Horribly Indescribable IV: Terror Incognita

Returning from the brief hiatus of the past few days, which can mostly be put down to a case of the Man Flu (Manthrax/Hebola/Manengitis/etc), today I will continue my series of articles on the techniques of the horror genre as applied to larp.

Next up is terror, which I initially described as "perceived vulnerability in the presence of uncertain fears". This is clearly related to dread in that both fundamentally rest on ambiguity and fear of the unknown; where they differ is in the sense of threat, and in the powerlessness of the subject in the face of that threat.

The difference can be difficult to fully tease out, but I think that it is worth trying to differentiate the two, as they have slightly different roles to play within what one might refer to as the methodology of fear. Where dread might be considered the unsettling backdrop, a kind of emotional ambiance, terror provides a more acute emotional effect - the !!! to the ??? of dread.

As with dread, less is frequently more. The exact nature of the threat need not be specified in order for it to be effective, so long as there is a clear sense of threat. The monster that is only glimpsed as a silhouette against the window is often more effective that the one that can be seen in the light - and, on a pragmatic level, this kind of obfuscation hides a multitude of sins when it comes to physrepping.

There are various that increase vulnerability, and thus susceptibility to terror; as with dread, feelings of disorientation serve to be a useful driver of this effect. Disorientation inherently messes with threat perception by putting one on edge; when you cannot trust your perceptions or knowledge of your surroundings, then vulnerability is an entirely predictable feeling.

In considering discontinuity as a driver of terror, it is worth mentioning the use of "bait and switch" techniques. An effective method is to provide a source of dread which leads players towards certain assumptions, followed by a countervailing shock - the signalling of a high-threat event that is in conflict with those assumptions. Consider, for example, following a mysterious trail of blood down a twisting, poorly lit corridor (dread), then reaching a dead end only to suddenly hear a the noise of a slamming door far behind you (shock).

More potent even that this disorientation is the effect of isolation. By forcing a small number of characters, or a lone individual, to face the terror alone, the feeling of vulnerability is heightened. This ties into something quite deep and ingrained in the human psyche, the childhood fear of abandonment which never fully goes away even in adulthood - even in the absence of other sources of fear, it is something that people tend to find profoundly unnerving. Whilst isolation need not be physical, this is often the easiest kind to achieve; in general, the feeling that should be aimed for is that others are either unaware, unable, or unwilling to provide aid in some manner.

As final point on the subject of terror, it is worth mentioning that, unlike dread, terror is a difficult emotion to keep up for an extended period of time. This is where the tension-release cycle comes back into play - periods of fearfulness should be interspersed with calmer periods, if only to prevent players from burning out. In this schema, terror should come at the climax of several tension-release cycles, across which there is a slow but steady ratcheting up of the perceived threat. One could consider it to be something like this:

Horribly Indescribable III: Judging Dread

Following on from my previous posts on the subject, today I am going to continue to share some of my thoughts of the use of techniques and tropes from the horror genre in larp. Today, I am going to be writing about dread, which I defined as a kind of fearful apprehension or anxiety that emerges from the ambiguity of perceptions. In essence, it is the fear of the unknown, combined with the human tendency towards apophenia.

As I alluded to in the previous article on shock, the key to the horror genre is more to be found in the set-up than in the payoff itself. Dread and terror are the two primary drivers of the tension which heightens the emotional payoff of the eventual shock.

Whilst I initially defined dread as concerning ambiguities of perception, it is probably more accurate to say that it is caused by ambiguity in the meaning of a perception (though pareidolia can also be an effective creator of tension). The trick here is that some aspect of what is seen must point towards a vaguely defined threat, without making the nature of that threat entirely clear.

The golden rule here is that the nature of the threat should not be shown directly. Less is more, and the imagination can almost always serve up greater fears than anything which can be created in the external world. 

Even despite this, preserving ambiguity is often difficult. Larpers are generally a fairly genre-savvy bunch, and there is often a tendency to pick up on the use of staple tropes of horror when they appear. One might consider the more general application of the "Don't Show the Monster" to be "Never Tell Them Enough" - in horror, knowledge is power, and the restriction of knowledge is thus vulnerability. The less that is solid, the more that rests on speculation and guesswork, the less certain players and their characters will be of what to make of ambiguities.

Undoubtedly, dread is most effectively produced when it is expected; by priming players to expect that they will feel scared, one creates something of a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby the process of apophenia will already be functioning, at least on a subconscious level, well before any dreadful elements are introduced. Indeed, I suspect that merely be advertising a larp as "horror", one sets up a set of assumptions and expectations in one's players which will predispose them to experiencing this kind of dread and fear.

