The Horror at Home

I have been doing a lot of research into horror lately; hell to be honest I've been "researching" horror most of my life - reading Stephen King books from a very young age, watching movies like Alien, Critters, and the Night of the Living Dead just as soon as I could get away with it - I have always found Horror fascinating.
Horror in all its differing media has profoundly different effects, but I'll cover that in a later blog. Right now I would like to address the topic of: The Foreign.
The best horror usually takes an average character, one we can identify with, and puts them in a new, unsafe setting OR takes a normal safe setting and twists it into something horrific. Either way we need a protagonist we can recognise or sympathize with and put them into a situation which is unnerving, dangerous, or utterly foreign to them.
In Alien, Ripley starts off as a normal mining operative - in outer space, sure, but she and her crew are just average working joes - and they encounter something so utterly foreign to them that they just cannot understand it until it destroys them. In Night of the Living Dead, Barbara and her brother are paying respects to their dead mother when they are attacked - by the walking dead. Their normal, almost mundane (including the mundanity of human grief and loss here) lives are shattered by the strange new rules - the dead get up and kill. Those that die get up and kill! Friday the 13th invovles a bunch of teenagers going out camping and having fun - a concept that up until the slasher era was as safe as apple pie. But now anyone who goes camping is terrified of masked stalkers, blair witches, and creatures that lurk in the woods. Because of horror movies.
We fear the unknown, but it is the normal made....abnormal that gives us the creeps.
The approach to "the other" works especially well for horror movies and horror games (horror games especially because we are already open and adaptive to the concpet of our preconceptions changing with the rules of the game). Movies like REC and THE RING are especially unnerving to American and Western audiences because of how unsettling the every day setting has become - people are still people, they have children, jobs, and drive cars....but they also have shrines to the dead in their own homes; they have cultural beliefs and superstitions that are strange and otherworldly to us but are completely normal to those characters - we get the feeling that everything is just a little...off...and different.
This works especially well in computer games because we are already used to the idea of the rules of engagement being...more maleable. We quickly get used to the idea that door slide open sideways, that there are little tomb shrines to old gods scattered around old villages, and we quickly adapt to shinto beliefs and ideals - we adapt to them becaue we are used to adapting to the rules of games, but it doesn't make it any less unsettling to the player. In Fatal Frame (Project Zero in cool countries) we quickly adapt to the believe that the dead will stalk the streets of an old village if they died in a horrific way. We accept that they can be killed by capturing their souls in photos, and we accept that herbal remedies will heal us from getting attacked by ghosts. These are game elements. But every other part of the setting - the strange architecture, the long flowing komono robes, the halting, slightly jarring english, the multitude of shrines, old japanese dolls, and so on, help to reinforce the horrible feeling the *we don't belong here*.

This slight oddness works at its very best in the silent hill and resident evil games: both made by japanese companies, they have western characters and settings - a foreign country is holding up a mirror to a world that we recognise, but it is slightly, and horribly, distorted. Streets are just a little too wide and too long - shops have a strange...not quite right feel... schools seem too claustrophobic, school busses cramped coffins, christian churches are tall, looming, menacing shapes, doors on hinges squeal open unsettlingly. Everything just seems slightly...wrong. Like the creator saw pictures of the places but didn't quite understand them - an almost cartoonish reflection of our everyday places. In both silent hill and resident evil those slightly off canvases are then built upon - one with zombies, crashed cars, insanse mansionlike architecture and gore, the other with the horrific nightmare world and the monsters therein. This makes it all the more unsettling.
Continue looking at the Silent Hill series - the first is set in the small tourist town of Silent Hill - an almost laughably twee little town with one school, one main street, one hospital, and one church. It begins in a stereotypical american diner, and seems to visit almost very aspect of an average american life - suburban homes with dog houses outside, schools, churches,  shopping malls, and hospitals. The second is set in that same town, but further around, with a different school, hospital, mall, and so on - almost on the other side of the lake that Silent Hill has been built around. It has more apartments and taller, more looming structures than the last one. Silent Hill three starts off in a shopping mall (and a very american Fun Park). Silent Hill 4 is set in an apartment. A very american apartment.
And yet all of these very mundane settings are slightly....off. And that is before the designers get creative with the monsters, blood and rust colored walls, and shrieking baby ghosts crawling out of the ceiling.
How can it feel this wrong? Anyway; horror is about taking the normal and holding up a twisted reflection on it - most horror is based rather solidly on the fears of that society - on the issues that have come up in that time - the fear of radioactive materials, of aliens from outer space, of overcrowding and overpopulation, of the promiscuous nature of teenagers these days and the older generation with older values being violently disapproving of it (yeah, a bit specific there with Friday the 13th part one, but hey...) of psycology and of dreams, of machinery, and so on and so on.
They reflect our normal worlds and our fears - gives them shape and provides a much needed catharsis by either letting us feel justified in being terrified of such topics or by letting the hero overcome such terrors with steadfastness or cunning.

....This sttrangeness, this whole new set of rules that make no sense to us is probably why religion can be seen as so terrifying - religions are agreed upon myths with their own sets of rules that often make little to no sense to those outside of the religious group. Not working on sundays, having to wear things on your heads, not eating specific food groups, nonsensical chanting, self mutilation. animal sacrifice, human sacrifice, eating flesh and drinking blood are just some of the outlandish rules that come from religions (the top three abrahamic religions, in fact - Christianity, Judaism and Islam) that characters within the horror might understand but we - the audience - do not understand. Imagine a helpless character being placed in a village where the locals believe that they have to smear lambs blood all over their doorways for protection, and that sacrificing their first-born son is not only neccessary, but the right thing to do. Imagine a religion where children are seen as vessels of divine innocence - an innocence that can be harvested. Nightmarish, right? That's religion for you.

But I'll leave the religious rant for another entry - the point is that rules that we take for granted (going to church every sunday to eat the flesh and drink the blood of christ) can be seen as nightmarish to anyone else. Imagine an outsider looking at the rules of christianity without understanding the metaphor or the context and then trying to build up a religion around that.... they would be nailing children to crosses by the end of the week.
"The Outsider" - a term that I, perhaps, should have used more often in this post. Ah well - at least this has opened up my thought processes slightly and let me ponder on my own horror writing.