Editorials
How Survival Horror Game ‘Stifled’ Uses Darkness to Pit Your Instincts Against You
Tendrils that crawl out of every pore in your skin? Stilted, faceless entities that gurgle incoherently while lurching hungrily towards you? These are some of the more nightmarish sights my mind can conjure. Yet, what could be more unnerving are sights and intangible forces that can’t be seen with the naked eye, beings unforgeable even by the most imaginative of minds.
Survival horror game Stifled is innately familiar with this tenet of horror. Not only does the game put players in environments draped in absolute darkness, but it also leaves them helpless as a child, in the presence of unseen, screeching monsters. To visualize the obstacles and boundaries in your surroundings, you’ll have to rely on echolocation, with only the outlines of objects illuminated when you murmur cautiously—or bawl unwittingly. What seals the game’s horrifying premise is this cherry on top of a very ghastly cake: these creatures are also drawn to sounds. And as a virtual reality experience, it’s impossible to avoid the creeping gloom around you: your senses are practically enveloped by it.
These may sound downright unsettling, but of course, they are: Stifled is triggering a deeply wired phobia, a biological fear. The fear of the dark is a primitive emotion from our evolutionary past, stemming from humanity’s earliest days when our ancestors are wary of the shadows. After all, that’s mostly where predatory animals—and therefore, danger—lay in wait. So this darkness in Stifled is more than just an obstacle; it’s predicated on pitting our basest instincts against us.
Playing as a man who’s plagued by a sordid past—which seems to involve a painful relationship and dead babies—Stifled takes the player through a series of eerie caves, underground passages, and other places where the sun can never reach. Since these areas are impenetrable by light, sounds become the primary means of piercing through this murkiness; the crash of waterfalls illuminates the vicinity, and the creaking of rusty valves as conspicuous as a blindingly bright spotlight. Lending a palpable sense of despair to the experience is the lack of atmospheric music, which makes the silence and your isolation even more apparent.
Interview With The Developer of VR Thriller ‘Blind’
Yet when most sounds attract unwanted attention, acting against your involuntary reflex to scream when spooked becomes crucial. This maneuver is thus tethered to a different sense of sight; we learn how to bite our tongues rather than yelp in fright or snap out of paralyzing fear when a phantom draws close, so we could navigate through the darkness safely. In a way, survival boils down to how adept you are at fighting your most primal impulses.
Stripping away your ability to see—such that we mostly rely on audio cues—as you traverse through myriad horrors is a feature some horror games have experimented with (Perception quickly comes to mind). But with Stifled, this also points to the greater juxtaposition between our instincts and actions, particularly in video game horror. In the beginning, the character is left outside an overturned car that’s aglow with fire, right in the middle of a desolate forest. The only way towards progress is to delve into an underground tunnel—a decision that goes against every grain in my body.
Illogicalities like this are plentiful in other forms of horror. Horror logic in films, for instance, can stretch to notoriously absurd standards, like the lone survivor who races upstairs to escape the danger instead of out the front door, or towards the murky shadows of a heavily wooded area. Video games thus return us a modicum of control in these situations, at least allowing us to shoulder some responsibilities of making irrational decisions in frightful scenarios. This is even more pronounced in Stifled, where players often have to leap into dark, ominous crevices. In one instance, I even had to shove aside a heavy shelf and crawl into a passage that’s deliberately concealed behind. All this trouble to squeeze into a seedy hole that is surely home to a horde of undead children.
‘The Light Keeps Us Safe’ Preview
But there’s merit in making its players actively participate in their own scares. Like crawling into a gaping hole of our own accord, it reveals our willingness to suspend our disbelief, to be shaken to our core. We temper our emotions to magnify our frights. We revel in our adrenaline rush, while repulsed by our oppressive surroundings. By forcing us against our instincts, these discrepancies lend some gravitas to these striking terrors. The scares are nerve-wracking but fleeting, becoming a thrilling unease we both loathe and crave. And when our startle response starts to kick in, you may be inclined to scream—but here in the boundless emptiness, that could just be the last thing you do.
Despite what the higher-ups at Marvel would have you believe, Stan Lee’s original vision for Spider-Man was very different from the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler that fans ultimately got.
It was comics maestro Steve Ditko that turned him into the lovable web-head that we all know and love, though even that first draft of the character wasn’t exactly meant to be a child-friendly mascot. Ditko envisioned an uncanny arachnid-human hybrid whose freakish poses and dark costume would strike terror into the hearts of criminals, with the inclusion of web-shooters possibly having been a suggestion by Ditko’s roommate at the time, renowned fetish artist and bondage enthusiast Eric Stanton.
