Instant Horror, Just Add Special Effects

A couple of years ago I had a frightening experience. I was getting out of the shower one evening when from behind me I heard the sound of metal scraping against metal. The house was empty and I was standing there in the bathroom, naked and dripping wet, and in that instant I knew that I was about to die. Immediately I had a mental picture of my killer: a tall, stocky man with a black mustache and some sort of knife or hook in his right hand. From the location of the sound, I knew that he must be standing inside the shower that I had stepped out of moments before. For about a tenth of a second I was scared out of my wits. The next moment I heard the shampoo holder crash to the floor and realized that the sound I had heard was the holder sliding off the top of the metal shower head. I felt pretty dumb at the time, especially considering how blatantly impossible the entire scenario was, but looking back I find that moment of fear fascinating. In the time it took for my toiletries to fall six feet to the floor of the tub, my brain conjured up a detailed mental image of something scary to explain the metal scraping noise. It’s like my imagination had this scary idea prepped and ready to go, and when the right variables came together (a disturbing sound combined with the vulnerable feeling of being home alone and buck naked), it sprang to life.

Last week I saw a preview for 1408, a new horror movie based on Stephen King’s short story of the same name. I was at the theater to see Grindhouse, which was quite enjoyable (especially Tarantino’s film, Death Proof). The preview for 1408 made the film look pretty mediocre, but I found myself even more disappointed than usual by the ad. Most horror story film adaptations follow the same formula: superfluous plot and characters + contrived rationalization of mystery + special fx + special fx + special fx = profit, and it seems that 1408 is no exception. What disappointed me about the trailer for 1408 is that the filmmakers seem to have dramatically misunderstood what makes King’s short story so compelling.

1408 is a short story about a writer staying in a haunted room and getting far more than he bargained for. The thing is, most of the story doesn’t take place in the room; less than half of the pages are spent actually describing the room and the writer’s experience there. The rest is dialog between the hotel’s manager and the protagonist, annotated with the protagonist’s own thoughts and memories. And even inside the room, not much really happens to the writer: the horror he experiences is comprised mostly of a nameless, implicit threat that manifests in a few key events. Despite the brevity of this part of the story, the effect on the reader (at least, on me) is intense.

The reason the story is so effective is that King has masterfully created a structure for horror and then left most of the detail work up to our imagination. He’s provided a locale (the haunted room), a reason to be scared (various deaths and other strange occurrences that the hotel manager spends most of the story describing), and a few key events to start the reader’s mind down a path. But from there on out King becomes more of a bystander than a storyteller. The weird history of the room and the series of increasingly disturbing things that actually occur once the writer enters it are more than sufficient kindling for the reader’s imagination to catch fire. And as the story ends, King shows his real skill by just letting that fire burn: he provides no rationalization or justification for the events that take place in the story, and thereby requires his readers to decide upon some personal explanation. This personalization makes the story extremely effective; as my brain demonstrated to me on my way out of the shower, we are much better at scaring ourselves than anybody else.

The trailer for the film version


Hooray for Hollywood

of 1408 seems to suggest that most of the film will be spent in the room itself, depicting various scary things. If the filmmakers are real screwups, they’ll also try to tell the audience why all these events occur and what they should mean. Doing this completely destroys the horror that the original short story is able to induce, and reduces the film to a mere catalog of CG effects. Some might argue that film as a medium requires more explicit visual narration, but I would argue that plenty of films are able operate on the same mechanic as King’s story by suggesting a lot but showing very little. Another King story-turned-movie, The Shining, is an excellent example. The Shining continues to be an extremely effective horror film because it gives the audience just enough information to let their mind wander into whichever territory they find the most disturbing. The gamut of effects-based nightmare events that seem to comprise 1408 is a cop-out on the part of the filmmakers: it removes the need for the audience to think and consequently lessens the impact of the horror it is attempting to deliver.

I should mention as a caveat that 1408 has not yet been released and I’m judging it based entirely on a single preview, which isn’t really very fair. But though I may be picking on a trailer for an unreleased film, I think that the contrast between the content of King’s short story and the events depicted in the film preview are a good basis for my point. In my notes from GDC 2005, I described Akira Yamaoka’s approach to horror, which involves “stacking” of fragmented and convoluted information to “create space for the imagination.” I think this approach is very similar to the mechanic employed by King in 1408, and helps explain why Yamaoka’s Silent Hill series is so consistently effective.

