Survival Horror

What do we most fear? And why? Horror video games are understood as flashpoints of terror for most, and the question of why they are so scary or what they are making a metaphorical terror out of typically falls out of the frame. There are larger ideas that horror draws from and social concerns that animate the trends we see in the media and shake us to our core. Horror games may emblematize this balance between drawing on the world for influence and reproducing these worldly fears as a cathartic release. As we see in this chapter, how these fears evolve can tell us how video games reveal important truths about our society and culture, as well as the ways games themselves help us unpack these fears in ourselves through an aesthetic expression.

Perhaps the most common observation about the 1980s slasher flick boom is that the whole craze and perhaps the entire subgenre of “crazed madman kills fleeing teens” is a thinly veiled metaphor for sexual conservatism. It’s not a bad observation, really, and it can be easily complicated by the realization that we as an audience typically relate less to, say, Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s Leatherface than the girl who escapes him. Media critic Carol Clover is generally considered the first major critic to make this turn in her seminal text on horror films, Men, Women, and Chainsaws, and she further argues that horror movies actually can allow us a space to explore radical feminist impulses in media. In other words, that Friday the 13th marathon you’re about to watch isn’t all about killing coeds after they just got done having some premarital sex; it’s about rooting for the one woman who escapes the blood orgy.

Now, there are some critiques of Clover’s perspective that are clear even from a cursory reading: How superficial were these emancipatory feminist moments, given that the craze happened at the height of Ronald Reagan’s culturally conservative omnipresence? Why is it empowering to let one girl live and kill five or six others? And why, in the revenge fantasy spur of the slasher genre, does a woman need to be raped or assaulted in order to claim some kind of agency? Is the claim that the slasher genre is feminist really any easier to dispute than the claim that it’s all about sexual repression?

Clover does answer more than a few of these questions, and I’m doing a disservice to her work by being so glib, but it is useful to see how the discourse around horror shifts and distorts around whoever is watching or experiencing the horror themselves. Horror is, at its core, a genre that asks a lot of its audience: it asks that the audience withstand deliberately uncomfortable moments of tension; it asks that its audience bring to bear on the media their own fears so that the scares resonate more deeply; and it asks that viewers sympathize both with the killer (in order to make the film more interesting) and the victim (in order to make the film more suspenseful). In short, horror needs its audience to participate actively to succeed as much as, if not more than, any other contemporary genre.

This helps to explain why the modern horror genre is populated with creators who were fans before they were writers, directors, or—in our case—video game developers. The active participation in the framing of horror, as a sort of symbiotic process between the film (or game, novel, etc.) and the audience, empowers a sort of personalized version of terror. More than, say, serious dramatic fare, it’s absolutely reasonable if not necessary to respond to a horror movie by talking about what it made you feel, how it impacted you, what it made you think it was about. I could argue the “correct” reading of To Sleep with Anger, but as critic Sean McTiernan demonstrated recently in his perceptive podcast on found footage horror, Hundreds of Dead Pixelated Bodies, one’s reaction to something like The Blair Witch Project is so colored by personal experience as to make a singularly correct or agreed-upon reading impossible.

All we can really say definitively about the horror genre boils down to three basic truths: horror is expected to scare its audience, whether through jump scares, psychological terror, excessive violence, and so forth; the success of the horror genre depends on keying in to its audience’s fears as specifically as possible; and, because of points one and two, horror must reflect back to its audience societal fears that are resonant enough to supersede our individual, discrete experiences of those fears. In other words, the horror genre reflects what its viewers can relate to but does so in such a way that many viewers can have different experiences of that reflection. It’s a tough balance, but somehow the horror genre has gotten more and more popular over time, so balance must be possible.

Fortunately for us, we consider only one arm of the massive horror industry: horror video games. Perhaps less fortunately for us, this is still a massive chunk of media, with more and more games coming out daily due to a thriving major market—sometimes referred to as AAA—demand and an industrious independent and amateur development scene making far more games than we could ever cover in one book, let alone one chapter. With this in mind, let’s shift our focus to the beginnings of the video game horror genre as we know it, specifically to the birth of the “survival horror” subgenre with the Alone in the Dark and Resident Evil series. This type of horror game, in which players guide one or more characters out of a terrifying situation with limited health, ammunition, and (often) time, was an innovation that sparked newfound interest in horror games and spoke to a somewhat primal fear of disconnection and loneliness in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

What followed the survival horror genre is harder to pin down, but the horror games of today have shifted from games about being, well, alone in the dark and focus more on fears of being surrounded, detected, or “found out.” This perhaps comes as no surprise in a global environment defined by surveillance: the authorities aren’t the only ones who can determine exactly what you’re doing online and in your personal life through closed-circuit television, social media monitoring, and algorithms that calculate the best way to advertise to your most personal desires. With such a wide-ranging and encompassing set of fears, it is also harder to narrow the focus to specific franchises, so for the sake of this chapter, I abandon that approach here and examine the genre as a whole. With horror games, this may well be the only way to approach them; as fans become creators and as the games shift both to reflect a shared generic past as well as a particular horrific present, horror games shift and change in relation to the other games within in their genre. The genre is reactive this way, and this of course is evident in the ways that certain horror trends dominate the scene for a few months or years before disappearing into history: there are horror themes that are right for a particular moment in time.

