The Politics of Analog Horror

I love horror games but I also have so much beef with horror games

I’ve been into videogames since my brother was into videogames as little kids, and he only got into videogames because my dad used to play videogames. Take a shot (of water) every time I use the word ‘videogames’.

I have this fond memory of standing next to the dining table after dinner but before bed, watching my dad play this ancient first-person shooter on his Macbook Pro, and having no idea what was going on but just watching a movie we could actually control was fascinating in itself.

However, as the younger sibling, my love for games comes mostly from watching them, rather than playing them myself. I mean, I’ll mess up Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing and basically anything that isn’t super high stakes, but I prefer to sit back for the competitive ones, the difficult platformers, and most of all, the horror games.

I used to hate horror. As a kid, Halloween was my least favourite holiday and it was only hanging on by a thread because of free candy and getting to dress up as Wonder Woman. I never saw the point of intentionally scaring yourself when the world was scary enough. I was also a kid with undiagnosed anxiety, for context.

To this day, actually playing the horror game is out of my wheelhouse, but I love watching them. Especially the lower budget indie horrors. I love their stories, and that sometimes they’re silly, and sometimes they’re lifechanging (I will never be the same after Mouthwashing, or Iron Lung). But I also have beef with indie horror game developers. One, the wife doesn’t need to be murdered in every story--c’mon guys. But also because of a little trend called Analog Horror.

For those of you who have a normal relationship with indie horror games, Analog Horror is a type of game told through found footage, or otherwise ‘analog’ vehicles for story—VHS tapes, old camcorders, etc. It’s kind of the ‘Stranger Things’ of the indie horror world.

A sub-genre within analog horror is this idea of finding or being shown a VHS tape that describes a threat to society, and it’s your job to learn how to identify this threat. Typically (and by that, I mean basically always) the threat is something that looks like a human, but is off in some way. They have gaping holes for eyes or too-wide smiles or scarred faces, etc.

The Mandela Catalogue - the indie horror that largely started the trend

And for some of the images they show, I’m sitting there thinking like—that could be a real person. That’s just a real person with a deformity. How does no one else see a problem with this?

Because this trend of analog horror often does what Hollywood has been doing for decades—it presents people with physical deformities who very well could exist in our world as villains, or evil, or dangerous. It says, “to be a safe and good person to be around, you need to look like all the other people.” It teaches the player to scrutinize the features of the people they’re looking at and other them based on how much they stray from your average joe. And often, in these games, it’s your goal to ‘eliminate’ them.

And I know already that analog horror lovers will want to argue that most of the time, and usually the deeper you get into the game, the faces they show are actually literally physically impossible. And that’s also true. But I would argue that we need to start there—not with people with burn scars or missing eyes or large noses.

Also from the Mandela Catalogue

One game that plays on this idea but actually does it well (in my opinion) is That’s Not My Neighbour, in which you’re a residential security guard making sure that only the people who actually live there and are meant to be there are admitted into the building. Except the people look like this:

And the same models that are used for the imposters are also used for the actual residents. Which means the lovely man you see above could be an actual resident or could be an imposter, and you determine whether he’s meant to be there based on his documents and your own files of who should be coming in and out.

The cartoon-y style plus the randomization on who is an intruder versus who isn’t gets around the issue I presented above, because it says that we cannot determine who is innocent through looks alone—we determine who is innocent through bureaucracy. Hooray!

I’m a little late to this discussion, analog horror has largely moved on from this trend anyway, but I find it important to discuss in my ever-evolving theme of everything is political and what you create is what you say about the world.

But also, if any indie game developers are reading this I’d love to write a story for your next game and I’ll do it for a pack of Cheetos and my name in the credits, so hit me up :-)