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How Do You Evoke Fear?
Dariel Quiogue wrote:
I have an idea for a sci-fi/horror story kicking around in the back of my head, and vague plans of starting a CoC PBEM later this year. However, horror is a genre I've never tried my hand at before. So I'd like to ask all of you these questions:
What storytelling devices and other tricks are effective in evoking fear? What gives you the willies more than anything else? What are modern people afraid of, now that so many myths and mysteries have already been explained or dispelled?
Dariel
Dennis Ching wrote:
What storytelling devices and other tricks are effective in evoking fear? What gives you the willies more than anything else? What are modern people afraid of, now that so many myths and mysteries have already been explained or dispelled?
Nature hates a void. So any myths that are dispelled or explained are replaced by new myths and mysteries. Like how come Daman is cheesy always?
White Wolf got the idea right. It's a game of Personal Horror/Fear. The idea is to personalize the horror/fear. You evoke the fear reaction by leaving blanks in the description and let the player's imagination fill it in. But you do have to get their attention.
Things that modern man hates/fears.
I'll let other people fill in the other stuff...
- loss of security
- something that they cannot explain scientifically
- something that they CAN explain scientifically, although the basis will be unsound.
- the dark.
- loss of modern conviniences. Nothing panics an employee more than the threat of power outage after oh about 3-4 hours of hard work and being unable to save.
Lost
Bob Moreno wrote:
Warning: Blather up ahead...
One of the problems in running a CoC campaign (as related to me by a fellow
GM a long while back) is sustaining the horror and suspense in the game, and that's something very important to consider for long-term play. A dead body
provokes a certain reaction when viewed by your average joe but a mortician
wouldn't blink twice. By the same token, the sight of a Deep One tends to
lose its impact after the fourth or fifth encounter by the investigators.Another hurdle is expectation. The players expect to witness something
horrific and so their minds are prematurely "geared" for such encounters.
IMHO, that effectively kills all prospect of evoking fear in the players'
minds. (Any sort of fear in this case would only be roleplayed "character
fear" as opposed to genuine "player fear").Going briefly into anecdotal mode, I'm reminded of a BattleTech campaign I
ran back in the early 90's.The players, running a pirate/mercenary crew jumped into a relatively
unexplored section of space in order to lick their wounds after an
unsuccessful raid on a rich Periphery world. Noting that their water
supplies were running low (because I said so, of course), they dropped down
onto a surprisingly habitable world in order to resupply. After a quick
vote, it was decided that the place was as good as any to conduct repairs
and establish a semi-permanent base of sorts. Considering the shape their
battalion was in, they were expecting a month's time or more worth of R&R
(that's repair and refitting). A mech encounter during this time was highly
unlikely given the remoteness of their location so everyone's guard was down
and most of their activities were committed mostly to training (racking up
risk-free XP) and the construction of their temporary base.Boooring.
Fortunately, I had recently read this sci-fi novel called Legacy of Heorot
(suggested reading). Ahh, what the heck. Time for that long overdue alien
encounter.Now imagine, if you will, an amphibious carnivore larger than a rhino which
moves at a land speed comparable to a leopard. The players, never
suspecting such a creature existed on the planet, and never expecting me to
spring this sort of an encounter on them, lost quite a number of people on
the first night. The creature (yes, just one creature at first) got past
their flimsy perimeter defenses one evening and managed to trash the only
working subspace radio in the camp. Their dropship, having lifted off the
planet a day earlier to ferry supplies back to the jumpship, wasn't expected
back for another two weeks (about week or so to the jump point and the same
amount of time back).Once they realized the gravity of their situation -- that they couldn't
communicate their plight to their mates out in space, that some huge
carnivore (and possibly more than just one) was lurking out there in the
darkness (they never saw it completely at first; just footprints and tail
tracks in the dirt, short glimpses of the thing's shadow, blocky silhouette
from afar, etc.), that any hope of rescue was two weeks away at the
earliest, and that between the remaining survivors (about 28, if I recall
right) there were less than a dozen firearms -- that's when the real terror
began.There were four players in the game and they all survived to be rescued
later on, though two of them were badly wounded (mauled, I think, is the
right word). All but one NPC died. Every battlemech was trashed, littering
the landscape in pieces like so much junk, but none of their owners cared.
They were glad just to have survived.It was wholly unexpected and yes, everyone was terrified the whole time.
Needless to say, that sort of an encounter only works properly the first
time you spring it on players. Afterwards, it becomes just another
bug-hunt. In fact, a good analogy here would be the films Alien and
Aliens. First one was horror/suspense. The sequel was action/suspense.
And if you go a little further on, Alien IV turned into an action/comedy
(which I liked, despite being that).As far as tricks and storytelling devices go, I think the remoteness of the
locale where the tale takes place is an important factor to consider. (a
tomb in the middle of a vast desert, the Himalayas, Antarctica, an island in
the South Pacific, or even just a ramshackle house in the woods). Being cut
away from civilization is terrifying to a lot of people.I think the best horror stories are also the one the ones wherein the
creature, entity or whatever is least described in detail. There should
only be a hint of the terrors lurking out there, never the full-blown CGI
monstrosity revealed under the light of day. (Best examples: John
Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, Rosemary's Baby and the Blair Witch
Project. Worst: The Haunting).There's also nothing more effective in increasing suspense levels in a story
than to sow distrust or suspicion among the characters. (The Thing, also by
John Carpenter, is the best example I can think of for this).For the terror to creep in and work its magic properly, there should also be
disturbing legends, rumors and half-truths surrounding the
place/object/person on which the story focuses (Examples: Candyman,
Lemarchand's box in the movie Hellraiser, the writer Sutter Cain in the
movie In the Mouth of Madness).Errr, that's it.