There are a few other cheap tricks that one should consider for invoking dread. Firstly, is the use of disorientation, the alienation of the individual from their surroundings. Restricting the ability of the player to perceive their surroundings is an effective method of unsettling the mind, one of the reasons that darkness is such a driver of dread. The ability of the individual to determine direction and distance can also be restricted through forcing players to take winding and circuitous paths from one area to another; the more maze-like an area can be made, the more effective this is likely to be. Disorientation in relation to time is trickier, and has numerous logistical difficulties (for example, in relation to players with health issues requiring regular medication), but can be deeply unsettling. The most effective of all might be thought of as "discontinuity", in which players are conditioned to distrust their memories - objects can be moved, doors opened or closed, or even entire areas rearranged, for example.

Another cheap, but effective, trick is to use the principles of Pavlovian conditioning to make an association between a particular sensory phenomena and the existence of some manner of threat. The ways in which this might be done are infinite; subtle coloured lighting, low-volume ambient sounds or white noise (or the abrupt stopping of such); or, to take a cue from the infamous Projekt Ragnarok, the sounding of an air-raid siren shortly before some reality-melting horror was about to occur, which has left several larpers of my acquaintance, myself included, breaking out in nervous sweats several years later. Similarly, some former players of Winter in the Willows may still have an instinctual twitch reaction to this rather innocuous song.

It is generally advisable to build up the feeling of dread slowly and inexorably. One might begin with a relatively mundane opening, progressing to a vague sense of wrongness, before introducing more and more sinister elements and finally emerging into the outright horror. The longer that one delays the introduction of a shock, the greater the impact. One might begin with relatively mundane ambiguities (Was that door open before? What was the noise outside?), moving to the more sinister (Why are there eyes chalked on the so many of the walls? What was that scraping noise behind the locked door?), and bring to a head with high-threat ambiguities (Was that a window breaking? Why have the lights suddenly gone off?).

One of the best examples of this process in horror cinema is the original Blair Witch Project. Spoilers follow, but frankly, it's been seventeen years since the film was released (a fact that suddenly makes me feel unaccountably old), so I don't feel too guilty about dissecting it here. The film begins slowly, with the protagonists interviewing various locals about the folklore of the area (foreshadowing), before heading into the woods where they camp for the night. The next day they move deeper into the woods, uncertain of the exactly where they are on the map (disorientation). They find some mysterious cairns in the woods, and the next night hear snapping twigs around their tents (ambiguous perceptions). The next day they attempt to return to the car, but get themselves further lost; again there are some unusual noises around the camp at night. The fourth day sees them continuing to wander in the woods, stumbling across a grove filled with mysterious stick-figures hanging from trees (ambiguous meaning); that night, things escalate further with the sound of children laughing in the woods, and unknown forces shaking the tent. This pattern of gradual escalation increases throughout the film, but at no point is the ambiguity of what is occurring ever resolved, even at the climax of the movie.

All in all, that's not a bad model to be aiming for.

Horribly Indescribable II: Shock and ARGH

Following on from yesterday's  post, I am going to spend the next few posts discussing the different kinds of horror, and how they can be used in the context of larp. Today, I am going to begin with a discussion of "shock", which I defined as the "response to a sudden stimulus whist in a state of heightened arousal". This, arguably the most primal form of horror, is deeply embedded in the brainstem and occurs on an automatic level - which is perhaps why it is so commonly invoked across various media.

The startle response is the neurological basis for this kind of horror - automatic reflexes which are fundamentally tied to survival instincts. Startle responses can be triggered by multiple different sensory modalities - visual, touch, proprioceptive (as in the instinctive response to the sensation of falling, so beloved of Inception) - but the most potent is probably the response to auditory stimulus.

This, the acoustic startle response, is the one most often taken advantage of by jump scares in film and other media; though it is usually the case that there is a visual component to focus the shock, it is generally the auditory component that drives the response. Whilst a very effective method of inducing amygdala hijack and the fight-or-flight response (CW: jump scare), this approach can be rather unsatisfying.