In short, horror games reflect the fears of their player base, and those fears evolve with and in reaction to those games. It is a pure expression of the sort of creator-audience feedback loop we see more and more in this medium, and as such, it bleeds beyond the typical series organization. What we will see is that this feedback loop serves not only to anticipate the fears of an upcoming generation of creators, but also to reveal the underlying fears of an often-unheard player base as the tools to make these games become freely available. The horror genre in games haunts its player base, first as a symbiotic leech for feelings of terror and horror and later as a reflective output for negative emotions and fears.

At the center of these fears is capitalist excess: loneliness during moments of plenty and submersion in moments of struggle. How these games reflect and ultimately subvert these fears reveal the political and existential stakes of this genre of game during the last twenty years.

Horror has been at the core of games since before their digitization, of course, as the vast Ouija board empire indicates. Indeed, the idea of the supernatural conjures the same basic narrative beats as the presence of a mystery or an adventure with an uncertain outcome: as a creative writing professor might intone, it gives the work a sense of risk; it gives it stakes. It’s not surprising then that two of the most seminal early horror video games—Roberta Williams’s Mystery House and Will Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure—are situated in the mystery and suspense genres. Solving a murder and navigating a cave are two very different tasks that, as popular film and media suggest, often boil down to the same thing: trying to stay alive. This gave added exigency to the text-based format of early games, and games like the seminal Zork still conjure terror and frustration with small, strange phrases like “you may be eaten by a grue.”

The difference, as much as a clearly delineated one exists, between this sort of generic horror and the survival horror that marks the beginning of our focus is that the horror in these early games was subjugated to the task of making these new digital objects. Williams, Crowther, and their many colleagues in the late 1970s and early 1980s created games that absolutely reflected their social moment but were doing so primarily through the lens of technological auteurism or, to put it a different way, as computer prodigies trying to make code do something new and different.

What this “something different” entailed was primarily text garnished with visuals drawn from ASCII and rudimentary graphical software. Mystery House had a consistent visual element to it, as your character wandered through the eponymous house, guided by text input, but the visuals of the game were not what you’d expect if you came into it as a gamer from 2021. Rather, the lines and shapes are rendered as choppy approximations, pixelated and abstracted, requiring the player to put a lot of themselves into the work of atmosphere creation.

Colossal Cave Adventure, on the other hand, was at first a fully text-based affair, with the imagined world left entirely to the player, like other early gaming classics like Zork. That said, the game inspired future graphical adaptations, including a particularly colorful 1986 release, which more importantly pushed the visualization of mapped space for gamers. Charting your course on graph paper and maintaining a good sense of where you’d been and where you were going was in essence a good way of staying alive in the game’s cave environment, but also a way of building an encompassing atmosphere. Just as Williams’s Mystery House had done, Colossal Cave Adventure encouraged players to build a world in a way that had not been done before. As a result, the horror in these games added a sort of narrative spice and was often quite well done in these and more obscure text-based adventures, the point of which was to shift the technological ability of the genre forward so that it could become the kind of expressive and spatially evocative medium we recognize now. Art, then, but more exploratory and curious than much of the work explored here.

The real test of expression in these games and where our analysis can truly begin to take shape, then, would probably be well after Mystery House and its architectural experimentation and into the advent of 3D experimentation on the PC, where developers were using polygons to create the illusion of a fully fleshed-out world with not only right, left, up, and down, but forward and backward along a z-axis. In 1992’s Alone in the Dark, developer Frédérick Raynal of Infogrames produced a horror game that provided a visual element to the sprawling mansions and caves that marked the text-based genre previously. As a result, the game itself has nonlinear maps, traps, and monsters that can surprise and vex the player, and it is the exploration of these tricks and quirks of the 3D world that allow the terror and lasting fear of the game to settle in.

It is tough to get honest reads on many of the older games I cover here, since a cottage industry of rereviewing classics—first in blogs and then on more established websites as a sort of retrospective—means that most reviews begin with an apology or explanation that the game is an established, canonical classic. There’s a place for looking back, but when you begin a review with an acknowledgment of the game’s history, it’s hard to understand how it felt to experience that game when it was released, how it must have felt to play it without any sense of expectation. Although I’m sure newsgroups and message boards buzzed about Alone in the Dark in 1992 and 1993, its introduction was long enough from our era that we have to rely on more prosaic archives.

