The World of Scary Video Games

A Study in Videoludic Horror

Bernard Perron

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501316210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

As for film and literature, the horror genre has been very popular in the video game. The World of Scary Video Games provides a comprehensive overview of the videoludic horror, dealing with the games labelled as "survival horror" as well as the mainstream and independent works associated with the genre. It examines the ways in which video games have elicited horror, terror and fear since Haunted House (1981). Bernard Perron combines an historical account with a theoretical approach in order to offer a broad history of the genre, outline its formal singularities and explore its principal issues. It studies the most important games and game series, from Haunted House ( 1981) to Alone in the Dark (1992- ), Resident Evil (1996-present), Silent Hill (1999-present), Fatal Frame (2001-present), Dead Space (2008-2013), Amnesia: the Dark Descent (2010), and The Evil Within (2014). Accessibly written, The World of Scary Video Games helps the reader to trace the history of an important genre of the video game.

PART ONE

The genre

CHAPTER ONE

The horror: Falling into the arena of video game genres

While genres may make meaning by regulating and co-ordinating disparate users, they always do so in an arena where users with divergent interests compete to carry out their own programmes.

Rick Altman, Film/Genre, [1999] 2000, p. 215

As part of the “Approaches to Digital Game Studies” series, this book seeks to fill the gap in our field between general theory and analysis of particular works by focusing on game genres. In order to rectify the “genre blindness” Rune Klevjer (2006) identified within game studies more than ten years ago, it is indispensable to commence our journey by discussing the concept of genre. As addressed in the introduction, since horror remains one of the most popular mainstream genres with the most written about it, one does not enter into its dark land without guidance. To stay in the audiovisual realm, first and foremost for the reason that horror films have had a great impact on the development of scary video games, cinema scholars have been cautiously mapping the territory over the last few decades. These past luciferous explorations need to be followed, and I’ll proceed closely from one marker to the next to start with. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that the trail is smooth or that everything has been perfectly well charted indeed, it may not even be possible to do so. What’s more, getting through the videoludic frontier obviously brings its own challenges.

Crossing paths with a “monstrous” concept

Following Steve Neale in Genre and Hollywood, horror might be considered one of the “uncontentious” major genres because “the terms critics and theorists have used have generally coincided with those used by the industry itself, and the films categorized or discussed under the headings these terms have provided have for the most part been categorized or described in the same way by the industry’s relay” (2000: 45). At first look, most film horror scholars seem to agree with this observation. After stating in the preface that horror is often seen as “the most peculiar and the most predictable of all film genres” (2004: vii), Peter Hutchings begins The Horror Film by stressing that

defining what a horror film is should be easy. After all, “horror film” is a widely used term. You will find it in film marketing: for example, a recent poster campaign for the American film Jeepers Creepers (2001) proclaimed it “the best US horror movie in the last ten years” presumably on the confident basis that everyone looking at the poster would know what that meant. You will also find it in film reference books, listings magazines and as a section in most video rental outlets. As is the case for the other main film genres, including the western, the musical and the thriller, there is a familiarity about the designation “horror film” and an accompanying assumption, both by the market and by critics, that audiences generally understand the term enough to organise their own viewing in relation to it, either—depending on their tastes—by actively seeking out horror films or by avoiding them like the plague. (2004: 1)

Writer and director Victor Salva will certainly have given the audience of Jeepers Creepers their fair share of jump scares and creepy moments. The movie follows the typical, accidental yet morbidly curious victims in the young sister and brother driving back home through the rural country, exploits some diabolic themes, and, above all, resuscitates an ancient demon (or “some hungry thing from a wicked place somewhere in time” says a character) so the mayhem can break out after dark. Theoreticians inevitably refer to this last core element: “Horror films, foremost, revolve around the monster and its threat to individual characters. The stakes are high because the struggle . . . is often not only a mortal but a metaphysical one. The horror story turns fear, whether personal or social, into a specific type of monster; and seeks to contain and destroy it” (Worland, 2007: 17). However, knowing that the monster is regarded in Noël Carroll’s seminal Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart as “impure and unclean” (1990: 23; we’ll come back about this in Chapter 10), to consider horror in the light of such a creature is not enough to make us feel safe in a fixed position toward the genre.

