Hi Tom.
Well even in the horror genre there is such a wide amount of what a person
finds scary and how various elements are combined. For example, you mention
the nightmare on elmstreet series as slasher. Yes, they are about a killer
with a glove with knives on the fingers who likes slashing up kids, however
equally there is the fantasy aspect of him being dead and coming back from
beyond the grave to attack people in their dreams.
I actually watched the first Four Freddy Cruger films when I was 10, and
found them not the least scary, indeed it was their fantasy elements that
interested me more than the gorey deaths.
Bare in mind I'd also watched the Alien films, Terminator, Robocop, etc,
indeed my mum went with me to the video shop to wrent Alien 3 and the man
behind the counter said "do you know this is 15 rated" where upon my mum
just said "oh yes, ---- it's fine!"
Actual films or books for that matter that scared me could be very
different, princeply because what I tended to find scary weren't the sort of
things which horror writers tended to often put in films. One of these is
intense pain.
I don't mind watching a fight or seeing someone quickly and bloodily
murdered, but I tend to find someone being tortured or dying slowly really
bothers me. This often meant that I found kids series and films, in which
the evil villain would torment people with the famous agony beam, more
disturbing than something like Freddy Cruger's creative murderings.
This should explain part of the reason why I found Shades of Doom so
atmospheric, since I was effectively running through the dark away from
monsters with highly interesting sounds, and if those monsters got me my
character would suffer a very painful death, ---- indeed I remember the
first time I triggered the Gelatinous blob on stage 2, and suddenly having
something with that crackling, burning slime sound coming for me, something
which took all my amo, and kept on coming until it got and murdered me was
pretty unsettling, ---- though in a good way, interestingly enough, I used a
double headphone hookup to display shades to a friend of mine who is a major
fan of the graphical doom series and of horror in general, and he stated he
found the lack of actual visuals in Shades made it rather scarier for him
than any of the similar graphical games he'd played, particularly since he
was left to imagine! all the monsters and how exactly they attacked and
killed the player.
Of course, the other thing I sometimes find disturbing is that sort of
warping of reality, that twisting reality out of true just slightly and
making it a little more disturbing, but I can think of comparatively few
films (event horizon is one), that manage this, albeit it is a technique
which writers like Philip K dick, Ray bradbery and Steven King are masters
of.
I can't however actually think of a game that had this quality, although
since it's something i've noticed in a few doctor who audio dramas it is
possible to achieve in audio with appropriately disorientating sounds and
atmosphere.
Now there! would be a project for a game developer :D.
Beware the Grue!
Dark.
---
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