Instead of trusting my own recollection of the game (I was seven, so we probably can’t do that reasonably) or trusting others’ “accurate” recollections of their reactions years after the fact, let’s look at Charles Ardai’s whimsical and, most importantly, contemporary-with-the-game in-character review of Alone in the Dark, in which he plays a proper old-time corporal who has left a mysterious diary that . . . reviews Alone in the Dark.^[1] It’s difficult to explain what a time capsule this piece is; the earnest, geeky, and ambitious qualities of Ardai’s article attempt to tell readers whether the game is worth buying and produces a snapshot of a very different time in video game retail. Magazines like Computer Gaming World, where Ardai published his review, used its access to games to sell issues, and readers used that access to determine if a game was worth paying $49.99 for during an era in which a game simply might be too bugged to play on your PC without hours of work. Readers wanted engaging reviews that had a clear bottom line: Do I want to buy this? Without the market environment of digital direct sales, emblematized by Valve’s “Steam” marketplace and the ascendant Epic Store, in which games continually go on sale due to a lack of material limitations, the consumption of games had to be more circumspect. The snippets people used to decide what to consume were carefully curated and presented by these magazines. So quirky, heavily informational, review-based content was, if not common, not entirely unexpected.

And so it is in this context that Ardai’s strange Colonel Lemuel Cork, who both reviews Alone in the Dark and leaves clues to his own disappearance within its pages, says the following about the game itself (emphasis mine):

It’s easy, in retrospect, to argue that Ardai would feel this way because he was dazzled by the graphics of the game, a reaction to a surprising leap in quality made possible by technological innovation that does not produce the same effect today. Screenshots of Alone in the Dark suggest as much, with its early polygon graphics making characters appear garish against the partially pre-rendered backgrounds of the house itself. The plot—a suicide with more at its core than originally suspected—is nothing we haven’t seen at this point in time, though its execution is exceptional. The game sets up and deepens the mystery through atmosphere and aesthetics. But it seems important that Ardai didn’t focus on any of that. Instead he said, “I feel that I have been inside a real house.” The feel of the house, not the representation of it, was what was important in Alone in the Dark. In other words, it didn’t matter if the house looked exactly right or if the figures were convincingly human or monstrous; what mattered was that the 3D space, paired with the sense of loneliness, made the horror feel real.

It’s this feeling that activates the shared experience of horror, because it wasn’t the monsters of Alone in the Dark, or the actual layout of the house, or even the mystery itself that impacted Ardai or future reviewers: it was the perception of being alone, in the dark, inside a real house. This kind of feeling requires a sort of mediation, a way for the player’s mind to create the horror through interpretation. This labor is what cements the actual horror in Alone in the Dark and in most horror games that really work. The verisimilitude of the world that contains the terrors of the game is less important than a space that urges you to do the work to feel a sort of affective relationship toward it. And so the repeated plots in the Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, and even Silent Hill series are less about bad writing and more about the sense of atmosphere being a highly personal interaction between player and game, which will be similar but not identical across experiences. As a result, the game’s story matters far less than the story you produce through play.

The feeling of isolation is built upon in later games in the genre, specifically the Resident Evil series. Like Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil privileges puzzle solving, survival, and maximizing your chances of surviving a horde of monsters. Much like monsters, ghosts, and the supernatural were the antagonists for Edward Carnby and friends in the Alone in the Dark series, the depersonalized zombie is the antagonist for the team of special agents you control in the Resident Evil series. Both groups of antagonists in their respective game series require very little in terms of remembered plot to be effective, and neither represents a real human antagonist. Although human evil is apparent in both games, the memorable antagonists are inhuman, the things that stand as obstacles that cannot be understood or reasoned with and must be overcome, typically without a lot of help or ammunition.

The loneliness in both game series, then, hinges not simply on feeling like you are in a house by yourself but instead relies on an embodied feeling of loneliness. In other words, Resident Evil works because you feel (as Ardai felt in his review of Alone in the Dark) that you are alone in the manor where the game takes place, not your avatar. It’s worth repeating: the scary part of these games is not their monsters or that the monsters appear to be real. Certainly, that helps. But the fear in these horror games is not premised on verisimilitude to ordinary life. The horror is in the design of these games, which elicits an affective response that makes you feel as if you are the one alone, hunted, and afraid.

The review space when Resident Evil came out in 1996 was a bit more bombastic than in 1992, not least of all due to the rise of next-generation competition between the Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation. If the reviews of Alone in the Dark represented a sort of careful balance between consumer caution and journalistic access, the reviews of Resident Evil were more like the one Super Bowl commercial a local developer could afford: loud and flashy with a kernel of a message if you squint enough. Computer and Video Games had an eight-page spread on Resident Evil, complete with tips and tricks, clashing backgrounds, and lunging characters yelling gags like, “What manor of horror is this?!”^[3] It’s tremendously fun to look at, but as with Alone in the Dark, what the reviewers actually thought about the game was difficult to figure out. Luckily, the first sentence of the review, which seems to be written by a collection of unnamed staff, tells us all we need to know: “Perhaps when Capcom dreamed up the name for this game, they were trying to tell us something—that when you buy Resident Evil, it’s as if a thing possessed has entered your home.”^[4]

It’s fair to ignore the reactive reviews of the day that praised the graphics or panned the voice acting to focus on this particular element again: the impact of Resident Evil was that it felt like something had entered your home or mind and occupied it. The distinction between home and mind here is a bit less hard and fast than we might imagine, and that old cigar-smoking archetype of psychoanalysis himself Sigmund Freud claimed that the feeling we had when we saw something just-this-side-of-normal that made us feel just a bit off, isolated, out of place in the world was the experience of Unheimlich, or, strictly translated, “unhomelike.” We typically call this feeling “uncanny,” and both game series discussed so far employ this feeling to its greatest effect.

