Fear and the musical avant-garde in games: Interviews with Jason Graves, Garry Schyman, Paul Gorman and Michael Kamper

© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. If you have ever experienced the cold chill of fear when watching a film or playing a video or computer game, it is highly probable that your responses have been manipulated by composers exploiting the musical resources of modernism, experimental music and the avant-garde. Depictions of fear, horror, amorality, evil and so on, have come to be associated with these sound worlds, particularly within the realm of popular culture. A number of game titles and franchises have emerged in recent years, which exploit these musical associations, exploring their creative potential as vehicles of fear and horror within the context of interactive game-play. Two composers associated with this approach are Jason Graves (Dead Space franchise) and Garry Schyman (Bioshock franchise, Dante’s Inferno). This article explores perceived links between avant-garde music (as defined in ‘populist’ rather than musicological or historical terms, as a ‘catch-all’ phrase for twentieth-century music exploiting experimental techniques, modernism and atonality) and depictions of horror and fear through interviews with Graves and Schyman. Further questions are posed to Paul Gorman (audio director – Dante’s Inferno) and Michael Kamper (audio director – Bioshock 2) to contextualize the discussion by demonstrating the significant creative influence of audio directors in guiding the musical approach taken by game composers. The article would be of potential interest to anyone with an interest in game audio, commercial composition/composers, game development, creative collaboration, audio direction and the power of music to manipulate the emotions in association with visual media

Plug-in to fear: game biosensors and negative physiological responses to music

The games industry is beginning to embark on an ambitious journey into the world of biometric gaming in search of more exciting and immersive gaming experiences. Whether or not biometric game technologies hold the key to unlock the “ultimate gaming experience” hinges not only on technological advancements alone but also on the game industry’s understanding of physiological responses to stimuli of different kinds, and its ability to interpret physiological data in terms of indicative meaning. With reference to horror genre games and music in particular, this article reviews some of the scientific literature relating to specific physiological responses induced by “fearful” or “unpleasant” musical stimuli, and considers some of the challenges facing the games industry in its quest for the ultimate “plugged-in” experience

An Examination of Halloween Literature And its Effect on the Horror Genre

This thesis will explore the effect of Halloween narratives in the wider horror genre. This will be accomplished by means of a close textual analysis with novels such as The Halloween Tree (1972) and films such as Trick ‘r Treat (2008) and Boys in the Trees (2016). This thesis will seek to provide answers, firstly, as to how Halloween narratives serve as a subversion of the typical horror formulas and, secondly, why this particular field of study has been ignored for so long. Horror literature and cinema, typically, has the effect of frightening their audience, by creating a sense of fear, unease and morbid dread. But it is my belief that Halloween narratives serve, entirely, the opposite purpose, that by utilizing the morbid and the monstrous it instead works to facilitate comfort and the diffusion of fear. Halloween is a carnivalesque celebration of death in many cultures and by celebrating it the human race derives catharsis in the thought of facing death without fear. Close readings of the novel and films have yielded intriguing results, and seem to confirm my initial suggestion. Despite this, there are few examples of the sub-genre available and no discourse on the subject. As a result, I have been forced to rely on other fields of theory, most notably in horror cinema and gothic and children’s literature

Homesick for the unheimlich:back to the uncanny future in Alien: Isolation

In 2014 Sega released Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation, a video game sequel to the 1979 film Alien. As an attempt to create both an authentic homage to the Alien franchise and a credible successor to Ridley Scott’s original film, Alien: Isolation was received as both a work of remediated nostalgia and as a deeply uncanny survival horror. This article discusses Alien: Isolation framed by theories of the uncanny (the unhomely) and of nostalgia (the homely), with the aim of revealing how the production design of the game reconciled these seemingly contradictory but nonetheless overlapping aesthetic qualities. By drawing on examples from Alien: Isolation’s visual and level design, this article discusses how the integration of nostalgic and uncanny qualities could be of value to horror and sci-fi game design, in particular to the development of sequels within existing franchises, and to remediations, remakes and reboots

Guilty Pleasures: Torture Porn and the George W. Bush Administration.

