BWP is not the kind of film one watches many times—it is not beautifully filmed, it has no elaborate production design, no aesthetically pleasing staging. The cinematography is nauseatingly amateurish, the production design scanty, and the staging often glaringly accidental. But those lacks are not deficiencies; they contribute directly to the power of the film. BWP was remarkably effective in using simple cinematic techniques and a suggestive multiplatform advertising campaign to engage audiences’ attention and produce very strong emotional responses in them. The basic predation scenario connected with deeply conserved evolved dispositions, and the lure of authenticity ramped up the perception of relevance. BWP was not the first found-footage horror film and certainly not the last, but it did launch the subgenre into the mainstream (Heller-Nicholas 2014, 95). Critics have argued that the film tapped into a context-specific fascination with conspiracies and the paranormal (Roscoe 2000) and millennial anxieties over uncertainty (Weinstock 2004, 242). Uncertainty, however, is endemic to the human experience because of limitations in our perception and understanding. We can never know anything for certain because our senses and cognitive powers are limited, and because the world is unpredictable in its complexity. Intentional agents are particularly unpredictable, which is why the depiction of youths lost in dark woods and hunted by some unseen agent is especially terrifying. BWP rose to cultural notoriety and commercial success not by immersing audiences in an elusive web of postmodern signifiers or by allowing them to wallow in misogyny and putative millennial anxieties. It rose to prominence by targeting evolved survival mechanisms through the multiplatform dissemination of a compelling pseudoauthentic story about malicious supernatural agency and vulnerable youths dying terribly at the hands of this agency.
PART 3
Future Evolutions in Horror Entertainment and Horror Research
CHAPTER 13
The Future of Horror
I have argued that horror is culturally pervasive because the genre is uniquely suited for satisfying fundamental human needs, most centrally the evolved need for simulated experience with threat scenarios. As I have shown in my readings of modern canonical American works of literary and cinematic horror, such works can target a range of evolved emotions, offer wildly different imaginative experiences, and be informed by strikingly different worldviews. Some horror works are uplifting, others deeply depressing. Some depict scenarios of existential threat and philosophical despair, and some feature protagonists in collision with vicious predators or metaphysical evil. Some works aim at producing ephemeral sensations of shock, surprise, and disgust, others leave vivid and lasting impressions of the fragility of the mind and the evanescence of life. The best works of horror have the capacity to change us for life—to sensitize us to danger, to let us develop crucial coping skills, to enhance our capacity for empathy, to qualify our understanding of evil, to enrich our emotional repertoire, to calibrate our moral sense, and to expand our imaginations into realms of the dark and disturbing.
Horror works by engaging psychological mechanisms that evolved gradually and adaptively over millions of years, and the genre itself changes in response to cultural variation, including technological developments. Predicting the future of horror is difficult, but one thing is certain: Horror is not going away. As long as we are fearful, imaginative creatures, there will be a central place for horror in our culture, and there is no reason to believe that we will evolve into fearless, unimaginative creatures anytime soon. Evolution by natural selection works slowly, and the human fear system as well as the imagination are such integral parts of our nature that a massive, sustained selection pressure would be required for evolution to whittle away at them. We need fear to stay alert and alive in an occasionally dangerous and unpredictable world, and we need imagination to make sense of this world and our place in it, and to guide our behavior—even in the 21st century and, presumably, beyond.
Our great-grandchildren’s horror will resemble our horror in most respects. The media will change—the content, less so. Like ours, the horror of our great-grandchildren will depict humans clashing with dangerous, unnatural forces. It will capitalize on our evolved fears and anxieties and feature predatory, supernatural, disgusting agents preying on humans. They will have access to a wider range of horror experiences, some of which are more immersive and much more emotionally powerful than anything we have today. Technological innovations will provide new outlets for the desire to get experience with negative emotion and threat scenarios in safe settings. We are already seeing such innovations emerge and take hold. Horror video games are entering a phase of maturity, and immersive virtual reality technology is now both affordable and convincing. Other forms of real-time interactive horror experiences, such as so-called haunted attractions, are embracing new technologies in their designs and are becoming more popular than ever before. Augmented reality, which blends actual and digital objects on a screen, as well as mixed or hybrid reality, which allows digital and real-world objects to co-exist and interact in a mediated world, are hospitable to horror scenarios. For example, the curious can download an app that uses the phone’s camera to depict the user’s environment while adding creepy elements such as suddenly emerging and screaming ghosts, visible and audible only through the phone. The prospect is deeply unsettling—you’re seeing your own home on the screen, but it’s suddenly infested with uncanny sights and sounds. That’s augmented reality, a fairly simple way of immersing the user in a horror story that unfolds in real-time. The technology is new, but the scare tactics are predictably designed to exploit evolved defense mechanisms: Pale, disembodied agents invade your home, behaving in a manner consistent with malicious intent; sudden noises startle you; the darkness is oppressing and sets your precautionary instincts on red alert. Such technologies are in their infancy and have little narrative and figurative content—they provide little more than serial jump scares. In contrast, some horror video games manage to take full advantage of the medium’s affordances and provide users with uniquely immersive horror experiences. Some even offer rich narratives and aesthetically pleasing representations.