The classic jump scare comes in three parts - and here I'll quote Bryan Bishop's excellent article in The Verge:

In fact, a well-done jump scare breaks down the same way Michael Caine describes illusions in The Prestige, with three distinct steps. First there’s the pledge: a character is introduced into a situation where danger is present. They hear a rattling in the kitchen, or voices when they’re home alone. Then comes the turn, where the character finds a reasonable explanation, or the immediate threat is somehow removed. Everything seems alright, and the audience lets its guard down. That’s when the filmmakers execute the prestige, hitting an unsuspecting audience with the actual scare — usually accompanied by a shrieking music cue or sound effect

One major problem is that it is very difficult to keep up any degree of pay-off if one relies overly-much on jump scares - if you're following the classic three-part setup, things can get predictable very quickly. Spring-loaded cats aside, there aren't many ways of varying the formula.

It is worth noting that the impact of a jump scare depends greatly on the amount of build-up that comes before it. The excellent (and free) Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion is an excellent example of this - shock rarely works alone, and even cartoonishly ridiculous shocks can be effective if one is suitably anticipating it. This ties into a lot of the material that I'm going to talk about in a later post, and is tied into the cycles of tension that create a rising feeling of dread before the payoff of the shock.

There is good evidence that startle reactions are greatly increased when one is already in a condition of stress, or otherwise in a state of anxiety- these clinical findings can be fairly easily related to casual observations around the tension cycle if we consider one of the main methods by which dread primes us for a shock to be the induction of hyper-vigilance. This also links into questions of the effect of concentration on the potentiation of the startle effect. Research suggests that when attention is directed to a startle-inducing stimulus the response is amplified, which one could surmise from playing a couple of Scary Maze games (CW: jump scare, obv.), or, if you prefer, Scary Flappy Bird (CW: Flappy Bird, and probably a jump scare. I don't know, I'm so terrible at Flappy Bird that I can't get beyond the first couple of pillars, and have thus never actually seen the end of this one).

The reverse also seems to be somewhat true - directing attention away from the sensory modality of the shock seems to decrease startle responses, though only in introverts. It's one of the few INTP superpowers, I guess.

How does this all translate to larp, then?

Shock can be an effective driver of play, but one should be careful of its overuse. Horror elements can create a great degree of emotional intensity, which is often desirable in a larp, but the emotions that repeated exposure to this kind of fear tends to bring up are not especially productive ones. There are safety concerns as well - whenever you try to invoke the fight-or-flight response, there is a reasonable chance of the former kicking in. Nobody wants to be the crew member that jumps out of the bushes to scare the players, and ends up with a point-blank crossbow bolt to the nads.

Another safety note - it's always wise to try and have a good idea of any phobias that players may have, and to avoid using those (or, indeed, any other common phobias) in jump scares. Panic attacks are not generally the kind of emotional state that one wishes to inspire in one's players.

This is not to say that one shouldn't use this kind of scare. One of my most memorable larp experiences was at the first Dark Tempus, when the sudden unexpected appearance of a zombie caused one of my group to involuntarily throw a glass of scotch all over it as we struggled to draw our weapons. But if you are going to use shocks, then use them well.

The tension-release cycle is perhaps the most important aspect here, and one which I will talk of more in later posts. One should aim for a cycle of Dread => Shock => Calm => Dread etc, rather than Shock => Calm => Shock => Calm. The former, in telegraphing the upcoming shock, will make it all the more effective; the latter rapidly falls into Cat Cannon territory, with sudden unpredictable shocks coming out of nowhere leading more to confusion and irritation than fear.

Stimuli do not necessarily need to be overwhelming in order to trigger a shock if the tension has already been built - a quiet voice in a pitch-dark room thought to be empty may be far more effective than a full-blown screaming monstrosity appearing with no build-up whatsoever.

It's worth playing with sensory modalities, though note that the auditory seems to be the most effective. In this, larp has an advantage over many other media, as all senses can potentially be commandeered towards the creation of experience. Sound and vision are potent, especially when combined; but there may be avenues of interest to explore in touch and proprioception. Touch, particularly, has a sense of violation about it, which can trigger strong feelings of fear and revulsion - the latter of which is an integral feature of horror, as I'll discuss later.

The potentiating effect of attention should be drawn upon where possible; if a player is engrossed in some activity that is requiring their full attention, then it not only makes it easier to set up the shock unnoticed, but the impact of the shock is greatly increased. A certain amount of bait-and-switch misdirection can be used here, a technique which I will discuss later in the post on Terror.

Finally, there is what one might term the Anti-Cat Technique. This, which might be described as "scar the character, scare the player", requires shocks to have a meaningful impact; they should represent credible threats or be somehow significant in the greater scheme of things where possible. This can of course be subverted - but the subversion is only effective when the majority of shocks are meaningful.

