Creative horror ideas

[Howlingwolf214]

Have you ever played a supposed horror game and frequently thought "That wasn't scary at all, I could totally make something scarier". I frequently think this and therefore go forward to invent my own horror ideas. Too many of the supposed horror bits just make you jump when a zombie/alien jumps out and starts attack you with its claws/feet/groin etc.

Here are two of my ideas:

This could be a cutscene or playable, would most work as a cutscene so i'll work it as a cutscene.

You're walking along a deserted castle corridor with another guy who you don't really get along with. Tapestries all over the walls etc. You walk past a corridor down the side. As you walk past it the dude you're with stops, you turn round to face him and he says "Dude, look behind you!". You look round, see nothing there and hear the guy laughing at you, as you look back you see a hand and a face appear behind the guy, grab him and bite him. Cutscene quits and you're left to kill the creature, after it tears apart the other guy you're with.

Number two;

You're walking through an abandonded house. With a baseball bat. For the authentic feel. There's a crash and a servered human waist falls down infront of you from the room above. Eventually you decide to go up, this is game remember so you can take your merry time about it. You go up and see the hole the waist fell through. You also see the top half of the poor dead dude with his hand reaching out towards a door. If you look up you see a jagged hole in the roof and you can hear a sort of jagged breathing. You walk through the door the guy is stretching towards and it closes behind you. Walk a couple of paces into the almost pitch dark room and you hear a thump in the room behind you and the door opens a crack with a human hand reaching through. The door opens fully and the body left stretching towards the door rolls through with a creature behind it. Haven't worked out what the creature looks like, you can fill it that blank yourself. If you look around the room you can see more victims. Then you go kill that creature with your bat.


Now. Your turn, any horror ideas? What did you think of mine, if a little psychotic and thought up in a maths lesson?

 

[Singularly Datarific]

You are forced to stay underground from World War Nukes, and strange things start happening to the last people you know, some die, some disappear, and eventually, you'd start to have the same disease/mutagen thing happen to you. To postpone its deadly effects, you have to kill, it was that or swallowing razorblades.

 

[P1p3s]

13 ghosts the game
/thread

no seriously thats the best i could come up with...i have no creativity
shame

 

[_Janny_]

You are forced to stay underground from World War Nukes, and strange things start happening to the last people you know, some die, some disappear, and eventually, you'd start to have the same disease/mutagen thing happen to you. To postpone its deadly effects, you have to kill, it was that or swallowing razorblades.

I'm not fond of the "deadly disease" idea, but that sounds like a great story; you're forced to choose between going outside where there's complete chaos or underground where you face your own creepy mutation. You just have to come up with a twist in the story and you're good to go, I'd say.

 

[Dante_Alucard]

Phantasm the video game that movie was all kinds of messed up.

 

[Shadow Law]

Make all the sounds in the game work best on surround sound systems and make most of the noises come from the back speakers, that scares the heck out of me when that happens.

 

[nova18]

I remember a similar thread a week or two back, so Ill say what I said before.

If the player has a cam connected (only a minority of console gamers do) then you could use it against them. In the corner of the screen, have a box that shows the player as the camera sees them, then during a long empty sequence in the game, flash images over the players camera and add strange shadows behind the image of the player.

Naturally this would rely on cameras and high tech facial recognition but the effects would be pretty horrifying.

 

[Xvito]

Phantasm the video game that movie was all kinds of messed up.

There is a game called Phantasmagoria, which is pretty fucked up. Also it has a sequel, Phantasmagoria 2: A puzzle of the flesh.

 

[Dante_Alucard]

Is it about the movie

 

[Dante_Alucard]

I remember a similar thread a week or two back, so Ill say what I said before.

If the player has a cam connected (only a minority of console gamers do) then you could use it against them. In the corner of the screen, have a box that shows the player as the camera sees them, then during a long empty sequence in the game, flash images over the players camera and add strange shadows behind the image of the player.

Naturally this would rely on cameras and high tech facial recognition but the effects would be pretty horrifying.

that would be fucking awsome I need an excuse to own an eye toy

 

[this_was_a_mistake]

No music, nothing is more scarier than total silence.

 

[bmf185]

No music, nothing is more scarier than total silence.

I agree. Most games don't grasp that no music and only sound effects would be much creepier.

 

[Dante_Alucard]

Phantasm the video game that movie was all kinds of messed up.

