I have never been drawn to or much interested in the horror genre in literature or film and have not participated in any video games in this genre. (Minesweeper is my forte). But I was drawn to this thread by the opening post as a way to begin to appreciate, perhaps, the motivations for the popularity in our time of horror-based fiction, films, and games. Toward that end I've done some research today and read an article that I think others here will find interesting. An extract and link are posted below.
From Axes to Grind: Re-Imagining the Horrific in Visual Media and Culture, Harmony Wu, editor, Special Issue of Spectator 22:2 (Fall 2002) 12-23.
TANYA KRZYWINSKA
Hands-On Horror
Extract:
" . . . The Horror Experience: From Film to
Games
The horror film derives much of its power to
thrill from the fact that the viewer cannot intervene
in the trajectory of events. While viewers
might feel an impulse to help beleaguered characters
in a horror film, they can never do so
directly. The horror film viewer might offer cries
of warning to the hapless teenagers who ignore
all diegetic warnings and persist in entering into
the spook house. The formula is well rehearsed,
soliciting groans and verbal advice, yet the
pleasure entailed in this process is founded on
awareness of the inevitability of the events that
will unfold. Characters and action ultimately
remain isolated from the sphere of the viewer,
regardless of the extent to which he or she might
“identify” with them. When watching a horror
film, viewers are always subjected to the flow of
events (unless they decide to turn away or cover
their eyes—a familiar reaction of some viewers
to moments of heightened horror or suspense).
. . .
In this sense, I concur with Steve Shaviro’s argument
that horror film suspense trades on a
masochistic economy of delicious passivity,
visceral affect and expectation.15 The spectator’s
experience of a restrictive inability to act on situations
is often underlined in horror film
thematics. Zombification, various types of
possession and bodily invasion are typical horror
film scenarios that represent a loss of
autonomy and self-determination.16 Theme
reflects reception here, the viewer—like the
beset characters on screen—is also helpless,
unable to alter the trajectory of on-screen action.
Yet film is less able than games to build into
their deep structure a concrete experience of
being in control and out of control of onscreen
events. None of this means that the film
viewer is entirely “passive” in the reception of
the film, however (a rhetorical trap that game
critics often fall into when discussing the
differences between gaming and cinema).
Viewers constantly engage, rationally and
irrationally, with the material presented on
screen; as Bruce Kawin puts it: “we interact
with the signs in the generation of meaning
and … our attention is selective.”17 The horror
film often plays more overtly with the
viewer’s inability to affect the action, however,
which is the key to some of its pleasures.
What, though, of the horror videogame? Does
the interactive dimension and the resulting
ability of the player to control the action
prevent horror games from replicating the
terrors and ecstasies of losing control?
It is my contention that the interactive
dimension of horror games enables a more
acute experience of losing control than that
achieved by most horror films. This is
achieved partly because, at times, the player
does have a sense of self-determination; when
it is lost, the sense of pre-determination is
enhanced by the relative difference. As I have
shown, game events are often taken out of the
player’s hands, a stratagem which allows the
deployment of horrific pleasures closer to
those of the horror film. Control and autonomous
action, which are always qualified, does
not mean the player is simply in a position of
mastery, however. The repeated actions, continual
“dying,” the intrusions of the sound
field, the cause-and-effect structure, the
operations of the “authored” structure, and
the cut-scenes, each work to offer the player a
sense that they are being acted upon by the
game’s deep structure. Like the horror film, it
is sharply apparent that the game’s virtual
world is a closed system: the authored aspect
of narration governs the fabric of game and
film, channeling the way we negotiate and
experience it. As Andrew Darley notes, and I
build on this to underpin my argument about
the moral occult, there are points in a game at
which its pre-programmed nature means
that the “element of control and choice…
is revealed as illusory.”18 Unlike Darley,
however, I do not see these moments as
“formulaic” game flaws. Instead, these
moments actively work to produce the crucial
sense of being out of control that is inherent to
the experience of horror. Although this
experience of being out of control is handled
in a different and deeper manner from that
of the horror film, there is a sense that the
virtual world, and its structuring moral
occult, is beyond a player’s control (even
if the player resorts to cheats and walkthroughs,
unless the cheat allows a player to defy the
game’s boundaries, in which case the sense
of immersion is lost).
There are some significant differences
borne of interactivity, however. Games are
organized around the traversal of space, to
which narrative is often secondary; in a film,
narrative is primary and always drives the organization
of space. This distinction provides
a further important difference between the
two media in terms of the way that “looking”
is treated. Unlike that of the horror film, the
operation of the moral occult in videogames is
rarely oriented around the punishment of
curiosity.19 Visual investigation becomes central
to the trajectory of a game as well as to the
way the story unfolds. Many horror films also
deploy an investigative strategy in the service
of narrative, yet it is at one remove from the
viewer, and is far more directed than in
games, which rarely deploy ellipses to eliminate
“dead” time. In some respects the more
open economics of looking in games unravels
the predetermined, ideological systems codified
in looking patterns of the horror film.