Horribly Indescribable, Or Indescribably Horrible?

Well, it's been a while.

It's been a long hiatus, but here I am, back in the world of blogging. Eagle eyed visitors may note that I have merged my two earlier blogs - Beep Beep Jeepform and Overly Honest Occultist - into some kind of hybrid rebus. If I was being highbrow about it, I would talk about trying to bridge the interdisciplinary barriers between various subjects, and say something about the nature of storytelling as a fundamentally magical act, and magic as a fundamentally artistic, aesthetic practice, and so on and so forth. But, if I'm being honest with myself, it was mostly due to laziness.

This month, in lieu of my usual failed attempts at NaNoWriMo, I have decided to attempt something a little different - a blog post every day (or there abouts) in the style of the spectacularly-named NaNoBloPoMo, working through various things that I feel like rambling on about in the vague direction of an audience.

Just too late for Halloween, in this and the next few posts I would like to talk a bit about horror in LARP - not the UK LARP Facebook Group, vile as it is, but on the use of themes and techniques from the horror genre as applied to LARP.

I'd first like to define a few terms, and say a little about the neurobiology of fear. An early definition, coined by the Gothic writer Ann Radcliffe, defined terror as the feeling of dreadful anticipation that preceeds the experience, and horror as the feeling of revulsion that occurs after something frightening has been experienced. One might thus cosider terror to be a form of anxiety, and horror a more direct stress-response.

Stephen King devised a system including three types of fear: Revulsion, horror, and terror; the first being fairly self-explanatory, the second encompassing the fear of the unnatural, and the third encompassing phenomena that disrupt one's sense of reality. These seem to give a reasonable overview of different types of fear, but I think it's possible to differentiate things a little more: I would propose a catagorisation based on dread, terror, shock and horror.

Dread and terror are states very close to one-another; they both describe feelings of uncertainty and fearful anxiety. Dread, I feel, rests more on the ambivalence of perceptions (What was that sound? Is there something moving in there? Where does that trail of blood lead?), whilst terror rests more on one's perceived vulnerability in the presence of uncertain fears (Hiding in the cupboard as the killer prowls through the room. Trying to outrun the werewolves. Being tied to a chair as the interrogator noisily executes the previous captive). Shock is what one experiences in response to a sudden stimulus whist in a state of heightened arousal (The skeleton falls from the closet. The ghostly scream. The voice from the darkness). Finally, Horror can then be thought of as a combination of revulsion and inevitablity (Being trapped in the room as the thing slowly rises from the bathtub full of blood. Waking up inside a coffin).

The neurobiology of fear is a relatively well-studied area, which deserves some mention. The primary route of action is through the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for mediating various hormonal and neurological mechanisms involved in the fight-or-flight reflex, such as causing the release of the stimulat hormone adrenaline, and the constriction of blood vessels in the digestive tract and skin in order to shunt more blood to skeletal muscles in preparation for physical activity.

Within the central nervous system, the fear response is primarily mediated by the amygdala and the limbic system in general. Damage to the amygdala has been reported to cause an inability to feel fear, and, apparantly, a lack of sense of personal space, which I am almost certainly going to house rule into all D&D Paladins from now on. And which arguably explains a lot about Warhammer 40k's Space Marines (CW: 1d4chan).

Fear is generally thought of as being the result of conditioned responses, though the more primative fight/fight/freeze responses are often considered to be innate and termed "species-specific defense reactions" (SSDRs). These can be considered to be instinctual and immediate reactions, often occuring before there is any conscious processing; this can also include the immediate induction of emotional states in a process sometimes known as amygdala hijack.

The process by which fears are learned is a form of associative (Pavlovian) conditioning, mediated by changes in synaptic plasticity that increase the sensitivity of pre-existing neural pathways, and by the action of the hippocampus and neocortex. Long-term changes in synaptic plasticity are thought to be a contributing factor in the formation of phobias, and in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Whilst these physiological reactions are fairly universal, the psychological and emotional processes involved in fear are somewhat diverse; a reductionist view might be to pin these differences on dopamine, and though there are numerous other factors that are likely to feed into one's experiences of fear, it seems likely that dopamine responses are likely to play a role in whether or not one enjoys the feeling of horror, especially after the fact.

So, where from here? Over the next few days, I will look into the four divisions that I outlined above, and look at how these concepts can be applied in LARP.