Esta tesis considera que las técnicas de iluminación y color usadas en las películas pertenecientes al subgénero de terror denominado “torture porn”, se usan para realzar una visión crítica de un gobierno “omnipotente” que trabajó en las sombras y que banalizó y trató de ocultar las torturas cometidas en el periodo posterior al 11-S. La primera década del siglo veintiuno en los Estados Unidos estuvo marcada por los infames atentados en el World Trade Center y la Guerra contra el terror llevada a cabo por George W. Bush, eventos que cambiaron el mundo como lo conocíamos hasta entonces. Los miedos y ansiedades que afloraron en la sociedad están representados en un ciclo de películas de terror no convencionales, denominado torture porn. El término fue introducido por el jefe de la sección de críticas de la revista New York Magazine, David Edelstein. Ejemplos primordiales de este movimiento, que tienen como temas primordiales el cautiverio y la tortura, son Saw (James Wan, 2004) y Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). La luz y el color son esenciales para la estética de estas películas y tienen un propósito comunicativo específico. La manera en la que percibimos y reaccionamos a las escenas de las películas tiene mucho que ver con el contexto histórico y sociocultural cuando estas se representan. Mediante el control y manipulación de características como la escala de colores, las emociones del espectador pueden cambiar de una escena a otra y ayudar al director a crear un ambiente determinado a su obra. La manipulación de luz y color puede relacionarse con las ansiedades y miedos de los espectadores de ese periodo.<br /

An investigation of priming, self-consciousness, and allegiance in the diegetic camera horror film

The main research question underpinning this study asks why and how the diegetic camera technique has become so popular to both contemporary horror filmmakers and audiences. In order to answer this question, this thesis adopts a mainly cognitive theoretical framework in order to address the mental schemata and processes that are elicited and triggered by these films. The concept of the diegetic camera is explored by analysing specific films and constructing an argument for the effects that this aesthetic and narrational technique can have on the cognition of viewers. Applying theoretical notions such as schema, priming, identification, recognition, alignment, and allegiance to the analysis of the focus films, I examine how the viewer’s mind works when watching these films. Another central concern of this thesis is the way in which mediated realism is constructed in the films in order to attempt to make audiences either (mis)read the footage as non-fiction, or more commonly to imagine that the footage is non-fiction. I demonstrate that the films under scrutiny create a sense of increased immediacy and alignment with the characters through various techniques associated with the diegetic camera. The concepts of identification and character engagement are interrogated by using cognitive concepts such as recognition, alignment, and allegiance (Smith, 1995). These individual concepts break down the notion of identification into distinct processes, allowing for a more rigorous examination of the notion of character engagement. The thesis also considers how priming and self-consciousness eventually affect the audience’s perception and cognition of the films, most significantly in relation to the theory of personal imagining (Currie, 1995)

‘Welcome to London’: Spectral Spaces in Sherlock Holmes’s Metropolis

This article examines the burgeoning tourist trade for locations featured in fictional narratives in popular culture. Symptomatic of a postmodern, hyperlinked culture referencing a vast reservoir of texts, such tourism produces a convergence of effects which render places ambivalent. Through a case study of Sherlock Holmes tourism in London, I argue that the city is constructed as seething with the spectral in which there is tension and slippage between paratexts, past and present, history and fiction, the observable and imperceptible. The tourist seeks out embodied experiences of their own secret London(s) which reside somewhere in-between the multiplicitous topographies

A world of difference: media translations of fantasy worlds

The modern consumer has access to a massively complex entertainment world. Many of the products available reveal a visible movement of popular fantasy worlds between different media. This transmedia process creates a strong link between film, merchandising and games; with all of these mediums borrowing from each other. This borrowing takes various forms, from licensed adaptations to unofficial copying of ideas, settings and characters as well as exploiting the different aesthetics and techniques of different media. Much of the scholarship on transmedia concentrates on storytelling, where a single overarching narrative unfolds over several different media. This thesis will move away from storytelling to consider how culture producers borrow the aesthetics, narratives and fantasy worlds from other sources, including computer games. This borrowing happens because it enables them to use transmedia functionality to gain market share from an already established audience who have a vested interested in, and enthusiasm for, an established world. Most of this borrowing happens around specific genres – especially fantasy, science fiction and horror. These genres are particularly wide-ranging and emphasise the possibilities of worldbuilding, making then good sources for multi-media franchises. This thesis will examine examples from these genres to examine what elements are translated to a new medium, and what is discarded. This examination will help explain how and why different media and settings work in the way that they do