Scare Tactics: Video Games and the Real-Life Horror Stories That Influenced Them

By Nathaniel Hohl

For fans of the horror video game genre, certain names are as hallowed as holy scripture. Castlevania, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, these and other properties both big and small have been giving gamers goosebumps for decades. Bringing any successful horror game property to life requires no small amount of originality and creativity, but in a surprising number of cases it also requires a liberal application of cold hard truth.

In Scare Tactics, author Nathaniel Hohl takes readers on a journey through the annals of horror game history, focusing on eleven specific horror game properties. In every case, the game or series being discussed has some connection to a real-life element or event. Whether it's the perpetually burning Pennsylvania town that helped shape the Silent Hill movie adaptation, the scrappy indie title that harkens back to the Salem Witch Trials, or the doomed video game project that would have cast Jack the Ripper as an unsung hero, real-life history has seeped into the horror game genre's bones like a specter of icy death.

Through a combination of historical research and narrative recounting, Scare Tactics paints a vivid picture of how these horror properties came to be, and the role real-life history took in bringing them to life. Horror fans, historians, and video game enthusiasts alike will enjoy reading about the subtle yet tangible connections that make these iconic horror works unique and allow them to be equal parts fascinating and terrifying.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nathaniel Hohl
• Release date: Oct 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463935842

Book preview

Scare Tactics: Video Games and The Real-Life Horror Stories That Influenced Them

By Nate Hohl

Table of Contents

Dedication

Introduction

Author’s Note

Chapter 1: Silent Hill

Chapter 2: Perception

Chapter 3: Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

Chapter 4: The Ripper

Chapter 5: Kholat

Chapter 6: Fatal Frame

Chapter 7: Slender: The Arrival

Chapter 8: BioShock

Chapter 9: L.A Noire

Chapter 10: Stairs

Chapter 11: Castlevania

Special Thanks

Sources and Additional Reading

About the Author

Copyright

To my parents, Patricia and Jeffrey, who gave me the strength to seek out new oceans, and the courage to lose sight of the shore.

Introduction

While I was attending Marlboro College between the years of 2007 and 2011, the biggest thing me and my friends bonded over was our mutual love for video games. We all had our own academic goals and extracurricular pursuits, but if one of us booted up a game console in their dorm’s common room on a quiet evening, chances were good we’d all drift in one by one before the night was over. We were like large bearded moths attracted to the soft glow of the television screen.

One of my fondest college memories stems from my friend’s discovery that he could hook his gaming laptop up to one of the large projector screens in the college science building. On a cold winter’s night, three of my friends and I gathered in one of the building’s empty classrooms to take full advantage of the massive screen and its accompanying surround-sound audio setup.

Being the brilliant college students that we were, we also decided the best game to test out on this large and loud setup was the intense first-person horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent. And I’ll bet anyone else who was in the science building that night got a real kick out of hearing four fully grown men screaming and hollering like frightened little girls.

When it comes to the horror genre, I’m what you might call a picky connoisseur. I appreciate the genre objectively, but I’m not a huge fan of jump scares, graphic violence, or the painfully overused based on a true story disclaimer. However, one of the things I do appreciate about the horror genre is how it can bring people together. We all like a good story, after all, and honestly what stories are better than the ones about things that go bump in the night?

I like to think the stories I’ve gathered in the following chapters have a bit of an extra edge because they all involve video games to some degree, and they’re all born of real-life history. I know I mentioned earlier how I don’t care for the based on a true story disclaimer, but that’s only because those who use said disclaimer often misinterpret it as an excuse to embellish the source material. The stories I’m about to tell really don’t need any embellishment, they’re scary enough on their own.

Even if you’re not overly familiar with the video games I discuss, I’m sure the upcoming stories will give you an appreciation for just how dark human history really is. As the following stories prove, video games allow us to experience that darkness in uniquely creative (yet still quite safe) ways. For the sake of this book, though, all you have to do is curl up and enjoy the fruits of my forays into interactive depravity and terror. You sure are lucky….or are you?

-Nathaniel Hohl

Author’s Note

Some chapters in this book focus on multiple games in a specific series while others focus on one game in particular. In all cases I discuss these games in great detail and often mention spoilers involving a game’s ending or narrative twist. None of the games I mention are very new (most are over a decade old or close to it), but I feel the presence of spoilers is worth mentioning nonetheless.

Silent Hill

In my restless dreams, I see that town… Silent Hill. You promised you’d take me there again someday… but you never did. Well, I’m alone there now… in our special place… waiting for you.

- Mary Sunderland, Silent Hill 2

In the late 90’s, the gaming industry underwent a major cultural shift as new consoles such as the Sony PlayStation and Nintendo 64 entered the mainstream market, officially heralding the transition from archaic 2D gameplay to a more expansive and robust 3D format. All of a sudden, beloved Nintendo personalities like Mario, Yoshi, and Donkey Kong were no longer confined to worlds that existed in a primarily 2D plane and could now freely roam around in 3D environments that both looked prettier and presented new gameplay opportunities. Over on the PlayStation side, Sony was working hard to establish its own stable of iconic games and game characters. Along with more family-friendly options like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, an unsettling new horror game was released for the PlayStation in early 1999, a game called Silent Hill.

Published by Konami and created by an internal team of Konami developers that was aptly branded as Team Silent, Silent Hill inevitably drew comparisons to Capcom’s zombie-slaying game Resident Evil which had been released three years earlier. This was mainly because both games featured detailed 3D environments, a heavy emphasis on exploration and solving puzzles to progress, and, of course, a spooky horror theme. However, whereas Resident Evil also routinely put the player into tense combat scenarios and drew heavy inspiration from classic zombie movies like Night of the Living Dead, Silent Hill took a more serene and slow-paced approach, focusing instead on psychological horror and symbolism. Sure, Silent Hill did technically have a combat system, but the game’s combat was also intentionally designed to feel clunky and unwieldy. This allowed Team Silent to further enhance the game’s oppressive atmosphere, ensuring that players couldn’t rely too heavily on fighting or firearms to get them out of sticky situations like they could in Resident Evil.

When Sony followed up the original PlayStation with the newer and sleeker PlayStation 2 in 2000, Konami and Team Silent put the enhanced capabilities of the new console to good use by producing several additional Silent Hill games, including what is often considered to be the unequivocal high point of the franchise: 2001’s Silent Hill 2. By today’s standards, Silent Hill 2 hasn’t aged very well in terms of gameplay or technical performance, but its high-quality narrative presentation resonated strongly with fans who valued a good story over good gameplay. Silent Hill 2 was also the game that introduced players to one of Team Silent’s most iconic creations: the bizarre recurring antagonist Pyramid Head who would go on to appear in several subsequent Silent Hill properties.

Given Silent Hill’s growing popularity, it’s probably not surprising to learn that in September of 2003, about a month after the release of Silent Hill 3, TriStar Pictures (a subsidiary of Sony’s film arm Sony Pictures) secured the rights for a Silent Hill film adaptation. The adaptation would be written and directed by esteemed French film director Christopher Gans.

Gans, an unabashed Silent Hill fan, already had some experience with the world of horror cinema since he had directed the 1993 French-American horror anthology film Necronomicon. It’s also entirely possible that a Silent Hill film never would have happened if not for Gans since he

Reviews for Scare Tactics

[Jasna Grobarka Djurdjevic · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Interesting book, enjoyed it. Some, for me, new games mentioned.