So... Continuing from this thread...

I agree with Bailywolf; The Ring scared the living shit out of me as well. In fact, I don't think I'll ever watch a horror movie again, because I've come to a realization: being scared is just no fun at all. I had always planned on seeing the Exorcist, but I think I'll give it a miss since every indication is that it's a scarier, more effective movie than the Ring. I don't want to be kept awake with all my muscles tensed and a headache because of a movie.

Add to that the fact that in this world, creepy, terrifying things happen. Some of them have happened to me. They're not cool, and they're not fun. Why would I want to subject myself to frightening images, designed to make me feel hunted, persecuted, helpless, etc.? What's the appeal?

Extrapolation: What's the appeal of role-playing a horror game? Why is it fun? Just looking for some insight.

Some more SPOILERS about The Ring:
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My take on things is as follows: The particular tape in the movie came into existance when something was recorded (a sports event) on the VCR in the cabin. Samara used her "I see things, and they are" schtick to create the tape at that point. I think she probably created other tapes and photos at other times, both before and after her death. We have vague newspaper clippings of disasters happening at horse shows and what not when Samara was alive. Also, I think Anna Morgan's suicide was probably the first instance of the tape (or film, or whatever) claiming a victim. We also have Samara informing the psychologist that "it won't stop" implying that she's been hurting people for some time, and plans on continuing to do so. Finally, Richard Morgan strongly implies to Rachel that the tape thing has happened before. Plenty of time and multiple occurences for a legend to be created.
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End Spoilers

I don't think horror films should try to scare the viewer. I do think horror films should be about scary things.

Ditto RPGs.

I dislike Call of Cthulhu and horror gaming in general because it becomes akin to "ghost stories around the campfire." Sure, that's fun...but it's just one person telling the other people stuff and trying to scare them. In an RPG, the GM is not only the "story teller" -- the GM can also direct stuff at individual players.

It's like Cronenberg says about shocking people. To paraphrase, "Sure, I can show a pig being butchered and that will shock some people...but so what?"

Horror RPGs should be about what scares people. The GM can help to do this. The players can help to do this. There's no A->B line of communication -- it's collaberative. Scare the characters, not the players.

Hey.

Fear is fun and good. I dig it.

Here's a previous thread about horror gaming, and here's another. Lots of good stuff.

Edit, after skimming the threads: well, at least some good stuff.

-Vincent

I would disagree with you Jared: As I see it, horror is about actually feeling scared.

BUT, I have to add, there are a lot of different styles of horror. There's the "in your face bloody guts until you puke" type as well as the lurking kind which makes you want to keep the lights on when you go to sleep because you know the evil is everywhere.

Actually the variations is much broader, but you know what I mean. Some of these movies could make you feel uncomfortable and jumpy, but that's not the same as feeling terror of the unseen forces which may or may not be real.

To try to answer silkworm's question:
I think it boils down to tension. Nothing can get you as involved or tense as when you're fighting for your life. Now if you're fighting for your life against horrifying forces beyond your ken, isn't that even more exciting?

For a simple sim take on horror you have (pimp!) my game. I go hard on running it Effect First though.

As a self-proclaimed horror expert (at the very least an aficionado), I have this to say.

People watch horror for all sorts of reasons. I mean heck, there's all sorts of horror.

Splatter, for instance, can be about identity - the violation of the human form, changing it from something recognizable to something unrecognizable. Or it can be about violence - when is it okay to use it, and can you ever be same again afterward?

Cronenberg, and many Japanese films (Iron Man, Body Hammer, Organ, etc.) are often about the violation of the human form - exploring various boundaries, taboos, and comfort zones, particulary in regards to our own biology.

We've said before that Night of the Living Dead is about people under pressure. Dawn of the Dead is often discussed in terms of rampant, mindless consumerism.

The Ring is one film, along with Videodrome and probably Feardotcom, that is trying to say something about our voyeur culture.

You get the picture. The horror "genre" is like any other genre - it tells the same stories in a particular way.

So why do some people prefer the conventions of the horror genre to perhaps some other storytelling medium?

I've heard it said that fear - blood pumping, adrenaline racing, and all that jazz - is the surest indicator that you're alive, and that's why people like to be scared. I dunno as I've never had a movie do that to me, and the few times I remember being that scared - like the time someone tried to break into the house I was renting - I don't recall with much fondness.

No, I think for me it came about because as I child I was deliberately barred from watching such things. My adolescent rebellion didn't come in the form of sex or drugs or booze, but with a membership to Lake Street Video. And to this day there's still a mystique around the whole thing, a taboo that forces me to seek out even stranger and more obscure titles, to challenge myself to find them and watch them and see how far I can push my limits (which ties into the conversation about The Ring - see above - in that I sometimes feel like a voyeur; that I shouldn't be watching this stuff, but I do anyway, and love every minute of it).

