This month has been a disappointing one for fans of horror games. Doom 3 promised to be the most terrifying of all time, but merely took us back to a world of scary monsters and haunted houses. For all its admittedly impressive graphical technology, the game design can only be seen as reactionary compared to the surreal psychological horrors offered up by Konami's Silent Hill, Tecmo's Fatal Frame or more recently Sony's Forbidden Siren.
For several years these Japanese titles have been appropriating themes from mythology, schlock horror movies, expressionist art, traditional ghost stories and countless other media to generate deeply unsettling images and experiences. Even the more mainstream Resident Evil, which, like Doom 3, makes great use of juvenile shock tactics, also explores concepts of body horror and the supernatural – and as with any zombie movie, it plays on innate human fears and revulsion of our own post-mortem decay. Which is more impressive than throwing a flaming skull at the screen and expecting us to crap ourselves.
But now even our favourite Japanese horror series are beginning to let us down. Silent Hill 4, with its emphasis on action, is a pale imitation of its relentlessly weird predecessors which often left you wandering for ages with nothing scarier than radio static to keep you on edge. And Resident Evil Outbreak is a joke in Europe, robbed of its key selling point – online co-operative play - which would have allowed gamers to explore the tense self-destructive group dynamic that has formed the basis of American horror cinema from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre right through to modern wannabes like Cabin Fever and Wrong Turn. Interestingly, Resident Evil 4 – perhaps influenced by those two recent movies - seems to be ditching zombies in favour of inbred yokels as the baddie of choice. Is Capcom looking to study metropolitan fears of rural folk? Or is this an attempt to push the series even further into the mainstream by providing more recognisable enemies? Perhaps the survival horror genre is simply morphing into the currently more in-vogue stealth shooter. That really would be a nightmare. What next? Resident Evil: Vice City?
If this shift toward action and away from suspense and psychological horror proves pervasive, it will be a real loss. Videogames have a unique capacity to explore fear. Through their very interactivity they force us into a closer relationship with the hero and his/her situation – and unlike with movies, we can't hide behind the sofa when we're guiding Claire Redfield, we can't shout at the idiot character for going into the cellar alone, because we're the ones pushing them down there. And with forty hours of game play available in which to manipulate the audience, the videogame designer has a much larger canvas to work with than the horror movie director.
The game developer can also use peripheral detail much more effectively than the movie director, knowing that the audience – able to explore at will - will have time to notice everything. In Silent Hill 2, for example, there are walls daubed with blood, strange signs on hospital walls, viscera in the toilet bowl – the gamer has time to notice them all, gorging on atmosphere. With the stylistically comparable movie, Se7en, the viewer could only hope to catch a tiny minority of the ambient horrors David Fincher litters in each scene without recourse to multiple viewings.
There's far too much potential in the videogame format, then, for horror to slip entirely out of the developers' canon. Fortunately, there are signs that designers are finding new ways to scare, and new dark themes to explore. Free Radical Design's stealth adventure Second Sight plays with para-psychological horror via its hero John Vattic who has violent telekinetic powers – recalling seventies shockers like Carrie and The Medusa Touch. And of course Rockstar's Manhunt –which on the surface appears to be just a pointlessly violent action adventure – is all about moral horror: it puts us into extreme situations and asks, 'how far will you go?'. Like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness it wants to know what happens when the restraining bolts of culture and social ethics are removed from the average person. When we step into the shoes of James Earl Cash we're testing our primal instincts, staring into the id and whatever horrors it holds.
Elsewhere, Midway's The Suffering, set in a haunted prison, made a rather cack-handed attempt to explore themes of madness and paranoia. It could have been so much better and surely there is a rich mine of material here. Imagine a game where the lead character faces a descent into madness, where anything you see on screen could be a paranoid hallucination – imagine an interactive version of Jacob's Ladder, The Shining or David Cronenberg 's Videodrome. On the subject of Cronenberg, the concept of gruesome metamorphosis as explored in his late-seventies parasite movies Rabid and Shivers would make great material for a videogame. We glimpsed these ideas occasionally in Vivendi's very good translation of The Thing with its scenes of man to monster transmogrification. Expanded to become the main gameplay focus, I can imagine a survival horror romp where you control a character who must locate some sort of antidote to reverse a Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde-style mutation. If nothing else, it would be a potent comment on, and analysis of our current obsession with cosmetic surgery.
The Thing, by the way, also used a trust/fear meter to represent the psychological state of the characters - an interesting concept that forces you to worry about your avatar on both a mental and physical level. A similar concept appears in Capcom's Clock Tower 3, where lead character Alyssa suffers blurred vision and becomes almost uncontrollable when her panic meter rises to maximum, a very compelling attempt to simulate the subjectivivity of mental anguish. Gamers are used to having absolute trust of, and control over, the lead character, so to have this umbilical connection severed, even momentarily, causes quite a psychological jolt (see also the simulation of temporary deafness and blurred vision in Rainbow Six when your soldier strays too close to a bomb blast).
So the big horror franchises are going off the boil, but there are interesting ideas bubbling underneath as developers play with the latest graphical and visual technologies to simulate alternate mental states and to explore new themes. Where will they look for narrative inspiration next? In the current climate of real world horror – of terrorism, protest and natural disaster – what need have we for zombies and psychological demons? Are videogame developers merely pausing and adapting to exploit topical themes and real-life terrors? Videogames with suicide bombers, corrupt politicians, hospital super bugs, alcohol-fuelled violence, refugee camps, ethnic war… The horror. The horror.