Who ya gonna call? Ghosthunter!

This evening I finally finished playing Ghost Hunter and posted a review. I expected this game to be a pretty bland shooter and was surprised to find it to be a sometimes-inspired Ghostbusters knock-off. It actually was a lot more fun than I would have given it credit for, but it also suffers from some annoying sections and obfuscated puzzles. I see it as kind of an interesting counterpart to much more serious (but mechanically similar) games like The Suffering.

Feature: The Prehistory of Survival Horror

I have posted a new feature article: The Prehistory of Survival Horror. This article examines some early horror games and how they influenced the genre that we know and love today. Here’s an excerpt:

Alone in the Dark in particular seems to be the direct parent of the Resident Evil game design: fixed cameras, static backgrounds, a character-centric control scheme, pivot-in-place combat mechanics, Victorian mansions, rationing of ammunition and health, and two playable characters (one male, one female), just to name a few obvious similarities. The direct line of influence on Resident Evil from Sweet Home is also clear: both Capcom games take a hard line approach to item management (though the blow was slightly softened in Resident Evil, as the player was granted more inventory space and inter-connected item boxes). Even Uninvited seems to have left its mark in the way that every area in Resident Evil must be throughly ransacked for items, clues, and notebooks.

This article ended up being way more interesting to write than I expected. As I got into looking at the similarities between popular modern games and their predecessors, I realized that the relationship between these games on several game design axes is quite clear. Check it out and let me know what you think.

April First

Ah, April Fools. What better way to get back into the habit of regular updates? My work life has just gone back to semi-normal, I’ve got some vacation coming up, and a bunch of updates to the site planned. A new feature is in the works, plus I have a lot of info to report on recent horror games. Sorry for being away for so long, but I think updates should be much more regular starting now.

Update: Now that the day is done, I’ve archived this year’s fake page.

Penumbra: Overture demo available

Thomas over at Frictional Games wrote me this morning about the new demo of their game, Prenumbra: Overture. Prenumbra is an indy horror game, and the team is using physics to create interactions that are pretty different than what we’ve seen before. They had a teaser demo a while back that was pretty impressive, and I’m looking forward to trying this new release. Though this is a PC game, it’s definitely worth checking out.

The Darkness

Kotaku.com has some video footage of the upcoming Xbox360/PS3 horror game The Darkness. I’ve held off talking about this game because it hasn’t been clear if it’s really a horror game or just another first person shooter with a lot of monsters. The footage seems to clear that up: though you play the antagonist, it seems like it is clearly designed to make the player quiver in their boots. I’ll post more about this game once I learn a little more.

Silent Hill Arcade Shooter

I’m sorry, I can’t not post this. Kotaku.com has a bunch of images from the new Silent Hill arcade game. You read that right. It’s a shooter, set in the Silent Hill universe, with lots of fog and film grain. And zombies. That’s like Silent Hill, right? Fog + film grain + zombies = winning formula, right? It even has Pyramid Head, whom you can apparently shoot, despite his blatant invulnerability to guns in Silent Hill 2. But hey, it’s got the Silent Hill logo on it, so it must be great, right guys?

Making a shooter out of a horror game is probably pretty tough. I’ve not really been impressed with the Resident Evil Gaiden / Dead Aim series (though I should play both more to be fair). But for a game like Silent Hill, where shooting is infrequent and often actively discouraged, this kind of thing seems like quite a stretch. Though it is clearly an attempt to cash in on a popular license, I suppose I’m not as irked by this game as I could be: the arcade scene is a really tough market, and I can actually see that arcade games might not even be made unless they are insulated by some brand or license. Still, this looks pretty terrible. Maybe next time I am in Japan I can try it out.

This is Crunch


hard work by Luis Becerril

I wake up at 6:45. Brush my teeth, drink my coffee, realize I have to brush my teeth again. Check my work e-mail from home, read through the 30-odd messages that have already arrived, and respond as coherently as possible to a few. I try to get out of the house by 7:30, and I have a 30 minute commute down the peninsula to work. The drive isn’t bad; I take the old highway to avoid the traffic jams and huge trucks.

