Ways to Tell a Scary Story: Video Games Pt 2.

Hello Everyone!

This is Part II of my Scary Video Game series.  We are talking about Resident Evil 7, which is one of the newest, and one of the scariest video games to come on the market.

Before I go on, I'm gonna post this first:

THIS POST WILL CONTAIN MINOR SPOILERS
If you haven't played the game, or watched someone play it, you may not want to read on.

Okay.

So the reason that I want to talk about this game is because it surprised me. All I had known about the Resident Evil franchise was that it had zombies in it.  And while I am not offended or even dislike the zombie genre, a lot of it relies on the fantastical, gross, and the jump scare.  However, Resident Evil 7 doesn't rely on that.

That isn't to say that it doesn't have those things, in fact, it has a lot of those things, but when I think of "what kind of horror" this game is, I would have to say that, at least for the first 2/3rds, it is an atmospheric horror.

Why? Because for the first SEVERAL minutes of the game.  Nothing. Happens.

And it is still terrifying.

I'm going to walk you through the first part of the game,

So your wife has been gone for 3 years, when out of the blue she contacts you and leads you to a house where she is presumably living and still alive.

This House.

Next to the gate is an abandoned van of a film studio.

Now, see the van door? See that crack? Thar is the perfect little detail.  The dark curious side of you (the one who likes to read/write/take in horror) wants so badly to open it.  The other side of you, or perhaps the part of you who knows the horror genre, doesn't.  You know there is something lurking behind that door.  

But the truly great part of this is....is that there isn't.  When you open the van door expecting a jump scare, expecting a zombie, expecting a dead body, you know what you get? Nothing.  But even still, the moment that you swing that door open, you get that thump in your stomach.

From there, you make your way to the house.  By the time you make it to the house, you've seen some disturbing looking "art" (made out of horse legs), and have seen a man walk by.  And then you get to the house.

What makes this section so eerie is that it is familiar.  I've never lived in a big house with a wrap around porch.  But I can feel the comfort, the homie-ness that comes with them.  I can imagine sitting on a porch, or a porch swing with the love of my life, while watching the sun set.  And when those positive images break down, its eerie.  We see the history that "once was" in front of the house. And it makes us wonder, "did this house fall victim to neglect? Or was it something more sinister?"

Then. We go into the house.  It too is in extreme decay.  

Again, the house isn't so broken down that you can't tell that someone once lived there, or that it is no longer recognizable as a "home".  Here it is dirty, and gross (there are very questionable things in those pots and pans).  But look at the sun coming through the blinds.  Look at that spacious kitchen.  I want you to imagine family gatherings, christmas dinners, late night talks.  And now I want you to imagine what could have possibly happened to make it look like that.  Why is your wife there? Why has she been there for 3 years? According to the story of the game, she was gone on a babysitting job.  Where is the kid? (Kids in Horror will be another series).  

The next few minutes, you continue through the house, picking up clues, gathering some story. Experiencing the feelings of the house.

Seriously. Would you go through this door? Spoiler alert.  Nothing is on the other side.

The first 15 minutes of this game....nothing happens.  

But you know what? It is scary as hell.

But as a writer, you can't write 15 pages without anything happening.  Or at least, you can't write 15 pages without making your reader feel something.  

As a short story writer, sometimes I don't have 15 pages, so I have to make people scared on page 2.  In a longer piece, by page 15, you want things to definitely feel off.  

You have to create ATMOSPHERE.

This game creates an atmosphere.  It gets you scared and on edge before anything actually happens.  In film or video games it's easy.  You can create atmosphere with lighting, music, sound.  But in a book. All you have are words.

Here is a passage from my favorite horror book "House of Leaves" By Mark Z. Danielewski.

"Focus on these words, and whatever you do don't let your eyes wander past the perimeter of this page.  Now imagine just beyond your peripheral vision, maybe behind you, maybe to the side of you, maybe even in front of you, but right where you can't see it, something is quietly closing in on you, so quiet in fact you only hear it as silence. ...  before you have time to even process that you should be moving, you should be running, you should at the very least be flinging up your arms...you won't have time to even scream."

The trick to creating atmosphere is to make the person consuming the media feel like there is something lurking in the shadows.  Like there is something lurking in your peripheral.  

The bump in the night is always so much scarier than what is doing the bumping.

Next week.  I'll walk through another scene of the game that evokes a scary atmosphere, and share another text that does it in a similar way.  After that, we'll jump into the American Gothic.

Memento Mori.