Halfway through my dark journey, in a moment of quiet introspection free of mindfucking, I asked myself why, precisely, I was consuming such a prolonged dose of horror. Since we last spoke, I’ve had two memorable sequences seared into my brain. In one of them, you walk into a warehouse, night flitting through the windows, and all is quiet, save for some moody music. The sole source of light is the small, blinking red button of an answering machine, sitting on a desk in the middle of the room. Upon pressing the button, you’re greeted with otherworldly shrieking instead of a recording, and all the windows in the warehouse shatter. Spectacular.
In another scene, you peer into a dark maternity ward of an abandoned hospital. Suddenly, your in-game persona hallucinates and sees a faceless nurse in soiled uniform cradling something. She turns to you, screaming through the window, until some invisible force slams her against it, creating a shower of gore. I remember furrowing my brow and wondering how twisted you’d have to be to come up with this shit. This also begs the question of why an arguably sane mind would persist in partaking of this stuff, and I think the answer is twofold.
Part of the answer is I’m in too deep now, and a foolish sense of pride prevents me from wimping out. The other part of the answer is the idea that I’m leveling up my mind, expanding its capacity in new directions, which is just too compelling, scars or otherwise. Surprisingly enough, I’ve been sleeping soundly recently, in spite of these regular sessions of terror. It’s weird, though, how I’ve been feeling consistently tired and sluggish at around 2, 2:30 in the afternoon. How do I remedy this? For starters, I can try not sounding like a 5-Hour Energy commercial.
There comes a critical juncture, after you’ve amassed enough electronic entertainments to last you through nuclear winter and beyond, where you look upon your backlog and decide to chip away at it. I’ve always pictured this far-off time, post-retirement, when I’d finally start playing all the video games I’ve purchased. This is a ridiculous notion, obviously, because by then, I’ll have slightly more important concerns, never mind the fact that electricity, decades later, may not be the most optimal way to power home appliances. Accordingly, I’ve started appreciating what I own now, with the side benefit of increased savings as I hold off on grabbing, like, every new release.
The last time I dug into horror was back in June. It’s not a genre I overtly crave. I find it stressful, in fact. But nerve-wracking as it may be, horror certainly generates some memorable moments. I fired up the F.E.A.R. series a few days ago, starting with the first episode, which was published back in 2006. While its age shows, graphically, I’ve been savoring its texture.
Like Dead Space, this game reminds me how screen horror is naught but a deft weave of sound, lighting, and timing. I’ve been paying attention especially to that last element–how fear is dispensed, essentially. You’ve got your jump scares, of course, on one end of the spectrum: a corpse lunging at you from a pool of blood, for example–I ain’t making this shit up, incidentally–or a gnarled face flashing across the screen. These scares are brutish, subtle as a hammer, and effective.
When you start moving beyond jump scares, however, that’s when things get interesting. Jump scares are instantaneous. A wider time horizon, on the other hand, affords the game space to prolong the terror. You’re negotiating a narrow ventilation shaft, for instance, with naught but your flashlight illuminating the way, and you see a creepy girl crawling toward you. Or you see a silhouette of a man through an opaque office window, about 200 feet away, only to discover an empty room. But perhaps the cleverest conceit the game employs is when it does nothing. There are stretches when you expect something to drop from the ceiling, or some other classic horror trope to rear its head, but instead you are greeted with silence. I’m hooked–and I’m dreading every moment of it.
Secondhand Rants will return on Thursday, February 02.