That's my story. I wonder if it sounds familiar to anyone else?

- Scott

Interesting. So, in a way, horror films can be a sort of blues.

I have a theory about the Blues (as a musical genre). Blues themes commonly explore the darkest elements of humanity - rape, murder, betrayal, incest, alcohol abuse, theft, angst, death, etc. This is of course not strictly limited to blues. Many forms of music - metal, techno, country, etc. - have strong negative themes. Blues is just the easiest example. Why do people listen to blues? I'm not sure, but I think there is a need in humans to vicariously experience pain and suffering - as a method of catharsis, sub-conscious white-balancing, or something. For some people, I'm theorizing, horror is what fills that role.

Does that make sense to anyone?
-e.

For me, horror is, in a way, a religious thing. I intensely dislike horror that is simply about some wise-cracking monster killing teenagers; I loathe any movies about serial killers, either real or fictional; and with the exception of Alien(s), I don't much like "creepy thing running around killing" movies or books.

I love Clive Barker, even though his movies are usually second-rate in terms of production and acting. Another exception to the above list is A Nightmare on Elm Street and maybe one or two of its sequels.

In a way, I guess I want my horror to confirm, if not God, that there is something more to life than the daily grind of hand-to-mouth survival. Survival in horror can really be freighted with a lot of meaning. The horrors themselves are statements about the nature of reality, or its uncertainty (I'm a great fan of Cronenberg's too). The monsters of the kind of horror that I like offer transcendence--a negative form, to be sure, but in some ways more believable than angels. I think it's an unfortunate habit of most people's thinking that we simply find it easier to credit something painful than something pleasant.

I think also horror lets us indulge a somewhat disturbing impulse, to be awed and immobilized by something too powerful ever to be defeated or even survived. There is a grandeur to the kings of horrifying monsters such as Dracula (now made common by imitation) or Pinhead. I think in a way, these characters are an oblique way of confronting death itself--the one power that there is simply no tangible victory over (not for one human life anyway), no escaping from. And this of course is one of the major features of religion, that there is always some explanation of the phenomenon of death and possibly what comes after.

Well, that's a long-winded Gothy ramble, but I hope it conveys something of the feeling, even a rather refined one, that's possible in viewing material that on the face of it would seem to extinguish hope rather than sustain it. But coming out of the theatre from at least some of these things, I actually feel lighter, less burdened by the ordinary pressures of life.

--JB

Interesting point, which JB's thread reminded me of...

(warning, pop psychology ahead...)

Cinematic horror often has its roots in real-world current events, although not always in the same ways.

For some reason, the early years of The Great Depression produced some fantastic horror films - Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Island of Lost Souls (1933), etc. My favorite, The Wolf Man (1941), came out as we were about to enter WWII.

It's no secret that Godzilla was, at least in part, an expression of Japan's fear of nuclear holocaust.

Our own fear of annihilation (or assimilation) can be seen in films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a product of The Cold War.

Are films like these a sort of catharthis for their respective cultures? I'm not sure, but there's definitely something going on there.

I'm curious though. What fears do we, as a people in this particular place and time, have that filmmakers (or game designers) could take advantage of?

Clearly we have some hang-up about watching others or being watched ourselves - spurred on by our reality TV craze - that's found expression in films like The Ring and Feardotcom (and, prophetically I think, in Videodrome, which is still the best of the lot).

I think that we're afraid of our neighbors. That we look upon others - even those we live closely with - with a certain amount of suspicion.

What else is there?

- Scott

hardcoremoose wrote: I think that we're afraid of our neighbors. That we look upon others - even those we live closely with - with a certain amount of suspicion.

What else is there?

I think many of you nearly nailed it, -to me watching or [role] playing horror is fun because of the feeling of facing the fear and reaching in and overcoming it. Vanquishing evil is one way of putting it.

As for gore and splat and all that, -Lovecraft did it best. He could scare me down deep without even telling me what I was seeing. That (to me) is pure horror. I think that's where CoC can fail for many people because most GMs aren't Lovecraft. The game becomes a monster hunt ala' D&D, but with more gross creatures and an insanity table.

Emily,

RE: The Reality TV thing.

A few years back I was writing a story (okay, it was a screenplay), about a guy and a girl and a world full of zombies. Standard Dawn of the Dead type stuff, but here's the catch: The main character is convinced the zombies are a passing thing, so he and his girlfriend are going around with some video equipment they've looted and are producing a Documentary of the Dead, which he's hoping will net him big bucks once society re-asserts itself. They hook up with a group of survivors holed up in a small town and he makes it his job to document their day-to-day activities. Again, he's thinking this is going to make great television somewhere down the road.

