Startled, Afraid, Terrified, and Horrified…

These are a few of my favorite things. For the past eight months, I’ve been one of the writers and full time GMs for a local area campaign called 1936: Horror. While our campaign is generic 1930s horror, "Cthulhu Live" published by Fantasy Flight Games, has made "Horror" into a standard LARP genre.

Running a horror LARP is a challenge. Horror is one of the most subtle and difficult forms to pull off when one has total control of the audience in a cinema, or through written media. Managing to horrify thirty to forty roleplayers is a big task to bite off.

First, decide what you want to do. Terms like fear, terror, and horror get thrown around interchangeably, but they can distinguish significantly different things. There is also a difference between feeling any of these and feeling startled. A lot of GMs tend to bundle those things together, and view them interchangeably. Partially that’s because of the movie industry which classifies films which involve any one of those elements as "horror" thus placing "Psycho" in the same genre as "Dawn of the Dead."

I’ll attempt to illustrate the differences, and give examples of how you can bring each of these emotions crawling up the spine of your favorite group of roleplayers.

Startled

Filmmakers know that the easiest gasp to go for is the one that comes from being startled. Being startled causes an adrenaline rush which is in itself quite addictive for some folks. The "rush" of being startled doesn’t have much to do with "fear" in the real sense, other than in a sort of abstract competitive way.

Being startled is what happens when the monster jumps out at you and you jump and run away, though you almost immediately know who is in the costume, and are not actually under the slightest apprehension that you are in any danger.

Trying to keep away from the monster gives the same sort of sensation as playing dodgeball, or trying not to be tagged out in baseball. It’s an adrenal rush, but not one in which there is any real emotional involvement other than the abstract value assigned by the player.

The problem is that being startled wears off for many players. The adrenal rush is never the same as "the first time." Thus you get the phenomenon of players who go to a game, have a great time, and then have a less good time on every return visit. The adrenal rush, which was enough to give them a good weekend the first time around, wears off. Players who are always able to get somewhat of an adrenal high out of being startled may not understand why it "stops working" for others. GMs who got a great response the first time they did it don’t understand why it "stops working" for their players.

Almost as much of a problem is that it doesn’t wear off for some players. Just like the athlete who always gets a thrill out of trying to steal a base, there are adrenaline junkies who always get a thrill out of running from the monster. It works from them, and they honestly cannot understand why it stops working for others. They want more and more, so when GMs digress along other paths and don’t continue to provide the same experience, they feel let down.

A few weeks ago I ran a very successful game which built fear by startling players. Late at night skeletal hands surprised players by scraping at the window, and skulls peered in. It was very effective. However, if I did the same thing next month, it wouldn’t be as visceral. It might seem so at first, between curiosity and a handful of people who missed it last time. But sooner or later, it would become merely dull, then actually annoying.

Startling players is a great tool for Horror GMs. If paced well it can place them in a suggestible state of mind, and make a commonplace costume or effect seem much more dramatic. If put in unusual places it can keep up a mood of suspense. But it must be used sparingly or it ceases to have any effect.

Fear

Very few things in LARP actually scare players. Being in genuine fear requires a feeling of being out of control of the circumstances, along with perceiving some degree of threat. The threat can be known (we may all burn to death) or unknown (something may be lurking in the dark).

"Fear" is almost too large a category to be useful, because it encompasses two rather different emotions, which I’ll identify as dread and terror. Dread is the anticipatory fear of events known or unknown. Terror is the fear of something that is actually happening, often because it threatens loss of life. It is easier to evoke dread than terror in a LARP, because dread merely requires the imminence of something bad, while terror requires that something bad actually be happening.

Dread is the feeling of fear when walking down the hall and waiting for something to jump out of the closet.

Terror is the feeling of fear when the axe wielding maniac or undead horror is pursuing you.