Most games, and specifically Undying, depend
on a player searching areas to find clues,
power-ups and other equipment that open the
way to the next level. As the game guide to
Evil Dead: Hail to the King warns, “Don’t be
afraid to look around and check out the area.
Otherwise, you might miss something important.”
Therefore, space is something to be
actively, physically, investigated if the player
is to “beat” the game. Looking in games can
mean that the player encounters danger, as
with Old Dark House-style horror films, yet
the difference is that (outside cut-scenes) the
player is encouraged to assert an active, rather
than passive, mode of looking.
Through the juxtaposition of being in and
out of control, horror-based videogames facilitate
the visceral and oscillating pleasures/
unpleasures of anxiety and expectation. The
interactive dimension heightens this fluctuating
sense of anticipation, implicating the
player in his or her fate. Failure to progress in
games necessitates repetition (being “stuck,”
with all its wider mythic and therapeutic
meanings). What is “punished” in videogames
is not so much curiosity, as in the horror film,
but the failure to make it into the next scene.
Through the active mode of investigation
facilitated by interactivity, the player may
place his/her avatar in peril, yet the trade-off
is access to new thrills and the promise of
continued gameplay. These are withheld if
a player does not pursue active investigation.
If a player fails to get through a set task, or
fails to explore effectively, the narrative itself
is withheld (no story before bedtime), a dimension
that is conventionally not available
in film. Darley usefully comments on this
exploratory aspect of games by suggesting
that “once a game is under way the player is
compelled continually and immediately to
respond.”20 Horror-based games are designed
to compel the player to investigate and overcome
dangerous encounters if they are to
uncover the game story and fully “colonize”
the game space. While the investigatory mode
might appear to be self-determined, it
demands a ritualized, mechanical response to
events. The moral occult of a game’s internal
structure pulls the player towards its goal of
defeating evil. Along the way, it solicits contradictory
desires for intensity, prolonged
tension, anxiety, compulsion and resolution.
The creation of such an emotionally discrepant
scenario fits quite neatly into Julia
Kristeva’s view that the experience of horror
is bound into “a vortex of summons and
repulsion.”21 The deployment of extrinsic,
Othered forces (akin to Lacan’s notion of
the “Big Other”) provided by the games’
programming that impinge on the player’s
freedom to act are rendered within horror’s
remit to provoke and intensify feelings
of powerlessness, offering an important
media-specific modulation of the generic
paradigm provided by the horror film and
affirming the value of looking at horror from
the perspective of games.
Potentially, interactivity presents a problem
to horror genre dynamics because its
inherent ability to allow players to drive the
way that they investigate the space of the
game means the loss of authorial control, to
some extent, of the narrational strategies used
to create suspense, which is crucial to the
development of the horror experience in film.
It is for this reason that videogames mix
interactivity with predetermined boundaries
and intrusive interventions that channel the
player’s engagement with the game. The
pleasure-suspense dynamics of horror-based
games are, as I have shown, very much
dependent on this combination. Both Undying
and Resident Evil 3 allow the player to act on
events, but only in a manner determined
by the game’s internal structure. Both games
create scenarios in which the erotic economics
of masochism can be experienced, which the
on/off dynamics of interactivity create and
heighten. As such it seems mistaken to call
games “promethean”:22 there is no transgression
of higher powers; players remain by and
large dependent on the tips bestowed, the
gameplay path is fated and predetermined.
At times during gameplay a player is dutifully,
sublimely, in their service, and the
pay-off is, precisely, the experiential gain of
suspense and tension. Yet this is always
balanced against a sphere of interaction that
promises self-directed agency.
Unlike their film counterparts, and in spite
of an often simplified moral framework,
horror-based videogames create a complex
interaction between bounded choice and
determinism that reflects, to some extent, the
way in which individuals interact with social
constraints. Within the safe context of the
fantasy arena of videogames, which are modally
marked as “fantasy” rather than reality
through their production values and generic
intertexts, the determinism of the game
accrues for the player a direct and heightened
experience of being acted upon. Games are
carefully designed and authored to take us to
emotional places that would perhaps be
avoided if full interactivity were available.
The manichean-based safety net actively
allows the games to invoke “dangerous” and
liminal experiences. Horror games interface
with the way in which technology is often
imagined as demonic and Othered; the player
is offered the challenge to defeat the technologically-
based demon (aided by the “good”
elements of the technology), which, if
achieved, can offer a pleasurable sense that
the technology has been mastered. The
contract drawn up between hands-on interaction
and hands-off pre-determinism works,
therefore, in part with the emotional and
erotic economics of masochism as much as
with the drive to act, colonize, and take
charge. The switching between the two intensifies
the experience of being both in control
and out of control, a strategy that is not fully
available to the horror film. This is because
such switching is grounded in the unique and
dynamic interactive nature of gaming media.
