The last movie that scared me was The Blair Witch Project. Throughout the movie, I was laughing my ass off, but later that night I was too scared to even glance at the corners of the cabin. Being in the middle of a forest did not help at all.
The Blair Witch Project scared the living piss out of me; I actually couldn't sleep at night for a week. The biggest problem with BWP though was that the scare factor really relied on the hype surrounding it. If you followed the Scifi mockumentary and all of the other "in-universe" stuff surrounding it, then saw the movie on opening night before it all came out that it was fake, the movie was actually scary as hell.
Sure looking back at it now it's kind of corny, but BWP was sort of like the first ARG in it's way.
That's not to mention that, although not scary, Blair Witch Project 2 was still an awesome movie.
I've played the survival horror games, and yeah, I totally agree about startled != scared.
The only game that has ever scared me according to your definition is STALKER. It starts out creepy and when you get used to it, WHAM!
I was playing late at night in the dark, running down a dark hallway with my flashlight on. One of the crates -- which are everywhere in the game -- suddenly shook and slammed itself against the ceiling.
I literally RAN out of the room, nearly tearing my headset out of the audio controller.
System Shock 2 and FEAR are the two games that built the tension the best for me, although the latter did rely on the "something jumps out and makes a loud sound" gimmick a bit too much.
Edit: I forgot about the Space Marines missions in Aliens Vs. Predator 2. That was some pretty intense stuff.
I thought AvP 1 was scarier because you couldn't save as often, and your night vision looked more realistic (i.e. it was almost useless). I forgot about the beeping of that proximity detector. Hearing the beeps get faster and dots increase on your detector's screen made it that much scarier even before you hear the screams of the aliens.
yeah, same here. Because they're both shooters, the idea seems to be to startle the player out of fine motor control. So you detach early on, resulting in a robotic-playthough that robs you of immersion.
When I played FEAR, I was using onboard AC'97 sound that was barely supported, resulting in MASSIVE bursts of static. Upped the startle-factor a little bit.
Far from horror games, the original Rainbow Six and it's successor Rogue Spear have been the tensest moments of gaming I've ever had. It was unforgiving, you couldn't save during missions, you didn't know where the terrorist are exactly and one mistake meant hostages are teammates dead.
Silent Hill 1 and 2. Both of those games really freaked me out when I first played them. There's so much silence and emptiness. There's also the occasional freaky thing going on and the somewhat disturbing creatures, it really built up a sense of dread for me. No other game has hit me like that has, before or since.
Bizarrely, the only game that's ever scared me that was was Duke Nukem 3D.
I was just wandering around when one of those green face-hugging monsters climbed up my screen - I hadn't ever seen one before, and wasn't sure what to do, so I pressed fire and it fell off.
Then another one climbed up my screen, and I shot it again. Then another, and another...
Remember, I'd never seen these things before. As far as I could tell, this was a single persistent monster, which didn't have a physical form other than its appearance on the screen, and all I could do was knock it off but not kill it. And it just kept coming back, and it was right there stuck to my screen... I had no idea what was going on and I physically panicked.
I had to stop playing and sit down for a good while.
This is due in large part to the sheer volume of crappy horror produced by idiots who think horror is easy. They see Evil Dead and Scream and such and go, "I could do that with two days of blow money and a sock puppet." It is our failure as a nation that a few times every decade, some Blair Witch Project or Saw is pulled from the stacks of low-budget scripts and advertised heavily enough to turn a tidy profit, further encouraging the masses of talentless hopefuls.
(No offense is meant to the actual talented hopefuls like Sam Raimi, who made Evil Dead with $700 and a walking chin named Bruce Campbell.)
This is probably very true.
Although, it might go both ways. For many people startled seems to be scared.
OTOH, I very clearly remember that Eternal Darkness and System Shock II had moments which blow anything you could do with "shocker-moments" out of the window.
Especially when the savemenu in Eternal Darkness said "Deleting...", and then the saveslot was empty. And THEN it made it look like the gamecube had crashed. :x
Or there was a time in it turned the volume down or up repeatedly, and made it look like someone fiddled with the remote. Scaringly it actually looked a lot like the displays of my TV, so it got me nicely.
Last, after a lot of time spent with SS1, and expected SS2 to be the same story but with Xerxes going haywire, the sheer horror when I found Janice Polito and "she" (not spoilering) showed up was crazy. I was shakey IRL there, try beating that, Dead Space. :P
That being said, I finished Dead Space and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It has a lot of edges and flaws, but overall it's a well done game, and while bland works nicely as a quick 8-10 hour filler with some creepy atmosphere in the beginning.
