Jim Sterling said:
The Ugly Secret of Horror Games
It's Halloween, the day that St. Spooky was born for our sins. On this haunted occassion, Jim Sterling discusses what truly makes a horror game scary, and decides that the worse a game looks, the better it is at frightening you. Oh Jim, there are no tricks when you're around. You are only ever a treat. And sexy.
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While oversimplified for appeal value, the core point is very sound -- when you're using less, you have to use it more wisely.
I think the most basic problem with modern horror (movies, games, etc.) is that they're too
direct, though. They're trying to scare us by "being scary." Or, perhaps more accurately, by "telling us to be scared." Since there are very few things that are
universally scary, they rely on gore and pop-scares, which have diminishing returns.
What they are failing to do is recognize what causes "scary things" to actually move us emotionally. They're failing to create
tension. Fear is too high-key an emotion to sustain... but tension? You can keep that going for a long time. And the longer you keep it going, the more impact the eventual scare will have. And tension is entirely about
unfulfilled expectation.
The good thing about the audience is that they
want answers. That means
withholding those answers has power. You can use that to pull them along to the next unanswered question, and the next... and because you're winding up all this tension, your small pay-off moments along the way have a lot more punch.
The bad thing about creators is that they want to
show everything. They want the audience to know how much work went into creating this monster, or that special effect. They want to make sure you know how much thought they put into the backstory. And the more resources they have, the more able they are to show off all that hard work. So they want to put all of that into the product... and in doing so, they
give up the power of those unanswered questions.