Video games can't do horror.

[MeChaNiZ3D]

As little as I know about horror in any media, I disagree with the idea that the horror isn't there because you know there is a way to get through. One, because this is also true of films and books and whatnot for the main character. They may be placed in a compromising situation, but there's another hour to go or another 200 pages, so they can't be killed off. The other characters, yes, but then so are NPCs in games. I honestly think horror could be better in videogames than in other media, because the player is the character. It's not the characters shortfalls and fears that are being leveraged, it's the player's, and it's the player's inaction or failure that causes death, to themselves or to NPCs. You still don't know when things will happen, what horrible things you may be forced to do, or whether your closest NPCs are safe. The protagonist's life is rarely at stake in any horror media.

 

[nvzboy]

I don't think horror is caused by some "fear of death" or failure to defend yourself, by that definition a movie can not scare you because you don't have to defend yourself, you are in your couch watching. Then again that does not make games the absolute best way of bringing horror. As others have mentioned, horror is not about the inability to succeed,I think too that it is more about having the reader/player/viewer constantly on the edge, slightly disturbed, eager to know how the events go on but at the same time have them think about the dark corners in their own minds.

 

[Jfswift]

I wrote a post for another thread, and after reflecting on it for a bit, I found that it's a very accurate statement.

So what in your opinion are good examples of horror (movies, books, etc). Also, do you feel that it is different for everyone, that horror is difficult to share with an audience?

 

[Theminimanx]

You should play roguelikes. You can die in those. Permanently. A horror-based roguelike game has the potential to be amazing, unfortunately it's never really been done so far. I hear ZombiU kinda sorta is like that, albeit not very well, but that's the only example I can think of and unfortunately I've never played it myself.

Hearing you say that, I can't believe no-one's ever thought of that before.

OT: Yes, as long as you know that in the end, you can't fail, horror games aren't scary. That's why it's so important for horror games to be atmospheric. Once you're immersed in the world, you forget that in reality, you're sitting behind the safety of your computer. You think as if you were in the game world, and death for the protagonist would mean a permanent end. Once you die however, you realize you're playing a game, and it takes time for the game to get scary again.
On a related note, the game being dark isn't the only reasen we turn off the lights when playing horror games. It's also so we don't notice the rest of the room, and are therefore less likely to remember we're playing a game.

 

[kasperbbs]

I think that games like dead space and amnesia do horror a lot better than any movie. I personally feel no tension watching horror movies, i don't care for the characters because their only purpose is to get slaughtered, except for one girl and some guy she likes if hes lucky. Truth be told i don't even know what fictional horror is, is it supposed to scare me or something? The only thing that i can find even a little bit scary is when i'm about to get my head bitten off in dead space and i don't really want to replay that part again.

 

[The Heik]

Now, I want to know if anyone agrees with this viewpoint. That if you absolutely cannot fail given the mechanics of a game, then true horror cannot exist. If not, why not?

While I agree in principle, I feel you may have underestimated the scope of it.

In truth, no form of horror medium is truly scary because no matter what, the audience/player/reader etc. is never in any real danger. They're just experiencing facsimiles of horror for the adrenaline high afterwards, but barring the most freak accidents, they will be able walk away from it. If there were any real danger (read: not simply "risk" like in skydiving) to any horror work, you couldn't drag them to go and experience it because unless they have a death wish they're not crazy enough to put themselves majorly on the line simply for a little bit of excitement.

And in my case at least, I simply couldn't find any horror settings remotely scary anymore once I realized this. Yeah, they can try a few jump scares, but all that's really doing is activating my fight-or-flight instinct, which is really just surprising me.

