Well I'm afraid I'm a little uncertain what you mean by "halloween games"
there charles, or how Shades is not one.
This could of course just be cultural since I suspect haloween is more a
major thing in the Us than it is over here, ---- usually here it's confined
to tv, the odd themed party or evening for social groups, and occasionally
kids showing up to extort money or sweets nominally in costume.
I therefore assumed "haloween games" meant games with a creepy or
frightening atmosphere, which certainly would count shades and nightjar
simply for their atmosphere, just as the Horror genre of literature or films
is more about atmosphere than about subject.
Harry Potter I agree is not a horror series, it's fantasy, though ideas like
the dementors are pretty nasty, where as a book like Steven King's It,
despite involving very many fantasy elements I'd definitely call horror
first for the high amount of monster related deaths, warping of reality in
many passages and often very atmospheric descriptions.
interestingly enough, I'm reading doctor sleep at the moment by Steven king
which I wouldn't! class as horror, simply because it hasn't quite had that
level of reality bending weerdness, although it is a sequel to the shining,
which certainly was horror.
Really, it's a slippery concept at the best of times, especially since it
can occur in so many different genres from psychological fiction to Sf.
Heck, Doctor who frequently dips into the horror genre, yet one of the
scariest and most horific Doctor Who audio plays I've ever heard was the 8th
Doctor Story The Cannibalists, in which most of the characters were actually
robots! For why I found it particularly scary see the review I wrote on:
http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/cannibalists.htm
Thinking about it, if we call "horror" simply stuff that is scary, well
haunted house and chillingham probably need removing from that list since
both were more comedy themed around old monster or ghost ideas, like a Ghost
train at a fair, than seriously spooky, or at least I found them so. Then
again, what an individual finds scary is probably very much dependent on
that individual's own experience, and though some ideas like warping of
reality or alteration of the everyday into something alarming are pretty
universal, whether you find these terrifying or just interestingly
atmospheric is likely up to you.
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
All the best,
Dark.
---
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