More than an Obsession: A guide to contemporary horror media

Recently, whilst on my never-ending doomscroll-fest, I came across a video where researchers placed toddlers of ages one to two in a room with some snakes, and my first thought was ‘that’s terrifying! How could the parents let this happen?’ However, upon further inspection, the kids weren’t scared at all, only the parents watching on in horror. The psychological explanation is that we only develop fears or phobias with age and experience; inherently, we cannot perceive a fear before it has happened to us or around us. This isn’t the whole story though. There are two fears that we are born with, two fears pre-installed before we even have a chance to experience anything: a fear of heights and a fear of the dark. While it is important to discuss conquering these fears, it is more interesting, and dare I say far more fun, to discuss how these fears, and many others, can be and have been exploited in modern media. As a massive fan of the horror genre, let me take you on a journey through some of my favourite pieces of horror media and which fears they prey on most...

Contemporary Movies

Of course, I have to talk about this at some point, so let’s get it out of the way as soon as possible. I think Obsession does what it sets out to do incredibly well. From the blocking of scenes (the diner phone call scene is the one that stands out to me the most) and the overall themes explored (who’s really the villain? etc), it’s clear that Curry Barker knows what he’s doing, and he made an excellent low-budget horror movie. It succeeds in the fear that it wants to draw out of the audience, in my opinion, probably the fear of trust and connection. Barker shows us comparisons throughout the movie between pre-wish Nikki, post-wish Nikki and Sarah, all with varying degrees of romantic connection with Bear. Post-wish Nikki is seen as the villain (obviously, we as the viewer can tell how messed up her mindset is), but in reality, it’s Bear and his wish to be closer to Nikki that causes the most harm to people; everyone around them is affected (and, spoilers, most of them killed).

In comparison, I think that Backrooms definitely succeeds at the message it’s trying to send, but in it’s obsession (haha) to convey that message, it drops behind Obsession in trying to put forth a specific fear. Watching the movie, it’s clear that the sentiment of Kane Parsons is ‘America’s over-capitalised and it’s going to doom us all’ which of course is an incredibly important message and I’m definitely doing it a disservice by dismissing it so casually, but the movie almost feels oversaturated with its capitalist metaphor. The backrooms in the lore of the movie is an effectively infinite space of winding pathways, dimly lit yellow rooms and frustrating hums in the background. Clark’s dissatisfaction with his life the way it is now and the way he uses the backrooms as an ‘escape’ of sorts from his reality is relatable, but not exactly preying on the fear I assumed the movie would going into it. Looking at the source material, both Kane’s original series on YouTube and the creepypasta post first describing the backrooms, I assumed the movie would focus more on the fear of being alone or schizophrenia, not about finding/being denied a purpose. The uneasy feeling of nothingness that the backrooms is supposed to represent isn’t as prevalent in the movie as it is in Kane’s series, and it might be due to the freedom that YouTube affords its creators. Perhaps the studio had a say in lightening the darker tones; A24, albeit introducing and developing many novel stories, seems to be a much more restrictive studio for horror projects than Blumhouse, the studio that Obsession was created under. I’m certainly not well-versed enough to comment on which is a better cinematic project, but as a piece of horror media, I definitely prefer Obsession.

Jumpscares

Often in horror media, the easiest way to scare your audience is with a jumpscare. This is pretty much always achieved visually and audially, and it does have the intended effect of inducing the fight-or-flight response; a scary monster screaming at you will almost always cause that massive spike in adrenaline that most horror-movie-enjoyers enjoy. For myself, it’s much more satisfying to experience a long, drawn-out period of tension, occasionally without a resolution, but a proper jumpscare at the end of a sequence like this is still incredibly satisfying. Horror video games are quite good at this tactic, making you feel uneasy for extended periods of time before a gnarled creature with way too many teeth pops out from behind a door and kills you. The genre of modern horror video games is unbelievably saturated with poor Five Nights at Freddy’s rip-offs trying to capture that feeling that the original gave you: I’m thinking of Poppy’s Playtime, Garten of BanBan, Amanda the Adventurer, Bendy and the Ink Machine, etc. There are some games, however, that don’t chase that high, my favourite being Faith: The Unholy Trinity.