However, if we're going by the facsimile basis for horror, there are some ways to inflict the "fail state" on horror gamers. The one that springs to mind is to actually give them something to lose a la FTL and ZombiU, where if your character dies that's perma-game over for that character. If the atmosphere and enemies are up to snuff, then when you run into an actual threat (preferably with the character lacking an appropriate means of defence) suddenly the players genuine have something to lose, and it should create a decent amount of horror tension.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

You should play roguelikes. You can die in those. Permanently. A horror-based roguelike game has the potential to be amazing, unfortunately it's never really been done so far. I hear ZombiU kinda sorta is like that, albeit not very well, but that's the only example I can think of and unfortunately I've never played it myself.

I can see that being SUPER hard to implement. You get a shit tonne of pros and an ass tonne of cons.

Pros:

Perma death means death is scary.
Randomized experience means horror can NEVER be expected in any particular.
The game can and WILL occasionally give you such an unlucky start that doom is inevitable. You WILL fail.

Cons:

Randomized environment? Hard to craft a scary atmosphere when SO many things can be different and an atmosphere has so many layers. Most of the roguelikes i play are fairly basic and interchangable in terms of encounters and scenery. Having a monster in a well lit area or PLENTY of avenue for escape will make it hard to "Plan" good moments.
Enemies will become known and recognized. It didnt matter in FTL that i knew what a rock cruiser enemy was because NO element of the fun hinged on me being unfamilar with EVERY particular of the rock cruiser because ive encountered it in every possible scenario. I know that thing like the back of my hand. If i got to know a monster that well it wouldn't be scary.

Horror is built with good planning. A roguelike would need to include good tension building and release while still being random, that seems super hard without becoming obviously patterned.

I think games can be super scary even though you know you can win. Horror movies shouldnt become scary until the last 5 minutes by that logic because i KNOW that the movie is at least 2 hours long so nothing happening at the 30 minute mark can possibly be a major issue. The protagonist has to survive at least that far. Same with books. I can SEE how long a book is. I know they will succeed and if they DO fail in a permanent manor it will be toward the end. These still manage to be scary.

Helplessness is scary. Im scared most by the super natural. By things i cannot rationalise and that are obviously FAR greater than me in EVERY aspect. I dont find serial killers in real life as scary as demons in movies. Because a serial killer is just a human like me and is capable of all the things im capable of. I know how strong they can be and how cunning and i have a chance to survive such an encounter. A demon is superior and esoteric on every level and totally beyond my understanding. Its why pyramid head was scary. He was a total unknown. I dont know how he operates or why he operates or what he will do next or how on earth i was supposed to outmatch him because hes infinitely more powerful than me. Games can achieve this effect ergo - scary for me.

 

[southparkdudez]

Horror dosen't mean death, it means something that unworldly, or a thing that looking at it would drive the strongest man insane. Sure its scary to die, but what if something is there just toying with you? The unknown is what is scareist.

 

[Skoosh]

What about multiple endings? Sure, if you die, you can restart at the last checkpoint, but that doesn't mean it's all without consequences. Certain actions in the game may very well have lasting effects for later in the game, and may turn out horrifying if you've invested yourself with the character.

But you're right, video games can never have "true horror". And neither can movies or books or anything that isn't actually happening to you at that moment in real life. I'd say the immersion is so much higher though with video games that it works significantly better for horror. It doesn't progress until you move, and I can't tell you how many times I've just had to say "NOPE, DONE" when going through, say Silent Hill 2. Watch a movie, it's just happening to that cute girl or that douchebag or whatever. In a game, it's as close as can be to happening to you. So that's what makes it scarier.

 

[Benpasko]

You should play roguelikes. You can die in those. Permanently. A horror-based roguelike game has the potential to be amazing, unfortunately it's never really been done so far. I hear ZombiU kinda sorta is like that, albeit not very well, but that's the only example I can think of and unfortunately I've never played it myself.

You should look up AliensRL. It's a survival horror roguelike based on Aliens. The sound design and scarcity are excellent, and it's hard as hell.

 

[Unsilenced]

Movies can't do horror because your TV screen can't physically stab you to death. No amount of protagonist death or pain can actually harm the audience in any way, so there's nothing actually to be afraid of. Unlike a videogame, there's not even an avatar of you that you are trying to protect. It's just a bunch of actors pretending to be scared who will be there again just fine if you start the movie over again. The only real way horror can be done is someone actually stabs you in the fucking face.