The enemies in this game are literally inhuman, but not so monstrous as to be unrecognizably human-esque—ghosts and zombies reflect our humanity back at us, though without recognition on their end. The setting is a home—albeit it far larger than your home—not in such disrepair as to be a ruin but declining enough to suggest that it accumulated dust and dead insects for thirty or forty years. If there is a feeling of dread inspired by each of these games that is linked to allowing a fearful thing inside your home or the feeling that you are in danger and alone, it begins at the ground floor, where you as a player respond. Once again, Resident Evil prompts the creation of fear in the same way Alone in the Dark did, and once again we see this amplified with a 3D space in which players move and, importantly, get lost. I won’t claim technological advancement is responsible for aesthetic production, but the difference between rounding on a monster in a first-person 2D dungeon is profoundly different than rounding a corner in what feels like a real space.

And so Resident Evil is scary because it feels embodied, real. The subsequent titles in the series, Resident Evil 2 and 3, build upon this and introduce new sprawling settings. Yet, despite opening the world into cities, police stations, sprawling labs, and beyond, the game insists on tight corridors, limited supplies, and a crushing sense of loneliness. When there are other players who are part of your team, they are almost always elsewhere. When your character pieces together elements of a vast pharmaceutical conspiracy spearheaded by the Umbrella Corporation, the gathering of clues is done via scraps of paper, leftover diaries, traces left by the dead or people who are no longer there. Bodies do not unreasonably litter the streets, and the emptiness of the space outside of you and your unresponsive antagonists is what gives these games their sense of aestheticized fear: you are alone except when, paradoxically, a monster arrives, making you feel even more alone.

The plots of all three of the first Resident Evil games are fairly standard fare and mirror the Alone in the Dark model of unraveling a mystery, except with a bit more skullduggery and intrigue. The plots, crucially, are not important, and the conceit of the narrative in these games simply keeps you venturing farther into the blank, empty space at their center. Series that followed Resident Evil built upon this tension between narrative and aesthetic, between the intended effect and the bread crumbs of story that serve to get you there, in compelling ways. The Silent Hill series most famously leaned into the uncanny elements of Resident Evil, creating far more troubling and somehow more humanlike enemies for the protagonists to contend with as they enter the town of Silent Hill to look for someone they have lost. Regardless of how the games resolve—a claim that may aggrieve some Silent Hill fans—the ultimate impact is a sense of isolation in a town filled with nothing but unresponsive or aggressive mockeries of the human form. The covering of the face by bloody bandages, flaps of skin, or, in a particularly iconic example, a huge pyramid serves to emphasize this effect. You are looking for lost family members in Silent Hill, but nothing is looking back at you.

There are dozens of survival horror franchises of this era—loosely from 1992 (Alone in the Dark) to 2003 (Silent Hill 3)—that mirror this approach with varying degrees of novelty and insight. The Siren series plays with the idea of being able to see and hear what others can without being close enough to help. Fatal Frame shifts the focus of the mechanics of these games from the knife or gun to the camera. Capturing images of the inhuman things haunting you as a player creates a second level of remove, wherein your pictures further distance you from the monsters while also cementing their reality in your world. Even the very strange responses to Resident Evil’s massive popularity like Dino Crisis—a game in which players with limited supplies and ammo are on the run from dinosaurs—contain the same basic elements: enemies with some intelligence but no recognition of your humanity, which can in turn be recognized by you as not quite human.

It’s remarkable that this aesthetic was successful through more than a decade of play, let alone that a sense of terror could impact anyone who played these games. It becomes perhaps less remarkable when considering the historical context in which these games were released, during what some would call the neoliberal boom of the 1990s, an era when, put succinctly, it was far easier to earn money as a corporation while also distancing people from the social communities through which we share responsibility for our fellow human beings. The gritty details are best left for someone like David Harvey in his seminal A Brief History of Neoliberalism, but here’s an overview: Regulations on corporate spending had been loosened during the twenty years leading up to the 1990s, beginning with the moment that Paul Volcker, then treasury head, said that the U.S. dollar would no longer be linked to the value of gold. At this point, the dollar was effectively deregulated, and global trade was put under not the gold standard, but the dollar standard—far faster, easier, and riskier (well, risky for the poor). In the end, neoliberalism hypercharged globalization and was instrumental in enforcing the conditions that have led to work being outsourced to poorly paid people working under dangerous conditions abroad.

