From the dimly lit, shadow draped corridors of Layers of Fear, to the unrelenting and oppressive darkness that so many other horror offerings seem content to ply their fearsome trade from, it’s way past time that the gaming horror genre realizes that ample terror and foreboding lay beyond such typical realms of gloom.
Rather than looking inwardly to their peers, developers should instead look to the silver screen where Hereditary director Ari Aster is making progressive moves in this regard. For his part, Aster has been violently wrenching the horror genre nakedly back into the blazing light of day, providing a highly underutilized direction for others to follow with his latest film, Midsommar, a Sweden-set daytime cult thriller with a psychological horror bent
At its root, both video game and cinematic horror efforts alike have embraced the gloom in the belief that such scenarios ran parallel with the tales we were told as children, that some unseen horror lay in the dark corners and under the beds of the world where their powers were perceived to be at the zenith.
Of course, horror games on the small screen have also long worked their trade from the shadowy peripheries, not just to elicit moody atmospherics, but also because it allows them to fall back on that most common, shopworn and most nervously reflexive trope – the classic jump scare.
In Aster’s Midsommar however, horror and terror find themselves not withered by the exposure to the blazing sun, but rather emboldened by it – a notion that is arguably more terrifying than that base fear of shadows that movies and games have sought to instill in us for so long.
Much of that newfound fear revolves around the long-held concept of safe places. The idea that if some unspeakable grotesque born from the shadows is hellbent on our destruction, that we can somehow banish it by escaping into the bright day – a physical manifestation of the notion that light overcomes darkness; another long-held belief that holds solace for many of us.
And that is arguably where the strongest horrors do their best work – in stripping away those safe places and layers of respite until we realize, ultimately, that nowhere is safe and that as much as good can be wrought in the darkness, so is the opposite true for evil as well.
As Aster’s Midsommar has done then, so too must games follow. Effectively etching out a new frontier of boundless possibilities for the genre, the creative latitude for engineering new scenarios of fear, horror, and terror is generously vast.
Unfortunately, though Aster’s caliber as an auteur and the quality of his output his hardly in question, it remains to be seen just how quickly the mainstream will adjust to the idea of moving horror out of the darkness. Being as slow and reticent to swift change as the mainstream machine is, it will likely be a good while until the great masses accept such new ideas about horror to be embedded in their collective consciousness.
As such, we can probably look to the likes of smaller studios, such as the Bloober Teams and the Red Candle Games of the world to make those first bold steps, rather than the likes of Capcom and EA for whom fresh ideas and concepts often find themselves hoisted upon the altar of mass market sacrifice.
Unlike the silver screen, the games industry has many more avenues with which to embark on this change too. In addition to the long established and fairly static PC and home console platforms, more immersive technology such as VR, AR, and mixed reality headsets all provide unique opportunities to engineer compelling takes on this new direction that the cinema simply cannot match.
Given its position as an influential medium then, gaming needs to do its part and follow in Aster’s footsteps in order to keep the horror genre fresh. As much as cinemagoers used to cling to the light as a respite from the dark, so too must creators now leave the ironically comfortable embrace of the dark behind and seek out the fresh opportunities for fear and horror in the blazing sun that lay beyond.