*nods sagely*



All joking aside, arguments like this always have the basic fact that people have, in fact, been scared by games. It's, like, a thing that has actually happened. Theoretical discussion does nothing to nullify that.

I damn near pissed myself in F.E.A.R. Penumbra made me feel guilty and helpless for what I had done. Games have induced in me wide range of feelings that would fall under 'horror.' What is the counter argument to that?

"YOUR FEELINGS ARE WRONG. YOU ARE NOT SCARED. SHUT UP AND SIT IN THE CORNER."



I would actually say that video games do horror better, since it puts the life of the protagonist in your hands. You don't just watch people be on edge as they fight for their lives, you have to *be* on edge, or you'll never make it to the end of the bloody corridor. Video games have a very direct way of making you care whether or not a character lives, and furthermore of making sure your emotional state matches theirs. Suspense, too, I think is enhanced by interactivity. Watching someone go investigate the noise from around the dark corner is one thing, but it's another to know that you personally are going to have to deal with whatever is there. With a movie it could be cthulu around the corner and everything would be all sorted out by the time I came back from making another bag of popcorn. Yeah, character might be dead, might not be, but that was always going to happen and would happen again a dozen times if I re-watched it. Video games however don't just make you watch the protagonist get horribly mutilated; they make you personally responsible for the fact.

 

[Mr.Philip]

Video games are the only medium that can scare me, all I've got to say.

 

[Darth Rahu]

System Shock 2. Your argument is officially invalid. Yes, you can revive after death, but the stuff coming after you is reason enough to be worried.

 

[emeraldrafael]

I'm scared of spiders. If (and this once actually happened), I woke up and had spiders literally crawling all over me, I'd be scared shitless, and I would say that would be horror to me. Will I die? No probably not (Depends on the spider), but I'd still be scared.

So no, I dont think a game cant do horror just cause it has an answer. Every horror portrayed in media has an answer, or at least most do. Silent Hill 2 was and still is one of the scariest games played, and there are always solutions. Maybe you just dont get drawn into the sotry and atmosphere, but thats what horror is. It draws you in and puts you in a position where you dont want to be and makes your heart race and blood run just a little bit colder.

 

[FireAza]

Are you high OP? Of course video games can do horror, in fact, they can do it better than film based on the fact that you've actively involved instead of passively observing. It might be scary to watch the protagonist go down a hallway where the horror lies in wait, but it's twice as scary when you have to do it yourself.

Of course, video games are beatable, while some horror films end with the death of the protagonist. But good horror is more than just the ending, and if the hero is going to make it out alive or not. The Shining is a great horror film, but it's not the ending that makes it scary, it's watching the Jack Nicholson character slowly loose his mind.

Even if you know that it's possible to finish a game, and you can re-load a save if you fail, that doesn't invalidate the entire game. Eternal Darkness has some great horror moments mostly revolving around the insanity effects that never fail to send a chill up my spine. This is despite the fact that these segments are very short and don't tie in to the ending at all.

Honestly OP, if you think games can't do horror, it's painfully obvious you've never played a horror game.

 

[shadow_Fox81]

thats taking for granted the horror genre is and always will be about over coming an obstacle.

this is simply silly.

horror has always been an attempt to create an experience that exposes the weakness in the human.

that weakness is so much more apparent when it flows unbroken from viewer to experience. video games are almost alone in making that flow unbroken, where the player character is often a direct surrogate for the player.

i simply, but respectfully disagree firmly

 

[SpaceCop]

A bold statement, friend; and really, a premise worth thinking about.

The main point is; How can a game be scary if the player character is always stronger than his adversaries by virtue of it being a video game?

Well, how can any work of fiction be scary if its protagonist must overcome every obstacle they encounter in order to survive and carry the narrative to its conclusion?

