A thoroughly depraved look at the evolution (or should that be evilution?) of horror in video games.

A thoroughly depraved look at the evolution (or should that be evilution?) of horror in video games.

Bloodthirsty aliens. Hordes of deformed, sub-human monsters. Heads bursting like watermelons in a vice. All of these would be absolutely terrifying in a film, but they also describe 90% of the games available this Christmas. While moviegoers jump out of their seats at the sight of a snarling beast, we hardened gamers simply shoot it in the face and then proceed to do the same thing to their family and friends.  In fact, it’s hard to imagine a game I played recently which didn’t have heads exploding like balloons filled with red custard.

Games require a different approach to fear. Regardless of what you’ve read in the papers, violence in a game is clearly nothing like violence in real-life. There is a definite line drawn: games on one side, real-life on the other, film straddling the line and occasionally crossing it in needlessly graphic movies like Saw. Likewise, scary games don’t translate well to film either: Silent Hill was a load of rubbish and the less said about the Doom movie, the better.

Early attempts at horror in games used pre-rendered cinema and an eerie atmosphere to scare the wits out of players, with technology as the limiting factor- not that there’s nothing scary about a crudely-drawn cardboard box monster, of course. Adventure titles like The 7th Guest and Dark Seed focused on puzzle solving and plot exposition rather than fighting off monsters. This is a trend that has mostly continued up to the present day, with endless Tower of Hanoi variations popping up to boggle players.

This all changed with the release of Capcom’s Clock Tower for the SNES, the first game in the ‘survival horror’ genre. You play as Jennifer, a girl trying to find her lost friends in an old mansion. The problem is you’re being constantly chased by a scissor-wielding midget, whose sole mission in life is to chop you up like a bunch of chives. It’s worse than it sounds. Clock Tower has ten different endings, most involving you being murdered. Rather than trying to fight off the Scissorman, your only hope is to hide somewhere you won’t be found until he leaves the area. By today’s standards Clock Tower is slow, clunky and even risible at times, but the tension is still palpable.

In the Playstation era, fear-junkies were getting their kicks from two new games that soon were among the most recognisable franchises in gaming: Capcom’s Resident Evil and Konami’s Silent Hill. Although often lumped into the same genre, both titles take a drastically different approach to fear: Resident Evil focuses on gory encounters with flesh-eating zombies, mutant spiders and giant snakes, while Silent Hill relies on tension-building and subtle environmental cues to unsettle the player before attacking them with knife-wielding children. Regardless of which is more effective (the answer is Silent Hill) these games were met with critical acclaim and became huge money-spinners for their parent companies. Both have now been translated to the cinema and are inexplicably popular, presumably only with those who never played the games. The Resident Evil movies are as scary as a sock puppet with a snarl drawn on it in Biro, although perhaps that’s a matter of opinion.

Although Resident Evil and Silent Hill were responsible for dragging the horror genre kicking and screaming into the modern era, it was Tecmo who developed what is arguably the scariest game franchise of all time: Fatal Frame, also known as Project Zero in the UK.  In Fatal Frame, you enter a haunted mansion (what else?) to find your journalist brother. It becomes apparent fairly quickly that your brother is nowhere to be found, but hundreds of ghosts are and they don’t appreciate the intrusion.

Fatal Frame’s stroke of genius is that the only way to dispatch the ghosts is by capturing their souls with an enchanted camera. Using the camera drastically narrows your field of vision, making it easy for the spooks to creep up on you unexpectedly. You only inflict maximum damage when the ghosts are inches away from munching on your face, the eponymous ‘Fatal Frame’.

The ghosts in are among the most unpleasant enemies ever devised. Murdered children, psychotic samurai and pagan sacrifices make the ‘Broken Neck’ ghost seem a little banal by comparison. It’s not just the ghostly encounters that terrify in Fatal Frame. You’ll come across cassettes with the dying messages of those foolish enough to stray into the house. Demented screams and manic laughter combined with dramatic camera angles fool you into thinking there’s something lurking around every corner. There normally is something around every corner, of course.

Lately, there’s been a shift in the style of horror films churned out of the Hollywood mill. In the 70s and 80s, filmgoers were quite content to be scared out of their wits by zombies, vampires and strangely erudite serial killers. Nowadays, the supernatural isn’t enough: look at films like Wolf Creek, Wrong Turn, Hostel, Saw… those aren’t monsters preying on the innocent, they’re just perverts! Similarly in games, the zombies of Resident Evil have been replaced by the Ganados of Resident Evil 4: they don’t want to feast on the flesh of the living, merely to bludgeon you to death and burn your corpse. The Ganados hunt in packs, communicating in Spanish and co-operating to trap you in a corner. The important thing is these foes are ultimately far more terrifying than anything the undead can throw at you.

Where does the future lie for horror in games? EA’s highly anticipated Dead Space arrived in the Student office last Saturday: a bloody combination of Doom 3 and The Thing, it seems to live up to expectations judging by the first few hours. Resident Evil 5 is scheduled to arrive next March, marking a further move away from the series’ slow-paced roots by introducing a new control system and co-operative play. While die-hard fans may sneer at the changes, anyone who didn’t enjoy steering a human tank in the older Resi games will appreciate that it’s for the best.

Rather than focusing on games dedicated to horror, elements from scary games are beginning to creep into other genres. Valve’s masterpiece Half-Life 2 is a fusion of intense combat with soldiers and frantic encounters with zombies. Games like Bioshock make use of the macabre while not explicitly setting out to scare the shit out of the player. Regardless of where scary games go in the future, gamers will stay in the same place: behind the sofa, cowering in fear.

Three of the Best Scary Moments in Games

Eternal Darkness: Sanity Effects The only thing that could scare a gamer more than being attacked by the denizens of hell is thinking your memory card is corrupted, your disc damaged and your TV is broken. None of these happen during Eternal Darkness, of course: it’s just the game trying to freak you out.

Fatal Frame: Blinded Let’s face it: being stabbed in the eyes is nobody’s idea of a good time. Fatal Frame’s Blinded ghost can’t see you, waiting instead for your footsteps before lunging out of the shadows. To make matters worse, Blinded loves to appear at random intervals. Bring clean underwear.

Half-Life 2: Ravenholm We don’t go to Ravenholm. Do you know why we don’t go to Ravenholm? It’s infested with ravenous zombies, poisonous hunchbacks monsters that throw headcrabs at you and ferocious skeletons that eat shotgun shells for breakfast. That’s why.