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Games Do Horror Better Than Movies

Clive Thompson, no relation to Jack it would seem, over at Wired Magazine has an interesting article up about how the Horror genre is better served by an interactive medium than by Film. Of course he mentions the horror game of the moment, Bioshock, in the first sentence and continues to refer to it throughout, mentioning Silent Hill and Resident Evil only in passing even though there is a wealth of other horror based games out there.

Its not surprising, to me at least, that games can scare you more than films. Film is a passive medium, you sit and watch the story unfold, with no input into the outcome. The tension and fear created by horror film is an empathic and experienced at one remove from the events on screen. You fear for the people in the film, not for yourself. Horror games push more primal buttons, it is you, albeit a representation of you, which faces the danger. Your actions, or lack of them, determine your survival.
In a horror film, the rules as laid out in the first scream movie generally hold true. You know that running up the stairs when the monster enters your house is a bad idea, and anyone who says “I’ll be right back” won’t be, but you can’t tell the people in the movie that. In a game you can actively not go upstairs or say “I’ll be right back”, whether this increases your chances of survival or not is completely up to the game’s designers. Because it is you that is in danger, you feel the tension and fear all the more.
In the article, Chris makes much of the audio in Bioshock, the insane gibbering of the Splicers, the innocent childlike intonations of the Little Sisters, and the dripping and creaking as Rapture comes apart around you. The horror in Bioshock exists on more than one level. There is the horror as you realise that this was a utopia which has degenerated into a watery hell. There is the horror over what the inhabitants have done to themselves and each other in the depths of their insanity. Finally there is the horror of what the society, if it can be called that, has done to feed its addiction to genetic manipulation, it has resorted to kidnapping and altering young girls, requiring you to either harvest (kill) or save them to survive. The horror is not simply one of things jumping out at you, or the movement out of the corner of your eye. The whole world of Bioshock is horrific, it is something corrupted and degraded which has grown out of something which had the potential to be beautiful. Rapture is a testament to the greatest horror of all, mankind’s endless capacity to destroy that which we strive the hardest to achieve.
So horror in games can be done better than in films, this was obvious, its the immersion that games are beginning to achieve that makes this possible. But horror is not simply about monsters under the bed or bad men with knives jumping out of the shadows. Horror is about facing the darkest parts of our humanity and fearing the consequences of their ascension. True horror is when you are frightened of yourself and what you might be capable of.
(From Wired.)