Places of Horror - The Secrets of Scary Settings - Extra Credits

Yes, it's that time of year again. All Hallows is upon us and many of us are looking forward to reveling in terror from the warm safety of our homes. Also, we once again get to unleash James on one of his favorite topics, which is horror games. Today we'll be talking about the settings of our horror games because as many of you might have noticed in works of horror, the setting is almost a character onto itself. It defines the type of fear we engage in. It surrounds us looming and impressive through every minute of the experience. So let's start with the first question. What makes a place terrifying? Why do we tense up? Why do the hairs on the backs of our necks prickle as we walk through some locations but not others? The reason can be broken down into two categories: places of disempowerment and places of residual dread. Disempowering locations are just that, locations that make us feel weaker than we normally think of ourselves. These are perfect for horror settings as horror requires vulnerability and these settings force the characters into the most vulnerable

states imaginable. The most frequent, in fact almost ubiquitous use of disempowering locations, is isolation. Practically every horror story, film, or game you'll ever see will have the characters isolated in some way from the mass of humanity because we are a societal creature. Together as a society we can endure anything and defeat anything, at least so we often feel. But alone, we're little more than a naked ape deprived of our most valuable asset for survival. This is why you see so many horror stories take place in a remote cabin, an Arctic research station, a ship in deep space. If we can be made to feel isolated, to feel alone, even among a small group, we're much easier to terrify. But that said, don't just think of disempowerment as being limited simply to a sense of isolation. Those Arctic research stations or the deep space vessel settings are excellent examples of disempowerment for other reasons, too. In that sort of space, the character's movements are limited, the environment outside is hostile, there's nowhere to go except that small tin can they're stuck in. Worse still, if that

tiny metallic shell is breached, the character will die. There's just a thin layer of metal wall standing between them and an inherently hostile outside world. Moreover, because of the hostility of the surrounding world, these are settings that fill us as players with the sense that this is a space we aren't supposed to be. That in some way we're trespassing on hostile ground. That our own ingenuity has put us someplace we were never supposed to go. And there's some part of our evolutionary brain that still understands this. That knows that these places mean death. Beyond that, there's the standard go-to of low-light settings. This is the classic disempowerment setting. Any place where we restrict the character's ability to see immediately makes them feel more vulnerable. Alien feeling settings also disempower the player, whether that setting is some nightmare world, the bottom of the sea, or some delusional realm created by psychosis, where the characters don't recognize the objects around them or the rules that the world operates by. When the character grabs a rock to bash the monster's head in and

the rock simply melts away in their hand or sprouts eyes and scuttles off, not really being a rock at all, the character feels lost, confused, made all the more vulnerable. But these are all just examples. The key here is to realize that the setting itself can disempower, and that's one of the essential elements to horror on both the macro and the micro level. Once you understand that principle, you can use it to craft all sorts of strange and horrific settings which instill in us that same gnawing dread. But disempowerment's not your only tool for creating a horror setting. Another option is to give your setting some residual horror. A horror that comes from the dawning realization of what happened in that place. An understanding of the place's purpose. A purpose that the mind recoils from. Asylums and hospitals are some of the more common horror settings that play on this idea, but lots of places can serve this purpose. Abattoirs, execution grounds, tombs. We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, as not falling prey to the medieval superstition that horror can linger in a place, that terrible things which happened in a place can themselves make that place terrible. And

yet, an abandoned asylum or a closed hospital still has that effect on us. When looking to create a place with inherent disquiet, all you have to do is give it a past that lives up to that disquiet, and make sure that the characters and the player become aware of that past. Maybe not every detail of it, but enough to be unsettled. Places like prisons and asylums are easy because most people already have negative associations formed around those locations, which can then be played on, turned more horrific, and amplified without much exposition at all. Other places, like cult sites, alien monuments, and the like, they may require more exposition as the player might not recognize them for what they are at first glance, but if done well, there can be a dread in that slow realization, in this awakening to the horror of where the player is. A dread that only dawns on the player once they're already too deep to get out. Once we've developed the disempowering elements of our setting and created the residual fear that lies within it, there are two other elements of horror setting design that I should discuss. The first is place as monster. After all, your

location doesn't have to be passively hostile or simply contain a sense of dread. If you want, it could actively be trying to do the character harm. Because horror often exists in a fantastical realm where things don't function the way we're used to in life, which allows for the delicious possibility of the setting having its own desires, its own cravings and needs. The most common example of this is the possessed mansion. Not just a place where ghosts are wandering around, but a house that is itself actually possessed. Maybe that house wants to keep the family residing in there forever, or maybe it wants to drive them out, or it wants to kill them, or perhaps even to push them to perform some special right. Whatever it wants, in horror, unlike in most other genres, the setting can be its own agent, which can make for some really awesome horror stories. And lastly, we must, of course, talk about the psychological landscape. It's something we've talked about before in Halloweens past, so if you want to dig into it more, you can check out this episode right over here. But, this is a powerful tool when it comes to establishing a horror setting, so it's worth bringing up again. The psychological landscape is simply a physical location that's

actually a representation of the character's inner life, often serving as a filter, as a way for the character to look at aspects of themselves that they've repressed or maybe they can't face. Silent Hill 2 and American McGee's Alice both are excellent examples of this. The key to delivering on these is not to make it immediately obvious to the character or the player, but rather to make it a realization that slowly dawns on them over time. These sorts of psychological landscapes often serve as the most disturbed, most disquieting horror settings, because nothing is quite so terrifying as an aspect of ourselves we don't want to see, and there is nothing we dread more than the parts of ourselves we keep locked away. Happy Halloween, everybody. See you next week.