At 8:00 I’m sitting in front of my computer reading yet more e-mail and downloading the latest changes to our project. I spend most of the next ten hours tracking down an annoyingly difficult crash bug and trying to keep up with the constant flurry of e-mails. I’m drinking coffee like a maniac, four or five cups a day at this point, and even skipping lunch I don’t have enough time in the day to get everything done.

This is crunch. This is the dark underbelly of the game industry, when the plans have failed and now a hardcore push to the finish is all that can be done. Nose, meet grindstone. Whether or not this level of effort is required is hard to say: there’s a lot to be done, but it’s unclear if working 70 hour weeks will really result in a perceptibly better game in the end. I sure hope it does–it would suck if we all killed ourselves for nothing.

This is part of the reason that bad games get made. Nobody sets out to make a bad game, but when time gets tight and people are working their fingers to the bone, a lot of stuff ends up on the cutting room floor. Sometimes it is stuff that nobody will ever miss, like an extra level that was never any fun, or cut scene that didn’t impact the story. Sometimes it’s a more dramatic cut, like something that is required for the game to be enjoyable. But usually, these cuts are made because at the end of the day, the choice between shipping a bad game and shipping nothing at all isn’t even a choice. By the time crunch mode sets in, the money has already been invested and there must be some sort of return. Will our project turn out well? Right now it is hard to say if we’ll pull it off or just start in with the scalpel.

I get home and completely exhausted. Even as I type this my eyelids are heavy. Tomorrow is Saturday, and I’m getting up at 8 to go in again. Soon we will ship and I’ll be able to write more coherently. Soon we will ship and I’ll be able to think straight again.

2006 Was a Bad Year


Not good

At least for horror gamers, 2006 was pretty much the worst year in a decade. Excepting games with horror themes but no intent to scare (like Dead Rising), only two games classifiable as horror were released. One of them, Siren 2, was restricted to Europe and Japan. The other, Rule of Rose, got awful reviews.

Yes, the year of 2006 was a hard 12 months for us horror gamers. I mean, sure, 2001 was a pretty bad year. That year, the average score for horror games was below 65%. And 1997 wasn’t too hot either: games like

Nightmare Creatures and Enemy Zero were all that was available. But both 1997 and 2001 saw the release of five games, and while none of them were all that great, horror gamers at least had some selection to tide them over. In 2006, we got one game (or two, if you live in Europe), a catalog more paltry than any other year since 1994.

What have we done to deserve this? In 2005, 15 games were released with us horror gamers as the target audience. On top of that, some of those games really good (like Resident Evil 4). How can the well have dried up so fast?

The answer? “Next Gen.” Those two small words spelled doom not only for horror games, but for all kinds of niche genres. Developers were hunkered down with their new development kits, spending millions on the creation of new titles for the Xbox360, PS3, and Wii. It was time for them to spend more than they have ever spent before on development (as next gen development is much more costly than current gen), but also a time for developers to assume much more risk than usual. The launch of any new console, not to mention consoles retailing at exorbitant prices, can be hard for developers, as the installed base does not yet exist and


Relative sales of survival horror games (North America, all platforms)

profit projections are difficult.

Next gen complaints are frequent on this site, so I’ll spare you that particular rant. Suffice to say that in the grand scheme of things, horror games are small potatoes. With the exception of the Resident Evil series, most horror games don’t move enough units to really warrant interest from the publishers. I mean, compared to main stream blockbusters, Resident Evil 4 was a pretty successful game. But the sales of Silent Hill 2, 3, and 4 combined can’t match it. Games like the Fatal Frame series are way behind that. And Rule of Rose? It has sold so badly that it barely even shows up in my graph.

In the context of the video game market as a whole, survival horror is barely a blip on the radar. Horror games are released when niche genres can still do well. That is to say, they are an indicator that risk (and cost) is low. The absolute absence of horror games in 2006 indicates that they are just too risky for publishers to pursue at the moment, especially as the next generation consoles have yet to fall into an obvious ranking. That’s not to say that the genre is dead, just that it’s too small to rate with most publishers. When every release must be a mega-hit to make money, genres like this aren’t even worthy of consideration. But when the market sways back into balance (as it will when the next gen consoles begin to reach a larger and larger audience), we’ll see them return. And the big guns, the Capcoms and Konamis, sell well enough that they can assume the risk presented by next gen.

But we may have to wait a little while until the little guys, the games with new ideas and crazy new game mechanics, are able to return to the market place.