The haunted house genre subverts our idea of home as a place of safety and escape. This is, after all, an era in which there is no certainty and no escape – the sociopolitical horrors of the world follow us to our TVs, smartphones and tablets they chase us on to social media. This year, two other titles Allison Road and Visage will make similar explorations of the old haunted house genre, and both put the emphasis on psychological fear rather than spooks and jump scares. There was also the excellent Layers of Fear, in which an increasingly unsettled painter fights to finish his major work in a house that is constantly shifting and changing. Last year saw the prescient We Happy Few about a dystopian society controlled by an Orwellian state obsessed with media manipulation. Visage is another game of domestic horror. The Baker family are the rednecks, the deplorables, taken to their absolute limits. Whether consciously or not, Capcom has taken its latest title into a place of symbolic fear and resentment for metropolitan Americans. Although obviously developed in Japan, it’s fascinating that Resident Evil 7 should take as its setting the American rural south, feeding into the horror mythology of the sociopathic redneck that cinema explored in the 1970s, through the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Deliverance and others. If horror entertainment really does reflect the fears of our times, then we should be entering another period in which the monsters are our neighbours, and the venues are our homes and towns. In short, we entered an era of mass, localised suspicion: who or what did my neighbours vote for and why? If they don’t think like me, what else are they hiding? In a debate that took in immigration, patriotism and identity politics, the impulse on social media was to ‘other’ those who held opposing views, to represent these people as intrinsically different, even alien. In the aftermath of both the EU decision and the US election, there was an outpouring of uncertainty and alienation people took to social media to express their incomprehension – families with differing political views turned on each other.
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Whatever your political persuasion, 2016 was filled with seismic sociocultural shocks, with Brexit and Donald Trump being the standout examples. But it also feels like the right time for horror games to turn in on themselves.
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Of course, there are commercial reasons for Capcom to revert to the style and structure of its original Resident Evil games: fans of the franchise were becoming alienated, and there were better military action games out there. Those games had epic battles, hordes of monsters and well-armed soldiers, and the pace was more akin to a military shooter than a classic horror experience. It’s an enormous re-direction from the previous two titles in the Resident Evil series, which took the originally tense and slow-paced formula of the survival horror genre in a more action-orientated direction. What he discovers however, is psychopathic family, who imprison him in their supernatural lair. Set in a nightmarish version of rural Louisiana, the story has everyman Ethan Winters stumbling on a seemingly abandoned plantation mansion while searching for his missing wife, Mia. This is why Resident Evil 7, released this week to much critical acclaim, is an interesting benchmark for where horror video games are right now, and what they say about the world around us. Horror cinema, with its in-built tropes of shock and tension, has always provided a convenient way for culture to process real-life fears. Later the chaos and bloodshed of the Vietnam war inspired a cycle of cynical, anarchic and bloody movies such as Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Wes Craven’s Last House On the Left, in which the rules of civilised society collapse amid senseless, numbing violence. In the 1950s, Cold War paranoia led to a spate of films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers about aliens hiding among us, looking to destroy humanity from within. H orror movies have always reflected and explored the political climate of the eras that produced them.