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Videogames Make Better Horror Than Movies?
Wired author Clive Thompson has up an article stating that, with today's jaded audiences, videogames are more effective horror-conveyances than movies. Thompson argues that the removal of the fourth wall, placing the player directly into the story, overcomes the obstacles movie-makers face when telling a scary story. "I'll start down a corridor, hear something freaky up ahead, then freeze in panic. Maybe if I stay quiet the monster will go away? S^!t, maybe it's already headed this way, and I should move! But if I move the monster will hear me ... so maybe I should stay quiet ... gaaaaah! Games already seem like dream states. You're wandering around a strange new world, where you simultaneously are and aren't yourself. This is already an inherently uncanny experience. That's why a well-made horror game feels so claustrophobically like being locked inside a really bad -- by which I mean a really good -- nightmare." Do you agree? Is your favorite scary tale a movie ... or a game? (Silent Hill, I'm looking at you.)
The thought of playing a video game in no way fills me with the same sense of horror as the thought of watching a Uwe Boll movie based on the game.
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I've never been scared by a movie, ever. But I almost soiled myself the first time I played Resident Evil (the part where the dogs jump through the window in particular).
I don't agree. While you're playing the game, you have some sort of an adrenaline rush, that effectively makes you immune to any kind of scare the developers might devise. That, and the inherent stupidity of the monsters you'll encounter surely makes them less of a threat.
But, on the bright side, it's easier to make a specific mood in a game, and make the player be afraid of that, for example - I was absolutely scared of playing Ultima Underworld alone when I was about ten or eleven. There was something in those dark corridors, bones lying around, and the music that provided the tension needed to scare the hell out of me. And it works today, too. Not in the way Doom3 would like us to have, but, for example, BioShock manages to capture the freaky atmosphere perfectly, making you look around your shoulder far more often.
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You know a demon's going to teleport into the closet when you do! Video games just provide a better environment for horror. Yes, the whole forth wall thing, but also the environment you play in. You often play them alone, in a dark room. You choose how long the suspense lasts before you pickup that gun. In the end, however, you do pickup the gun... and when nothing happens; it gets worse because the environment didn't react the way you expected. Until you turn around of course.
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The screeches of the monkeys in System Shock 2 always freak me out, no matter how many times I play it. (playing BioShock right now and it's nowhere near as scary as SS2 IMHO)
Or the sounds Haunts make in the Thief series.. eek.
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I heard good things about Alien Doom so when I finally downloaded it I turned off the lights to get the most from the experience.
For the first 20 minutes or so you are creeping through corridors, always wondering what might appear around the next corner. Nothing much actually happens except that the corridors gradually become more and more covered in alien slime. You go through several levels without actually seeing any enemies, even though you know you must be getting closer to their lair.
All of a sudden an alien jumps at you out of nowhere.
I have never before and never since been more scared by a computer game.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
The interactivity of a game makes for a scarier and more intense experience than any film can provide, now that graphics are becoming more and more realistic. In a game, the player feels like he's actually a part of the story, rather than merely a spectator.
The original Half Life was a really classic example of this. You could make a decent monster movie along the same plot, but you wouldn't have quite the tension.
EG, the tension where you are creeping through the silo with the giant tentacles, the first time you meet the big shark-thingy, the elation and then horror as the marines come, etc....
A movie wouldn't be nearly as immersive.
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While it didn't have the whole game, there's a level in it - The Cradle - that's absolutely, completely spooky. Running around a burned-out building that used to be both an insane asylum AND an orphanage...
Why exactly would a game be inherently better than a movie for the horror genre? Hell, a novel could be just as effective as either one of those mediums.
It comes down to good writing. The reason most horror movies aren't particularly effective is because the writing is such garbage. If these writes were to produce scripts for games those games would be equally ineffective at being scary.
If anything, I'd argue that it's easier to make a good horror movie than it is to produce a scary game. It's very easy to manage pacing in a movie. The entire thing is nicely packaged and the director has complete control over the movie. With a game, in addition to the underlying plot a creator has to be concerned with how the gamer interacts with the game. How to convey the proper atmosphere and provide appropriate challenges without making the game tedious.