De facto, Hutchings immediately qualifies his remarks about the characterization of a horror film:

Yet if one looks at the way that film critics and film historians have written about horror, a certain imprecision becomes apparent regarding how the genre is actually constituted. Not only do these critics and historians differ as to whether horror is a bad thing or a good thing, degrading or uplifting, mindless or thought provoking; they also sometimes differ as to which films should be thought of as horror films and which should not. This is particularly the case when attempts are made to separate out horror from the science fiction genre. (2004: 1)

Brigid Cherry quickly moves in the same direction as Hutchings.¹ She implies in Horror that while “it should be easy to define a genre by its distinctive set of characteristics, formulaic plots and identifiable visual style,” “this is not quite so true of horror” (2009: 1–2). She supports her statement by referring among others to Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1978), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), I Spit on Your Grave/Day of the Woman (Meir Zarchi, 1978), Interview with the Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994), Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998), and Saw (James Wan, 2004). Cherry observes about these films:

Some are set in the past, many in the present, one or two in the future. Several contain impossible supernatural monsters, others merely all too human killers, a small number improbable—yet physically possible—extra-terrestrial creatures, the odd exception may not—or may after all (hesitation being the key)—even contain a monster. A fair number are extremely violent and/or gory, others rely on a creepy atmosphere. . . . Many tell a story from the point of view of the victims, others from that of the monster. Some are about revenge, several feature the struggle to survive, a few embrace death. It is not simply that there is a range of conventions that offers some degree of variation on a coherent, formulaic theme (as there are with other genres such as westerns or action films), but that this genre is marked by a sheer diversity of conventions, plots and styles. (2009: 2)

The heterogeneous or “monstrous” nature of the horror genre becomes more evident, for instance, when it is compared to the western. The films constituting the bulk of the western “herd” take place in a more specific period and in a more delimited location (the Wild West during the last half of the nineteenth century at the American frontier), tell in a continuous way the conflict between wilderness and civilization (as opposed to the struggle between Good and Evil of horror), and have since the beginning featured archetypal characters (cowboys, Indians, outlaws, or the cavalry) as well as recognizable iconography (i.e., horses, cowboy hats, Colt six-shooters, saloons, vast desert landscapes, etc.).² Highlighted by Rick Altman in Film/Genre, there is another important difference between the two genres: “Whether the Western is defined iconographically or structurally, Western-ness is virtually always assumed to be located in key aspects of the films themselves. In contrast, definitions of the horror genre usually stress viewer experience” ([1999] 2000: 86). It is based on the response to the genre that James B. Twitchell goes further in his survey of horror in art, literature, and cinema and claims in Dreadful Pleasures: An Anatomy of Modern Horror: “Horror art is not, strictly speaking, a genre; it is rather a collection of motifs in a usually predictable sequence that gives us a specific physiological effect—the shivers” (1985: 8).³ Although I will study in detail the effects on the viewer and gamer in Chapter 3, their significance nonetheless needs to be emphasized right away in that they steer toward an essential interrogation called to our attention by Mark Jancovich, here again in the initial page of Horror, The Film Reader:

The history of writing on the horror genre has been dominated by two key questions. First, there is the question of what one might mean by terms such as “horror,” and this usually becomes a question of how one defines the horror genre and so identifies its essential features. This first question also presupposes a second and more fundamental question: what is a film genre, or more properly, what should be meant by the term “genre” when it is used in film studies? Even those writings on horror that have not addressed these questions directly are almost invariably—if not inevitably—structured by their definitions of the term “genre” in general and “the horror genre” in particular. (2002: 1)

There is without a doubt no straight way out when we decide to enter the domain of genres.

