Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Honestly Yume Nikki was less scary and more just kinda eerie.
now, I will argue that dotflow was rather scary. The atmosphere in that game was almost oppressively scary.
The zombies in STALKER creep me out. They're still living humans, but their brains got burnt out by the psychic activity in the Zone.
They shuffle around, use guns (badly) to attack still-healthy humans, and mumble phrases related to their prior lives.
What really gets me is that sometimes they show up in powered exosuit armor---even the best gear in the Zone can't save you from bad luck.
Also, from the same games, the Pseudogiants deeply disturb me. One can either learn or guess at the origins of the rest of the Zone's horrors---what the HELL made the Pseudogiants and what dosed them with so much radiation that your Geiger counter clicks just from being near them?
I'm glad I didn't come into it thinking it was scary, but there are a lot of very eerie things, its just that the infinite tunnel, for whatever reason, scares me.
There is also the glitches you can do after you go to the RPG world. You have to go to a specific room and press use against the wall. Glitched tiles will start to appear throughout the room. I forgot if this leads to anything else happening.
ah right here it is, it just wakes you up after getting a fake crash.
edit: also .flow looks like it will be fun.
I like this idea because revenants lack standardisation or true consistency, therefore being fantastic tools for horror.
Rules can be scary though! Look at the scene in Pan's Labyrinth with the 'don't eat the food' rule.
Yeah, but that rule wasn't logical or anything. It made fairy tale sense, being a test of character, but it was always meant to be broken anyway. It's a different breed of rule from "sunlight kills vampires" and that kind of thing, because it doesn't provide a means by which to defeat the monster but a means by which to fall victim to it.
In fact, those kinds of rules are generally more exciting to me. One of the best is "don't look at the monster", which is kind of genius in its childlike, gut logic.
What is going on with this whole revenant shit, anyway? If I am to take it, like, as a word to describe all kinds of animated dead, then well, obviously, they lack standardisation or consistency because every effin' kind of a walking dead is included. Then it just boils down to stuff like with vampires in Discworld, you need to find out which set of standardised rules they follow and you're home. Or is it so, that you're using this word as a name of a living corpse that is not defined as belonging to any of the standard sets?
Yea. That and trippy. Regardless, the endless tunnel scared me, too, as well as the face in the otherwise unremarkable sewers.
I don't like Dead Space. Everything it does good was done at least as well by Resident Evil 4 some years earlier, and the big spooky cosmic horrors are rather easily torn apart despite it ostensibly being a survival-horror game with Lovecraft-y elements.
On that note, Eternal Darkness is a fantaaaastic game if you play through without using sanity restoration spells on yourself.
Kind of like this, but the concept of a revenant also sort of implies that the standard sets are impositions of human logic. Sort of. Because even in folklore, the "same" kind of undead varies wildly, from vampires to draugr. That's why I like to think in more general, versatile terms and why I like the idea of a revenant -- it's kind of a conceptual container for (particularly European) undead types, and easily modified.
Strictly speaking, a revenant doesn't even need to be corporeal. Or it may impose the illusion of physicality while remaining a disembodied spirit in its place of death. Stuff like that. You can never really say for sure what a revenant is.
Just look at the Revenants from Dragon Age- also called 'Corpse Walkers', they're what happens when powerful demons possess the corpse of a warrior. Quite different to most concepts of revenants.
So...you like that it can basically be whatever the writer wants it to be? Ok.
I wonder what some other not-often touched facets of Horror are.
No, it's more a thing of "The audience does not have any knowledge of what the creature is", which feeds into the audience's fear of the unknown.
So, where you are describing it for the first, second, whatever time, what do you say?
"It's called a Revenant and it does x, y, and z"?
Yeah, it's got more to do with how the audience experiences the entity than the author. But even the statement "be whatever the writer wants it to be" niggles at me a bit, because the writer may not want to settle on one thing. This is particularly important when dealing with the ill-defined revenant, since the way it's handled in folklore implies that its powers are relative to the nature of the person and how they died.