Ultimately, this is the problem I've found with nearly all horror games, including the Resident Evil series. The game hits a point where they're wandering back and forth trying to find something, or are given these odd tasks for the sake of providing some level of gameplay ultimately reminding me that I'm just playing a game. With a movie or a novel, I know it's fake, but I don't have to worry about some gameplay mechanic disrupting the experience and thus it's easier for me to become engrossed in the story.
For me the experience of watching a movie is usually so far removed from that of playing a game that I can't directly compare them. While a movie can use a particular character or characters as surrogates for the audience, youre essentially watching things happen to other people. You can be sympathetically scared for them, but you don't really feel scared for yourself.
When you're playing a game, that avatar on the screen is, for all intents and purposes, you. You're not just watching some movie star go down the stairs to their doom, you have to choose to go down those stairs yourself. The experience of that sort of scare is very different, and to me much more personal, than the one-sided character/spectator relationship in films and such.
The only experience that for me sort of blurs that line between those two types of scares is listening to an audio play, such as radio drama or Big Finish Productions' audio CDs. When I'm listening to one of those I usually have my eyes closed and my imagination turned up high, and thus tend to see things from more of a first-person perspective in my mind's eye. A good horror story on audio can therefore approach the levels of immersion that a good video game provides, without being interactive.
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...was playing Fatal Frame in the pitch black of night. No movie has ever terrified me more than the tension that builds up with the ambient soundtrack and the tiny light that tells you something is near, to activate the camera and go into 1st person mode, creeping along to find the ghostly image before it jumps out at you.
Anyone who's played it will no doubt remember the chilling moment while you tiptoe down the Rope Hallway and the red light comes on, looking up and coming face to face with Vengeance.
Silent hill sums it up perfectly, the movie wasn't too far removed from the games, but the movie isn't scary compared to the games and it's for 1 simple reason. Movies will continue no matter what, you can walk away and shrug and they will still play. Where as in a game you take control and must continue the fear to continue the plot.
Silent Hill games make you feel like at any moment you could be jumped by some insanely powerful monster and then it toys with you with the radio, a little noise here, a little growl there, is it just random noise or is a complete freak out monster about to maim you? who knows? These things get to us, we have no idea -how- to rationally deal with these things because they are beyond all logic, movies we can go "CGI" "Make up" "hero must survive" and then we play silent hill and suddenly it's "oh fuck, what the hell is going on?"
One thing I would note is the cultural differences, Japanese horror tends to work on tension and supernatural things. Ghosts, bumps in the night, general feeling of unease. Where as Western horror tends to be more gore and shock, the gore and shock has long ago lost it's shock value to us adults, where as the feeling of tension is very hard to break no matter what.
Compare Resident evil (Western horror style) with Silent Hill (Japanese horror style) and you'll see one is scary for a while, where as the other continues to be scary even if you're in a safe room with nothing creepy ever.
And just because it needs mentioning. The mannequin beheading event in Silent hill 3 is the scariest moment I've ever had in a game, just insanely creepy even though it presented no danger to me, it felt like I HAD to leave that room or something would behead me next.
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I'd have to vote for the moment when the green alien dude (whom you've mistaken for a fellow astronaut in need of rescue from a forbidding otherworldly fractal-scape) pops up in front of your damn windshield and starts banging his way into your spaceship in Rescue on Fractalus, one of the first games ever to come out of Lucasarts. I used to play that on an Atari 800XT and it used to scare the hell out of me.
But there's a difference between that (relatively) easy videogame shock and the sense of deep disquiet that a really good horror movie can instill in you. It's true that the average scary game may make you jump more often than the average scary movie -- which rarely seems interested in the kind of classic horror-movie atmospherics that inform current game design -- but that's because the average scary movie really, really sucks. They're targeted at an audience of high-schoolers and/or gorehounds. Rob Zombie's movies may be *meaner* than anything this side of Manhunt, but they're certainly not scarier.
But the best scary movies are about something bigger than jolts. It may be hard, after several decades' fetishization of H.R. Giger's designs for the original Alien, to understand just how deeply creepy those insectoid, vaguely sexual, shapes up on screen were. It's easy to forget, watching the original Halloween at home on a letterboxed Anchor Bay DVD, what that movie looked and felt like, back in the day, when it was playing up on the big Panavision-sized screen in the kind of cavernous movie house that doesn't exist anymore.
