Article: How to Make Fear

There’s a pretty good article over at Next-Gen.biz about the creation of fear through media like film and games. It’s all rather general and doesn’t really get into any specifics with regards to games or movies, but the author makes a lot of valid points. If you are interested in the mechanics of building tension, it’s a pretty good read. Thanks to forums member vajra for the link.

Web News Roundup

As we approach Halloween, the number of sites running stories about horror game seems to steadily increase. Here’s a couple of interesting links I saw today:

  • Rumor Mongering: Silent Hill Origins appears to be in serious trouble. It’s all rumor at the moment (and it should be noted that employees who’ve recently been laid off sometimes try to start rumors about their former employers out of spite), but if the story proves true then I think the chances of this game coming out are pretty slim.
  • Here’s a nice retrospective of the Resident Evil series.
  • Lastly, Strategy Informer has picked a fairly awful list of Halloween-themed games. The stars are in there, but it’s sort of sad to see some of the lesser known gems of this genre lose to games like Theme Park World.

Article: Fraidy Cat Gamer

I followed a link from Slashdot Games to this interesting post about the difference between horror games and horror movies over at the hilariously titled GamersWithJobs.com. The author admits to being absolutely terrified by horror games despite having no trouble with horror movies. The point he makes, which is a big part of the reason I am running this site, is that the level of emotional involvement that a video game can produce can be much higher than passive media like film. Playing the roll of the main character means that we are unable to use common cliches as a defense against fear. I think that this type of involvement is possible for other types of games as well, but the horror game genre seem to be where the best of the best currently reside.

The Role of Lighting


This room isn’t pitch black, but it’s dark enough for us to be worried.

Though I didn’t think it was a great film, one of the things I dug about Juon 2 was the way the director used lighting to suggest some sort of abstract malice. Unlike many traditional horror movies, Juon 2 doesn’t rely on pitch-black locales to build tension; instead, it suggests that the characters in the film could be attacked anywhere where there is the slightest degree of shadow. It also seems to be necessary that the victims be alone, but the director makes it clear that well-lit rooms are no defense against the film’s traveling curse.

I think that director Takashi Shimizu’s goal here is to keep the audience on the edge of their seat by suggesting that nowhere is safe. The antagonist of the film isn’t contained by a dilapidated mansion or haunted graveyard; she can strike anywhere, even during the day or in a brightly lit room. The protagonists have nowhere to hide, and unlike many lesser horror films, the audience has no chance to relax.

Once the director has communicated this idea to the audience (as he did so effectively with a particular apartment scene in the first Juon), we begin to scrutinize every shot for possible danger. The power of a small shadow or slightly dark corner is dramatically increased, as we know that it might be the source of immediate danger.


Even a little bit of shadow in the corner can be suggestive.

This puts Shimizu in an incredibly powerful position over the audience; if he wants to create tension, all he needs to do is put his characters in a room by themselves and include the mere suggestion of darkness. Juon 2 shows that this method can produce high-tension scenes without relying on music, tricky camera work, or any sort of special effects. Any further suggestion of malice (such as the tendency in Juon for common appliances to reveal impending danger) only increases the suggestion of danger produced by his approach to lighting. The result, I think, is a rather relentless pressure on the viewer that increases as the film slowly unveils the horror at hand.

Unfortunately, Shimizu damages his own tension with a terrible script and a few completely out-of-place scenes. But there are a few moments in the film where his ability to use light suggestively makes an otherwise predictable scene pretty scary stuff.

I think that there are several video games that are already taking advantage of this sort of approach. The Silent Hill series, especially Silent Hill 2, have used suggestive lighting to dramatically increase the level of tension inflicted on the player. Unlike Resident Evil, which gives the player


Silent Hill switches between ambient light and the flashlight to produce different moods.

easy-to-identify safe rooms, the Silent Hill series has often employed varying levels of ambient light to suggest the relative danger of its various otherworldly locales. These games also switch between areas with some ambient light and areas that are are only visible through the tight beam of the flashlight. Here the message is the same but the effect is a little more direct: nowhere is safe because danger lurks everywhere. The radio in Silent Hill serves the same purpose as the rogue appliances in Juon: to incrementally increase the tension already created by the rest of the scene.

Though horror movies have traditionally relied on scenes that are pitch-black to sell the idea that danger may be lurking in the darkness, movies like Juon 2 show that the same effect can be achieved without turning out all the lights. Once the audience has been lead to believe that any shadow may harbor danger, everyday locations can easily host tension-filled scenes. Though it seems like the same sorts of techniques are applicable to video games as well, very few developers actually take advantage of this sort of iterative creation of tension.

