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nightcoremoon · 6 years ago

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I think part of the reason why I hate horror movies is because of the overreliance on jumpscares and shock value and BWAH SUDDEN LOUD NOISES rather than on atmosphere, believability, tension, fear.

here's a list of horror movies from google and the reasons why I hate them, or why I love them, or that they're not actually horror movies.

A quiet place: haven't seen it yet but it's a thriller more so than a horror. thrillers can be scary though but then again so can comedies. and romances. 50 shades is definitely scary: it is psychological abuse after all.

Halloween: slasher film, automatically boring and shit. I'm including the entirety of the franchise here, by the way, and I'm also gonna be including Friday the 13th, nightmare on elm street, etc. They're all the same brand of sensationalist garbage. maybe the very first in each series could be redeemable but the mass volume of shitty and terrible CGI gorefests have ruined them forever. "oh no the scary unkillable monster is coming after us and he's gonna kill us in overly violent ways" 💩

Hereditary: I don't even give a shit it looks trite EDIT maybe it's okay but I don't give enough of a shit to bother to ~give it a chance~ because hey. that's what fucking horror games are for.

Insidious: boring, not scary, 0/10

Get Out: haven't watched yet but will because it's a cinematic masterpiece that defies genre conventions

Bird Box: IM SO FUCKING SICK OF HEARING ABOUT FUCKING BIRD BOX SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT BIRD BOX HOLY SHIT. It's just the goddamn happening by shyamagofuckyourself and it's an excuse to profit off of sensationalist suicide. oohh so spooky. eat my ass, boggart

It: too much bad cgi makes it a comedy. plus a bunch of kids say fuck a lot. good movie that's technically horror I guess but is it scary? nah.

Suspiria: I've never heard of this movie

Annihilation: same

Split: M NIGHT SHYAMALAN IS A SHITTY FILMMAKER and also it's ableist as fuck so

Mandy: google you suck none of these movies have any mainstream appeal

The Conjuring: 💩💩💩

Hush: ??? you know what fuck it I'm skipping the ones that don't matter

The Vvitch: 🙄 my mom's a witch, my best friend's a witch, I'm a witch. hey yeah maybe let's not buy into christian colonialism please? scary witches are boring as shit. gimme something actually scary. like Catholics.

The Nun: wait shit not like that! and by that I mean BORING AS HELL aside from the jumpscares. which are shit

The Babadook: clearly an LGBT movie, not horror

Cabin in the Woods: a parody and an excellent one at that. at least the gore is in homage, or hilariously over the top

Sinister: the fucking epitome of shitty jumpscares and shock value and lack of atmosphere and bad acting and bad plot and jesus fucking christ this is one of the worst and most boring movies I've ever had the misfortune to see DONT WASTE YOUR GODDAMN TIME

Saw: it's actually a thriller with Cary Elwes, Danny Glover, Michael Emerson, and Tobin Bell. it's a campy cheesy low budget true to form horror film with adequate writing, good acting, AMAZING MUSIC BY CHARLIE CLOSER, and isn't over the top with gore considering it's all practical effects. top fucking notch but spawned a dozen terrible sequels.

Shaun of the Dead: it's a touching and heartfelt romantic comedy... with zombies, EXCELLENT CINEMATOGRAPHY, excellent acting, and sad parts that will rip your fucking heart out, stomp on it, and grind it to dust. literally one of the best movies ever made of all time, eat shit tarantino.

The Ring: eh, the original Japanese was better (Japanese horror is its own genre and not a part of this criticism, I actually really like original Japanese horror unfucked up by american audiences as long as it doesn't just gratuitously glorify suicide as Japan does), but this was still a really good mystery thriller with some really cool effects, and is the only movie that has ever actually scared me for real. even now I hate that there's a tv with a vcr right at the foot of my bed.

The Sixth Sense: shyamalan made a couple of good movies. this was one of them. but it wasn't a horror movie and if you didn't know the twist IT WAS A FUCKING AMAZING ONE. like, goddamn empire strikes back levels of supreme and god tier plot twists. it went a little overboard on shock value but compared to the rest of the COMPLETE BULLSHIT on this list (AND IN HIS OWN MOVIES) it really could've gone way further.

The Descent: goddamn claustrophobia. too much horribly cgi'd gore and terrible decisions to be truly enjoyable though. would've been a much better movie without the mutants and the middle finger to physics throat stabbing and the JUST FUCKING KICK IT YOU GODDAMN IDIOT and oh yeah the subtle misogyny. the first half was good tho

28 days later: shitty remake of a merely ok movie EDIT I was thinking of 28 weeks later, 28 days was actually okay I guess

Scream: did not age well but it's okay for being meta, despite the fucking torture porn of drew barrymore at the beginning. allowed for scary movie 1 though, so I'm glad it exists.

