Game Design Musings Episode 001: 6 Rules of Horror!
So relatively recently i watched Alien for the first time and although i didn’t find it remotely scary, years of watching comedy sci-fi appears to have completely desensitised me to the xenomorph, not that i will be giving quiche a chance any time soon, it did get me thinking about how horror stories work.
If you’ve ever watched Alien you may have noticed that the titular Alien doesn’t actually appear in full till the very end of the movie, and even then that’s after it’s ceased being a problem for Ripley and the radioactive particle clouds that were her peers and thus doesn’t need to create tension anymore. Not showing the monster benefits the movie because the unknown scares people.
Scary!
This reminded me of Chuck Jones’ rules of RoadRunner, which if you haven’t heard of them are a set of 9 guidelines he used to write satisfying to watch road runner cartoons, so I thought I’d try and do the same for horror movies. First some definitions: