Videogames Make Better Horror Than Movies?

Wired author Clive Thompson has up an article stating that, with today's jaded audiences, videogames are more effective horror-conveyances than movies. Thompson argues that the removal of the fourth wall, placing the player directly into the story, overcomes the obstacles movie-makers face when telling a scary story. "I'll start down a corridor, hear something freaky up ahead, then freeze in panic. Maybe if I stay quiet the monster will go away? S^!t, maybe it's already headed this way, and I should move! But if I move the monster will hear me ... so maybe I should stay quiet ... gaaaaah! Games already seem like dream states. You're wandering around a strange new world, where you simultaneously are and aren't yourself. This is already an inherently uncanny experience. That's why a well-made horror game feels so claustrophobically like being locked inside a really bad -- by which I mean a really good -- nightmare." Do you agree? Is your favorite scary tale a movie ... or a game? (Silent Hill, I'm looking at you.)

Absolutely.

[oxidiser]

I've never been scared by a movie, ever. But I almost soiled myself the first time I played Resident Evil (the part where the dogs jump through the window in particular).

No.

[Xtense]

I don't agree. While you're playing the game, you have some sort of an adrenaline rush, that effectively makes you immune to any kind of scare the developers might devise. That, and the inherent stupidity of the monsters you'll encounter surely makes them less of a threat.

But, on the bright side, it's easier to make a specific mood in a game, and make the player be afraid of that, for example - I was absolutely scared of playing Ultima Underworld alone when I was about ten or eleven. There was something in those dark corridors, bones lying around, and the music that provided the tension needed to scare the hell out of me. And it works today, too. Not in the way Doom3 would like us to have, but, for example, BioShock manages to capture the freaky atmosphere perfectly, making you look around your shoulder far more often.

Games are scarier

[grub]

The screeches of the monkeys in System Shock 2 always freak me out, no matter how many times I play it. (playing BioShock right now and it's nowhere near as scary as SS2 IMHO)

Or the sounds Haunts make in the Thief series.. eek.

Re:Absolutely.

[iapetus]

You think you had it bad - after seeing the start of Resident Evil for the first time I had to walk home past a graveyard. :)

That said, the Resident Evil formula (in the early games at least) soured pretty quickly. There's only so many zombies that can come through so many windows before it loses its impact. Silent Hill was a big step up in that, with a far better sense of creeping dread - and one that didn't always lead to a big explosive ZOMBIE THRU TEH WINDOW finale - some of the creepiest sections were those where nothing actually happened at all.

Halflife, duh...

[nweaver]

The original Half Life was a really classic example of this. You could make a decent monster movie along the same plot, but you wouldn't have quite the tension.

EG, the tension where you are creeping through the silo with the giant tentacles, the first time you meet the big shark-thingy, the elation and then horror as the marines come, etc....

A movie wouldn't be nearly as immersive.

Re:Absolutely.

[dintech]

I had the same crapping my pants experiences with the original Alone in the Dark game. I'm pretty sure that predates Resident Evil. Also it does it without any incredible Hollywood special effects.

Thief 3.

[Moryath]

While it didn't have the whole game, there's a level in it - The Cradle - that's absolutely, completely spooky. Running around a burned-out building that used to be both an insane asylum AND an orphanage...

Very different experiences

[Rob T Firefly]

For me the experience of watching a movie is usually so far removed from that of playing a game that I can't directly compare them. While a movie can use a particular character or characters as surrogates for the audience, youre essentially watching things happen to other people. You can be sympathetically scared for them, but you don't really feel scared for yourself.

When you're playing a game, that avatar on the screen is, for all intents and purposes, you. You're not just watching some movie star go down the stairs to their doom, you have to choose to go down those stairs yourself. The experience of that sort of scare is very different, and to me much more personal, than the one-sided character/spectator relationship in films and such.

The only experience that for me sort of blurs that line between those two types of scares is listening to an audio play, such as radio drama or Big Finish Productions' audio CDs. When I'm listening to one of those I usually have my eyes closed and my imagination turned up high, and thus tend to see things from more of a first-person perspective in my mind's eye. A good horror story on audio can therefore approach the levels of immersion that a good video game provides, without being interactive.

Re:Absolutely.

[lukas84]

I've finished my first play through Bioshock this weekend, and i wouldn't classify it as a "horror" game - it's a solidly done shooter with several good RPG elements, but it doesn't come close to my System Shock experiences.

In System Shock, i started out as a hacker that could barely handle a pistol in it's hand. I was weak, ammo was low, scary sounds, scary environment, scary lightning, always low on resources, and then you just wasted a few bullets because you panicked and didn't aim. Very good. Even though after a few levels (i would say about after recreation), you'll also start to become a superhuman, with an assault rifle and plenty of ammo.

Bioshock is a lot more shooter than SS. And i never had the feeling of being weak. I played on medium, and i always had plenty of ammo, eve, health kits, etc. I didn't die once during the playthrough. I also started out as a superhuman, being able to fire flames and stuff from my hand - the splicers encountered early don't have the same capabilities, so i always better than anyone around me.

