Why indie horror is so effective

Where do you go when the mainstream just doesn't kick anymore?

A lot my personal thoughts and feelings come out on this blog simply because I feel it serves best to be some form of honest when I write these, as such I don't always cover as wide a range of games as I feel that I should. This is something that I've sought to work on, simply so that I'll have more material to draw from, and that's allowed me to really get a lot closer with some of the weirder side of gaming that I was mostly ignorant to before. And let me be clear that when I say 'weird', what I really mean to say is 'non mainstream', because gaming is such a hard to pin-down form of entertainment that anything outside of the mainstream has a good chance to be wild in all manner of ways; some of which might have you confronting exactly what 'entertainment' is even supposed to be. Just look at Frog Fractions. (No seriously; look at Frog Fractions. Nothing I could say will do that thing justice.) And this retrospective of indie titles all across the land has drawn back two conclusions to me; one: that a lot of Indie games are horror titles, and two: that they usually end up being way scarier then AAA horror games.

Now don't get me wrong, I still think that horror has a place in the mainstream market; just look at Resident Evil and my rather transparent love and respect for those games and that franchise. I think the original Outlast is one of the most terrifying experiences I've ever gone through, nearly sticking me with emergency heart bypass surgery; and recently I even got around to a playthrough of 'Amnesia: The Dark Decent', which was a masterclass on atmosphere that I honestly wasn't quiet expecting. But those last two examples I offered, whilst undeniable horror classics, were not AAA games. In fact they were both Indie. AAA games tend not to go after the horror market too often, but instead prefer to make games that are horror adjacent. The only real exceptions I can think of from the modern age would be 'The Evil Within' (Which I like but a lot of people don't) and 'The Medium' which seemed to be pretty lukewarm from most reviews I picked through. (A real shame too. I had faith in Medium) 

So what is it about independent horror games that hit differently from their AAA departments? And why is it that the only active horror series from a big studio in today's day and age is Resident Evil, and there's a franchise that specialises in Action Horror, not pure horror. I don't claim to be any great psychologist with his finger on the trigger of societal opinion, but I personally think that a hint might lie in an example from the entertainment industry in the past. Only a different platform for entertainment. In fact, I have an example from my very own home country of England, and the sort of hysteria that fuelled the video horror market over here in the 1980's. What I of course refer to is the phenomenon known at the time as 'video nasties'.

Now 'Video nasties' is a term popularised by the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association (Now known as Mediawatch-UK) and was used as a flag under which to hunt down and prosecute video media that was considered to be 'immoral'. There's some extra details around here about how some of these videos couldn't be properly rated in order to keep them out of impressionable hands due to workarounds regarding early video rights ownership laws, but that was about the high and low of it. And in the manner of all things like this, once these sorts of films were given the red stamp and told to be frowned upon, that merely sparked the early video watching audience to seek these films out to discover what they were missing. As you can imagine when we're talking about the hitlist of a morality toting activism group, a lot of the movies they targeted were explicit horror movies, and so these were the sorts of films that became in demand during this time. Eventually people went around sharing poorly ripped and overplayed versions of these low-budget gorefests, the shoddiness of which almost fed into the allure, the illusion if-you-will, that these horrific affairs could be real. And of course they weren't, everyone knew that; but seeing films existing outside the accepted constraints of the mainstream helped conjure up a false verisimilitude, even when the actual quality of what you were watching would be obviously limited thanks to the scope of the budget.

Now I think the way we look at horror in the gaming market isn't exactly one-to-one with that so to speak, but you can see the resemblance. A genre of storytelling that relies on being shocking and unpredictable, constrained by a set of rules and stipulations that some can interpret as holding back the art form. In terms of 80's movies there was a certain level of visual gore that the ratings board wouldn't touch, and in terms of modern gaming it's more that there's just a whole level of obscure directions and arthouse twists that just wouldn't be appealing to enough people to warrant the investment. And when the mainstream can't cut it, that leaves a primed stage for the indie scene to step up and take the glory. Of course, that's just one connection, I think there's another.

Just as with the illusion and mystery of swapping under-the-counter banned movies, there's a certain thrilling sense of danger that comes in seeking out these sorts of games where you wouldn't normally find them, and what these sorts of titles might contain. It's a bit silly to think of Itch.Io as some wild frontier full of the unknown, but to someone who only ever gets their games off of Steam or storefronts like that, it can feed into this question of 'what am I really installing on my computer?'. This is something that can really be exploited by a certain breed of horror which is almost unique to the indie market; meta horror. Now I've mentioned Doki Doki Literature Club before in this vein, but if we're really going back to the roots then maybe a more apt game might be IMSCARED. That was a rather straightforward horror game that managed to do the impossible and send it's atmosphere outside of the 'magic box' of the game world and into the real world. How? Simple; it just created files. Simple text files. But the sort of thing you were encouraged to find on your computer in order to unravel more of the mystery. Think of how crazy of a forth-wall break that is! That transcends anything that the movie market could possibly pull off and anything that the AAA game market would have the nerve to pull off; it made the danger feel real.

And then there's the other aspect about the unregulated market: actual danger. Now I know that a lot of this is melodramatic and drummed up for effect, and no one gets excited about the prospect of downloading a virus instead of their game, but I'm talking about the sorts of legendary games for their depravity. (So when I say 'danger', I more mean 'mental danger') Whether I talk about a game that touches on topics too uncomfortable for the main stream (like actually playing as a man who murders his entire family) or even a mythical game that goes beyond any limit of taste and apparently features actual snuff. (Something which I'm absolutely not in support of, and thus I refuse to even name the rumoured software) Where there's the thrill of actually screwing oneself up by seeing something scarring, they'll be an audience for it. Just look at me; I actively seek out the most evocative games I can, even when it's gut-wrenching, just so that I'll feel anything. It's a real addiction.

The best thing about indie Horror in the light of everything I just discussed; is that it doesn't need to cross any of the lines that I laid in the sand at all. Great indie horror can go just as far as normal mainstream horror, but still come away hitting harder all because it could have gone further. I mentioned it in other blogs, but Horror is fuelled more by your imagination about what's around the corner rather than what actually is, thus Indie horror benefits most by reputation above all else. All this I say despite, bizarrely, not actually liking horror all that much. I think it's telling to see the ways in which modern horror has started taking cues from the indie market, rather in contrast to almost every other genre out there, and just goes to show you where the real scary experiences can be found. So if you ever find you becoming bored by the mundane same-old-same-old horror stories; maybe it's time you angled yourself away from the established, and further towards the whacky world of the lawless. That's indie developers, I should clarify, not bank robbers.