There are some contemporary examples as well. Before their visual tropes became the stuff of cliché, Japanese horror movies like Ringu and Kairo brought the scary pretty effectively. 28 Weeks Later spun anxiety about avian flu and the Iraq war into a haunting zombie yarn about the dissolution of the family unit and wartime theatrics. The Descent had some real white-knuckle moments involving strangely deformed creatures in the near-total darkness. I love Bioshock and the immersive experience it provides in all its Dolby Digital 5.1 glory but the seams show -- the lines of dialogue spoken by the splicers are repeated too often, the gamepad mechanics are a little too abstract, the high-polygon creatures and texture-mapped environments just a little too uncanny-valley. Shocks-per-minute rate aside, the movies provide by far the more enveloping -- and aesthetically compelling -- psychological experience.
... I was playing Bioshock. I had just killed my first big daddy. I was badly injured, I had almost no ammo left. I looked for a vending machine to buy some ammo and health when a SECOND big daddy comes around. I hid under the stairs in the game and hoped he wouldn't see me because I was so low on everything. I saved and went to bed.
Let me breathe a bit after that first encounter. That was brutal.
"They took my baby!" Heebie-jeebie hoo-ha scared all night.
And the first appearance of the Pinky? "Wow, huh. That looks tough. HOLYCRAPITSCOMINGHOLYCRAPITSCOMING!"
...but a great original 1985-era scary game was Rescue on Fractalus (it used actual fractals to generate an alien landscape, hence the title). You'd rescue downed pilots, who would see you land, run under your ship disappearing from view and (pause) there'd be a taptaptap to let them in. The trick was sometimes, after the pilot had disappeared from view, the "pilot" was really an alien and it'd SUDDELNY JUMP UP ON YOUR WINDSHIELD COMPLETE WITH SCARY MUSIC AND IT'S BANGING TO GET IT KILLITKILLITKILLIT!!! Great times, I'd play it with a friend and we'd both about wet ourselves.
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one little section in Max Payne... That dreamish sequence where he walks into the dark on that vine-ish looking tightrope... Mayhaps it's jus' 'cause I'm a parent, but hearing that dead baby cry and call out while surrounded by darkness gave my goosebumps goosebumps.
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Look at you, Hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?
Best horror "movie" out right now is Bioshock. :)
I think there's three reasons:
1. A game is more immersive.
2. The game probably gets a lot more thought put into it than a horror movie.
3. The horror movie genre has become the "virtual snuff film" genre and caters to sick fucks.
Mod me flame bait for #3 if you must, but I completely stand by it.
They're releasing a "Art Of Bioshock" book. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an "Art Of Hostel" or "Art Of Saw" book.
I'm sorry, the link to the "3D Monster Maze" video was incorrect; here it is. Don't have nightmares! :-)
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I really enjoy horror films. It's a shame there are so few good ones. Blood and gore aren't scary, they're just gross. Pulling your audience in, making them believe one thing and then jerking the carpet out from under them leaves a much deeper impact. The gaming industry is learning this.
I thoroughly enjoyed "Saw" for it's suspense. It wasn't really a gory film at all despite what the author of TFA says. I'd wager only a few gallons of fake blood were used in both Saw movies. "Saw II" and the pit of needles... that freaked me out enough that I was squirming in the theater seat and turning my head away from the screen. We each have our own deepest fears. "Dusk til Dawn" had blood by the 55 gallon drum, but it wasn't scary at all. "Hostel," rated as the scariest movie of 2006, was pathetically tame and generally stupid. (Push the eye back in, idiot, don't snip it off.) The wife discovering her husband had killed in "What Lies Beneath" or the little boy's reaction of "You weren't supposed to help her," in "The Ring" were classic, gut-wrenching twists.
I played the BioShock demo. Once I got past the immature gore, it did develop into a layered, creepy environment with a fairly original story. I didn't like it well enough to buy it, but with the lack of quality horror films, I may start turning to horror games more often. I just hope they aren't all FPS since that's my least favorite genre.
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If you think the scary parts of Doom3, HL 1/2, FEAR, STALKER, etc are immersive when you are sober, try game night with a two drink minimum. One more reason games are way scarier than movies - you rarely watch movies (at the theater) under the influence, but you play all your games with a few drinks in you (at night with the lights off) and the last bit of disbelief fades away and you are there, living it. There are a few places in Doom3 where (a few glasses of scotch in my system) I had to turn it off and walk around the house turning on lights.
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