Paranormal Activity: PARANORMAL FUCKING ACTIVITY CAN EAT MY ASS, ITS SUCH A SUBLIME FAILURE OF EXECUTION. I WANTED IT TO BE GOOD BUT IT WASNT. oh well at least it inspired five nights at Freddy's. I'll go ahead and throw all shitty found footage movies under this one, including unfriended.

Blair Witch Project: a fucking pioneer of its time. a genre definer. truly scary. good movie. I'll go ahead and throw all good found footage movies under this one, including cloverfield.

The Shining: a thriller, not horror. but goddamn is it the scariest not horror movie ever made. Stephen king you magnificent bastard

Alien: goddamn fucking alien. science fiction masterpiece. director's a little creepy but eh, sigourney weaver kicks ass, and alien isolation is such a good game (despite its many flaws), and it's just so iconic in terms of sheer scope of concept. it's the same horror movie as anywhere else but in space, and I still can't fucking believe this was made in the 70s. this and Star Wars were FUCKING AMAZING, and the xenomorph? THATS ALL PRACTICAL EFFECTS BABEY. NO OVERRELIANCE ON CGI GUTS AND SHOCK VALUE HERE, ITS JUST PURE HORROR AT ITS FINEST. good movie. aliens was better. everything else... eeehhh...

The Thing: same as the descent but with men instead of women, and EVEN WORSE DECISION MAKING. IT IS UNBELIEVABLE JUST HOW GODDAMN STUPID EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM COULD POSSIBLY BE. and in the remake yeah the practical effects were mind blowingly fantastic and inspired dead space which I believe is one of the best horror games if not just best games or horror pieces of media if not just best pieces of media constructed. but the prequel? 🙄 no thanks

The exorcist: masterpiece of practical effects without an overreliance on jumpscares and gore

Jaws: it's Stephen fucking Spielberg in the 70s and one of the most influential horror films and just films in general

Hellraiser: okay I'll give all works by clive barker a pass here because goddamn is he a demented fucking genius if ever I saw one. if only Jericho was actually a good game, it could've been the next doom 3

Poltergeist: an actually good horror movie that depends on atmosphere and effects more so than jumpscares and gore? SIGN ME THE FUCK UP

Evil Dead: campy but misogynist. the sequel was a comedy so it's okay. the next sequel is also a comedy AND ARMY OF DARKNESS IS ONE OF THE BEST MOVIES EVER FUCKING MADE. FIGHT ME. and fuck the remake. sam raimi should've retired after spiderman 3. maybe even before that.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: honestly not bad. it was actually freaky and believable. rednecks really are fucking scary with all their inbreeding and terrible music and hatred of black people. I refuse to acknowledge the original and the sequels.

Psycho: eh, hitchcock's worst is still better than most of the shit on this list.

The Wicker Man: OH GOD NOT THE BEES! AHHGUBLAHH MY EYES! AAAAAHHHHH!!! fucking excellent comedy. but it doesn't have any naked ladies in it like the original did. oh well, can't please everyone.

Night of the Living Dead: THOSE ZOMBIES ARE BULLSHIT. ZOMBIES CANT USE WEAPONS AND THEY SURE AS FUCK CANT TURN YOU INTO A ZOMBIE BY STABBING YOU WITH A TROWEL. THEY HAVE TO BITE YOU. FUCK YOU GEORGE ROMERO. Also, dawn of the dead was just sensationalist garbage. "They tore apart a real pig carcass tho so it looked like real intestines" what? the fuck??? who gives a shit????? I watch movies to escape from reality, dumbass. I don't beat off to chopped up human carcasses. If I want a zombie movie I want the walking dead sans the soap opera bullshit and the racism and then "no one is safe and everyone will die" boring mentality propagated by twd and got and other things I used to like but no longer care about (because why should I give a shit about it if everyone could die? I can already be sad enough about all the real people I know who die. enjoying the pain of the deaths of those important to us is a privilege the cishets have). the walking dead seasons 1&2 was pure horror and the very best kind. don't give me boring contrivances. "but sheena, night of the living dead was a trope definer! everything in it was original!" yeah, you know what else is original? *farting noise* George Romero is just rob zombie without a rock band. his best work was fucking call of duty. that's pathetic. "maybe you just don't like gore" HEY YEAH SURE I DONT WANNA SEE UBER REALISTIC INTESTINES AND ORGANS IF THEY ARENT PART OF A MEDICAL DEAL SO IM JUST A BIG DUMB HATER. I'm the one in the wrong. fuck me, right?

