Horror game by a landslide. I am a fan of all things horror and I cannot for the life of me return to the original Silent Hill. Those damnable little children with knives in the school just creep me right the hell out.

There is no day of the year I look forward to more than Halloween. I literally spend the entire day watching old horror movies. So naturally, I like horror games.

The interactive element definitely makes games more scary because my ass is on the line, not some jailbait babysitter that can't help but fall down when running from rapists with machetes.

They're heeeeeeere...

I just saw the movie Slither this past weekend and I actually think it might be a good canidate for the video game treatment!

Hey don't forget about Sadness coming to a Wii near you very soon! (Honest). It will redefine the psychological horror genre as we know it, allowing us to, for example, wave the wiimote like we are waving a stick at rats!

The horror, the horror.

Sadness did just lose it's publisher, so you might want to retract that statement comrade.

Event Horizon is just plain EVIL!

Street cred points for mentioning Event Horizon. The only movie that ever actually scared me.

How dare you put the name of The Ring in with scary or horror in any article. That movie was boring and lame and never scary or "wtf"

I just found it odd that the first Resident Evil game was heavily influenced by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and similar films, and yet when it came time to make the first Resident Evil movie, they rejected George Romero's script in favor of something that was only superficially related to the game. ("Hey, it doesn't feel much like Resident Evil, so lets slap a bunch of Umbrella logos everywhere so people don't forget what they're watching!")

she is HOT!

The very idea of Horror Games is better than Horror Movies. 2 reasons:

1) YOU decide when to walk through the door/dark hallway/basement. The movie builds the suspence, but when to take the plunge is decided for you, you can even turn away and "Is it over yet?" as some must. No such luck in the game. YOU go.

2) The movie is a completed product, with a set story. In the back of your mind you can think, how is the main character going to get out of this one... No such guarantee in games. At any moment some zombie/giant spider/hatchet murderer could rip your head off.

The article was TLDR, but to address one point I skimmed over let me just say that horror movies have been around much longer than games. The latter still has room for improvement. In a few decades we might be doing the whole VR thing, even. I guess I'm saying that games may replace movies as the primary source of entertainment one day, just like TV replaced books.

No horror game or horror movie scared me more than The Descent. That shit traumatized me.

Poltergeist sucks.

That is all. :)

Mmm, walnuts. That's what their heads look like. That is all.

Isn't "tldr" short-speak for "I was too lazy to read, but I'm going to pretend I did and speak to the topic anyway"? Quick, to the Becktionary!

Topic? I saw no topic. Just walnut-heads.

Movies play out, you know there's another hour or two to go, in the video game you might not get away from what's in the next room. And it is especially scary when your controls aren't based from you vantage point, sometimes it's harder to control your character, and the maddening horror of running right into what you were trying to run away from is scary to me. At least until you get you used to the controls I guess.

Have you played Stalker yet?

TALK ABOUT SCARY ATMOSPHERE

Stalker was pretty meh for me. It was more of an "oh shits, there's somethin there. Bang, yer dead."
...
I will not play Silent Hill again. That you reminded me of its presence in a box of old games in the closet will make it far harder to go to sleep....
Damn.

@ Necros:

I read George Romero's Resident Evil script. Trust me, we were better off with the version we got.

The first Resident Evil game was inspired mostly by an NES game called Sweet Home. The decision to go with zombies as the monsters definitely was Romero influenced (as was any zombie-related media after 1968)

Yes, The Decent! Now that was a scary movie.

Though nothing frightened me more than the Resident Evil Remake. It was the scariest thing I'd ever played. It was so scary, infact, that I couldn't play for more than 15 minutes with the lights on, with my dog in the room. And I was shaken for days after playing it.

But yes, the fact that you get to choose what you do in any given horror setting makes for a much darker experience. When it's you and not some 18-year-old idiot that have to face whats on the other side of the door, it gets to you.

Collete... You're so badass.

oops. I meant to spell that wrong ;)

I was less badass before you fondled my breasts in Miami. That transformed me into a real woman.

Off topic, but Chad reminded me of a game that time forgot -- Descent. I got so dizzy that I literally threw up after four hours of nonstop gaming. Oh, the horror!

@ Mxyzptlk:

Yeah, just read it tonight, tracked the script down off of Wikipedia. You're right, not that good, even if it seemed a bit closer to the original Resident Evil game.

"I hope this isn't Chris's blood."

I think the horror movie folks should just fucking quit with the whole scantily clad group of chicks taking the mystery machine out to the lake routine. Find some forsaken tomes, have killers chase the elderly, don't frigging touch cgi, stop humping after your schoolmates have dropped dead, and get some fucking excellent animatronics.

I remember my first really scare survival horror moment is when i was playing te first resident evil. I was walking down a hallway(mind you i was easier to be frightened at the age of 10) and everything is quiet. I was expecting something to happen like a zombie to come around a corner or something. Then all off a sudden *windows shatter*, the dog smashes through the window into the mansion, i was scared to hell. I literally jumped three feet off my bed. That was my first survival horror moment, and trust me it was a good one.