It also facilitated investments in the connective data networks that define both global finance and the modern era of internet connectivity. In the 1990s, this connectivity was just beginning to become supercharged, with cheaper and preinstalled modem. The U.S. economy was booming, allowing average people access to the internet, and the world suddenly felt a lot bigger. But just as people in major urban areas complain that they are lonely despite being surrounded by millions of people, the internet era brought people together without really increasing human connection. Human connection, of course, wasn’t the point, and the internet served to streamline not only business interests but the acquisition of knowledge and baseline communication, so it isn’t as if we can paint it with a broadly negative brush. But the feeling of being alone among many was now relevant whether or not you rode the subway with them daily. This fear of loneliness, nascent at the release of Alone in the Dark and rampant at the release of Resident Evil, fueled the sympathetic responses to the loneliness of these games. In a moment of relative plenty, everything around us, from our relationships to the environment itself, seemed to be crumbling or distancing itself from us. The internet had given us a community of people who were, at best, uncanny. And rampant business-first deregulatory practices had made the poor even poorer, disenfranchised, and forced to labor for the few who profited. Who wouldn’t feel a bit lonely?

What happened next is too easy to describe incorrectly but too interconnected to get precisely right. We of course need to acknowledge that 9/11 fractured the American psyche badly enough to drive a sort of hyperaware surveillance mindset onto not only America, but most other first-world nations infected with paranoid delusions. This of course led to the Iraq War, an obvious-in-the-moment boondoggle and illegal war, and to conflicts that still rage in Afghanistan. There are better places to find full descriptions of this truly strange period in history—for instance, the excellent Blowback podcast—but suffice it to say that the sense of loyalty to Western idealism superceded the sense of global interconnection while maintaining a sure grip on deregulation and the increased profitability of massive corporations.

Perhaps this national fervor combined with a financial sector all too willing to issue bad loans to bolster an economy devastated by 9/11 and the George W. Bush administration, thus creating the 2008 economic collapse. This is the second event that changed us from a society that feared isolation to one that fears the monster. People who felt secure in their exceptionalism had been told they were not remotely exceptional twice: on 9/11, when they realized that others could attack them, and in 2008, when they realized that they too could face total collapse and homelessness due to the whims of bankers and financial gurus.

It’s crucial to understand just how utterly defamiliarizing the 2000s were for Americans specifically, and globally to a large degree as well, as the global market cratered and American militarization was put into overdrive. Global changes like this don’t happen in a vacuum, and the utter decontextualization and defamiliarization that followed in the wake of 9/11 directly influenced video game development, as it did every other kind of media. It is no coincidence that the horror genre had a bit of an identity crisis, too, and perhaps not surprising that the catalyst for change was the introduction of many, many guns.

Resident Evil 4, released in 2005, is the most remade and retooled game in recent memory. It was originally released for Nintendo Gamecube and nearly every console thereafter, including Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and Xbox One. A remake is in development for the next generation of consoles as well. This game has cast its shadow over fifteen years of gaming—a period of time that has witnessed the debut of many consoles that soon fell into obscurity—and it is still relevant. Resident Evil 4 was also a risky departure from the Resident Evil formula, as it did away with the limited supplies that previous games relied upon as a way to add tension. Now, ammo and guns are relatively easy to come by, which posed a bit of a problem for the game; namely, if ammunition was no longer scarce, where did the risk that drove the gameplay loop come from? In other words, how could the game produce tension and risk for the player when a loaded gun made feeling alone far less scary?

This is a classic problem faced by the detective story as well: the introduction of the handgun throws off the balance, allowing anyone to kill at any given moment, without plan or feasible motive. Sherlock Holmes may have had to use his wits to gain access to the criminal mind in order to unpack the deep crenelations of the plots in Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic tales, but there is a reason that the 1920s and 1930s saw the rise of the pulp, with Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op and others preferring to shoot first and determine motive later. This is no great insight; it’s something that writers and critics have grappled with for years, from Hammett’s Red Harvest to Wes Craven’s Scream. Introduce violence in an easy-to-obtain package, and the structure of the story you are telling changes dramatically, as any tension at an inescapable situation is potentially deflated with a quick draw and two shots.

For Capcom, the resolution was fairly simple: it introduced more enemies. Resident Evil 4 is full of enemies, completely ignoring the ethos of the earlier games, which emphasized fewer encounters and more impactful moments of terror by extending the player’s feelings of isolation. In Resident Evil 4, your character, Leon, is almost never alone, and not only because of the horde of zombies on the Spanish isle he has visited. The game is full of spoken parts, characters who act as secondary protagonists, villainous foils, and crafty merchants. With some, it’s unclear if they have succumbed to the zombie plague, but what is clear is that they have recognized Leon as human, breaking the cycle of uncanniness.