There are problems with evoking fear as either dread or terror in live roleplaying games. Many players are unwilling to let go of enough control to be in surroundings where they feel genuinely frightened. If they do become afraid, they snap out of character. Fear is a very primal instinct and many cases the player will want to assert control by dealing directly with the GM and situation.

It is difficult to create real dread, and even more difficult to create real terror. The brain is a pretty crafty organ. It can tell the difference between walking along a sidewalk and being told "you are on a precipice with nothing below", and actually walking along a precipice with nothing below.

Many situations which would create terror are dangerous, or involve items or elements such as fire which can be dangerous to use in a close quarters setting.

In movies, we feel "sympathetic fear" we identify with the character and feel fear through them.

Usually this does not work in LARP because it is not possible to convincingly create the circumstance with any degree of safety. We are hard pressed to create the fear of hanging thirty stories above an abyss without substantial threat to the player’s life. And the brain is cheerfully willing to dismiss the best special effects we can muster on a standard LARP budget.

Many players simply do not want to feel fear. It is one thing to get an adrenal rush from being startled, but it is another to actually be afraid. A surprising number of people who claim to "enjoy horror" in movies and other media actually like the adrenal rush of being startled, and are really upset by or made uncomfortable by fear. They reject fear as an experience.

If one player in a group has a strong negative reaction, either during or after, it can sour the experience of the entire group. Lack of control and helplessness is central to fear, and if you poll a group of LARPers about things that they most want to experience in games, I am willing to bet that "lack of control" and "helplessness" will not even be in the top forty.

The favorable side to fear is that unlike being startled, which is really either on or off, fear, especially dread, is something that can run at various levels. Certainly you can be a "little startled" or "startled out of your wits," but one way or the other it peaks and is over. Dread has the capability to go from a small twinge in the back of the mind to a massive gnawing certainty of doom, over several hours.

All that said, here is what I have found is successful for creating fear in games.

1. Fear of being startled

It’s cheap but true that startling players dovetails with fear. More sensitive players especially may be more afraid of the monster jumping out at them than they are when a friend in a costume actually jumps out. So to a certain extent, creating situations that promise the possibility of being startled can create a mild sort of fear. However, this is at best a sort of low end "McDonald’s" fear. It may be good to ramp up the atmosphere, but it is not what you should build your entire game around.

2. Go below the threshold – sound, smell, and other subliminals

The conscious mind doesn’t fully control fear. Certain smells and sounds have some ability to cut through conscious barriers and create an atmosphere of fear. For example, unexpected noises, animal noises of certain sorts, etc. Smells such as smoke may generate fear in certain circumstances. However, these things are seldom enough to create terror in themselves. They are good adjuncts. To some extent things that are quite out of place help create terror, and those things if introduced subliminally can be quite powerful. An unfamiliar or heavy scent may make a tomb more cloying, even if the players don’t recognize it or really associate it with something that scares them.

3. Complicity

Enlist the players to help. As noted above, it is difficult to create circumstances in which players are really afraid, without introducing elements of danger. The best counter to this is that players who want to experience fear – the sort who read Hitchcock and like it – are willing to exercise substantial willing suspension of disbelief. If you tell them what you are trying to do, and enlist their conscious aid they will help scare themselves. Obviously there is some dissociation here – you can’t start a scene and say, "in this scene you’re supposed to be scared of the shambling mummy." However before the event, and between events you can try to get across the mood, and enlist the help of the players to try and psych themselves and others.

Beware, however that some players are "anti-players" in this regard. They don’t like to feel out of control and frightened, and will do what they can to sabotage mood that makes them feel that way. Worse, they accomplish this not by doing "in character" things (trying to break the mood with a graveyard joke for example) but by dropping out of character, or behaving in ways their characters wouldn’t. Complicit players can help pressure them not to spoil the mood for others.