Game over movies for ONE reason

Condemned, that was the only form of entertainment that made my soul jump out of my skin for a moment, play that game 3am in a dark room. That, to me is one of the 360's most unappreciated games. theres just somthing about playing a horror game in first person armed with just a pipe thats make it more terrifying.

Games, hands down. FEAR terrified me as nothing ever before in my life had. Hell, even the combat was scary. "Holy shit, elite soldiers who actually know how to fight!"

The interactivity is what does it for me. I don't get frightened at horror movies, because that isn't me getting haunted or whatever, it's some babysitter I don't care about.

*looks around* Guess I'm late to the party. It's already been touched upon, but it's the interactivity that makes survival horror games so near and dear to my heart.

You get the enjoyment of feeling like you are there in the mix, without the worry of your own personal safety. Unlike a movie where you just sit back,relax, and analyze it pieces, you are distracted by the puzzles and where to go next in the games.

This is why we all jumped out of our seats in Resident Evil, when the dogs crashed through the windows. We were truly caught off guard.

horror = epic!

Event Horizon scared the nuts outta me..

Just watched The Descent after reading this post. *shudder* What a well made movie. That is how horror should be!

I love the Silent Hill games. First game to ever scare me enough that I had to turn the lights on. The bleeding walls in 2 (or was it 3)... *shudder*

Horror movies, on the other hand, tend to just make me laugh.

both genres tend to be lame due to the inherent problems with the topic matter. it's very hard to write scary. that combined with the fact that most if not all game writing is completely atrocious combined with typically poor voice acting, games unfortunately are pretty low on the artistic pecking order. gamers tend to be more forgiving of these things due to length of content of the material and because there are often some genuinely spectacular moments resulting from eye and ear candy. but moments typically are not enough for anyone who isn't into gaming and those who aren't typicaly have very good reasons for it. my wife for example is an artist and a sf/horror fan and she generally thinks games are lame lame lame. i showed her silent hill two and she was very unimpressed. weird creatures crawling on the ground combined with a lousy plot and iffy dialogue were not enough to keep her attention. my friend who is a published sf writer was absolutely pissed at the ending of silent hill one. as a real fiction and screenplay writer, he needed to see some real resolution to the story to an extent like what was in the movie. i can only imagine the difficulty involved in trying to make a cohesive story out of such random events and situations. most people who aren't gamers need plot lines that make sense and characters with legitimate motivations which tends not to happen in games as much. again gamers such as myself tend to be more forgiving in these matters because there is gameplay involved as well as puzzle-solving and quite often neat things to "discover" in the game. colette rightfully points out that twenty hours beats two in aiding the developers in creating an engaging story but unfortunately i rarely see a story that is truly engaging and thought-provoking on its own. frankly regardless if it is survival horror or any other gaming genre, the story and dialogue tend to be weak. both the gaming and eye candy aspects of the game is what motivates players to continue. i just don't think gaming (and in particular console gaming) attracts writing talent that matches the incredible programing talent we see. finally to answer the questions proposed in the article, it is because excellent movies are hard to make. most studios are interested in 1. keeping costs low, which is why you get mediocre actors like mila whatshername for ri and mediocre directors, 2. courting the teen dollar, which is why they pick a license like silent hill and a tired genre like zombies, and 3. the genre is very hard to write for considering the pressure to stay true to the original "story" with seemingly hundreds of open plot points that have no real explanation or reason to be there other than to add length to the story or provide something cool to see or do - this is called fillerb and there is tons of it in games. in the end i reject the notion that games capture something in a better way than movies do. they are different and one isn't inherently better as a whole. i would say that due in part to some of what i write above, there hasn't been a game made yet that can be considered anywhere near art. there are artistic and arty aspects to them and they can be beautiful at times but they have a long long way to go to make it tosomething we could call art. i think it will some day but it's not even close yet. however movies as they stand today and as they stood 80 years ago can be art and truly great movies survive in a way that we have yet to see in gaming. i would love to see this change but until gaming takes as much care in careful and rich plot development and in voice acting as it does in the candy aspect of it, then it will always be something that is a force in popular culture but limited to popular culture.

Event horizon was class (Considering it's a Paul W S 'I ruined the aliens/predator franchise' Anderson movie), aside from ending with that gash prodigy tune... way to keep the atmosphere!

Some David Lynch movies are true horror imo. Pure mind fuck, sexy time joy bags.

As for games, Condemned is possibly the freakiest I've played, closely followed by F.E.A.R. Those guys know how to use sound really well.

