What you fear is already inside you
(or, Fear that which is already inside)
CW: SA, Bullying, Animal Cruelty, Torture
Spoilers for Rule of Rose and American McGee’s Alice — included
Horror has a long history of being a genre often used to discuss societal fears, anxiety, and personal traumas. From alien invasions used to explore xenophobia (The Alien from Alien is literally called a Xenomorph), zombies to discuss capitalism, and liminal horror as a means to comprehend the incomprehensible, the genre is ever popular with an infinite ceiling for revitalization, evolution, and resurrection as long as there is something for us to fear. Horror can resonate with many for multiple different reasons.
As a long time fan of Resident Evil, the games can do little after an initial playthrough to scare me. The anxiety of figuring out where to go, which zombies to dispatch, and the order to tackle objectives has long since faded to be replaced with pseudo-speedrunning route optimizations. The biggest fear turned into dying unexpectedly and having to restart from a previous checkpoint or save. As a result of that, horror games following in its likeness (Dead Space for instance) similarly do little to terrify me prior to stripping me of the arsenal they themselves have handed to the player. Which is why my adverse fear of horror games has changed from survival horror to psychological horror.
Survival horror places a focus on players enduring a horrific situation, overcoming immediate dangers, and confronting that which seeks to cause direct harm. Psychological horror is a more abstract genre that focuses more on emotional damage and harm. While the two can often be combined and mixed together to make something like Silent Hill or Rule of Rose, when the two are separated, psychological horror tends to stand out and leave a far larger impact on me. Psychological horrors can’t be dealt with as immediately as a monster trying to devour you. Instead, it torments you by attacking something one doesn’t want to protect, but also doesn’t want to acknowledge: trauma.
Trauma can manifest and persist through many different means. Trauma induced by singular events, recurrent events, physical/emotional pain, and generational trauma can all weigh on their victims without them even recognizing just how impactful such experiences are. Being unable or unwilling to acknowledge these traumas causes long term impacts to us, those around us, and our ability to function daily. What scars us also can vary from person to person, even if the experience or event impacted two people at the same time. The death of a loved one can cause one person to form attachment issues while another can develop a phobia or unconscious habit such as lip or nail biting.
The requirement to acknowledge such harmful events in order to move on and develop past them is what makes trauma ample fuel for psychological horror games. Confronting trauma is very difficult for those who have experienced it, to the point that doing so too early can simply cause the victim to be re-traumatized or mentally regress. It creates this door in ourselves that we must open in order to move past, but the very act of approaching it means coming into contact with what hurt you to begin with and looking directly into its eyes. Building the courage to stare at that which hurt you and accept that it has caused you lasting pain is little different than admitting you were irreparably changed by something against your will. Yet, acknowledgement of that pain is the only means to start the long road toward regaining control of your life.
Rule of Rose is a game centered on the main protagonist (Jennifer) re-experiencing multiple traumatic events that she endured after being sent to the Rose Garden Orphanage following the death of her parents aboard a zeppelin that crashed, killing everyone but Jennifer in 1930. The game’s chapters can be played in a non-linear order and mostly takes place aboard a flying airship, heavily mixing the two traumatic locations of Jennifer’s childhood together while keeping her as an adult. The “Red Crayon Aristocrat Club” would torment Jennifer during her time in the orphanage through many means including but not limited to: Name-calling, refusing to acknowledge her, scapegoating her, forcefully restraining her, locking her into a coffin, pushing her down stairs, locking her in rooms, stealing from her, ruining her clothes, and killing her dog. Even the person Jennifer would confide in, would attempt to control and manipulate her as a means to force Jennifer to depend on them. The game’s good ending allows Jennifer to move on from these past experiences, promising to remember those who meant a lot to her, but allowing herself to live as an adult with renewed clarity of her past.
While not the only game to focus on trauma as the means by which the game explores horror, Rule of Rose is a rich example of how trauma can manifest and the harms its victim long after the events take place. The disorganized timeline the game explores, the mixing of two locations into a blended miss-matched cohesion, and the mental regression Jennifer experiences going through her childhood trauma as her adult self all serve to create the oppressive horror atmosphere that the players explore throughout the game. The use of crude yet cruel children’s story books to depict horrific acts and events only further emphasizes the incongruity of Jennifer’s mental state as she is forced to confront these recurrent past traumas. It’s similar to, but different from, the use of trauma in American McGee’s Alice and Alice Madness Returns.
Alice Liddell is the survivor of a house fire that killed her family and, as a result of years of psychiatric “treatment”, retreats to her internal Wonderland that has been reconfigured as a result of her trauma. Her victory over the Queen of Hearts in the first game aids her in improving her mental state to the point in which she’s able to leave the the institute she was once housed for years during her catatonic state. The sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, sees her delving back into Wonderland which is slowly becoming corrupted again as nightmares and visions of the the house fire begin to re-emerge. American McGee uses Alice’s Wonderland as a means to address her trauma and mental state as a survivor of a single traumatic event that scarred her for life. Even if the game isn’t directly a horror title, the use of trauma as a narrative device allows the players to better understand Alice and her perspective as a trauma survivor on her journey to not only regain control over her life, but to better survive these lingering affects of her childhood trauma.
Games aren’t a monolith, and while there are plenty of questionable (if not outright disrespectful) depictions of mental health/trauma in the medium, they offer a very unique and emotionally powerful means to foster sympathy and understanding for those suffering in ways that the player may be unable to understand elsewise. They can show different ways those pains and fears manifest through explicit and implicit means while also showing that those suffering aren’t past the point of redemption or aid. Survivors of trauma can have agency in their own stories while still being victims. These stories can also give hope to those suffering that they can both seek aid from others or overcome their own past through various means instead of being trapped under the weight of their pain.
As a trauma survivor myself, these games allow me to feel not only seen but understood in a way that isn’t demeaning or disrespectful. My struggles feel acknowledged and understood while spurring me to address my own issues both akin to and separate from those that these characters experience. While I was more fortunate than Alice, watching the house you live in slowly lit aflame in the middle of the night is not a vision that I expect to leave me. Nor do I expect the scars from being bullied, having my back shoved into metal lockers, being called horrific things, being taken advantage of, and denied recognition of my past suffering to quickly be resolved afterward, playing these games helps. They help me sympathize with these characters and, in turn, sympathize with myself.
There’s no cure for trauma. Some wish to forget the events that happen and they shouldn’t be told that they aren’t allowed to. Confronting trauma is itself traumatic and takes great patience to slowly unravel. It requires the survivor to admit painful truths and brace themselves for whatever comes after opening boxes that were long since shut tight. Yet, we should be allowed stories that do show our victories. That show life can go on after opening those doors and pressing on despite the heartache. Even if it is painful, and it very well can be very painful, we can still find happiness and be in control of our own lives no matter what came before or what may come after.