Author's note: I would like to thank Sue Morris, Geoff King, Will
Brooker, Harmony Wu and the editors of Spectator for
their insightful comments on this essay, a revised version
of which appears in ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/
interfaces (London: Wallflower Press, forthcoming).
Tanya Krzywinska is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Brunel University, LondonLondon, UK. She is the author
of A Skin for Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film (Flicks Books, 2000), co-author (with Geoff
King) of Science Fiction Cinema (Wallflower Press, 2001) and co-editor (with Geoff King) of ScreenPlay:
cinema/videogames/interfaces (Wallflower Press, 2002). She is currently working on a book entitled Sex and
the Cinema, interspersed with playing videogames in preparation for a co-authored book with the working
title Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders.
NOTES
1 Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997) 1.
2 See Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska in the introduction to the forthcoming book, ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/
interfaces (Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska, eds. [London: Wallflower Press, 2002]) for a more lengthy consideration
of the relationship between games and cinema.
3 The term refers to a model of the universe formulated by a 3rd-5th century sect, the Manichees, for whom the
cosmos is a site of an endless dualistic battle between good and evil. Many popular texts are structured around a
battle between good and evil, good usually winning out in the end (see Tanya Krzywinska, “Hubble Bubble, Herbs
and Grimoires: Magic, Manichaeanism and Witchcraft in ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer,’” Fighting the Forces: Essays on
the Meanings of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, David Lavery and Rhonda Wilcox, eds. [Lanham, Boulder, New York and
London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002]). The way in which good and evil is defined in a given text is, of course,
subject to dominant, and often fundamental, ideological values.
4 The horror genre has played an important role in targeting videogames to young adults (most games fall into the 15
rating bracket). The genre also has an established and very active body of fans, which makes them an ideal
grouping for videogames’ marketing.
5 Silent Hill 2 (Konami, 2001) is an example of a horror-based game that, in drawing from psychological-based horror,
makes an attempt to disrupt the conventional good-evil paradigm. This is achieved by building questions about
the “good” status of the avatar.
6 The term was first used by Peter Brooks to describe the way in which melodramas often work to literalize and
make visible in a text an ideologically constructed metaphysical order of universe, which is mainly organized in
terms of manicheanism: good versus evil. As Brooks puts it “Balzac and James need melodrama because the deep
subject, the locus of their true drama, has come to be what we have called the ‘moral occult’: the domain of
spiritual forces and imperatives that is not clearly visible within reality, but which they believe to be operative
there, and which demands to be uncovered, registered, articulated” (The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry
James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess, 2nd edition [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995] 20-21).
7 Unless, like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk (who once tampered with the programming of a “no-win” training simulation,
thereby beating an unbeatable scenario) players are able to interfere with a game’s programming.
8 Romero was slated to direct the Resident Evil film, but pulled out during production.
9 Eve Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (London: Methuen, 1986).
10 The term is used in a programming context, which is, necessarily, a collective activity.
11 The game version of the Evil Dead films, Evil Dead: Hail to the King, employs the same fast-moving I-cam forwardtracking
shot in a clear attempt to map formal hallmarks of the parent film text onto the game medium.
12 Steve Neale, “Halloween: Suspense, Aggression and the Look,” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Barry
Keith Grant, ed. (Metuchen, New Jersey and London: Scarecrow Press, 1984); Linda Williams, “When the Woman
Looks,” Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams,
eds. (Frederick, MS: University Publications of America/American Film Institute, 1984); Carol J. Clover, Men,
Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (London: BFI Publishing, 1992).
13 See Neale, Williams, Clover.
14 Other formal differences and similarities between film and games operate. The presence of altered realities in
Undying helps to sustain visual and narrative interest and may help to compensate for the absence of what in
cinema would be supplied through the use of cross-cutting, a key device used to create tension and signal threat.
Sound also plays a crucial role in both media to invoke the emotional impact of horror, and is often linked to the
operation of the moral occult. Many videogames deploy sound as a key sign of impending danger, designed to
agitate a tingling sense in anticipation of the need to act. The effect can be produced through changes in the type of
music being played or through sounds that have their sources directly in the space of the game. These aural cues,
present in both Undying and Resident Evil 3, help to create an increased level of expectation and play a significant
role in the creation of atmosphere as well as in emotional and structural dynamics of the games.
15 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota, 1993) 55.
16 See Tanya Krzywinska, A Skin For Dancing In: Possession, Witchcraft and Voodoo in Film (Trowbridge: Flicks Books,
2000) for a discussion of possession in the horror film.
17 Bruce Kawin, “The Mummy’s Pool,” Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, Barry Keith Grant, ed. (Metuchen
and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1984) 4.
18 Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000) 157.
19 For example, Kawin states that the horror film “emphasizes the dread of knowing, the danger of curiosity” (8). A
very literal rendition of this appears in Opera (1988), where the eye is literally and graphically punished.
20 Darley, 156.
21 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press,
1982) 1.
22 Steven Poole, Trigger Happy (London: Fourth Estate, 2000) 217.
