This is probably topical considering next month.

The reason that I'm asking this is that, in my playthrough of The Suffering, I just realized that none of this game is actually scary. Yeah, the monsters and their actions are disturbing, and the game does a marvelous job of building tension, but I feel like it fails in giving me that lingering feeling after I turn off the game (Or a reason TO turn off the game). The same thing has happened with Resident Evil, Doom 3, and several other "horror" games that I have played (In fact, the last time I actually turned off a game because I was "too scared" was on my first playthrough of Halo CE back when I was in middle school). And, I've noticed this in numerous media where they do the same exact thing. In films, they build up the "fear factor" in the same manner, but they don't have to worry about the player's interactivity; they just focus on making sure that the viewers "see" what the director wants them to see and hears "just enough" (Or, they go for the torture factor, which stops being "horrifying" after the first 15 minutes). And, in books, the author relies on the readers imagination running away with them by giving away "just enough" detail that the person then starts assuming the worst.

BUT, none of this every feels like it's actually scary. It seems like a lot of the horror in media is there to shock the person experiencing it rather than actually give you a lingering thought in the back of your mind.

Why does it seem like horror is built upon tension and "disturbing" the person experiencing the media, but none of it actually attempting to SCARE people?

EDIT: I forgot to mention. I am having fun with the game.

Last edited by Transdude1996 at 9:33 pm, Sep 22 2019

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I think the main point is this. People don't feel compelled to make stuff scary just because of how it's classified, they just try to make it entertaining. It's been this way at least since the late 70s with slasher movies, and maybe even a little earlier with gory drive-thru movies like Herschell Gordon Lewis's movies. Those kind of horror movies are more like action movies with excessive violence and gore. Even then, some people are legitimately scared by those kind of movies. Same thing with jump scares - a lot of people get very scared watching movies with a lot of jump scares, but other people aren't that affected, or it doesn't bother them once the movie is over.

Another movie I thought of was The Ring. People were either terrified by it or were completely unaffected. I think the premise of the movie "worked" on some people and not on others, so some people were scared for the whole week after, and others didn't even understand what was so scary. So I guess part of it is that different people will get scared by different things.

Because it is goddamn predictable