Horror is probably the coolest genre in cine꧋ma right now. After decades of being the schlock joke genre of the movie industry, the starting point (or final resting place) for screaming starlets and buff idiots, crammed with monsters and gore and special effects and nothing close to resembling nuance, horror is now quietly enjoying a golden age. ‘Elevated horror’, as Scream mockingly labels it and then copies it, is in. Thanks to Jordan Peele, A24, and cult hits like The Babadook, horror movies are no longer brainless buckets of blood, they mean something. Unfortunately, games have missed the memo.
Friday the 13th is just about a bunch of teens being killed at a campsite. Evil Dead is just about a bunch of teens being killed in a cabin. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is just about a bunch of teens being killed with a chainsaw. Get Out, however, is a deconstruction of 𓂃how white Americans appropriate and fetishise Black culture even as they discriminate against Black people themselves. Midsommar is about the ways vulnerable white women can be indoctrinated by the alt-right under the g💧uise of feminism and empowerment.
We try to overthink old horror movies, like claiming Texas is an examination of the ways society enacts a kind of violence on poor citizens of the Midwest, but we’re injecting meaning where it does not exist. There are some basic points made, like The Wicker Man bravely standing up to say cults are bad꧋, but nothing like what we have today. The closest late 20th century horror got to these types of thoughts is the use of sexual activity as a sign of condemnation in Halloween, a trope director John Carpenter has since admitted was not deliberate. Right now seems the perfect time for a horror game, but nobody is stepping up.
Perhaps that’s not fair. Games media has a habit of talking almost exclusively in a triple-A sense, unless we highlight a specific indie darling like last year’s The Forgotten City, which won TheGamer’s Game of the Year. Indie games have not been ignoring horror, however. Just last month we had Martha is Dead, whose horror was so severe certain player-led scenes were censored and turned into cutscenes on PlayStation. And Martha is not a brainless horror either, in it you play as an Italian teenager in 1944, who is insulated from the rations and wartime turmoil by the fact her step-father is a Nazi officer.ಌ It’s layered in its narrative and uses its horror, graphic as it may be, to tell a story about how much we are shaped by who we are, and how much we are shaped by the circumstances we find ourselves in.
Other smaller hits, like Phasmopobia, have shown there’s an appetite for fear, but the big dogs just aren’t biting. On the triple-A scene, we haven’t had a great horror game for quite some time, maybe not since 2014’s Alien: Isolation, a game lauded as one of the greatest the genre has ever produced, but one that underwhelmed in sales, as horror games tend to do. For that reason the series, and seemingly triple-A horror video games with it, died. The Medium and a few other double-As have kept the flame burning, but the genre has withered. Supermassive Games is pretty much the only studio pushing horror to new places, but it can't do it alone. It’s dismissive to say indie games would be better with a bigger budget, but then if you ask any indie dev if they could have one thing to improve their work, they’d say ‘more money’. Triple-A games aren’t inherently better than indie games, but if you took the creativity of the indie horror scene and the budget of even the smallest, middle-market triple-A games, you’d probably get some pretty great video games.
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What’s strange is that indies are often under even more pressure to sell well. The targets are lower, but failure at an indie level can often mean studio extinction. Triple-A studios, now that so many of them are conglomerates owned by billion dollar organisations🎐, should be more willing to take risks, especially on a genre that’s enjoying a cinematic renaissance that shows no signs of slowing down. We’ve even seen horror elements be folded into successful games (regardless of what Neil Druckmann says The Last of Us is a zombie game), but few games that have gone all out on horror. Games love copying movies, but no one has tried to make Hereditary.
Horror is the ꦜperfect genre for video games too. Jump scares can be a somewhat cheap tactic, but the fact that video games require player agency gives them much more license to♏ scare you. In the cinema, you can look away when it gets too much, but with video games you need to experience it fully. The past few years have been a relative cultural peak for horror stories, and it has passed video games by entirely. Ghostwire Tokyo, my hopes are resting squarely on you buddy.