Sorry if this is all sort of a stream-of-consciousness. In the future I have some other random thoughts about techniques that games developers could learn from modern horror film, but this post is already long enough.

Siren 3

The MagicBox is reporting that Siren 3 for PS3 has been announced by sony. No details yet, but I think that rules.

Now if we can just get them to release Siren 2 here in America.

Juon 2

In preparation for the American version of The Grudge 2, I decided to watch the original sequel to Juon, which was itself a remake of a TV movie. In total, I think there are at least six versions of these movies, all directed by the same director and all pretty much the same. To its credit, the latest American remake looks pretty different than the Japanese version, so maybe that iteration will change things up a bit.

Juon 2, however, is pretty much a perfect-to-form sequel to Juon. The director, Takashi Shimizu, has making this movie down to a science; it almost seems as if each scene can be described by an equation with slightly different variables. All the neat things from the first film return in the sequel: backwards, Memento-style storytelling, a curse that jumps from one person to the next like a virus, modern-day appliances behaving maliciously, and a female antagonist with long, face-obscuring hair. The first Juon also experimented a with a sort of time warp effect for one of its characters, which felt out of place because it did not match the rest of the film. Juon 2, on the other hand, takes that idea and makes it central to the presentation, with pretty great results. Shimizu has also progressed as a cinematographer: the shots, sets, and lighting are pretty high quality, and seem to be a distinct improvement over the original film.

That said, Juon 2 also has some fatal flaws. First of all, the story is sort of pointless. The main resolution of the first film explained to us why Kayako, the antagonist, likes to kill people in interesting ways. Having answered that question, the second film doesn’t really have anywhere else to go. We have a cast of characters that are assaulted by Kayako one after the other, but there’s no overall tension or drama to the story itself: it’s just a collection of scary scenes. I guess there is an attempt to tie the story together with a single, reoccurring character, but this just leads to a really dumb ending. While Shimizu is an expert at creating a five-minute scene that is full of tension, he seems to lose focus when considering the film as a while. I thought another of his films, Marebito, had the same problem.

As in the first film, Shimizu also shoots himself in the foot a couple of times with some really, really poorly done special effects. While not as egregious as the original Juon, Juon 2 has a scene or two where I was just unable to suspend my disbelief any longer. These scenes are minor and they don’t ruin the film, but they do sort of pull you out of the scary mood.

So, in summary, Juon 2 is almost exactly the same as Juon, only with less overall plot focus. If you liked the first movie, you’ll probably enjoy the second. If you hated the first movie, there’s nothing here that you’ll find any better. If you are looking for Japanese ghosts killing girls, you can do far worse than this film, but if you care about plot or script, you may be disappointed. While Juon 2 perfectly replicates the good parts of its predecessor, it also suffers from a lot of the same flaws.

Franky, Fatal Frame is Freaky

I was all set to give Fatal Frame III the highest score of the series, something around an 8.5. I gave the second game an 8.3 for being well executed but sort of lacking in focus, and at first it seemed like Fatal Frame III was a distinct improvement. Sure, the third sequel in this ghosts-vs-girls-with-cameras series isn’t by any means revolutionary, but it seems to correct a lot of the problems with the previous games without trading away any of its freaky atmosphere or amazing production values. For most of my 15 hour play session, I was really digging the game’s oppressive, claustrophobic environments and reasonably well executed story line.

All that changed when I finally got to the end boss.

In my review for Fatal Frame 2, I lamented the design of the end boss: not only was the fight placed an extreme distance away from the last save point, but the boss can kill you in a single hit, even if you have a stone mirror (the series’ charm for avoiding death). I found the end boss extremely frustrating, and it ended up lowering my overall impression of the game.

With Fatal Frame III, Temco went and made a bad situation worse.

I guess that’s not really fair. To their credit, they placed the last save much closer to the end boss, and they made it so that stone mirrors can still save you from the boss’ mega attack. But they didn’t remove the one-hit-kill problem–they actually made it worse. The end boss in Fatal Frame 3 isn’t hard to fight, but at certain times the environment will change and the boss will go into one-hit-kill mode. During this time you must pick a direction to run and hope that the boss doesn’t appear right in front of you, as she is likely to do. There’s no skill involved in surviving this section; you can only make it back to the normal combat mode if you happen to pick a direction where the boss isn’t waiting. And since she appears out of thin air and tries to grab you, there’s about a 50/50 chance that the random direction you picked will lead you straight into her.

