thoughts)
LINK- The Rise of Retro Gaming During Covid
LINK: Japan: My Journey to the East
LINK- Blood, Sweat and Pixels- Book Review
LINK- Utopia for Realists- Book Review
LINK- ‘Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire’ LINK: Elden Ring- Videogames As Art