Horror Videogames and the Uncanny

Ewan Kirkland's paper examines the uncanny dimensions of avatars and gamespaces in survival horror videogames, drawing on Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay on the uncanny as its central theoretical framework. The argument holds that the avatar's combination of lifelike animation and underlying lifelessness embodies Freud's notion of the uncanny, while the interaction between player and machine blurs the boundary between dead object and living person. Drawing on Donna Haraway's cyborg theory and Bob Rehak's Lacanian reading of the player-avatar relationship, the paper frames the avatar as an "unstable dialectic" of self and other.

The study traces the historical movement of survival horror from two-dimensional, top-down figures in Sweet Home (1989) to fully three-dimensional, photorealistic characters in titles such as Resident Evil 4 (2004) and Silent Hill: Homecoming (2009). Kirkland supports his claims with close readings of specific games, including Haunting Ground, Fatal Frame, Silent Hill, Clock Tower 3, and Silent Hill 4: The Room, alongside a discussion of how avatar animation is assembled from pre-rendered sequences recombined in real time.

On the architectural dimension, the paper argues that survival horror spaces, such as haunted mansions, residential neighbourhoods, and the shifting town of Silent Hill, reproduce Anthony Vidler's "architectural uncanny," with mazes, locked doors, and the gradual transformation of familiar settings into nightmarish doppelgängers. Kirkland also draws on Gillian Skirrow's 1986 psychoanalytic reading of gamespaces as maternal wombs, concluding that the genre's preoccupation with family origins and gynaecological imagery reflects deep psychological anxieties that the uncanny framework helps to illuminate.