Don't Breathe: A FUCKING TURKEY BASTER FILLED WITH SEMEN. THATS SO STUPID I FORGOT IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE SCARY. BEST CRINGE COMEDY OF THE YEAR :D

Tremors: legitimately great movie with a hundred shitty sequels. like saw but your faves win so you walk away filled with determination rather than sad and disappointed. enjoyment of tragedies are a privilege awarded to those who are neurotypical.

Zombieland: gore done right. the only casualty is mindless zomzoms and bill murray. good. granted it counts as a romance and a comedy but honestly last time I watched it I cried at the part where you find out buck isn't tallahassee's dog. god I love that movie. AND FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS IS THE MOST BADASS MOVIE OPENER EVER.

The Fly: Jeff fucking goldblum. amazing effects for good reasons. need I say more? the original doesn't exist because 1950s horror movies are all bad because all 1950s movies are bad. the 1950s should just be purged from america's records except for pleasantville.

All other Stephen king movies: hit or miss but mostly still good. although very few are actual horror.

10 cloverfield lane: more of a thriller like above's misery but still an amazing movie.

Peeping Tom: literally a movie about how creepy it is to fetishize the deaths of women WHILE LITERALLY FETISHIZING THE DEATHS OF WOMEN. like, come on man. how do you miss your own point so completely?

Invasion of the body snatchers: it's not horror and if it's made to be horror using gore it's shit. the whole thing is just an allegory to the joe mccarthy communism witch hunts anyway.

Cube trilogy: the ultimate b movies. so bad they're good. and it's such an interesting concept too!

Killer Klowns from Outer Space: fucking alien clowns come to earth to turn us into cotton candy by killing us using carnival fare. THIS IS THE GREATEST BAD MOVIE EVER MADE.

All horror movies based on horror video games: either irredeemably bad, or action movies

All creepy Netflix horror movies: wow any idiot with a camera and basic cgi skills can throw shit together to make a movie these days, huh

The Slender Man: I am literally too pissed off about this movie to insult it.

Marble Hornets, Tribe Twelve, the Slender Man movie on YouTube: triumphs of meta, editing, found footage, proof of concept, and story. Slenderman is such a malleable entity for a perfect horror experience, HOW CAN YOU POSSIBLY FUCK THAT UP? YOUD HAVE TO BE INTENTIONALLY SABOTAGING YOUR WHOLE MOVIE TO FUCK IT UP AS BAD AS SOMEone who exclusively directs remakes... oh... oh no.

Wrong Turn: one mediocre movie and a dozen loathesome snoozefests coasting by on shock value

Troll 2:

oh god

they're eating her

and then

they're gonna eat me

...

oh my gooooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-

(Troll 2 is literally the worst movie ever made and I have to respect it for that at least)

but yeah, horror is just bad for movies. but for video games, though...

#long post

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swipestream · 6 years ago

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Uncanny Game Feel(ings)

I’m really interested in the types of ways games make me FEEL. In general, I’m less concerned with the plot of a game session, the world it’s in, or even the types of characters I might be able to play, and more invested in whatever kinds of feelings it allows me to play with and analyze after the fact. I interact with most media this way! I feel the same way about movies, tv shows, music, fine art, theater… the most impactful art is the stuff that makes me feel things. Arguably, I think its the most important art.

So how do you design a game toward the feels? Almost all my games have this agenda in them somewhere, but my most recent game that is currently on Kickstarter (til Oct 4th) Something Is Wrong Here is specifically designed to create an emotion based experienced. How did I do this, I know I know you’re on the edge of your seat. Well let me tell you a few tricks I’ve learned along the way, as well as some touchstones for emotional play I’ve experienced in the past.

Emo Games

I’ve played a lot of games in the past ten years or so that have delivered amazing emotional experiences. When I say emotional, I truly mean the full range of emotions, from joy to love to sadness. An obvious one is Monsterhearts! Monsterhearts doesn’t have specific emotional mechanics that go “feel this thing!” but they do encourage emotional play by mimicking the emotional behaviors that arise from those feelings. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed, you might try to Run Away, or Lash Out, two move options in the game.

The unspoken thing these moves encourage you to do is roleplay the emotions first, prompting the move.

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The unspoken thing these moves encourage you to do is roleplay the emotions first, prompting the move. I find that even on this level of emotional roleplaying, if play is focusing on feelings, and my character is feeling them, I tend to feel them too!

A LARP I played a long time ago called Mad About The Boy encouraged emotional play by pairing personality types of the player with the character. This causes a fair bit of bleed, because when roleplaying your character you’re thinking a lot like you’d normally think in everyday life. It’s also an incredibly emotional game, and the most emotional moments tended to arise through guided meditation sequences, where they would ask you to imagine what you would do in the real world if all the men were gone from your life. The concept of this game itself drives emotional experiences… it’s a fantastical feminist thought experiment that posits, what would the world look like without patriarchy? (There’s some gender issues with this thought experiment but that’s already been thoroughly covered elsewhere). It made me look at the world differently after I left. Sometimes all it takes is engagement with a heavy concept.

