The Horror, The Horror!

Funnily enough, I haven't been playing many games, what with the moving house malarkey and all. I must say, the 360 was one of the last things to be packed, just in case I had a moment to just sit, or even something to sit on. Of course I didn't ever get that moment. However, I did get duped by British Telecom into believing that my broadband would be a seamless transition. What a fool!

Apart from voluntary Internet separation on holiday, when was the last time you were wrenched from the comforting womb that is being online? Exactly! Before the move I was assured that it would be put on Monday, so I'd be able to work. The reality was two days of phone calls, haranguing and sighs of disbelief later, I still had no broadband.

Rage ensued. How did we survive without the Internet – it's kind of like trying to live without fire. If the Prometheus myth was being written today, he'd be stealing the Internet, not fire, from the gods, you can be sure of that.

To top it all, we'd decided to throw a Halloween house of the damned warming party. Of course we would normally communicate via email, but now this became a textathon via mobiles. Hence, by the time the party arrived I was so ready to be transformed into a demon – deliverer of hellfire and damnation.

When it comes to Halloween, there's nothing like plundering movie references to dress the house and yourself. Yes, I did buy a red lipstick, especially so I could scrawl REDRUM across our bathroom tiles and I did have the original Nosferatu playing in the living-room. In true Dawn of the Dead style, a zombie shambled his way around the party.

Literature was also inspiration for a lot of costumes. We had a Terry Pratchett incarnation of Death, complete with Death of Rats, as well as an Anne Rice vampire. V from V for Vendetta made an appearance, flying the flag for comics, but where were the videogame references?

Horror games are a well furnished genre with the likes of Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, and Resident Evil. They're all very successful at scaring the bejeesus out of me and offer some memorable gaming moments. However, they're kind of the end of the line when it comes to inspiration.

Arguably, horror began with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the success of Dracula, along with Poe, Lovecraft and others spawned a cultural phenomenon. Cinema quickly adopted the conventions of literary horror and ran with them. Horror movies have given us some of the most iconic figures and moments in cinema – Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Michael Myers, man standing under a street light and of course Freddie and Jason.

Even Hollywood is struggling to bring us new horror. It's no coincidence that now Japanese horror has been reworked and squeezed for all it's worth, the old originals such as Amityville, Omen and Halloween are being revisited. For revisited also see "ruined."

When it comes to making horror games, all the conventions are third hand, having already passed through the filter from literature to film and now from film to game. Okay, so each medium has its own benefits, games' being that you are firmly in the shoes of the protagonist and have some control over their actions. But games haven't brought us a new brand of horror; they're just doing the same old thing in a slightly different way. Cats jump out of cupboards and maniacs chase us with chainsaws – didn't that all happen in the 80s already!?

Don't get me wrong, horror games certainly do the trick for me, in terms of scaring the holy crap out of me, but they're just not as iconic as their literary and cinematic counterparts. Nobody came to my party as thingemy bob from Silent Hill or a big pink rabbit with blood on them – although that would be freaky. And where the games failed, the movies have succeeded once again. Turn up in a ripped red dress brandishing a shotgun and we'll all go "Resident Evil – cool."

I think games have the scope to reinvent the horror genre and titles like Killer 7 went some way in opening new avenues.

Silent Hill has always been the most inventive in terms of delving dark corners of the human psyche and I haven't had the mettle to get to the end of one yet without a bit of company.

Horror games have more to offer us, give us some iconic horror figures and show us something that hasn't been borrowed from cinema and give us new costume ideas for Halloween. That's what it's all about after all.

Most played: Soul Calibur (Dreamcast)

Most wanted: Assassin's Creed

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