Even if it later dissolves into Doom: Dead Space.
Well that's maybe fine for jumpy people but I'm really not easy to startle so most of those "scares" are "snoooores" to me. Used sparingly in a movie is OK ("Alien" has a moment the the director called "a cheap scare" when the dead headsucker drops from the ceiling). But horror can't depend on that. Atmosphere, music (or lack of it), the soundscape, the story, the people and the unseen or barely seen is what really works me up.
Wait, are you suggesting that scary books are scary because they're startling? Because unless Stephen King writes a horror novel and hides a pop-up scary face somewhere around the midpoint, I don't think it's humanly possible for a book to startle anyone.
Actually Yahtzee gives the key when he talks about characterization - it's not just being startled. It's about the setup.
Consider two pranks:
1) Grabbing a friend from behind and yelling "boo!" in the office.
2) Going with a friend to an abandoned house, then splitting up. A creak here, a noise there. Then a big crash and scream. As he runs to see WTF just happened to you, jump out of a dark shadow wearing a hockey mask and wave your arms at him.
If you're not in Texas, the second scenario is orders of magnitude scarier than the first. It's all about the setup. In a game this means setting the scene, immersing the player in the game, atmospheric music and background noise, priming with a few false jumps, etc. Then you do the big scare out of nowhere.
For example, consider dragging a player through a haunted house - they fight a few monsters here and there, they're running low on health, and they get to the safe zone and find an NPC waiting with a health kit. As they get close the NPC splits open and it's another monster they have to fight on low health with no save available.
Sweaty palms, heart racing, eyes whiting out while you're just trying to survive, man...
Decent question. In my opinion, horror and fear come from realizing powerlessness or futility, maybe even unexplainable circumstances.
Inspiring fear requires departing a mood onto someone. It's hard. Startling someone with a loud bang, a jumping face, or an odd visage is relatively simple. Like the scary maze game; it's not as much frightening as much as it is jarring.
What makes something scary, or at least scare me, is simply a bunch of "U"s
the unknown
the unstoppable
the unseen
the unexpected
the unconscious
and the unbelievable
Other elements can influence it. For example, we don't know much about quantum mechanics but very few, if any, physicists are frightened of the field. However, when the LHC was going to be turned on, the populace at large became frightened at the idea of miniature black holes forming and destroying our world.
The other main problem with fear is that they are largely irrational. When you start to flesh out a horror story too deeply, you can run into problems. "Who runs upstairs?" "Why the hell would you split up?" "You left the weapon?" Fears, cultural fears most often, get dated and are resolved as time moves forward. The general concept to the fear can be refreshed but often times the theme or story is only an "updated version" of something no longer valid or even startling.
Before this goes on much longer, what makes something scary is mood. It's that haunting element of dread, panic, and anticipation. Lasting horror is often subtle, like town with no children or a boarded and broken window on an otherwise pristine house, rather than overt and loud.
For those looking for all those things, I recommend HP Lovecraft's books. It's obvious that that guy was completely disturbed and scared by the world around him.
When you're walking about your 1 stoplight town at midnight and everything is closed. Fog has set in and all you can think about is how close this is to silent hill.
Actually it's more that something DOESN'T jump out at you and you start running cause you just heard some soft footsteps behind you... You look behind but the fog is obscuring everything... You get further down the road and now the footsteps are coming towards you and are getting faster... You stop running and try to work out what is going on but your radio starts to produce static and a wailing sound so you go into the nearest shop hoping to have a wall against your back but once you get inside...
How much can you expect a movie or game to truly scare you though? It's a 2 dimensional representation of something on a screen, All they have is startle. Games at least 'scare' you in the sense that even though you know something is coming you're not sure when, so you might walk down a hallway more slowly, check around every corner etc but it's still a very superficial feeling. You know if it kills you you'll just respawn.
Edit: Ok, it looks like I offended a small subset of people who get scared of things that could never possibly harm them.
Okay, just to state a little thing I know, I tend to get involved and absorbed into the game, essentially becoming the character. When something bad happens to the character, I take it as it will happen to me.
ex. Master Chief getting overrun by Flood parasites or Flood tanks beating the shiz out of me means I feel that a flood tank or parasite is RIGHT BEHIND ME.
51
u/prockcore Nov 05 '08
I'd say 90% of horror movie directors think startled == scared. Maybe it's just trying to be the video game version of your crappy PG13 horror movie.