Games give us a more transparent version of quantum immortality [http://www.cracked.com/article_20109_5-mind-blowing-academic-theories-as-taught-by-classic-movies_p2.html] that allows us to catch a glimpse of our character's grisly failures before reloading and trying again. It's a ubiquitous conceit of narrative fiction dealing with dangerous subject matter; that protagonists can survive seemingly overwhelming situations because it's a near-necessity for telling a cohesive story. Would 28 Days Later have been a better film if Cillian Murphy had died the second he left the hospital and the movie ended there?

True, movie characters don't have the option of replaying a section to get it right. But horror film protagonists do adapt to their surroundings. At least a little; it helps the audience suspend our disbelief as to how our everyperson main character has survived this far into the zombie apocalypse--or whatever. For real, how many horror movies give us no justification as to why the final survivor lasts as long as they do?

For a movie...the protagonist can simply be made to putz around for the duration, right up until their untimely demise (whether it's death or otherwise) and have not learned anything. They don't know what the nature of the monster is, or what it's capabilities are. Where it came from. Nothing. That can't fly in a video game.

James from Silent Hill 2, to use a more retro example. Despite what happens over the course of the game, James does not change. The James you control at the beginning of the game is not fundamentally different from the James you control at the end of the game.

The new knowledge that James is a guilt-wrapped delusional mess changes the way we perceived earlier chapters; the appearance of the monsters, the way Angela and Eddie treated him, the reason he was drawn to the town; everything, we now view in a new, distressing light. It all starts to make a horrible amount of sense as we realize why James has been taking this awful journey through his own psyche. And of course, how well James looks after Maria and himself affects their ultimate fate.

A protagonist in a movie or book can very well be killed, or succumb to madness, or become that which they have fought against. But a video game protagonist cannot.

The majority of Eternal Darkness's 12 playable characters go insane or die horribly or both. Silent Hill 2's plot is driven by James' delusions and neurosis. For that matter, how much of the Silent Hill series could potentially be taking place inside our characters' heads? The most recent Far Cry has Jason Brody grappling with madness; sure, the visions don't hamper his gameplay abilities, but how healthy is it living in a perpetual drug-fueled murder rampage? The brainwashed protagonist, and the players themselves, are manipulated into terrible things in Bioshock; to say nothing of Spec Ops: The Line...

Any attempt at trying to show the darkness within the human mind is doomed to fail for the same reason. The protagonist will not succumb to madness. They can't. That's what makes them the protagonist.

...Actually wait, no, let's talk about:

Spoiler: Spec Ops: The Line

Spec Ops: The Line's protagonist, Captain Walker, starts the game as a ruggedly handsome, noble-minded US soldier. By the story's end he is a burned-out wreck of a man in a tattered uniform, screaming death threats at opponents. The atrocities we've seen throughout the game were Walker's fault; he turned a simple recon mission into an absolutely monstrous bloodbath, urging his ragged men on because he was desperate to feel like a hero. He spends the entire game justifying his actions as harsh but necessary, until the end reveals that the expected antagonist was inside himself this whole time. He--and by extension we the players--made everything worse with every action we took, slaughtering untold innocents and turning his men into blood-soaked self-loathing killers, all for less than nothing.

 

[SpaceCop]

As was previously explained (This goes for everyone else who brings this up as well), it's not that failure is scary, it's that the protagonist is always stronger than the adversaries, whether it be through guile, strength, or what have you.

Running away, hiding in closets, crying like a little girl? Being incredibly lucky? Having helpful friends/canine companions? Knocking furniture over? Being guided along by forces beyond their comprehension? A hallmark of plenty of horror games is characters who survive through cowardice and sheer chance. You might be bypassing your monstrous enemies by running away from them, but you're still helpless; the power is in the monsters' hands. In those scenarios you're making a reflexive, reactive bid for survival that is entirely dictated by your opponents' actions.

If you hand a mugger your wallet and they let you live you haven't overcome your adversary with guile. And if you have to reincarnate 3 times to figure that out it doesn't make you stronger than him.

