Lunchtime Discussion: Terror

I will admit that I’m easily scared in the real world. I’ve never been a huge fan of darkness, and an empty street still kind of freaks me out. The kind of street that you get at about 4am, no one else on it, a little haze in the air giving the street lights a weird aura, that kind of street makes me almost instantly feel that I’m going to get mugged or have some sort of monster jump out at me. I find that few games or films really draw you in enough to give you that kind of terror.

Sure they try to capture the fear, but somehow they don’t quite seem to get it right. Settings like Dead Space can work, placing the played in an unfamiliar setting is a good start. It gives a little disorientation, and adding tight corridors and controlled spaces allow for easy set up of hidden enemies jumping out at you. The problem with these kind of settings is that they’re too unreal. Sure they can be scary, but they don’t seep into reality. Because they’re in such an obvious fantasy setting we don’t ever get into a similar situation, removing some of the terror.

For me it’s the games that are in settings similar to ours that really induce fear. When we can relate to the setting the scenario somehow becomes more plausible, like it’s something that could easily happen as we walk to work or the shops. People always seem to think it’s the extraordinary that scares the most, but it’s something being slightly off in an otherwise mundane situation. Aliens are scary, but something out of place as your character walks down a normal street can, in my opinion, unnerve you a lot more.

Are you scared more by situations which reflect our everyday life, or does fantasy and scifi scare you far more? Is it the mundane or the extraordinary?