THOMAS GRIP
ROLE: Creative director, Frictional Games
HORROR CREDENTIALS: Penumbra series,
Amnesia series, Soma
THE MOMENT: There are many favourites, but
the one that has always stuck with me is the start of Silent Hill
(the first one). This is when you lose track of your daughter and
enter this spooky alley. The way the tension builds up as the
alley just gets creepier and creepier blew me away. The music,
the camera angles, and the imagery was something I had never
seen before.
THE ADVICE: I think the mistake many make is to just focus
on the basic scariness. Rather, I think the most important
part is to think about the narrative. So instead of just having a
spooky forest, you want to build up a story around it. You want
to give the forest some mysterious background and construct
a scenario where it makes sense for the player to be there.
Player motivation is especially important as that grounds the
player to the scene and makes it possible for them to relate
to the happenings. Then you want to have fed just enough
information for the player to have their mind running wild on
the horrible things they might encounter. Once that is all set up,
you can focus on making a spooky forest with creepy sounds
and visuals. But if you lack the narrative foundation, the whole
scenario will just come off as shallow and not be nearly as
frightening as it could be.STEVE BRISTOW
ROLE: Assistant head of design, Rebellion
HORROR CREDENTIALS: Manhunt 2, Zombie
Army series
THE MOMENT: The telephone call in the school
in Silent Hill. I expect that’s a common answer but there’s a
reason for that. I was playing it in the dark, on my own like
you’re supposed to. The timing, the atmosphere, the jump scare
of the phone ringing and then the kid’s voice saying “Daddy?”.
Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. I hadn’t played
anything like it before. It felt like real, serious, grown-up horror
at the time.
THE ADVICE: You’ve got to get the player’s full attention; get
them immersed in the moment or fully empathising with your
character. You want them leaning in. That’s one of the reasons
VR is so uniquely powerful for horror. You can literally put
your player in the scene where whatever’s going to happen will
happen to them, not their character. Audio is crucial and often
made more potent by its absence. Then the rest of it is timing
and finding a way to tap into the weird things we’ve all got
dragging their nails around inside our skulls. We were looking
at a character in Zombie Army 4 and it has an element about its
design that gives me the proper creeps... it genuinely makes
me uncomfortable to look at because it’s got a long finger like
an aye-aye (Madagascan lemur), a creature I find absolutely
repellent. I’m intrigued by those odd, personal horrors beyond
the common fears we all share. Though in this case, everyone
should be scared of aye-ayes – they are just obviously horrible.
KAZUNORI KADOI
ROLE: Director / designer, Capcom
HORROR CREDENTIALS: Resident Evil series,
Resident Evil 2 remake (director)
THE MOMENT: This is from Capcom games
actually, but the scariest moment in recent years that made
my heart stand still was in Resident Evil 7 played with VR,
the moment when Mia disappeared momentarily and then
suddenly appeared near me and grabbed my arm. Since VR
enables you to feel that something is really ‘close’ to you, it was
a very effective method to make an enemy suddenly appear
near players out of their eyesight.
THE ADVICE: It is a golden rule that you don’t show the feared
object first – make players sense its presence only by sound,
change of situation etc., and then make it appear at the most
effective and unexpected moment. But we need to always
question how we can evolve this method by [using] new ideas
and technology.
SpooktacularInterface
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