There is a game called Phantasmagoria, which is pretty fucked up. Also it has a sequel, Phantasmagoria 2: A puzzle of the flesh.

dude I just watched a cut scene from that game it looks fucking awsome

What about the people under the stairs movie

 

[Trivun]

I have a really messed up mind, and I'm quite creative. I honestly worry myself with this, but I wrote a screenplay (complete script, in my drawer next to me now) for a horror film that I wanted to try and produce with the film-making society I'm involved in at university. Basic summary of the plot to follow:

- 6 friends in a car crash in the opening montage, 1 guy dies in the crash. Others don't realise he's still alive though when they leave him, and he dies of his injuries.
- The others get creeped out and see their own graves at the friend's funeral
- One guy gets freaked out and hangs himself
- His best friend (who's girlfriend he loves as well) gets stabbed by the girlfriend
- Then the car crash guy's ghost kills the girlfriend with the same knife (stabs her in the back of the head)
- The remaining two friends go insane and end up in a mental institute
- The ghost then kills them both in their padded cells. He cuts their hearts out with a knife, while they're still alive.
- Just as he kills the remaining girl, she admits that even though he's murdering her, she loves him
- Film ends with their joint funeral in the graves they saw in the vision earlier in the film.

How sick and twisted is that? I came up with this idea when I was bored. And in lectures, I get bored very easily. The way I imagine the story in my mind, I honestly haven't seen any game with a more gory story (not even Silent Hill...).

 

[Howlingwolf214]

No music, nothing is more scarier than total silence.

Piano music creeps me out more than silence. I have no idea why.

 

[scnj]

I like the idea of playing as a completely defenseless person alone in a huge dark foggy forest being chased by a single invincible enemy who can show up anywhere at any time.

 

[Xvito]

Phantasm the video game that movie was all kinds of messed up.

There is a game called Phantasmagoria, which is pretty fucked up. Also it has a sequel, Phantasmagoria 2: A puzzle of the flesh.

dude I just watched a cut scene from that game it looks fucking awsome

You should watch the Spoony Experiment

 

[Rusty Bucket]

What i would love to see is a more psychological based horror, where it's not the monsters that are scary, but the threat of them. I'd like there to be a group of 3 or so guys (one of them player controlled). As the game goes on, your companions get picked off one by one by something you never see. Once you get down to just you and another guy, the other starts talking loads out of fear. Eventually he talks less and less, and then he's just gone. There's no screams, no butchered corpse, he just isn't there.

Once you feel completely alone, i want the game to really mess things up. Flashes of images on walls that aren't there (the images aren't really there, the walls are), turning a corner to find a corridor full of blood that dissapears a couple of seconds later. I want people to be in pieces after playing it.

 

[Uszi]

I don't know if I buy the no music thought. Music is usually critical for the success of any scene, movie or video game. I can't think back on a truley terrifying moment in a movie where there wasn't at least some subtle something in the background.

Or maybe you're chalking up like a heartbeat in the back ground as SFX and not Ambient/Music type noise. I don't know.

I would say that a really scary horror game depends on these elements:

Great Music

Enemies who pop up behind and attack you.
This is not to be overdone, i.e. should not be your main game play mechanic. But you need the player to be concerned about turning his back on something for him to be afraid.

The unexplained.
Answering all the questions makes things less scary. Probably the best horror game would plop you in a supernatural setting and give you little clear explanation about what's happening to you. Would would need to be clear, obviously, are your objectives and motivations, but that's separate from wondering why all the corpses in this room have your face.

Things that move weird.
I think if you watch something, we're unsettled by things that don't move the way they should. Whether its the girl from the ring, or the possess girl from the exersist, or whatever, seeing something move unnaturally is unsettling. Think Regenerators in RE4. I remember a short movie where some monster is attacking someone in a house, and you get a glimpse of it from the top of a stairwell, and the director has you stare at it to try and figure out what it is, then just as you're peering forward, the thing bum-fucking-rushes you with teeth and fangs extended. You never really understand what it is, by the way, you can never see it clearly

Fog
I think The Mist by Stephen King has the potential to create some scary moments for players.

Unsettling the Player
I think horror games try to do this through gore too much. Not necessary. All you need to do is make the player apprehensive, alert, uncomfortable even, and then from there you can use any cheap tactic to scare someone, and it will seem great.


Here's my idea for a creature/villain in a horror game: A monster that attacks you if you look directly at it. So whenever you encounter them, you need to look away as you pass, or else they'll run screaming at you and one hit your face.

 

[sgtshock]

A lot of horror games seem to think that it's all about scripting. That isn't neccesarily true. Go play STALKER to see what I mean. As you walk through the creepy-as-hell cooridors, you have no respite knowing that every horror has been pre-planned for you. There aren't any areas you know you were supposed to be surprised.

Instead, they just point you to a dark, underground laboratory infested with unspeakable horrors that can kill you in one hit. No musical cues, no NPCs who will obviously die in the next cutscene, just pure terror. You don't feel like you're in a horror film, you feel like you're actually in a haunted laboratory, fighting for your life.