Editorials
[Horror Declassified] A Look At Inventory And Resources
Welcome to Horror Declassified — here we’ll be examining mechanics, tropes and design philosophies that are common in the horror genre. Have something you’d like covered? Send us an email.
Written by Matthew Ritter, @matthewmritter
Games have inventory systems. Not all of them, but any game that has limited player resources has some kind of inventory system. Mario keeps count of coins. Shooters keep count of bullets. Games where you collect flowers keeps track of flowers.
Adventure games and games with puzzle and key items often have much more complicated inventory systems. Red keys and blue keys, weird boxes, umbrellas, that broken orb you need fixed by the magic item repair shop down the street but first you have to make sure you’ve gotten the coffee mug. Things like that.
Inventories come in all shapes and sizes, limited inventories and infinite inventories, grid inventories where you have to play Tetris to get your items to fit, menu inventories that often can only hold 99 of something, and inventories that you don’t even realize are inventories. Right now we’re looking at inventories in horror games and the connection they have.
Horror games, especially survival horror games are often associated with very limited or frustrating inventory systems. The limited ones are generally there for very different reasons than they are in other genres. In a standard shooter limited inventory space is used to control the flow of action. To force the player to decide on a favorite weapon and to make sure the player has to consider their next move carefully. This is the same with many games, but in horror while resource management is the goal, the emotional value of the limited resources is very different.
In many games that truly wish to frighten the player the designer is often attempting to make sure the resources available and the inventory system are not up to the combative task ahead. In a more straightforward action game the choice might be between the rocket launcher or the machine gun. In a horror game often the choice becomes significantly more complex. There might be a rocket launcher, but it only has one or two shots and takes up important inventory space. The player is never sure if they should waste it now, or if they’ll desperately need it down the line. This incredibly frustrating aspect of limited inventory horror games is intentional.
It creates a feeling of controlled helplessness and brings the player into the world of the game. The player is in control of the inventory as limited as it is. Their survival and horror (Heh, see? That’s why that sub genre is called that!) is based on their ability to organize and manage what they find. To mitigate their ability to kill enemies that are often much stronger on average than most games.
It is exceedingly rare to find a horror game with unlimited resources of any kind. When a player has an unlimited resource they feel powerful. A feeling of empowerment is the antithesis of what a horror game is normally trying to evoke. It’s one of the few genres where regenerating health is still uncommon. Of course if the game is horror in trappings only infinite resources might abound. The Devil May Cry series, for example, uses the iconography of horror games, and the first one was even originally supposed to be an installment in the Resident Evil franchise, but a feeling of desperation and terror is not the game’s goal.
Resource management and inventory can take on a lot of hidden forms. Eternal Darkness, for example, made sanity and the characters and even the players grip on reality a resource to be measured and mitigated. There was a green bar on the screen that let the player know at any given time just how much sanity they had left. A commodity to be carefully protected, that could be earned back by killing monsters, and was lost at seeing horrible things. The game also had an invisible stat for stamina, with each playable character being able to run before getting winded for different lengths of time. Definitely an important resource in a game where most of the things you face can dig in through your eyes and wear you like a suit.
This actually segways well into the feelings some people have that true horror games are being killed by action horror homogenization. True or not, the main difference isn’t controls, or even atmosphere. The main difference is often resources. The same game where one has to struggle for every bullet, is a much scarier game than the one where guns rain from the sky like candy. Though, infinite resources is not always a surefire way to keep a game from being scary.
There are many situations in horror games, or games with horror sections where infinite resources are used to heighten the tension. Having every bullet in the world feels great when you’re blasting away at easily blast-awayable (I conjugate the way I want) zombie kittens. It’s not always the case when you face something that is either very difficult to kill, or impossible, with the resources you have. Being shown that your seemingly useful weapons aren’t actually useful can be a great way to turn things on its head. The Left 4 Dead series, while predominately action, uses this often. With many enemies that can render a single player helpless no matter what resources they might have.
I mention this because there’s often a rallying cry for a push back to simpler and more limited inventories and resources in horror games. I respect the sentiment but the problem is not in how much stuff the player has, but in the overall game’s design. Inventory space and the resources the game gives out are just one aspect of play that must be balanced with the rest of the overall experience.
For example, I personally prefer grid management inventory systems. I like playing Tetris with my swords, guns, and pills. It isn’t right for every game though.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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