With all due respect to Steve Neale, there are no “uncontentious” genres. Instead of speaking about what would be impregnable fortresses, genre criticism and genre theory must have taught us by now that when we deal with this notion, we do fall in what is more likely a vast arena where various discursive forces in flux confront each other—this is what Altman’s quote—used as an epigraph to this chapter—is formulating as well.⁴ We must in fact agree with Altman and “conclude that genre is not permanently located in any single place, but may depend at different times on radically differing criteria” ([1999] 2000: 86). The effects of horror, which need to be constantly perfected if they don’t want to lose their impact, exemplify this constant dislocation. For a contemporary viewer, The Wolf Man (George Waggner, 1941)—and the werewolf transformation of Lon Chaney Jr. depicted in a few dissolves of his feet turning into paws—would certainly be less frightening than the eponymous remake directed by Joe Johnston (2010), and the very bodily and forthright metamorphosis of Benicio Del Toro strapped to a chair. Likewise, the former might not even be viewed nowadays as a “horror” movie. According to Worland: “The first uses of the term ‘horror movie’ by critics and industry commentators appeared in 1931–2 upon release of Universal’s Dracula [Tod Browning, 1931] and Frankenstein [James Whale, 1931] and similar productions by other studios, as observers noted the arrival of something new and groped for a commonly accepted name” (Worland, 2007: 18–19). In that vein, productions prior to 1931 shouldn’t be christened “horror movies” since they were neither thought nor marketed under this umbrella. According to Raphaëlle Moine in Cinema Genre:

A cinematic genre only appears when it is named and designated as such, since its existence is tied to an awareness of it that is agreed upon and shared by a community. Thus, the first occurrence of a genre is not to be sought, retrospectively, in films that correspond to a category established a posteriori, but in the discourse held about the films. ([2002] 2008: 142)

To say “it is likely that the very first motion picture was a horror film,” as Tony Magistrale does in the first line of Abject Terrors: Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Film ([2005] 2007: xi), and to identify it as Georges Méliès’ The Devil’s Manor /Le Manoir du diable (1896),⁵ denotes perfectly how theorists and historians often give a genre a “post-dated birth certificate” (Moine, [2002] 2008: 142). Conversely, the study of the horror genre didn’t come without delay or hesitation. While the Universal monster movies of the 1930s are among those looked at in Carlos Clarens’ An Illustrated History of the Horror Films (1967)—considered to be one of the first American books dedicated to the genre—they are in French examined in books entitled Le fantastique au cinéma (Michel Laclos, 1958) and Le cinéma fantastique (René Prédal, 1970). Horror might then not be labeled as a genre, but as a subgenre or, along with science fiction and fantasy, a “main branch” of the “family of the fantastic film” as Worland views it (2007: 22–24).⁶ The delineation is not simple to make, even in the view of Steve Neale: “As has often been noted, it is sometimes very difficult to distinguish between horror and science fiction. Not only that, it can at times be difficult to distinguish between horror and the crime film, and science fiction, adventure and fantasy as well” (2000: 85). It’s unlikely that genres didn’t or won’t go through hybridizations and mutations. Genrification is therefore better seen as a process.⁷

Rather than talking about horror and genre in general as a category, a structure, a formula,⁸ or, following the expression popularized by Andrew Tudor, only as “what we collectively believe it to be” (Tudor, 1974: 139), I will align myself with those theoreticians who carry on the spatial metaphor I have used. As Christine Gledhill asserts in “Rethinking genre,” we must remember that “genre is first and foremost a boundary phenomenon. Like cartographers, early genre critics sought to define fictional territories and the borders which divided, for example, western from gangster film, thriller from horror film, romantic comedy from musical . . . . Not surprisingly, the process of establishing territories leads to border disputes” (Gledhill, 2000: 221–22). Consequently, since the concept is utilized by different “interest groups” (filmmakers and producers, game designers and developers, journalists and critics, historians and scholars of various disciplines) not confining themselves inside closed and immovable frontiers, its productivity lies in the fact that “boundaries are defined, eroded, defended, and redrawn. Genre analysis tells us not just about kinds of films, but about the cultural work of pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE The genre
• PART TWO The history
• PART THREE The scare tactics
• Afterword
• References
• Ludography
• Index
• Copyright