No matter how powerful the monsters were or how weak you are, as long as success is inevitable, it's not horror. There's just nothing to fear.

If you're able to finish a game is there nothing you could see, hear, or experience along the way that would be horrific?

I mean, it's totally rad if you're stoic to the point where an irreversible final death is the only things that frightens you, but there are a lot of people out there who can be scared by atmosphere, disturbing images or sounds, the familiar becoming the unfamiliar, body horror, glimpses into the darker aspects of human nature or the human condition, loss of self, betrayal of trust, etcetera, etcetera...

Many of the scariest moments in my gaming history have come from Silent Hill 3, and none of them involved the protagonist being in direct physical danger. The spinning wheelchair wheel stopping as you approach it; finding the roasted dog and wondering what deranged person could have possibly prepared it; the screaming headless mannikin after endless rooms of deathly silence; your reflection in the mirror freezing as you continue running.. None of them were explained. Disturbing, distressing things that build a deep-rooted sense of dread and apprehension as your subconscious works against you, filling in the blanks with your own unvoiced fears...

Let me put it this way. What is it that makes a game scary, what turns it into horror? It's extremely easy to disturb a human. For example, you can force emotions through certain sounds, because they essentially trick the brain. Infrasound, for example, can even cause the human mind to hallucinate as well as cause anxiety, fear, and revulsion. I would argue that games were people feel are 'horror' simply fool people into thinking they are with techniques like Infrasound.

Well, yeah. That's what horror, as a genre of entertainment, is; using words or images or sounds to trick people's brains into feeling fear.

If you wanna move beyond simple scary tricks, go for the real deal like I do; when you play Condemned: Criminal Origins duct tape a live cobra to your controller.

 

[Drizzitdude]

I wrote a post for another thread, and after reflecting on it for a bit, I found that it's a very accurate statement.

[Horror] simply doesn't translate to video games. You can't accurately capture what makes Xenomorphs scary if the protagonist cannot fail. But if the protagonist was capable of dying permanently (whether through a scripted event or just persistence like ZombiU), then you would be right back here complaining that it's Call of Duty all over again.

Pure horror just isn't something that video games do well, because the aforementioned fact that you absolutely cannot fail. For example, Dead Space 2. They put a lot of effort into trying to make you feel unsafe in the vents...but the vents were where I felt safest, specifically because you were completely defenseless inside of them. If a Necromorph were to legitimately attack you there, then you would have no chance to stave off your death. A video game can't allow that, and so vents = safe.

I could even use Amnesia as an example. Amnesia wasn't scary because you were never backed into a corner. There was always a way to proceed, you just needed to find it. No matter how powerful the monsters were or how weak you are, as long as success is inevitable, it's not horror. There's just nothing to fear.

No matter how powerful an enemy or obstacle seems, it is not insurmountable. You can overcome it. You are inherently better than it, simply because you can defeat it without exception.

Now, I want to know if anyone agrees with this viewpoint. That if you absolutely cannot fail given the mechanics of a game, then true horror cannot exist. If not, why not?

I feel like this is completely untrue. The only way that you can find this to be the thing that stops a game from being horrifying is if you are looking at the game AS A GAME and if you are doing that it obviously failed to immerse you in the experience completely. For a game to be a good survival horror there are a few core points that have to be done.

1: The story or protagonist is someone you can relate to: This is important because if we cannot relate to the person in some way or another you feel detached. The story is just that, a story, that the protagonist (not you) is following. This is why they are often portrayed as the average joe, the engineer, someone who has little to no experience that would help him in the current situation that he is in. Which leads on to the next point.

2: Feeling of being helpless: In order for a game to represent true horror there has to be situations where you feel completely helpless, or at the very least completely overwhelmed by the enemy even with the tools that you have. While the protagonist is allowed some form of defense against the all powerful dark force that haunts him, in the end it should be difficult or at least limited in some form (being in a fading light in some games, guns being restricted by low ammo, etc). In truth this does not even have to be limited to terms of combat, but also dementia. In dead space for example something that was completely unavoidable was Isaac slow fall into insanity, it was unavoidable and the player as did not have a way of defending themselves against it in any way.