4. Mood and the Macabre

Macabre elements can help slowly build a mood. Of course one has to draw a fine line between macabre, and humorous – the Addams family, despite being chock full of stuff that should be scary, is merely funny. In fact it’s anti-horror – it makes us feel superior and smug because we aren’t afraid of these scary things. Even so, odd characters, circumstances, and grisly things can, used sparingly, help create a mood. The best things are simple, and not too elaborate, and when possible different or new.

Certain types of people or things are symbols that evoke mood. Look for those that are effective. A plastic glow in the dark tombstone from Spencer Gifts does not evoke a macabre mood in anyone older than five, however a flower from a funeral wreath, dried and wrapped in a scrap of old fabric, might be very poignantly evocative of death.

5. Using phobias

Sometimes, you satisfy yourself by scaring some of the players, by playing on phobias. This is an area to use some caution, because you don’t want to cross ethical lines here, and play cruel psychological games on people (at least not without their explicit permission).

However certain things do scare a wide cross section of people. Heights, insects, reptiles, closed spaces, are all scary to a broad range of people. There are some obvious other things which are likely to play on phobias. Using these in moderation is a good way to cut beneath entrenchment against fear.

Be aware, however, that the invocation of an unexpected and visceral fear is one of the things most likely to make a sensitive player drop character and break the mood.

Of course phobias frequently simply don’t do anything for a lot of players. Don’t assume that because you are scared of snakes, you can put a lot of snake symbolism, or rubber snakes in a game and scare someone else. I’ve seen many scenes that fell flat because a GM assumed that what scared him would scare everyone.

It is also useful to avoid the "heebie jeebies" or "the creeps." This is a sort of subcategory of fear that deals with tactile phobias. The fear of being touched by a reptile for example. Very few people find the "heebie jeebies" exciting or fun – they tend to excite revulsion not fear. A GM who doesn’t understand the difference is more likely to annoy his or her players than put them in a susceptible mood for horror.

6. Disorientation

The GMs best friend is disorientation. Something that would not much bother you in your living room may be very frightening if you encounter it in a dark room when you don’t know exactly where you are.

Disorientation is difficult to create in LARP, because so frequently we use the same space over and over again. "What is beyond the wall?" asks the alarmed player. Well, if we know it’s "the laundry room" it just isn’t all that scary.

Still it is possible to disorient players in time, space and frame of mind.

A classic example of disorientation in space is a trick Washington Area GM Mike Young pulled for his "Dark Summonings" Horror campaign. He had his tech staff build a rather long tunnel leading into his basement door. The tunnel was built out of refrigerator boxes, and covered with plastic to be light proof. I had been in the same room numerous times through the hall door, but entering through a tunnel it did feel different and more claustrophobic. Altering space, using unusual methods of approach, disguising the walls or other features all help with disorientation.

In a game I ran about ten years ago, called Lifeboat, I did not permit the players to have any working watches. They were disoriented in time, and did not know when things were happening, and this helped build the overall mood. Usually this sort of disorientation is not possible. One reason that late night is scary is that we lose our sense of exactly what time it is, and it becomes "the depths of the night."

Finally, even if you cannot play with time and space, you can play with frame of mind. Doing things that throw the players off balance helps make them suggestible to fear. Largely this consists of doing the unexpected, or using unusual pacing, or properties, or even special effects – for example loud noises are very disorienting.

7. Darkness

Darkness gets a header all to itself. Nearly everyone is somewhat afraid of pitch-black darkness, simply because they cannot see. Darkness also hides many flaws. The costume or prop which looks shoddy in broad daylight may appear much more realistic by candlelight, or in semi-darkness. Dark confuses, obfuscates, and conceals. Use it whenever possible.

8. Danger

There is nothing to create fear like having a real reason to be afraid. Ethically it is important to inform players as to dangers, and to avoid placing them in any real risk. Like most other areas, this too is somewhat the art of illusion. Darkness, the mood, and attitude transform a situation that is slightly alarming or carries an element of risk into "danger."