Most recently, a LARP I played by Brodie Atwater called Here Is My Power Button has an incredible emotional impact on everyone who plays it! Almost everyone cries at the end of the game, and there’s a lot of psychological tools at work in the game to make that happen. Specifically the use of sad music at key moments in the game, the fact that it moves between group scenes of about five people to one on one scenes with individuals, and the specific scenario of giving someone power and then taking it away. It’s brilliantly emotionally manipulative, in the way a good movie can push and pull your feelings toward a sad scene.

Mechanics Of Emotions

I took what I learned from these emotional game experiences (and even more I’m not mentioning here!) and tried to utilize my favorite ones in Something Is Wrong Here. The main techniques that create the most emotion in the game are:

Intentional Bleed. You’re encouraged to play close to home, the facilitator will sometimes switch between calling you your real name and your character name, and before the game begins you’re asked to think about things you’re afraid of in your own life and dreams. What this does is make thin the veil between your character’s experiences in the game, and your own. While it’s up to each player how deep they want to dive into this emotional playing field, the option is there to correlate the character’s feelings with your own.

Emotional Music. I curated the game’s soundtrack to be particularly manipulative at different times in the game. The music plays in the background at key times, sometimes repetitive, sometimes grating, to enhance the feelings those scenes are about. David Lynch famously has done the entire musical landscapes of many of his films, and I’m incredibly influenced by music in the media I watch! I sometimes joke that I like something at least 50% based on the excellence of it’s music.

Safety Mechanics. There’s an emphasis on safety both before and after the game. This is a trick that’s used in kink play as well, where basically, if you create a space that is safer to explore a certain type of vulnerability, people are more likely to explore! If you know that at any time you can stop a scene if it gets too intense, ask for support, or remove a specific topic that’s personally difficult for you, you’re going to trust the environment a little more and get emotionally heavy if you want to. Saying “this is a space to talk about heavy emotions if you want to, and we’re gonna be here for that and you” is a powerful statement that allows people to play more emotionally than they normally would.

Character Connection. While each character is an archetype of something in a David Lynch type uncanny Americana world, there’s room for each player to inject ownership of that character on the character sheet. Specifically, the player determines what past trauma they’re trying to deal with, and naming which other character they think can help them. In creating the trauma, a player can easily insert themes that are important to them, consciously or subconsciously, therefore playing through issues with their character they care more about.

Emotional Cues. Each scene is literally focused around the goal that players have to portray a specific emotion associated with that scene. Since emotions are the goal of each scene, that becomes more the focus of play than whatever the literal plot is.

Uncanny Feels

The second goal though was to communicate an Uncanny Game Feel. So similar to the uncanny feel you’d get watching a David Lynch gig, but more like something you’d feel in game media. Where does this feeling happen? How do we encourage it to happen? I looked at the tools that horror games used, and plugged em in, as well as some similar inspiration from other uncanny media, specifically film.

Disturbing Music. Half of what gets ya in a horror film is the sound scape. Having the right sounds to create tension, discomfort, or suspense are key to invoking that sense of the uncanny. I got some great electrical sounds for the most uncanny parts of the game.

Pacing. Pacing is KEY, KEY!!!! You have to build suspense to something scary, and waiting, not seeing the monster, knowing that… something is wrong here, can be the most potent tool in creating an uncanny or scary feeling. I deliberately paced both acts and the scenes within them, creating repetition, making sure the timing is all meticulously kept by the facilitator, creating rituals that are later to be broken in the second act… these all have subtle impacts on us as we experience a narrative.

Buy in. In any horror game, the most important thing is to get everyone involved to COMMIT to being scared. Really, no matter what the game is doing, the commitment to being scared is what’s gonna scare people the most. They have to be ready to have fun being scared, like they’re walking into a haunted house, or sitting down with a scary movie. I tell the facilitator to just outright ask players to commit to this! No side talking, try to stay in character and immerse as much as possible. This will get you the scariest experience.

Atmosphere. Creating the room feeling is essential to uncanny game feel. Lower the lights, start with some moody music, add a few freaky in game props. Ask people to costume if they want to. With roleplaying games, we have the unique ability to influence the space around our play.

These might seem like simple mechanics, and in a sense, they are! It’s all how they’re remixed and utilized that makes the most impact in a game. Since my design goals for Something Is Wrong Here were to create an emotional, uncanny experience, I’ve leaned heavily on the ones that make that impact the most. Have you ever experienced these mechanics in a game before? Do you love experiencing emotional game play as much as I do? Let me know in the comments!

Uncanny Game Feel(ings) published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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