3: The enemy has to be scary: This part is obvious but also one of the core things that is often messed up in the genre. The enemy you are fighting has to be horrifying, this can either be done by the more common method of making them visually disgusting (Dead space, Silent hill, Resident evil) but the far more immersive form is to make the enemy powerful and unseen. Something that the player is forced to avoid and only glimpse from time to time, it has to be some kind of towering, all powerful being, that you as the player should feel is impossible to fight. This is the best kind of antagonist, the one who hides and waits for your every mistake to punish you, whose force is so powerful that the player has to avoid them just to survive, where no matter how strong your weapons are or how skilled you are as a player this is the one thing you just need to straight up avoid. This is why games like slender and amnesia work, because the protagonist is forced to avoid confrontation. It is the same sort of element that we commonly find in most horror films (big scary monster or serial killer, completely helpless victims etc)m and it works even more so in videogames because it forces us, the gamer into the shoes of the completely helpless victim rather than that of the all mighty hero.

4: Enviroment: This one isn't so much of an issue today as it is commonly the priority focus in most games claiming to be survival horror. A player needs needs environment that force confrontation with evil, that force them into the helpless situation or make them scared at simply the thought of continuing in whatever twisted world they have arrived in. More often than not this is done by taking a normal scene (say a hospital) and forcing it into a an asylum of horror. The twist from normal everyday elements into something scary is mentally disturbing and keeps us on edge. At the very least the environment needs to have heavy implications either like the twisted world of silent hill or the abandoned living quarters in dead space, something that would just give players the inclination that this place used to be normal, and that people used to live here and go one with their everyday lives just like the player does. Once again it is all about relating the player to the protagonist and setting that makes a horror game.

I have to be heading to work now, perhaps I will add on to this later if I can think of some more essentials in survival horror, but for now I think we have the basics down at least.

 

[Kopikatsu]

I wrote a post for another thread, and after reflecting on it for a bit, I found that it's a very accurate statement.

So what in your opinion are good examples of horror (movies, books, etc). Also, do you feel that it is different for everyone, that horror is difficult to share with an audience?

I can't think of anything I would consider a good example of horror. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means that I have terrible memory.

The key elements to horror, to me, are this:

1. The protagonist(s) cannot ever learn the true nature of the threat. Speculation on the part of the character(s) is fine, but they can never know.

2. The threat is legitimately threatening. Every time it harasses the character(s), something severe should happen. Someone dies, a device they needed is irreparably damage, etc.

3. The capability of the threat is never fully explored. Whatever they throw at it seems to work, but it never does. Bullets might slow it down originally; an explosion might make it retreat for a short time...but it never stops. It never falters. Alternatively, whenever one is killed, another simply takes it's place ad infinitum. Any barrier made to stop it is either torn apart or easily circumvented.

4. Success is not guaranteed. Ties in with point 2, the threat should prove that it, without a shadow of a doubt, is immensely stronger than the characters. They should not be able to survive constant encounters with it and come out unharmed. In essence, the media should make it clear that the characters are truly hopeless. No matter what weapons are at their disposal, or how smart they may be...it does not matter. Nothing matters. Their fate is inevitable.

5. Mental degradation of the characters. The experience should screw them up, and it should show. It should make at least one of the characters rash and do illogical things. An example that is used commonly, as in Nightmare House (in one ending), Saya no Uta, and Dead Space: Extraction is that a character is assaulted by monsters, and so they kill all of them. Only to later discover that they didn't kill any monsters. It was their family, or merely bystanders. Since I'm on the subject, I'll say something that really disappointed me: The way the hallucinations were handled in Dead Space 2. If it were up to me, I'd have removed the orange tint (and let the monitors freaking out be the only indication that Isaac is freaking out), removed the glowing lights from Nicole, and added less clear hallucinations.

