New article by me in resolution magazine:
http://www.resolution-magazine.co.uk/issue4/feature_gameoverforsurvivalhorror.htm
Interesting article, but I think you got it wrong on a
lot of accounts. Your various analysis would indeed make for a better-than-most horror game, but it wouldn't produce a Great-Horror experience.
This is because you largely overlooked the single most important element of creating a horror story that touches a reader/viewer/gamer and leaves a lasting mark; the story.
And story should mean “characters,” if it is a good story.
Horror has to be "real." Not in the sense that the Queen of England is real but as a grocery store clerk or a toilet is real. What drives the story (aka, the "monster") can be totally unreal, even ridiculous and hilarious, but good horror has to place the viewer inside the story and it must not let them totally escape at the end. The characters have to be one that we could imagine meeting (indeed, that we could imagine being). Creating a creepy environment and tense moments can add to the “horror” effect, but those are transitory experiences that come and go quite quickly. The tensest moment I can recall in a video game was fighting Phantom in Devil May Cry for the first time. There was no horror there, there wasn’t really even much of an attempt at horror. So I’d generally claim that tense situations do not equal horror (they can help, of course, but one should keep one’s eye on the thing itself, not the paraphernalia).
One of the great short comings of many horror projects is the utter lack of a viewer/protagonist connection. In horror films, we know we are supposed to "root" for the people attempting to survive, but we are almost never given a reason to give a flying rat's ass as to if they live or die. Indeed, often enough we are given reasons to hate or dislike them (the “revenge” motif that a lot of horror villains have going for them). If the viewer doesn't deeply care about the characters, then the viewer can't connect with them, and so we, the viewers, can't
become them and feel the fear that they feel.
You mention the need of a good story and characters, but you glossed over that. All the tense moments, atmospheric effects, sounds, graphic, controls, and camera angles in the world cannot make up for a bad story and poor character development. While on the other hand, a good story and brilliant characters can make up for any other shortcoming.
Only when a game, movie, or book makes us feel as if we were the characters (or if the characters are people we truly known and care about), is real, good horror even possible. If you consider how rare stories and characters like that are, you might start to realize that horror isn’t dying; it is just that there never have been all that many instances of good horror.
Characters are first.
The second element is, of course, that the situation (aka, the story) has to have an element that would make us afraid. You are quite right in that the less we see the more afraid we are. But you didn’t go on to suppose why that was. We aren’t afraid of the unseen, we are afraid of the unknown. It is as H.P. Lovecraft said:
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
What
might be around the corner is always more terrifying than what
is around the corner. But on a larger scale, when facing the unknown, we also don’t know what will happen to us. The sort of horror that will make a person change their behavior because of the story (even knowing that the story wasn’t real) is a horror that pits us against the unknown to unknowable (and uncontrollable) results.
Good horror is humanity looking into the great unknown and realizing that everything we do will not be enough to control it (or even ourselves). People are afraid of being buried alive not because they are afraid of small spaces (though sometimes that is the case), or because they can’t get out. Rather, it is because, no matter what they do, it won’t have an effect, and especially the effect they desire; the unknown will happen, and there is nothing we can do about it. They are not in control.
That being said, there are two things that come to mind as examples of noteworthy horror (both, I would argue, have above average character development and splendidly horrific plots): The Empty Child and Blink (both are Doctor Who Episodes).