What makes a horror game...a horror game? - A genre op-ed part 1!

When I was in film school, I took a class that was required of my academia called GWAR (raise of hands if you dealt with this...just me? Oh.) While, for all the acronyms and long words, was basically a writing class based around a subject of study and then, well, anything. Lucky for me, I had a student teacher (i.e, a nerd) who proudly carried her web-comic bag in with her as she came into class. 

Why am I telling this? Well, getting to the point, on Fridays when papers were due, she would greet us with an old, fat Sony Playstation 3 model and one of many old, niche horror titles. We would turn in said papers, and she would have us play through the first hour of said games and have us talk about how the game related to the film we had watched that week. At the time, video games were one of my reasons for becoming a film student (as I proclaimed "Video games are the closest thing we have to interactive films!" every family round table when my comment would be brushed off as the teenager I used to be) and as such, I was the first to always raise my hand, comment on the film tropes and camera movements the games were using that were easily taken from films of the same genre.

And while we can have titles like Naughty Dog's magnum opus The Last of Us or Capcom's B-schlock flick Resident Evil, horror in video games run exactly as horror in movies do; it's a genre term that can be melded and molded like a paste, and mixed with different ingredients to make a horror that on the surface, may not scream that blood, guts, swearing, chainsaws as you would think (Evil Dead, The Exorcist and every slasher film ever made, i'm looking at you!) but really, horror can come in anywhere such as a wrecked, destroyed civilization and low ammo count as Gears of War, and then after that I'll bring you all back to the late 1990s, and send us up into space as we discuss the forgotten horror gem that is System Shock 2, and explain how it paved the way for the 'subtle horror' that we got in the 2000s of gaming. 

"Dammit, we suck!"-Damon Baird, Gears of War

 

Released in November of 2006, many say that Gears of War created what many gamer's today call the 'chest high wall shooter' as, for those who haven't played the game, a lot of the first title involves making it to an open space, chest-high walls appear either from some mechanisms created by either opposing armies, or even by an act of some sort of benevolent god ("oh man, we need cover? Look out for that falling chunk of building that is going to fall miles away and make us cover!") and you have all of Gears in a nutshell. So obviously, you might be asking me, how the hell is Gears a horror title?

Well, i'm sure people have heard of the horror shooter. It's what Resident Evil became for a short while, and it's what games like Dead Space helped to pioneer in the mid-2000s...just when Gears came along. Really, the series horror roots can be seen starting as early as the original, eerie and very well produced 'Mad World' teaser. Set to Gary Jule's haunting cover of Tears for Fears 'Mad World', we follow the main character Marcus Fenix as he is running from an unseen pack of the series villains, the Locust (alien lizards really) as he breaks through destroyed buildings and past once bustling streets. The trailer even starts with an incredibly haunting first-person shot of Fenix cradling the cheek of a once beautiful angel statue. The trailer ends with Fenix being the only person going against a giant spider-like locusts called a Corpser, set in a dark room and glowing eyes/machine parts of the creature. Note through this shot, the sounds of gunfire and creature noises are muted so only the piano of the song is audible. 

That trailer made an impact on me in my late digits. I remember seeing it in a movie theater and realizing just what games have become. A haunting trailer for a game I had no idea of, that interested me to no end. Playing it now for as long as I have, I have come to welcome Gears'  brand of horror. The type of horror that shows rather then tells. In subtle broken down buildings and fluttering propaganda posters in the wind. The soft echoing of the wind in broken down skyscrapers and the even softer growling and yelling of the Locusts in the background. The sounds of glass breaking as their large feet break through what was once ours. The Locusts can basically appear from anywhere, and that's where alot of their horror lies. Yes, the 'grub holes' where they appear always come in the same places (this was mid 2000s, what do you expect with AI?) but the Locusts were smart. I can't begin to talk about all of the smart ways they would corner me, even chainsaw me from the back without me noticing. They killed squad mates without mercy and we just had to sit and watch. 

Of course the night wasn't safe either. While we need to worry about unwanted animals and bugs, humans on the planet Sera had to worry about killer bugs, Locusts coming from the shadows. Basically, what i'm getting at here is Gears never made it easy to survive. And that's where the horror lie. The humans of Gears of War had their planet taken away from them in a matter of weeks. Humans are becoming extinct and we're sending endless fodder of soldiers in an attempt to push it back. Our world is being destroyed around us, ammo is scarce during firefights and even the guns you pick up start off low. You pass destroyed corpses and burning crashes. The horror in this shooter series is the horror of losing everything you've built. It's meant to show what can happen in literally a snap of a finger, with billions dead and humanity driven back. We become the endangered species, and the first title in the series shows this the absolute best. 

So as I post this, this is my first blog post ever. And I'm hoping that with this, I can show everyone that mixing film genre/tropes/many other things and video games can show us more of what we are missing (or have!) in the genre. Plus, it gives me an excuse to talk about alot of my favorite topics and ideas. 

Feel free to follow, comment, or even ask me about things you want me to talk about! Next post I am going to dive into what I teased, System Shock 2 and it's horror impact on many games you wouldn't even believe are horror! 

((screenshots (in order); trueachievements.com))