Game scares and film scares, by a scaredy cat.
By Kentish

There is this dream where you are trying to run away from a monster and you just cant get your legs going. No matter how hard you try, your feet are either stuck or slip and slide like something out of a cartoon.

And there is this videogame, where you are trying to defeat an eight-foot-tall rotting corpse, and no matter how hard you try, you just can’t get your damn avatar out of the way of his devastating charge attack. Damn Capcom’s laborious control system. It’s enough to give you nightmares.

Scooby Doo – shit me up.

There’s something uniquely panic-inducing about playing a videogame, ‘Survival Horror’ or otherwise. Unlike a scary movie where all you’re required to do is just watch, games demand that you engage your faculties and interact with the action. It’s this participation that scares the shit out of me. You see, part of my brain is wimpering,“Why does the music have to be so frightening?” or “Damn this fog!”, and even, “Oh my fucking Christ, what the FUCK is THAT?!!”.

At the same time, those cranial compartments charged with comprehension and action are desperately trying to drown out the wailing and flailing limbs in order to get on with the basics of playing a game - move him there, shoot that, pick up that green herb, etc. Add that to the tension which accompanies any depleting health bar, and you have a medium which can routinely wring the sweat from you. While you’re not exactly strapped to a chair with your eyes prised open, Clockwork Orange style, videogames do demand that you enter a state of heightened alert to rise to their challenge. You can’t hide behind your hands or look away (not unless you want to die that is).

It may look innocent, but it is evil. EVIL.

I’m not even talking about games purposely designed to make you soil your boxers. Take a recent discovery – Namco’s venerable Rally X. For those of you unfamiliar with its basic mechanics, the game requires you to drive your car around a maze, picking up flags, before your fuel runs out.

So far, so what? Well, after a brief state of grace, an army of red cars gives chase with the sole purpose of crashing into you and taking your life. The truly terrifying thing however, is the speed with which they move and the remorselessness of their pursuit. They remind me of the zombies in 28 Days Later, who, far from the shuffling goons of the past, move with inspired speed and hatred. I swear there is fury in the way the Rally X cars eat up the ground, and a hatred when you cause them to spin out. They swarm towards you, cutting off escape routes, with your only defence an oil slick - which eats up your precious fuel reserves when dropped. Even the triumph of clearing a screen simply delays the inevitable moment when you run down a blind alley, chased by those bullies, and you know that chain-link fence at the end is just too high to climb…

“Take that, Clarkson, ya twat!”

If all of that isn’t bad enough, due to lack of gamepad, I have to play the damn thing using keys. The communication link between my brain and fingers is never the best, but in moments of high tension I might as well be wearing boxing gloves. We’ve all experienced moments of pure gaming nirvana, where you’re so far in the zone that a game’s obstacles seem to melt away. Well, welcome to my flip side: a hedgehog-like state of gaming paralysis where your arms get rigor mortis, and you curl up and die.

I am embarrassed to say that a number of games in my collection have gathered dust due to my unwillingness to endure such anxiety. Resident Evil 2 lasted as long as it took me to encounter the Licker monsters. Shadowman had me glued to my N64 until I reached the asylum and those hook-wielding horrors. The Flood put me off my Halo stroke for four months until I realised I was being utterly ridiculous.

And damn it, why the hell did Chronicles Of Riddick have to go all Aliens-like towards the end? Just what was wrong with beating up prisoners? All of this earns me endless abuse from my younger, more robust brothers, and in recent years, I have begun to carefully avoid the likes of Fatal Frame and Resident Evil remakes altogether.

The reason I’m convinced that videogames can be uniquely frightening is that I am such an enthusiastic consumer of horror films, which rarely induce the same palpable panic. Then again, I firmly believe that the horror in films is inherently ‘superior’ to that found in videogames. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that a film can be consumed in one sitting, and that despite the rapid march of technology, the programmer cannot yet match the film-maker for visceral aesthetics.

It’s also down to the maturity of the artform. Horror films have been recognized since 1931 – with Universal’s Dracula the official start point for the genre (although some trace its roots as far back as the 1896 when George Melies released La Manoir Du Diable which featured a bat transforming into the Devil). While you have to concede that the vast majority of output is just fodder, there are plenty of iconic moments. The discovery of Sloth in Seven, the elevator scene in The Eye, bodily explosions and implosions in Alien and The Thing, Sadako crawling through the TV in Ringu… Then there’s the study of human evil in the likes of The Witchfinder General and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Cinema horror can also do subtle – the creepiness of Peeping Tom, or the pre-figuration of tragedy throughout the magnificent Don’t Look Now.

Don’t Look Now . It is all about the colour red, see.

It is very easy to accuse horror films of cheapness: the stabbing strings, the implausible character action…But when they get it right, you leave the cinema, or switch off the television, and the film stays there under your skin. Truthfully, how often does a videogame do that?

The really scary thing is when the technical power of videogames catches up with cinema. That’s when you will get to live your worst nightmare. It’s one thing to watch some nubile teenager get carved up, it’s entirely another to have your personal digital avatar-ass on the line. As screenwriter Dave Callahan tellingly said of the film version of Doom: “As far as a completely immersive and cinematic experience, we were never going to top Doom 3 anyway, and we all knew that”.

April 2005

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