While many recreational sports do this all the time, it isn’t commonly done in LARP. Most physical events trade some minor risk of injury (though very little chance of death) for the accompanying adrenaline rush. Slightly more extreme activities, which present some significant possibility of injury, and an outside chance of death, are fairly common. Skiing, snowboarding, parachuting, surfing, jetski, and BMX offer an experience that is basically "controlled danger."

There are many good reasons that LARP GMs shy from this. It is difficult to establish which players are really interested in and few GMs care to weather criticism. In the U.S., also there are insurance risks, and risks associated with responsibility.

Also because not all LARPers are athletic, many tend not to draw a line between dangerous, situations in which injury might occur, and deadly situations in which death might result (other than by freak accident). While this can be useful for creating fear, it can also be a real nuisance when players react to a situation presenting the possibility of a cut or sprain as if it presented the risk of immediate and horrible death.

Still the perception of danger can make a relatively commonplace event very much not commonplace. As people grow sedate and middle-aged, things that seemed adventurous but not overly dangerous in our younger days seem quite exciting, because they contrast so heavily with our day to day life. It becomes comparatively easy to offer an experience which is not particularly life threatening, but which has a strong "flavor" of danger.

Horror

Finally, there is the element of horror. Horror is a slippery animal to define. It isn’t fear, because it is possible to feel horror without feeling any sense of fear.

Many writers have tried to put a finger on just what horror is. A commonly held precept is that horror involves something that is inherently out of place or wrong, just as fear tends to revolve around feeling helpless or powerless. Let’s look at a classic example. It isn’t horrible that Norman Bates is a "mama’s boy." It isn’t even horrible that he kills his female guest at his mother’s instigation, though it is startling, and his knife-wielding arm is terrifying.

It is horrible that the mother that urges him on has been dead for years, yet he talks to her and answers back. The very normality of their relationship makes the fact that she is dead horrifying.

Horror, however, goes beyond being out of place. After all, much humor is built on things that are out of place. Horror must at least have a macabre tone. A fountain pen in a bowl of cottage cheese is weird, and might even be funny, but it isn’t horrifying. A severed finger in a bowl of cottage cheese is horrifying.

One quality of horror is that it suggests many things that we cannot mentally digest at the moment and may not even want to think about. It also tends to turn beliefs we have upside down. Horror creates more mental demand than we can deal with, but demands that we deal with it immediately. The encounter in Hitchcock’s classic Psycho with Norman Bates’ dead mother immediately challenges our confident perceptions about the nature of the crime perpetrated, and impels many understandings about Norman Bates and his daily life, none of them wholesome or savory.

To my thought, a quality of horror is that it suggests, but does not describe, things we do not want to know. It forces us to think of things that we don’t want to think about. Horror in this way is related to dread, but is more focused – dread forces out mind to conjure up terrible details. Horror provides a starting point and lines to color between, but forces our mind to do the coloring of the details. It stretches our mind in ways that are uncomfortable.

Lovecraft and Cthulhu

Many modern discussions of horror among those familiar with science-fiction/Fantasy or roleplaying games eventually come round to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Inevitably it is suggested that Lovecraft is brilliant because he forces the mind to fill in the details of things by an absence of detail, by a mere suggestion or outline of detail.

However, this misses one of the principal points of Lovecraft’s work. Though he lived substantially after Neitzsche, in Lovecraft’s heyday of the American 1920s and 30s, most people accepted the existence of God, or at least an ordered universe. Even Neitzsche makes man his central subject – he removes God, but the existence of the human race is never questioned – it is the central theme of the universe. Beginning in the late Victorian period, literature began to capture the suggestion that man is not alone in the universe. Lovecraft expanded this and his classic horror focuses on one idea. Lovecraft suggests that man is unimportant. He presents a view of the universe in which man is not central, in which the actions of man are in fact no more important to the central beings of the universe than the actions of a fly to a man. Moreover, he suggests that the real point and action of the universe is no more comprehensible to man than philosophy is to the housefly.