For example, when Isaac is first released from his bindings at the very beginning of the game. Halfway through that room, I would have had Isaac get grabbed my a Necromorph from behind, and then the room flashes to a pristine white room, with human arms around his neck and nurses rushing towards him while the person behind him yells for someone to restrain the patient because he's having an episode again. A Doctor comes up on the side and pulls out a syringe...then it flashes back to Necromorphs, with the syringe now being a Slasher's claw. Isaac draws his legs up and kick's the Necromorph's arm, causing it to be rammed into the Slasher's eye, which causes it to collapse while Isaac headbutts the one holding him. Then when he's running through the area, have it flash back to the white area once more before reaching the door. When the Slasher gets stuck in the door while it's trying to close, have it flash back to the white area with a Nurse stuck in the door instead. She reaches out towards Isaac and sobs, "Help...me..." just before returning to 'reality', where the Slasher is torn in half and dies.

Edit: After writing this list...I realized that the media that fits all of this criteria is the movie that really screwed me up as a kid. It was called They. It was about another dimension/world/something, it was never explained. But there were monsters that lived there, the titular 'They', but their forms were never shown. You merely saw snippets of them. The most you ever saw was when one was in a pool, and you could see a skull mounted on it's forehead. But even as it swam, you couldn't even tell if it was aquatic or humanoid. Anyway, they would kidnap children (The opening scene has a boy tell his mother that he thinks a monster is under his bed. She tells him to just put a blanket over his head and that will keep him safe. Later that night, he hears growling and the bed starts to snake, so he put the blanket over his head and it stopped...and then something reached under the blanket and grabbed his foot before dragging him underneath the bed) and implant shards of bone inside of them which They could use to track down the kids once they've grown, and then would kidnap them again to eat them.

So, the main protagonist is a woman who eventually meets up with other people who were taken, and they form a group to protect themselves from the monsters. One of the guys reveals that the monster's one weakness is light, and that they will never appear when the person isn't alone. It turns out, they're fully capable of destroying the lights- so light only slows them down. A guy had candles throughout his entire house to try and stop them...but one triggered the fire alarm, so the lights were extinguished. No matter what they did, they were hunted down one by one. The protagonist found the bone shard and tore it out of her head in an incredibly bloody fashion, but it did nothing. They still could find her no matter where she went. Eventually she goes crazy and attacks two guys, stabbing one of them in the throat with a shard of glass because she thinks they're monsters. She gets sent to an asylum for being insane, and is looking out of the little window on her door. She sees a room of patients and nurses, all of them playing games or talking and having a great time. She sighs with relief, just as the door to the other room closes...and then a dark shape fills the window. She ends up being dragged by the monsters into the closet, and is pulled into their world, although the door to the closet was left open, so she's still covered in light- which keeps the monsters at bay.

Two Doctors walk into her room after she's kidnapped and look around the room for her a bit before both go to look in the closet. One asks the other where she went, and the other simply says that she must have escaped and slowly starts to close the door, while the woman is screaming for them to help her. Then they close the door, removing the light as the monsters rush forward...and then it ended. I was about seven when I watched that movie. I spent most of my time trying to think of how one would survive against the monsters, but I couldn't. The best idea I came up with was flying in a plane to keep up with the time zones to always stay in the light. But that would be far too expensive, and you would end up spending the rest of your life on a plane. Who would you get to fly such a thing? There was just no escaping the monsters. Sheer hopelessness.

Edit 2: I'd planned on responding to more posts, but this one left me drained. So maybe a bit later...

Edit 3: Forgot, I didn't answer the second part of your post. Well yes. I do think that horror is different for everyone. However, that is why I said that I believe most forms of horror media 'cheat' and use techniques like infrasound to induce fear where it should not exist. The difference between artificially induced fear and true fear is that...well, drugs for example. Drug-induced bliss might feel the same as true happiness, but they are not the same.