These more adult-oriented origins may have changed over the years, but one could argue that Spidey never completely lost his darker side. In fact, we’d eventually see several grim storylines that explored the horrific consequences of Spider-Man’s radioactive blood. While having his irradiated body fluids give Mary Jane cancer is likely the most terrifying of these yarns (track down Spider-Man: Reign if you’re up for a depressing read that was at one point set to be adapted to film by Michael Jackson), one of the most memorable horror-adjacent moments in these comics has to be the acceleration of Peter Parker’s mutation and the eventual introduction of Man-Spider – a storyline that appears to have been one of the main inspirations behind the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
I sincerely doubt that Marvel Studios is really going to give their toy-selling juggernaut a Cronenbergian rebrand, but the most recent trailer for Brand New Day suggests that the creative team is pulling from some surprisingly spooky source material in this latest superhero sequel. Specifically, the trailer makes it seem like the film is set to be a loose adaptation of the Neogenic Nightmare arc from Spider-Man: The Animated Series, commonly known as the best exploration of Spidey’s radioactive dark side that also features the most iconic version of Man-Spider.
If you’re wondering what these influences could mean for the upcoming film, I’d like to invite you to join me as we look back on some of the animated series’ most horror-tinged episodes.
A fourteen-episode story arc that made up the show’s second season, Neogenic Nightmare began airing in September of 1995. At this point, the series had already earned a reputation as the definitive version of Spider-Man despite dealing with absurd levels of censorship and executive meddling. It’s widely known at this point that this incarnation of Spidey was prohibited from ever punching his villains, and the studio even insisted that realistic guns should be replaced with futuristic laser weapons in order to avoid enraging concerned parents.
And that’s not even mentioning bizarre demands like setting up Hobgoblin as the original Goblin villain simply because the folks responsible for the toy-line had already prepared the character’s merchandise before scripts were even written.
At the end of the day. the show’s success mostly came down to John Semper’s excellent writing, with the (mostly) faithful recreation of the Spider-Man’s core principals and a handful of iconic storylines (coupled with an excellent cast behind the scenes) elevating a what was intended to be a kid’s show promoting ToyBiz products.
Naturally, the rampant cartoon censorship of the 90s couldn’t keep Semper from wanting to explore darker themes from his own favorite Spider-Man comics, and that’s how his team came up with a season-long re-imagining of iconic arcs like the Six-Arm Saga, The Mutant Agenda and even the first appearance of the Sinister Six. These stories would be enhanced with additional “dark” characters like Blade, The Punisher and even Morbius (though the latter had to exchange his vampiric blood-drinking for bizarre plasma-absorbing powers in order to conform to network guidelines).
If you haven’t yet seen it, the complete Neogenic Nightmare arc follows Spider-Man as he discovers that his mutation is progressing beyond his initial superpowers and threatening to turn him into a more monstrous hybrid. After developing extra arms, Spidey goes so far as to request help from both the X-Men and several other super-heroes as he becomes embroiled in a criminal conspiracy involving a team-up between some of his most iconic villains. The arc eventually introduces us to the show’s version of Man-Spider, which is depicted here as the monstrous final stage of the process which began when Peter was first bitten by that radioactive spider.
Personally, I think this werewolf-like addition to Spidey’s genetic curse is the best incarnation of Man-Spider that we’ve ever seen. This is because the six-armed body horror of it all adds even more weight to Peter’s decision to keep helping others regardless of what his powers may cost him, with the creature’s final rampage even giving the supporting cast a chance to help Spider-Man for a change. While I don’t hate the Morbius movie as much as some other comic fans, it’s a shame that Sony relegated that story to a solo film instead of later incorporating it into the Man-Spider saga like Neogenic Nightmare did.
Season two of the animated series ended up being an even bigger hit than the first, with fans loving the show’s take on an expanded Marvel Universe (which even included the ’90s X-Men cast) as well as the darker take on a more monstrous Spider-Man. That’s why it makes sense that the MCU’s return to street-level comic adventures would harken back to this particular storyline – especially since it appears that the Disney wishes to use the upcoming film as an opportunity to shine a light on other Marvel characters just like Semper did back in the day.
From what we can see in the trailer, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man appears to be going through his own additional transformations, including creepy fully black eyes and organic web-shooter, as well as the cocoon-building behavior previously seen in Marvel’s The Other arc in the comics. As I mentioned before, I doubt that the MCU will allow this particular cash cow to fully transform into a nightmarish spider freak that can scare away children, but there’s always a chance that the studio could surprise us with more horror elements. I’d also love to see the story explore Spidey’s mutation and use that as an excuse to formally introduce X-Men’s mutants into the MCU, especially since Sadie Sink is rumored to be playing Jean Grey in the flick.
However, even if Brand New Day doesn’t adapt as much of the Neogenic Nightmare as the promotional material has suggested, I’d argue that this particular season of Spider-Man: The Animated Series is still worth revisiting simply because it’s a great example of artists being able to work past network limitations in order to tell complex stories that approach full-on body-horror.
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