While that can still be a rather numbing emotion if you let it grip you, it has lost much of its kick in the cynical era of the postnuclear world. We are inoculated to such an idea by decades of its repetition onscreen and in writing.

This leaves an interesting phenomenon in the form of "horror" fans who are really fans of their ability to feel superior to horror. Providing one does not tend to lay awake at night wondering how long time is, modern man is fairly well inoculated against the principal horror in Lovecraft, and therefore, his work is a fairly safe read.

While the idea of being coated with tar and burnt alive makes Poe’s Hop Frog still viscerally terrifying (through identification we experience the terror), the Alien Autopsy generation finds Lovecraft’s "Great Race" quaint and harmless, and his giant squid-god fanciful but no more frightening than Godzilla. Thus a substantial number of "fans" are not horrified at all, and basically express an enthusiasm for macabre adventure stories in which their basic beliefs are never really challenged. They believe they are superior, because they read something deemed horrifying and aren’t horrified by it.

But it is the challenge that makes true Horror. The sickening, sudden, inversion of what we know is "right." "I ate whom?"

Unfortunately this means horror is heavily dependent on the act of realization. That sudden moment where everything falls into place and the gears begin to spin. This is easier in literature than live roleplaying. In The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Bierce can simply bring us back to the present in such a way that within a few words we realize that the entire narrative is but the death fantasy of his protagonist as he hangs to death. To do this in a live roleplaying context is a bit trickier.

There are two ways to achieve such realization – forced realization and self realization. Only forced realization works reliably in a live roleplaying setting.

Forced Realization

The obvious way to achieve horror is "forced realization." Opening the cottage cheese and finding a finger. There is nothing wrong with "forced realization," however the results are seldom as significant.

The drawback with "forced realization" is that it must be rather fast. Finding a finger in the cottage cheese by surprise is horrifying. Opening the cottage cheese and finding, as expected, a severed finger, is merely macabre and possibly grotesque.

This generally depends on players discovering things in such a way that they are not obviously set up to be discovered. If it is fairly obvious that a box contains a mummified human hand, there is nothing particularly horrifying about finding it. And if it is not at all certain what a box contains, but it is known to be something fairly odd and mysterious, then it isn’t all that horrifying to find something grotesque, though it may be shocking.

If, on the other hand, it is perfectly obvious that a box contains, say, a hat, opening it and finding a head is horrifying. However this requires a prop that is not a dead giveaway (i.e. it is obviously made by the GMs and has great significance),

Self Realization

The highest form of horror is "self realization," where the individual realizes and quickly propagates a horrible truth. At the end of the film Soylent Green, Thorn screams "Soylent Green is made out of people!"

But how to get such realizations across to the players, and in such a way that they propagate them so beautifully?

The only answer is craft. A carefully crafted set of clues, and an excellent group of players to field them. Only experience and care can create the moment of self realization.

Even more difficult is to propagate it so that it spreads at once among a group of players, with a significant number of them having the experience of the realization.

Self realizing horror is a great goal, but often it is better to sacrifice it for the "certain hit" of a forced discovery. Blown, it is often of no use at all.

Here are a few guidelines:

• It must be something that both player and character genuinely find horrifying. It is not enough for it to be horrifying in "game terms."
• The realization must have some "final clue" which allows everything to slip into place, but which does not demand a lengthy explanation when it is blurted out. This requires writing on a par with good detective fiction
• The targeted player or group must be at least immersed enough to "go along" with it.

Last Words…

We’ve looked at being startled, and at fear, with its two forms of dread and terror, and at horror itself. Startling, causing fear, building a sense of dread leave players psychologically open to horror. Understanding the different elements of horror may make it easier to target them, and to piece together an entire tapestry.

Likely it wouldn’t be possible to have a game based on any one of these precepts – they all need to be present, and to some degree to play off of one another, for your players to have a peak horror experience.