The problem is that it isn't good television. It's real boring television actually. Having acclimated themselves to the situation, the survivors are making a decent go of it. They have their defenses up, they have a food supply established, and they're going to be able to wait the zombies out with a minimum of difficulty. The zombies, for their part (and true to the standard Romero zombie conventions) aren't much of a threat; they're slow and stupid and individually not very strong. And unlike in the Romero films, the survivors aren't melting down, torn apart by their differences; the undead threat has actually galvinized them, given them a common enemy to focus on, allowing them to see past their problems with each other.

By the climax of the film, after trying to inject some needed drama into his documentary by trying and failiing to pit the survivors against each other, he decides to go for the gusto. He waits until everyone is asleep and then lets the zombies into their shelter. And then films it.

Of course, we see the same thing repeated in any number of zombie flicks. I was thinking the gimmick that would make it work would be that the movie itself would simply be the uncut documentary footage the main character was shooting. Then The Blair Witch Project came out (as if I was actually going to get this made anyway), so I decided to convert the idea into a roleplaying game. Part of that became NightWatch - which to date is probably my favorite game-related piece of writing I've done (note that I didn't say "my best") - but I think there's a lot of potential in that premise, which I hope to explore again soon.

Oh well, just thought I'd share that story.

- Scott

silkworm wrote: Why would I want to subject myself to frightening images, designed to make me feel hunted, persecuted, helpless, etc.? What's the appeal?

silkworm wrote: Why would I want to subject myself to frightening images, designed to make me feel hunted, persecuted, helpless, etc.? What's the appeal?

By the way HP Lovecrafts article 'Supernatural Horror in Literature' is good food for thought on this, it can be found HERE

I think horror RPG's appeal to people who are more interested in narrative/role-playing stule of play than people who are interested in the accumulation/accomplishment style of play.

A character that is experiencing the alienation, despair, hopelessness and fear of a well-crafted horror story forces the player to examine his character on multiple levels at once, to give the character's frailties a primary consideration in some ways (IMHO) makes the very nature of Horror RPG's a deeper sort of catharsis than other types of RPG's that concentrate on external foci to motivate and examine the characters.

Good horror is always a psychological game on some level, even splatterpunk gross out to be done well has to rub a certain nasty part of the psyche to evoke disgust.

Horror is a subtle and difficult art to master, and in RPG's I think it's particularly hard unless your players havet he depth and desire to make the psychological exploration of their character the primary focus of the experience.

A good book that speaks to this thread is Stephen King's Danse Macabre, in which he looks at American horror film between 1950 and 1980, examining and exploring its themes. It would be interesting to see a DM 2 which looks at the ideas he develops in light of films from 1980-2000, but I don't think Mr. King's going to do that for me anytime soon.

IMHO, the best horror fiction is fiction which explores a particular emotional theme. For instance, Clive Barker's novella The Hellbound Heart (which became the movie Hellraiser) is about people who use sensation to fill emotional voids. His Cabal (filmed as Nightbreed) is about masks and people who decieve each other about what they really are. The Damnation Game is about the fear of death. The supernatural elements simply allow the exploration of these emotional territories to be staged on a grand scale.

Also, the supernatural elements sometimes allow us to look at aspects or consequences of a particular process in a clear, overt way that burying them in a more subtle, "realistic" story would. Taking the examples above, the Cenobites from THH are the ultimate sensation junkies: emotionally voids driven to inhuman extremes of pain and pleasure. The Tribes of the Moon (Nightbreed) from Cabal give a striking contrast to the human monsters (the psychologist, the sherrif, the priest) in the book. Sure, the 'breed are monsters, but they don't hide it. You know what you're getting into.

One more point before I get off the stand: I am very hard to scare, at least as far as games and movies are concerned. I just don't feel a visceral fear reaction to pretend threats. Creepiness, on the other hand...

What I loved about The Ring is that it was sublimly creepy. The line was drawn between the "real" world of the characters' lives and the "imaginary" world of the video. The way this line was blurred over the course of the seven days was fantastic.

I guess that means that creepiness, to me, is that creeping feeling that reality is coming apart, or was never what I thought it was. And not in a good way.

Lon

Hello, VegasThroat, and welcome to the Forge.

While this is a very interesting discussion, it's customary here at the Forge not to post to threads that have lain idle for more than a month or so. It's better to start a new thread and include a link to the old one.

Also, VegasThroat, you might want to take a look at the GNS article for some insight into the "narrative/role-playing" vs. "accumulation/accomplishment" issue, and why we try not to treat it as a dichotomy.

Okay, I see Clinton has already pointed this out. I'm going to slink off into the corner with my tail between my legs for a bit now, if you'll excuse me....