Games are definitely better at horror. Theres actually a chance the main character will die. Movies simply CAN NOT create the suspense and adrenaline rush that a game create because the main character almost never actually dies. And even if they do, you know damn well that it will be in the last 10 minutes of the movie, so in the back of my head I have a timer, and if Im only halfway through the movie and Luke has a battle with Vader then I know that he wont die yet. Ruins all the suspense. And, there is something added to an event when you are doing it. I remember when I played Silent Hill 2, and there was this urinal real early in the game, and it does this close up and it says "there is something shining at the bottom, will you reach in?". It took me half an hour to work up the courage to answer yes, after exhausting all other options. I guess I won't spoil what happens for anyone that might play it in the future, but I can say that that scared me more than any movie could possibly hope to do.

Horror movies are fun to watch mostly because you can make fun of them the whole time. Hills Have Eyes anybody? But playing scary games scares teh shit out of me. I got the Resident Evil remake on the Gamecube when it came out, i was playing with my friend next to me, he had to take the controller. I refused to go around every corner in fear of there being a zombie, so he would just yell at me to go, finally i decided to give up.

And then there are games like FEAR, i love it. I played through about 4 hours of that game on my friends 50" HDTV with his smoking PC hooked up through HDMI on a surround sound system. It was fucking amazing and WAY scarier than any movie.

Although there are a couple movies that are coming out that seem to be changing the genre as well. Disturbia looks fantastic, and Vacancy is looking pretty decent as well.

Wow, no mention of System Shock 2 so far, color me "shocked". Granted I love Fatal Frame, Silent Hill, Resident Evil just as much as the next thrill seeking nut-case, but come on! You can't think of Bioshock without thinking of the critically acclaimed System Shock, can I get an amen? (Bioshock = no longer having to endlessly tweak System Shock 2 so it'll run in WinXP) :)

Watch the movie: Audition, a 1999’s creepy horror film from Takashi Miike.

Terrifying.

audition, descent. excellent horror movies.
slither. a really good movie, surprisingly.
but has anyone seen High Tension?
Now that shit is wtf scary

colette. you rock hardcore.

I thought The Descent was pretty lame and predictable...
Event Horizon scared the shit out of me.
Doom 3 had many "scary" moments for me.

@sobaka:
no video game yet created is art??

I think not sir:

This just in Sadness is still a go.

I'm a real puss when it comes survival-horror, Resident evil is as far as i've ventured with the genre. i had to laugh when playing resi 4 with my little brother (no chance of doing it alone!) i was running from the first regenerator you meet,turned a corner, and was met with another one. for once i didn't freak but my brother literally leapt 3 feet straight up off the bed!...i had to trade in the original remake for gamecube...baaad memories...

"You can't think of Bioshock without thinking of the critically acclaimed System Shock, can I get an amen?"
A- FUNKING -MEN BROTHER!! I just registered just for that amen. Also, Colette forgot to mention Alone in the Dark which was before the Resident Dead. I'm sure she forgot to mention many other games as well. Still, good article and good posts, everyone.

"It makes me truly consider that games could be the ideal medium for the best of the horror genre. "
I SO absolutely positively agree. Movies: passive, games: interactive.

Fatal Frame is probaly my favorite and most hated game ever...mainly because, yes, I am a huge wuss. I've never been able to get past day 3 in that game, just too freaked out.

And yes! System Shock 2, that game was flipping scary. the only game i can remember where you'd go up to a door and wait, not wanting to open the door.

Wow, this blog was what drew me to this site, and I have to say that you are preaching to the choir. Most of what you said I've said at some point in my life regarding the horror genre while debating it with friends and strangers (those random encounters one generally has when in line at Blockbuster or just eavesdropping and deciding to join in). Except that, as much as I like Clive Barker, that Hellraiser II was a hell of a lot better.

I also agree that the horror film is dead, no pun intended. The Hollywood system keeps pumping out crap and don't take the time to make sure it's quality. If it makes money, fine by them, that's how the system works. I'm a senior screenwriting student at Columbia College of Chicago and was going to primarily do horror film as I feel that I could take the time and possibly do some justice for the market. That was until earlier this year when I had one of those oh so great epiphanies that deem that video game writing is my true destination. And I agree.

Horror's greatest medium is in the video game realm because it is interactive and puts you smack dab in the middle of things. I do like a good chunk of the horror games, even the ones you mentioned. They creep me out alright and at moments scare me, but when they use the same "throw the cat at the screen with a loud noise technique" I get a little disappointed. That's not fear. It startles you and makes you jump, but unexpected loud noises generally tend to do that to most people, at least from what I've seen. People love to get scared. That's why they go to the movies, haunted houses, and play video games. It's a safe arena for them to do it in and only have somewhat of a chance to get harmed psychologically instead of physically. What I want from a game is fear and for it to be coupled with dread. I want to "not want" to go into that room because I'm too freaked out to do so. One game that did that recently was Condemned on one of the later levels in the basement of the serial killers house. I dreaded going around each corner. I didn't like most of the game, but it had its moments.

Anyways, video games are the avenue for fear and now that gamers are becoming more mature and we're seeing more adult oriented games there will be a lot of area to have some damn good horror to scare the hell out of us and I hope to contribute to that.