Recently I saw a film called The Woman in Black. My opinions of it aside, I was intrigued by people who seemed to think that it was some sort of throwback to the days when horror was about more than gore and violence and loud noises intended to cause the audience to jump. It’s true, the gore and violence might not have been there, but the gore is a much less important issue, in my view, then the ever pervasive “jump-scare”.
The Jump-scare was exercised throughout the woman in black, and it completely ruined any chance the film had at creating a psychological and gripping atmosphere. As an example of this, I’d like to turn to the gaming world, and one of the finest pieces of art it has ever produced: The Silent Hill series. More specifically, Silent Hills 2 and 3.
What Silent Hill does, better than any other game/film/book etc. that I have ever experienced is create a thick, inescapable atmosphere, which I’ll get to in a moment, but the key thing is that Silent Hill is almost scarier when the monsters aren’t there than when they are. How does it manage this?
Turning back to The Woman in Black, the scare formula that it sticks to like glue is suspense, then jump-scare, then downtime, repeat. There are two inherent problems with this. Firstly, the jump-scare is cathartic. When the flashing image pops up supported by a loud instrumental flourish, and your brain’s defence mechanisms create a sudden rush of adrenaline and causes you to jump, the tension completely evaporates. This should be avoided. If you want to scare your audience, what you need to do is keep the tension utterly palpable, so thick you could cut it with a goddamn chainsaw.
Let’s break it down into stages. Stage one: The main character is in a state of tension, usually through a fear of danger. Two: The character notices a monster, and begins preparing to deal with the encounter, either through combat or fleeing. Three: The character fights the threat or flees from it. Now, what I think is the crux of the matter is that a lot of modern horror films leave out step two and put too much emphasis on step three. We go strait from a state of tension to a state of alertness. It’s a very jarring experience, that’s why we jump, because step 3 comes out of nowhere. This is what happens in The Woman in Black.
Now, let’s contrast that with Silent Hill. In the beginning of Silent Hill 2, it takes about half an hour of gameplay before you see the first monster. During this time, the game creates a thick, engulfing, almost oppressive atmosphere. This is an atmosphere that survives and thrives precisely because the threat of danger is always there. It’s not the danger its self that causes us to be afraid, it’s the threat of it. Silent Hill realises this, and you can spend long sections of the game without seeing a monster. The effects of these sections are twofold. Firstly, the thought in the back of your mind that you might be attacked at any moment is allowed time to really be planted and gradually develop and ferment in your mind. And two, it creates a crushing feeling of loneliness, which isn’t of particular note in this blog but it’s use in the games is very effective. What we are more interested in is the first effect.
Everything in Silent Hill is gradual. The small seed planted in your mind gradually becomes a constant thought, you can’t turn a corner without being terrified of the possibility of what’s behind it, you can’t open a door without taking a breath, steadying yourself for what’s might lurk behind it. That, ladies and gentlemen… is fear. That is horror. We’ll call this particular effect the tension effect.
And when you are eventually confronted with a monster, the game holds it’s tension brilliantly. The transition from stage one to stage two is also gradual. When a monster is close, your radio slowly crackles into life, the now iconic sound of static hitting your ears, the static eventually establishing its self as the most dreaded sound in the game. Because so much of the game is in darkness, you also almost always hear the monster before you see it. It’s important to remember when it comes to this process that it’s the opposite of what you might traditionally think. Stage three is the least important phase, it’s stage one that should be focused on, it’s stage one that achieves the tension effect, not stage 3.
Now admittedly, Silent Hill is a game, and The Woman in Black is a film. I think Horror comes more naturally to a game than a film, because gaming is naturally more immersive, being interactive vs. a non interactive medium such as film. However, the lessons we can learn from Silent Hill can be extrapolated. If we want films that generally scare us, as opposed to just disgusting us with gore or making us jump, then we need to go back to basics and take a good hard look at the horror formula, and I think we can look at things like Silent Hill and say “what did they get right, what is it about this that scares us, and how can we learn from it”. If not, then the bland wasteland that is modern horror may endure for sometime. And that is indeed a very, very scary thought.
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