And Phantasmagoria... I got my hands on that game when i was around 12, 13. Very, very scary :)

The scariest experience I'd ever had

[Alzheimers]

...was playing Fatal Frame in the pitch black of night. No movie has ever terrified me more than the tension that builds up with the ambient soundtrack and the tiny light that tells you something is near, to activate the camera and go into 1st person mode, creeping along to find the ghostly image before it jumps out at you.

Anyone who's played it will no doubt remember the chilling moment while you tiptoe down the Rope Hallway and the red light comes on, looking up and coming face to face with Vengeance.

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Re:Absolutely.

[CastrTroy]

You know a game is good when you get scared, even though they only had 17 polygons to draw a person, and midi sound. Sometimes game developers think too much about flashy graphics, and forget to go back to the old tried and tested methods of creating ambiance with lighting, background music, and building suspense. Metriod Prime is an example of a recent game was great at this. It had pretty good graphics, but I found that was unimportant in drawing you into the game.

I'm really dating myself here...

[Commander Doofus]

...but a great original 1985-era scary game was Rescue on Fractalus [wikipedia.org] (it used actual fractals to generate an alien landscape, hence the title). You'd rescue downed pilots, who would see you land, run under your ship disappearing from view and (pause) there'd be a taptaptap to let them in. The trick was sometimes, after the pilot had disappeared from view, the "pilot" was really an alien and it'd SUDDELNY JUMP UP ON YOUR WINDSHIELD COMPLETE WITH SCARY MUSIC AND IT'S BANGING TO GET IT KILLITKILLITKILLIT!!! Great times, I'd play it with a friend and we'd both about wet ourselves.

Re:Absolutely.

[cHALiTO]

Agree. I also found Alien vs. Predator (the games, I and II) very scary, especially when you played as the marine, and kept seeing blips in your movement detector getting closer and closer and you couldn't see where the heck they were coming from until you had them on you.

Re:Absolutely.

[jollyreaper]

The scariest version of Doom was the one with the Aliens sound wad. Turn down the lights, hear those screams in the background, holy shit!

Really, though, the scariest part of any of these games is how immersive they are, cuz you know a flatmate is going to come and knock on the door or sneak up behind you and say something and you're going to jump twenty feet in the air. "WHAT?!"

Re:Absolutely.

[PriceIke]

Oh holy crap. I totally understand and agree. I remember the first game that scared me was played on my Commodore 64, and it was Alien [wikipedia.org]. It wasn't even a very well-implemented game, but it was fairly consistent with the movie .. you were on the Nostromo, you had to get as many things accomplished as you could with the remaining crew, before the Alien got to them and killed them.

The graphics were pisspoor, but I remember the sound effects and I remember the increase in heartrate when I knew the alien was close by. After a while, I stopped playing that game. It freaked me out too much.

I have been considering checking out one of these "horror" type games just to check them out. Maybe Eternal Darkness? [wikipedia.org]

Re:Absolutely.

[Fallingcow]

I think the worst part was that they put a monster in every. single. place. where one could be hidden.

"Oh, look, a new room with a pillar in it. 10-1 odds there's a monster behind it. In fact, I'll just strafe and fire blind... *BLAM* *GLARG* Yep, sure enough."

I was never creeped out, because EVERY room had a monster in EVERY possible place that it could. Which is cool if you're going for the, "OMFG monsters everywhere!" chaotic sort of scariness, which Doom1-2 did, but they didn't really do that The hell levels are the only part that consistently succeeded in anything like that, and consequently, are just about the only part of the game that I liked. The rest of the time they seemed to be going for "atmospheric, reading-about-scary-stuff, survival-horror creepy", and failing miserably.

All the way from the first 10 minutes or so of fighting (I kind of like the opening scenes and initial chaos after the portal is opened, actually) up to the beginning of the hell levels, I was bored out of my mind. To make things worse, the level design wasn't any good from a run-and-gun perspective, either. Lame. I'd have liked it much better if they'd dedicated the first 1/3 or so of the game to watching the place fall apart under the demonic influence, with more NPCs running around for a while. It would have made the isolation later on more frightening, and they wouldn't have had to rely on their (terrible) attempts at "boo" fright for as long, which may have made it tolerable. By the time that was getting old, you'd be in the hell levels, which they could leave more-or-less as-is.

Re:Deep Fear

[Glonoinha]

If you think the scary parts of Doom3, HL 1/2, FEAR, STALKER, etc are immersive when you are sober, try game night with a two drink minimum. One more reason games are way scarier than movies - you rarely watch movies (at the theater) under the influence, but you play all your games with a few drinks in you (at night with the lights off) and the last bit of disbelief fades away and you are there, living it. There are a few places in Doom3 where (a few glasses of scotch in my system) I had to turn it off and walk around the house turning on lights.