Bob
Frank Perez wrote:
What storytelling devices and other tricks are effective in evoking fear? What gives you the willies more than anything else? What are modern people afraid of, now that so many myths and mysteries have already been explained or dispelled?
I would say the threat of losing something valuable is a common fear for
most of us. Anyone who is suddenly held up at gun point can attest to this.
Losing a lot of money is also something to be afraid of. Nevertheless, these
are prosaic fears, not the kind that is associated with horror.Perhaps the greatest fear is that of the unknown. Even the fear of death can
ultimately be based on the fear of what lies beyond the Veil. When one is
faced with something that is alien to his normal experiences, the survival
hormones start kicking in. The moment something is understood fairly well,
it loses its ability to horrify. In Vampire the Masquerade, for instance,
the sight of a 9-foot werewolf is something that can strike fear for most
vampires. But for one who knows their every weakness and prepares for them, combat with a werewolf is just another exciting hack-and-slash session.Lovecraft capitalized on this fear of the unknown when he created his world
of dark gods. The horrors that lurk in his universe are so alien as to strip all hope from those who confront them. Even in this modern day and age, there are still things in the cold, vast universe that mankind is not prepared to deal with.Nevertheless, one does not have to go over the top to elicit a fear
response. Alfred Hitchcock understood this very well. He once said that if
you make a movie showing a group of people in a room, and suddenly a bomb
explodes, there is no suspense here. However, if you change the scene so
that the audience knows there is a bomb but the hapless people in the room
don't, the audience cringes in fear, wondering if and when the bomb will go
off. Remember "Dial M for Murder"? The scene with Grace Kelly on the phone
and a man right behind her, about to strangle her? The audience knows the
man is there, but Grace Kelly does not. The man hesitates, adding all the
more to the suspense.For RPGs, you can give your players a sense of foreboding, a sense that
something is amiss, something that the player's can't quite put their finger
on. Slowly build up the suspense as the threat becomes more distinct. Then
shock them with something they didn't quite expect.Here's a sample from an actual CoC game of mine:
One of the characters, a professor at a university, opens his office door
and finds that it is strangely heavy. As he steps in, the first thing he
notices is a sharp, coppery scent. The second thing he notices is that the
floor is sticky. (Already he senses that something is amiss).He turns around, and he says an associate professor, his feet about 6 inches
off the ground because he is impaled on the forehead with a dagger. (At this
point, the player gets a bit of an adrenalin surge. There is a potential
threat.)He checks the phone lines. They are dead. (Panic.)
He hurriedly leaves his office. As he passes the rest rooms, he hears the
sound of running water. It's coming from the ladies' rest room. Someone is
probably washing her (or its?) hands... Is it because someone had blood on
her (its?) hands?The professor takes out his gun.
The GM says: "Wait a minute. Whoever killed the associate professor must
have been powerful enough to lift him 6 inches of the ground with one hand
and to drive a dagger through his skull and through the door with the other
hand. Are you sure you want to face what's in there?"Player: "You have a point."
The professor nervously holsters his weapon and takes a few quick steps
forward, bypassing the rest room.Suddenly, the door behind him creaks open...
(Fill in your favorite monster here.)
Frank
Roland Sacerdoti wrote:
What works for me and a few of the people i have GM'd is making them feel really really really attached to either their characters and/or an NPC. then pointing out that you have no problems with killing them off. makes them more careful, sometimes paranoid, and if they're paranoid, they'll fear anything :) Also dimming the lights and adding some eerie music to the session makes the players a bit more uneasy :)
Roland
Farah Lozano wrote:
Foreword:
I'm not one for horror myself, so my threshold for fear is probably laughable to most of you hardened cynics out there. =)
*********
What storytelling devices and other tricks are effective in evoking fear? What gives you the willies more than anything else?
The my-perfectly-valid-worldview justification of brutality...seeing inside the mind of evil, or watching one's descent into the pit, so to speak, realizing you understand and, therefore, could quite conceivably BECOME.
What are modern people afraid of, now that so many myths and mysteries have already been explained or dispelled?
When the unknown is known, all that's left to fear, i think, is the senseless.
That , in this age of reason, that some dauntless, unreasonable force will come and overthrow everything we've worked so hard to achieve. Yes, nuclear war would be stupid and pointless, but in the mind of an overzealous "patriot" bent only on redeeming dead ancestors' honor with no thought of self preservation, what would it matter that the whole world would die as well?
You wake up every morning and face the daily grind to reassure yourself about the tangible and real and that if you do and live what is sensible only sensible things will happen and maybe one day you rush out onto the street latte in hand, briefcase in the other, hailing a cab with your cellphone ringing cheerily and nothing at all is new about the morning
except the 45 magnum in your face, the flailing body dropping from the top floor of your apartment building, or a headline that says your imperfect life ends tomorrow and there's nothing you can do about it.And, oh yes, helplessness, of course.
Farah
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