Horror video games share characteristics with horror films but crucially add interaction (Clasen and Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2016, Krzywinska 2002). In such games, players control the behavior of a digital agent—an avatar—in the game. The player’s behavior determines the outcome of the game. We can do things in the game world, and the game world responds to our actions (Fox, Arena, and Bailenson 2009, Landay 2014). Such interactivity fosters immersion, defined as the “experience of losing oneself in the digital environment and shutting out cues from the physical world” (Fox, Arena, and Bailenson 2009, 96, Therrien 2014). Players feel present and invested in the game world; they feel that they are agents in a deadly zero-sum game, that they are directly responsible for the unfolding of the narrative. If their avatar dies, they will have to replay the level or the whole game. Perhaps they lose valuable in-game currency such as fuel or ammunition. Immersion through virtual embodiment is evident in the curious fact that gamers typically use the first-person pronoun when they recount gameplay experiences to others. They’ll say, “I shot up a horde of zombies with my Minigun,” or “I evaded the face-gobbling behemoths by jumping clean across the pit of snakes.” Conversely, nobody in their right mind would say “I managed to survive Michael Myers’s killing spree,” no matter how intensely they empathize with Laurie Strode as they’re watching Halloween (Carpenter 1978).
The purest instance of the horror video game is the subgenre known as survival horror. Games in this subgenre typically use a first-person perspective. They situate players in a game world that teems with danger, and they set players at a distinct disadvantage by giving them no or few means of defense. Those elements come together effectively in the independent 2010 production Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Grip and Nilsson), celebrated as “one of the scariest games in recent memory” (Onyett 2010). The player controls an amnesic character, Daniel, who finds himself in
a 19th-century castle, hunted by terrible monsters, alone, and in the dark—with no map, no weapons, and very little knowledge about what is going on. The player must solve a number of puzzles to complete the game, and is intermittently rewarded with cut scenes—short noninteractive film sequences—that deliver backstory. The game uses a first-person optical perspective to generate the illusion that the player is in the game, as depicted in Figure 13.1. It looks as though we are seeing through Daniel’s eyes. As the game designers put it, “one of the main goals was for the player to become the protagonist” (Grip 2010). The illusion is enhanced with event-sensitive audiovisual feedback. When Daniel sees something particularly disturbing, such as gore-spattered walls or an approaching monster, the visual field ripples and distorts (Figure 13.1), and the game emits sounds of quickened breathing, accelerated heartbeat, and whimpering. This audiovisual feedback mimics fear-induced perceptual and physiological changes (Clasen and Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2016). The game uses predictable stimuli to evoke negative affect in the player. The monsters preying on Daniel are humanoid creatures with predatory morphological characteristics such as claws and a huge gaping mouth with rows of sharp teeth (Figure 13.1). They are supernormal predators, motivated apparently only by the desire to attack the protagonist. Conversely, the protagonist can do nothing to protect himself—except hide, for example in a closet. The player has to pay very close attention to the virtual environment to survive and proceed in the game. Only by staying alert will the player spot the monsters in time to hide from them and find caches of fuel for the lantern, and only by being persistent in their attempt to evade the monsters and solve progress-enabling puzzles will they reap the reward of compiling the full backstory and completing the game.
Figure 13.1: Survival horror games such as Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Grip and Nilsson 2010) are structured to facilitate immersion. The game uses a first-person perspective and audiovisual feedback mimicking fear-induced perception changes to sustain the illusion that the player is in the threatening game world, and the toothy monsters evoke ancestral predators.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is notoriously effective in evoking negative affect in players—strangely so, perhaps, given that the situation depicted in the game is so far removed from most people’s lives that we might expect it to be perceived as utterly irrelevant. How many of us have ever found ourselves—or anticipate finding ourselves—hunted by supernormal predators in an old German castle? Yet the basic premise resonates powerfully with ancient structures in our constitution. For eons we werehunted by dangerous agents with claws and sharp teeth. We did have to navigate unknown, dark environments in a quest for resources, we did have to overcome obstacles through cunning, and we did have to stay alert to stay alive. Amnesia taps into conserved dispositions to satisfy an evolved desire for imaginative experience with scenarios of predation (Clasen and Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2016). The monsters roaming the castle may be implausible, but they look fairly real—real enough, that is, to be cognitively and emotionally processed as dangerous agents rather than dynamic pixel patterns on a two-dimensional screen. A recent empirical study polled college students on their experiences with horror video games and found that graphic realism (that the game world looks real) caused fear in players more frequently than did manifest realism (that the events depicted in the game are likely to occur in the real world) (Lynch and Martins 2015). The stimuli used by Amnesia to engage our attention and elicit negative emotion are fairly common to survival horror games—according to the study, the most frequently mentioned fear-evoking stimuli are darkness, disfigured humans, zombies, and the unknown (Lynch and Martins 2015). Sound effects, such as sudden loud noises to accompany fright-inducing visuals, also play a major role in producing fear responses (Toprac and Abdel-Meguid 2011). These are all predictable stimuli from an evolutionary perspective, stimuli that reliably produce negative affect in humans. We see similar stimuli in horror literature and horror films, but the experience of playing Amnesia is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the experience of reading stories and watching films. Amnesia is significantly more terrifying than any novel I’ve ever read or any film I’ve ever seen—but it’s also imaginatively and intellectually less satisfying than the best horror stories and films. Survival horror video games more effectively provoke negative emotion and immersion than does horror in other media, but they still lack the richness of narrative, depth of characterization, and complexity of symbolic structure that horror in literature and cinema have achieved.