And so the horror of the game is definitely muted; it’s not entirely clear to me if Resident Evil 4 is meant to be scary beyond a sort of existential fear surrounding a massive plague turning people into the walking dead. Instead, it feels like a game that is meant to be cathartic, allowing players the space to wipe out the enemies around them instead of fearing them from a distance. In this way, it is reminiscent of Sega’s 1996 game House of the Dead, which spawned a number of sequels and stole many Japanese and American players’ spare change at the arcade. House of the Dead is a shooter on rails, and if it’s scary, it relies on jump scares and grossing players out; there is no loneliness nor feedback loop of fear. Instead, players are there to have fun and shoot zombies with a light gun, and the game succeeds admirably in producing this effect. The same can be said of Resident Evil 4, which isn’t on rails—players can move their characters where they want and explore the island at their leisure—but is more shoot-’em-up than slow-burn suspense.

Perhaps the game clicked during a moment of hyper-televised violence and knee-jerk reactionary fervor. It doesn’t have any recognizable politics, beyond heralding the end of the fear-of-loneliness genre. At the moment that the villains in Resident Evil 4 looked back at Leon and recognized him as an enemy to kill, as opposed to simply following a sort of instinctive urge, the genre collapsed into something new. As the recognizing gaze of the villains in Resident Evil 4 mirrored a sense of being suddenly seen and vulnerable, which rippled in the security state of post-9/11 America, it should come as no surprise that conceptualizing this new genre turn for Resident Evil would be as difficult as understanding the way securitization impacted our everyday life in the years following 9/11.

For Resident Evil, the search for a new identity would stumble over the same casual racism and intolerance that ran rampant during the Bush years, which materialized in, at the very least, some truly unfortunate optics. Resident Evil 5 (2009) returned to the idea of hordes of enemies, but set the game in Africa, producing images of white protagonists gunning down dozens of black zombies. Developers of the game have long insisted that race is of course present but not meant to be derogatory in the game, citing the setting of the game as the reason for the predominance of black zombies.

Still, the game remains controversial, not least of which because it follows the historically racist and imperialist trope of white people “saving” Africa from itself. But the game still sold well, and the series continued with Resident Evil 6. This game was mostly forgotten, or at least passed over when discussing the series, and in this way, it is a lot like Resident Evil 5—however, the plot wisely avoided the white savior narrative and instead returned to its roots in the high-conspiracy genre, introducing more intrigue and twists and turns. For a game series that historically does not have much use for its plot, this largely went unnoticed, and the main takeaway from Resident Evil 6 was that Capcom, the game’s parent company, considered the series to be “bigger” than the survival horror market and that the games needed to adapt to the action genre.^[5]

This was not an unfair statement in 2012 when the game was released. Through the Bush presidency and Barack Obama’s first term, the games industry thrived on first- and third-person military shooters like Call of Duty: Black Ops, Battlefield, and even the curiously antimilitaristic Spec Ops: The Line. Action saturated the marketplace, and the sense of being alone had been jettisoned by the horror genre—in many ways, being crowded and overwhelmed by enemies was not only the trope of choice for games, but for politics in general. Fear of invasion, of replacement, drove mainstream politics for nearly a decade and arguably still drives it today, with Republicans like Pat Buchanan calling for border walls and the fear of terrorists lending popular support to John Ashcroft’s notoriously vile Patriot Act. And standing as the sole guard against a breaking wave of enemies served to reflect these desires profitably for video game companies, which either did not believe their games were political or simply did not care.

But what then do we make of the horror genre, which requires the space for introspection to produce the sympathetic fear we described earlier? Loneliness isn’t the only way that horror can be expressed or accessed, but nonstop action is not particularly scary in and of itself. No, the fear of being simply one of many, the fear of crowding, may have led to massive xenophobia, but it also is the core fear during the last twenty years of American culture. It just took until the middle of the 2010s for video games to recognize that fear and channel it into something beyond the reactionary lashing out at brown and black people.

Fear of isolation, through a long and painful journey during the beginning of the twenty-first century, had become a fear of never being alone again—a fear of no longer being the exception.

In 2017, Capcom released the seventh installment of Resident Evil. Seemingly a return to form, the game took place in a Faulknerian manor, crumbling and gothic, if also a bit contemporary, judging by the crud and mess infesting it. The game’s trailer shows a first-person perspective, in which the character explores a series of locations, including a mobile home; a decrepit, refuse-filled house; and tunnels. Exposition flits across promotional sequences, but one of the most memorable qualities of the trailer is the appearance of the antagonist, a balding middle-aged man who is not exactly a zombie but can’t be killed by multiple gunshots. “Dad is coming,” a voice says, “we have to go now!”

At this point, the tone of the trailer changes, with a more frenetic shifting among points of view, including video camera shots of characters speaking who later appear as antagonists. A modernized remake of the John Jacques Rousseau folk song “Go Tell Aunt Rhody,” sung by Jordan Reyne, begins at this point, and the lilting lyrics flit over the scenes of violence, terror, and pursuit. The synergy between the audio and visual is the second most striking feature of the trailer. The repeating lyric, “Go tell Aunt Rhody / Go tell Aunt Rhody / Go tell Aunt Rhody / Everyone is [dead],” is paired with a scene of the antagonizing family at a table filled with spoiled food, leering at the viewer, in a clear parallel to Tobe Hooper’s seminal (and, I’ll add, brilliant) 1974 film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The significance of pairing a folk song—one admittedly updated to something quite darker than the original version’s dead goose—with this imagery suggests the lost innocence that characterizes the horror of isolation. We desire what we had when it is gone, and the sepia tone of the decaying house and the childlike melodies call back a sort of nostalgic defensiveness.