This is one of the worst boss fights I’ve ever played. It took me longer to kill this boss than it did for me to complete the entire rest of the game. This is the type of fight you can play for 15 minutes flawlessly, only to have the one-hit-kill mode take you out. Since the Fatal Frame series has no check points and no continues, dying means you have to go all the way back to the main menu, reload from a save, and then run over to the boss area again. Gah!

When I finally defeated the game, it was by luck as much as anything else. The one-hit-kill mode activates pretty much every time you hit her, and it took six or seven strong hits to win, so I won just by randomly picking the right direction to run in seven times. No other portion of the game approaches this level of difficulty (or randomness). In fact, the rest of the game is pretty much a breeze.

Anyhow, now that it is finally over, I’m glad I finished the game. I wrote a full full review for you to check out. Other than the infuriating final boss, the game is very well done, and gives Crimson Butterfly a run for its money for the best of the series.

Holy Redesign, Batman!

I finally killed off the awful gray “color” scheme I’ve had going for this site since 2003. Hopefully this new design is a little easier to read, a little more interesting, and doesn’t horribly break under Internet Explorer. If everything looks broken to you, try forcing your browser to reload in order to clear the cache of stuff from the old site.

I’ve wanted to fix the design of this site for a while, but it’s a time consuming process that I’ve never really had the schedule to complete. This weekend I just sat down and did it, almost in a single sitting, which is pretty cool. I also cleaned up a bunch of the scripts that run this site, so future modifications should be easier than this one was.

Anyway, let me know what you think. As far as horror games go, I’ve been banging my head against the end boss in Fatal Frame 3 for the last two weeks. I swear to God, Tecmo, you had better not make another game with a one-hit-kill boss.

Fatal Frame Three Thoughts

I’ve been playing Fatal Frame 3 lately, and I’m enjoying it quite a lot. It’s not a big departure from the previous games in the series, but it does offer the ability to play as multiple characters and the progression is made more interesting by the addition of dream sequences. Most of the “regular” Fatal Frame gameplay (running around in an old Japanese mansion fighting ghosts with an old camera) takes place in the dreams of the main character. During the day, you can control this character in her home as she tries to piece clues from her dreams together from actual research her late boyfriend was performing. I like the switching between day and night because it gives the player a chance to progress the story and save without complicating the design of the haunted mansion. I can also see how the scariness of the game may be increased if the ghosts start to appear to the protagonist when she is awake.

One thing that is interesting about Fatal Frame 3 is that it is very obviously influenced by recent Japanese horror film. There is imagery and entire scenes that have been lifted almost verbatim from films like Juon and Pulse. It’s interesting to see the influence so strongly in this game, and I take it as a sign that the developers are trying very hard to create a game that is scary.

Fortunately, they’ve been pretty successful. The dilapidated Japanese mansion setting continues to be extremely unsettling, and as in the previous Fatal Frame games, the visuals are astounding. Also deserving note is the audio, which is still among the best in the genre as far as I am concerned. The guys at Tecmo have tried very hard to make the experience as complete and as unrelenting as possible.

The game still has the same sorts of flaws that its predecessors had. The control scheme is a little dated, the enemy movement can be annoying, and there are occasional spikes in difficulty. One thing I don’t like is that the camera–which you must spend points to power up–is different for each character. Even though you have to share your points amongst the three characters that you can play, powering the camera up for one character doesn’t seem to affect the others. Another thing that bothers me is that the ghost AI seem to have reverted to the original Fatal Frame tactic of “being very annoying.” They’ll often disappear and then reappear right behind you, something that they avoided in Fatal Frame 2. The other thing that is annoying is that sometimes the enemies will not attack, which means you can’t actually hurt them. The Fatal Frame combat system requires that enemies get close and attack before you can really hurt them, so if a ghost decides to just hang out and make creepy sounds at you from afar, you just have to wait for a while. The other thing that struck me as different about this game compared to the other two is that after five or six hours of play, I’ve suddenly run out of film. I’m completely out, which has never happened to me before, and without film I seem to be completely screwed. Not only can I not fight guys or take shots of non-violent ghosts for points, I can’t even shoot the clue areas to progress.

But overall I am having a good time with this game. It’s a solid entry from Tecmo and the series remains one of the best in the genre.