The more recent and more technically accomplished horror video game Until Dawn (Bowen, Reznick, and Fessenden 2015) explicitly attempts to combine the qualities of horror film with the affordances of video games. In this game, a youthful group of friends travel to a remote cabin to spend a few days. Not surprisingly, they are hunted by a malicious agent—several malicious agents, in fact. There’s a maniac in a creepy mask and dangerous Wendigoes out there. The virtual environment is carefully rendered; many of the scenes approach photorealism. In this game, the player controls each of the eight characters in turn, but from a third-person perspective. This perspective diminishes the sense that the player and the avatar merge into one—we are given control over the characters’ behavior and encouraged to invest in their fate, but we don’t quite feel that their fate is our fate. If one youth dies, no big loss; there are seven others to control, and besides, some of the characters are programmed to be fairly annoying. Until Dawn uses reaction shots similar to the ones used in horror films, to make up for the decreased sense of perspective-taking. When the game employs jump-scares, however, the perspective on several occasions changes from third- to first-person. At one point, the player controls a character, Ashley, who believes she has seen a ghost. She is nervously investigating a creepy old basement with another character, Chris, who is at this point in the game computer-controlled (Figure 13.2). Suddenly, a ghostly face appears out of nowhere—just as the perspective changes to a first-person point-of-view, to enhance the perception of personal threat and thus the startle in the player (Figure 13.3). The use of a variable point-of-view is efficient in giving players both the pleasure of total immersion and the more detached pleasure of controlling the behavior and fate of characters.
Figure 13.2: The horror video game Until Dawn (Bowen, Reznick, and Fessenden 2015) combines the pleasures of the video game with the pleasures of the horror film, situating players in an interactive slasher film. Here, the player controls the character Ashley who is investigating a creepy basement.
Figure 13.3: When the character Ashley comes across a creepy ghost in Until Dawn (Bowen, Reznick, and Fessenden 2015), the perspective changes from a detached third-person to an immersive first-person perspective, which ramps up the startle effect. The threat of the ghost feels much more personal and immediate.
Until Dawn balances tightly scripted sequences with ones that grant the player a great deal of control. This is typical for horror video games that need players to follow a certain trajectory in order to shape and guide their experience while giving them the agency characteristic of the medium (Krzywinska 2002). In some sequences, we have little or no control over the characters; in others, we have to search the environment for crucial resources or make choices that may lead to life or death. In Until Dawn, several such decision nodes emerge at critical junctures during sequences of predation, for example when a character pursued by a maniac enters a room that has opportunities for hiding as well as opportunities for escape. About midway through the game, we control an attractive young woman, Sam, whose clothes mysteriously and, ahem, inconveniently disappear as she is enjoying a warm bath. She’s now walking around in the cabin wearing only a bath towel. Soon enough she is attacked by the masked maniac. She flees, and at predetermined intervals during her flight the player has to make crucial choices under intense time pressure—does she hide under the bed or jump over it? Does she run or hide, as in Figure 13.4? Quick, make a decision! The premise of the game is painfully familiar—we�
��ve seen countless slasher films featuring youths in remote locations and pitted against homicidal maniacs or supernatural monsters—but Until Dawn lets players shape the narrative. Early in the game, players have to pick from lists of common phobia objects such as gore and bugs. The chosen objects then appear later in the game. In this game, we don’t have to yell at the heroine for deciding to investigate the weird noise from the basement; we can choose to ignore the noise and go elsewhere. If the heroine’s decision to hide under the bed rather than keep running gets her killed, that is our fault because we made the decision. When completion of the game (and the fate of the characters) rides on the player’s vigilance, there’s really no zoning out, no looking away from the screen. It is an engaging experience, and one that can be genuinely terrifying. Technology is expanding the range of options for the horror aficionado—especially the aficionado eager to become participant in, rather than merely observer of, the horrors.
Figure 13.4: In Until Dawn (Bowen, Reznick, and Fessenden 2015) the player has to make crucial decisions under intense time pressure. Here, the player controls Sam, who is pursued by a homicidal maniac in a mask. Does she run or hide? The player makes the choice by pushing the thumb stick on the PlayStation controller either to the left or to the right.
Why Horror Seduces Page 19