But the insistence on juxtaposing this nostalgia with the antagonists loudly and forcibly intruding upon your protagonist—leering and laughing, clearly in recognition of you as a peer, if one of lesser status—short-circuits this. Just as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre emphasizes the similarities between humankind and the animals that they ruthlessly slaughter in order to produce fear of the potentially dangerous people with whom we share our spaces, the Resident Evil 7 trailer signals a sort of familiarity with the grime and cruelty we see that we can’t just ignore. Resident Evil 7 shows us no Leatherface, only the hitcher and the gas station attendant who seem harmless until they absolutely are not. Worse, the villains in Resident Evil 7 appear, in the trailer, to not be entirely in control of their faculties but also not inhuman. That ambiguity forces us to question the humanity of our protagonist, too, and wonder exactly where the line between the real and the imagined horror lies in this game.

Unlike previous Resident Evil games, then, RE7 is more complicated than the destruction of zombies and the fear of being alone. Indeed, although the plot follows the typically forgettable viral intrigue wherein the patriarch of the gothic plantation home we see in the trailer is creating a regenerative serum that infects people and causes violence (e.g., zombies of a different kind). The protagonist is called into the situation not as part of a paramilitary group, but as a husband searching for his missing wife. The lure of the personal recalls Silent Hill, but much like Silent Hill’s abortive but arresting reboot, PT, the unhomelike is replaced with a home that is overweaning and oppressive: hyper-homelike. Literary scholar Nicholas Brown has observed that when marriage is introduced into detective shows, they become sitcoms, which explains the lack of domestic drama in shows like Dragnet. In much the same way, the insistence on the lived-in home, even the occupied wreck of a home, shifts horror away from the terror of loneliness or isolation to the terror of crowding, of never being alone.

There are any number of games that parallel this kind of structure—and not as explicit or even implicit responses to Resident Evil 7. The 2019 co-op multiplayer game The Blackout Club plays with these issues in an homage to the 1980s teen adventure genre as a group of teens explores their town at night and avoids sleepwalking adults who potentially kidnap and kill kids in their strange fugues. The gameplay is not scary so much as collaborative and exciting, producing a cat-and-mouse chase that involves traps and clueless parents. But the introduction to the game is played alone and involves your character navigating its own home to try and escape a monster that can be seen only when you close your eyes. This combination of intentional obscurity that is required to see the threat coupled with the paradoxical sense of being surrounded by something unseen when you open your eyes imbues the home with a sense of deep menace. The dark of the house is deeper because the actual threat is living within the familiarity of the home and not simply an intruder in it. And if you escape the home, the threat exists outside of it in the people you interact with every day.

This latter complication may explain why so many recent horror games embrace the multiplayer genre; the familiarity both cuts and deepens the fear inherent in play. Games like 2016’s Dead by Daylight—in which one player takes the role of a killer and five others, the flailing teen victims of an 1980s slasher, try to stop him or her—might speak to the potential of the multiplayer genre, but like 2013’s 7 Days to Die and 2015’s Dying Light, the slasher-cum-zombie genre is reinvented as a sort of action movie, the fear replaced with an adrenaline spike. More typical of the multiplayer intensification of familiarity that we see in The Blackout Club is the unexpected hit of 2020, 2018’s Among Us.

Although it isn’t a horror game by any means on the surface, Among Us sets you on a spaceship with five to seven other players, one or two of whom are imposters intent on killing you and sabotaging your ship. Crewmates wander the ship, fulfilling certain arbitrary but easily completed tasks while they are stalked by people who look exactly like them. The crewmates can win by completing all of their tasks, or the imposters can win by killing off the crew or fatally sabotaging the ship. When players are killed, their bodies remain on the ship, and when others come upon them, they can call an emergency meeting, in which the living members of the crew debate who the imposters are. This of course means that the imposters are debating as well. A well-orchestrated game of Among Us always tilts in the direction of the crew, as players watch to see who is where, who is performing tasks correctly, and who is closest to a suddenly dead body.

But most games are not well orchestrated at all and devolve into the imposters telling obvious lies in often hilarious and ineffective efforts to create doubt, which causes crewmembers to accuse each other of being the imposter, which then leads to fewer and fewer non-imposters, as crewmembers vote them off the ship, casting them into space. The game is, you might be thinking, very similar to the grade-school game of Mafia (thanks to colleague Andrew Meyer for this observation). But Among Us differs because the game is set up over an internet connection and allows communication only when there is a meeting over a dead body. The tension and fear arise due to doubts and suspicions about the other players: everyone looks just like you, acts just like you, functions just like you—everyone is recognizably the same as you and shares your (cartoonish) humanity. You can’t determine who to trust because you are performing monotonous, occupying tasks that make it difficult to pay attention to what the other players are doing. You are murdered while either emptying the trash chute or trying to do a card swipe, or you murder someone who is doing those tasks. The everyday quality of the horror in Among Us is precisely what makes it an often divisive and increasingly noisy and angry party game.