Faith is a videogame trilogy created by Airdorf Games that tells the story of Father John Ward and his repeated struggles to exorcise powerful demons, often failing to save the innocent along the way. I adore this game, not just for the way it builds up tension through its gameplay loop and fight scenes or its absolutely horrifying imagery, but for its deceptiveness. Looking at the game from an outsider’s perspective, it can be hard to build up hope about Faith being a ‘scary’ game due to its 8-bit graphics and unintentionally funny computer-generated voice (although that in itself can be quite off-putting), but it’s that illusion of safety that makes Faith scarier to me than a lot of other horror games. I will say that the gameplay itself is quite mundane, oftentimes you find yourself running around the place, sometimes away from demons, sometimes towards demons, sometimes finding clues and hints of story, but perhaps because of its simplicity, the horror itself stands out more. Although set in a religious context, I don’t think Faith is trying to capture the fear of the divine but instead the fear of failure. The first game is set in a location where Father Ward had already failed an exorcism in the past and, fittingly, most demons seen throughout the series come directly as a result of someone’s failure, whether that be sacred failure (exorcism), failure of care (maternity), or failure to see past someone’s deceit. The game expertly shows the player the direct consequences of people’s actions, including your own, that affect the story outcome, characters’ survival and more. To top it all off, the jumpscares are incredibly well-placed, marking moments of incredibly high tension in the plot. I can’t help but think Faith encapsulates its intended fear beautifully.

Nostalgia

My favourite subgenre of horror media is decidedly analogue horror. The term, coined by YouTube series Local58, is used to describe a wide range of horror videos, all utilising nostalgia or rather the subversion of nostalgic feelings to produce its fear factor. Often, analogue horror videos pretend to use visuals that seem like they are from old video tapes or an old era of television and recording to instil a feeling of comfort in the viewer, most of whom would have grown up with similar looking media. What I enjoy most, however, is how intricate these videos can be, i.e. how much care and detail their creators put in the videos. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about just one, so here’s a little bit about a few of my favourites:

1. Local58: The original analogue horror series, Local58 takes broadcasts from a local news station in Mason County, West Virginia (fake broadcasts, in case that wasn’t obvious) and turns them into dread-inducing thought experiments, including a broadcast telling everyone that America has lost in the war and it is people’s patriotic duty to shoot themselves, or running a simulation that aims to reduce people’s ability to recognise faces, or a consistent theme of telling people to (not) look up at the moon. The father of analogue cosmic horror.
2. The Walten Files: I know I complained earlier about a bunch of Five Nights at Freddy’s rip-offs ruining the horror gaming scene, but analogue horror has been flooded with some excellent representations of mascot horror, including Harmony and Horror and The Battington Tapes, but none in my eyes have achieved just what Martin Walls has done in this series. So far only five episodes deep, it explores trauma and brokenness, a story of a family ripped apart by events out of their control, and one man’s plan to put them back together. It’s an incredibly fascinating take on how different people react to tragedy and honestly the most heart-breaking, frightening story that I’ve experienced.
3. R.A.D.A.R: A short film about moving on, Radar tells the story of a man trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth, and it focuses on an extremely primal fear of death. Within the closing moments of the film, we see the events that transpire to put him in this situation, and I believe it’s the relatability of the main character, as weird as that sounds with him being stuck in a death loop, that makes this so scary. His very realistic reactions to what’s happening to him accentuates the fear in the viewer, an ‘it could be you’ situation.

There are many, many more that I haven’t covered (Vita Carnis, hiimmarymary, The Man in the Suit etc), but I hope you can see that through this medium, many creators can turn a false sense of calm into something horrific, that has the freedom to exploit a multitude of different fears.

What’s so scary?

Especially in the horror genre, it’s quite difficult to explain how a visual and audial piece of media brings out emotions via some words on a page, so I do urge you, if you’re interested, to check out some of these incredible works. I’m not doing any of these titles the justice they deserve, their creators put so much effort into making them and they deserve to be recognised, for me, as a testament to what horror as a genre can achieve. I believe that the horror genre is much more free than others to convey complex topics and emotions, and the induction of fear into the whole system exacerbates those emotions even more. Fear draws out a very specific reaction in the body that no other emotion really replicates.

So, why do we get scared? It’s a preservation mechanism telling our bodies to do something before we get hurt, and it’s incredible to see so many creators making movies, series, games, books, and more that can draw out that mechanism without our bodies actually being in danger. Pretty scary, no?