Hey! Sorry it's been a while since my last post. Between the holidays, general life, being sick, etc... it's been a long month.
Also, sorry that this isn't Star Wars related, but with TLJ coming out in the next few weeks I assure you I'll have plenty more Star Wars content in December- including, finally, a gallery of all my painted stuff.
Now, let's get down to business- and honestly, this article would've been way more appropriate a month ago, but whatever.
One thing I've thinking about since Halloween time is the nature of horror. See, from what I can tell, the big obstacle that horror films typically have is that they are meant to illicit only one emotion: fear. Or, rather, that's the only expectation that fans have going into a horror film, when reading a scary story, or when playing a horror video game. "Fear" is almost synonymous with "horror", and that rush of adrenaline is why some of us like the genre while some immediately write it off.
Personally, though, I think that this reliance on fear has caused a lot of issues for the genre. Some movies try to overcome this by inserting a lot of humor into their films, as that seems to go pretty hand in hand with horror, creating a bit of a rollercoaster of emotion rather than a flat desert highway. Sometimes this works pretty well (Cabin in the Woods, Zombieland), and sometimes it comes across pretty campy (the Leprechaun movies, Chuckie). This year's remake of IT also comes to mind when I think of cross-genre horror films. I guess it comes across as vain if I quote myself, but I'm gonna do it anyway- when I walked out of the theater in September, I said "That wasn't one of the scariest horror movies that I've seen, but it's probably one of the best." Somehow, New Line Cinema had created a horror movie that gave me very little scares, but had thoroughly entertained me and gotten me invested without camping itself out. The characters were just too well done, and fun. That's important- it'd be easy for a film like IT to rely entirely on the charisma of a character like Pennywise, but I think the kids in the movie easily held their own on the stage.
Probably the biggest complaint of a horror film would be "it wasn't scary". Tied for second place would be "I didn't even really care about the characters", and "the movie spent too much time setting up the plot with little payoff". I see those as opposite ends of the horror spectrum when it comes to characterization, and to be successful you have to hit that sweet spot in the middle- you need to create characters that the audience cares about, while slowly ramping up the threat as the film goes on.
This is why I don't mind a few cheap jump scares or fake scares early in the film, as long as they're not abused once the true threat emerges- they help get the audience in the mood for the scares, without ramping up the actual plot too fast. For instance, early in the film Paranormal Activity, we hear the character Katie scream from the bathroom. Micah (the camera-carrying husband) runs in to see the insidious form of... a spider. Later in that film (or another in the Paranormal Activity series- honestly, they all run together) we see our cameraman slowly walking toward a closet to investigate it, only to have some family member pop out and scare them.
I know a lot of people think of those scares as "cheap", and maybe they are, but I think they're also beneficial to the film. They buy the film a bit of time to develop characters (though, whether Paranormal Activity specifically utilized that time is up for debate) and allow the threat to have a bigger reveal later in the film, while simultaneously not completely boring an audience that is expecting a few scares. They're the foreplay of the horror genre, if you will. Not as fun as the main event, but hey, it gets you in the mood.
A film I watched last month did this really well. Mark Duplass (yeah, "Tall Guy" from The League) stars in a film called Creep. I don't want to give away too much of the plot, but it's pretty creepy- basically, the audience doesn't really know what to believe about the characters at any given time, and while things don't really ramp up into "dangerous" territory until later in the film, there's a sense of unease and vulnerability throughout the entire movie.
So anyway, I think it's pretty clear that it's incredibly difficult to tell and pace a horror film. You have to slowly ramp up the scares, while steadily progressing the plot. You have to have characters the audience cares about, but it doesn't really hurt to have some characters that also deserve to die. You can add in some laughs, but be careful never to let them dominate the film.
But what does that have to do with board games? Well, think of the horror games you've played. Betrayal at the House on the Hill. Dead of Winter. Eldritch Horror. Fury of Dracula. One Night Ultimate Werewolf, even.
Have you ever been scared playing one of these games? Sure, sometimes the text on a card in your average game of Betrayal might be a little creepy, but for the most part "fear" itself isn't what you're feeling. So, have you really been scared?
Perhaps some of you have, but for the most part, a player's immersion into the game's world doesn't bring fear so much as a fun sense of familiarity or nostalgia. And honestly, I don't think that sense of fear is even really an expectation for gamers (well, board gamers, videogamers not so much). We like Eldritch/Arkham Horror because they allow us to tell our own fantastic Lovecraft story. We like Zombicide, Last Night on Earth, and Dead of Winter because we get to play out our zombie apocalypse fantasies in the comfort of our living room. Fury of Dracula and Letters from Whitechapel allow players to track down infamous horror villains. Perhaps explaining why it's such a popular game, Betrayal at the House on the Hill acts as a smorgasbord of almost all the horror tropes we've ever seen, ranging from aliens and zombies to an ouroboros attack.
Of course, perhaps most disturbing of all is the most cartoonish and innocuous-seeming game on this list- One Night Ultimate Werewolf. In this game, players get to live out a brief simulation of a medieval witch hunt or werewolf/vampire scare. Events in which, sadly, thousands upon thousands of innocents were needlessly killed due to that one emotion we've described so much during this article: fear.
May the Force be with you!
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- Thomas
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