But it’s unbelievably popular too! With millions of stream views, a Twitch smash hit, and a sudden piece of the zeitgeist, Among Us finds players crowded even when isolated by a pandemic in 2020. If Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy—an indie horror game that perhaps captures the transition between the horror of the lonely and the horror of the many better than any major studio release—posits that “every house is haunted,” then haunting is not a mark of inhumanity, but a mark of banal humanity. Every house is haunted, in Anatomy’s case, with a sense of being lived-in, of being occupied previously, of embodying some kind of materiality that its current occupants cannot touch or remove. As we have discovered in near-universal isolation during the coronavirus pandemic—depending, of course, on your government’s commitment to safety—this unsettled quality of feeling surrounded by sedimented history is not limited to the home.

Indeed, although I can’t cover every horror game released between 1992 and the present, the massive shifts in the trends of predominantly mainstream, AAA releases are fairly lockstep in their transitions. There’s something to be said here about the gentle direction of history in these changes, by which I mean that the games themselves are not produced in response to history specifically—no one is releasing Resident Evil 7 with, say, the murder of Eric Garner in mind—but rather that the games respond to the world in which they are produced. The sense of loneliness that occupied the minds of horror gamers in the mid-to-late 1990s was a mindset that assumed a certain tendency of history, an end even. Francis Fukuyama popularized this mindset with his influential End of History, a book claiming that after the fall of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy would lift all boats in its rising tide. Yet, even if we agree with Fukuyama that the world’s political turbulence would end with the fall of the Soviet Union, then we are still left all alone together in the world, united but largely atomized. Or, at least, the predominantly wealthy, white, and privileged classes of people who were reviewing and playing these games (myself included).

The onset of 9/11 and the 2008 economic crash perhaps proved that history had not ended, that we were not alone in our shared acceptance of the American future, but it was the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement as a reaction to the murder of Michael Brown that caused people to again interrogate the history of American exceptionalism. Although this frame for thinking about horror games centers around the West—despite a predominance of Japanese games—the shift in mindset from the isolated fear of being alone to the overwhelming fear of being crowded is not American specifically. This is something that has occurred globally, particularly when the classes, races, and people for whom history has neglected speak back. It is no surprise that at a moment when we are forced to face the ugly materiality of the past in our homes, states, countries, and world, we begin to fear the presence of people instead of their absence. And as global warming continues apace, the sedimented quality of the past accrues, heightening this anxiety as it becomes existentially threatening to all.

In 2013’s Outlast, a truly game-changing entry into the horror genre, you play as a reporter who breaks into an asylum on a random tip to find unexpected horrors. The actual content of the plot is, as usual with these games, not really the point—the point is that you are surrounded, unable to fight, and must rely on hiding yourself away or running from the monsters that pursue you. Outlast’s Steam Store page puts it more succinctly: “you are no fighter—if you want to survive the horrors of the asylum, your only chance is to run . . . or hide.” This gameplay philosophy has been echoed in other massively successful horror games like Alien: Isolation and Outlast 2, and it parallels the agency given players in Resident Evil 4, which changed the genre. If you have a gun with a few bullets, you might be scared of the enemies these games throw at you; if you have a gun with a lot of bullets, you may find the experience more fun than terrifying; if you never had a gun to begin with, you lose all sense of self-definition and simply must survive as best you can.

At the turn of the 2020s, we find ourselves as a species faced with catastrophic climate collapse; centuries of sedimented tension due to immoral atrocities committed against various races, classes, genders, and nations; and a growing sense of doubt that we can ever even things out between the extremes of the few haves and the many have-nots. There may be action we can take, but how can we blame people if, during times of recreation, they take a small thrill from doing one thing that feels like the most obvious way out: run, hide, and try to survive.

Joseph Ardai, “A Fragment of the Diary of Lt. Col. Lemuel Cork, Found among His Papers after His Disappearance,” Computer Gaming World, June 1993, 107, www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_107.pdf.

Ardai, “A Fragment of the Diary of Lt. Col. Lemuel Cork,” 107.

“Resident Evil,” Computer and Video Games, July 1996, 176, https://archive.org/stream/Computer_and_Video_Games_Issue_
176_1996-07_EMAP_Images_GB#page/n51/mode/2up.

“Resident Evil,” 176.

Wesley Yin-Poole, “Capcom: Survival Horror Market Too Small for Resident Evil,” Eurogamer, March 23, 2012, www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-03-23-capcom-survival-horror-market-too-small-for-resident-evil.