For instance, during the general societal anxiety of the bubonic plague and after, revenants were said to spread disease wherever they walked. So I consider the revenant to be "perfect" in how it integrates into different contexts. Unlike the cultural understanding of a vampire, it needn't be weak against sunlight, nor must it have a taste for human blood. There are no hard and fast rules pertaining to its creation as an entity, or any set method by which to defeat it. A revenant may or may not have a body. It may or may not carry memories from life. Perhaps it's intelligent, perhaps not; perhaps it masquerades as intelligent as a means of fooling victims.
Not only can the concept of a revenant be different from author to author, but every individual revenant can be as well. A revenant isn't only a monster but fundamentally a character as well, and they were probably made the way they are through some tragedy or abuse, making the struggles against them carry some implication of apologism. So there is no real, complete victory against a revenant.
^^ You say "It's a Revenant and you should probably like run before you die"
Sorry, I'm just trying to understand more, because this revenant stuff is interesting me.
So, the main thing is how, from the Audience's, and probably the protagonist's perspective, this monster could theoretically do anything, because they don't know the limits of what it is capable of, and that is what makes it scary?
Whenever I hear "Revenant" I picture some cross between a ghost and a zombie.
I have no idea why this is the case.
... Sort of.
Okay, look. You know the Sidhe? About how they're bound by an arbitrary set of rules such as not being able to lie?
It's like that. The audience doesn't actually know why they can't lie, and neither do the characters. They just have to deal with it.
It's sort of like that. It's less not knowing what they're capable of, and more a fundamental lack of understanding about what these things are. We don't really know what a revenant is; and it's useless to try and pin it down, because it changes depending on the needs of the story.
In some cases, it's completely understandable- the Revenants in Dragon Age, as I stated, are powerful demons who possessed the corpses of warriors. But we also don't know why. The reasons are hinted at, but nothing concrete, giving us an elusive peek at the mechanisms behind it but not letting us see how it actually works.
More or less. But you can also take "revenant" as a typology rather than an entity in and of itself -- a vampire is essentially an Eastern European revenant, for instance, and a draugr is a Scandinavian one. That's why a revenant has no rules, being a culturally ubiquitous entity in foklore insofar as Europe is concerned. And what it could do changed with the anxieties of the people that told stories about it.
To understand revenants, I suggest watching good horror movies concerning the undead -- but not zombie films. The zombie as we understand it has elements of the folkloric revenant, but is largely an African concept filtered through US counter-consumerism (and then filtered through consumerism itself). Hell, Ridley Scott's Alien film is a good place to start. Apart from not literally being undead, the Alien in that film is actually an awesome example of what a revenant might be.
Okay, I think I gotcha.
What good horror movies are about the undead but aren't about zombies?
i think the lost boys is meant to be good, but its about vampires
While not strictly about undead, The Exorcist gives a good example of senseless supernatural shenanigans. Films concerning ghost hauntings and the like are good as well. Paranormal Activity comes to mind as a good haunting movie about something that follows few if any rules.
Oh, and The Tunnel. It's an Australian film, and while the monster in it isn't said to be undead (or said to be anything, for that matter), it's a good example all the same.
Blair With Project, maybe?
Okay, I have seen most of those movies. I think I've got a pretty good idea now. Sorry, I wanted to make sure I understood because I really want to get into Horror more, especially modern horror that is good. I have seen a lot of horror movies from the 70s and 80s, but not enough ones from around this time. I know a lot of people think good Horror is dead, and I would like that perception to change, regardless of if it is true or not.
But like Juan said, Horror is the second hardest genre to write, right behind Comedy.
Does H.P. Lovecraft's style of "supernatural horror" count, based on the general definition for horror? 'cos, The Colour Out of Space was real freaky, for one thing.
Lovecraft's was... try-hard, for the most part.
There's I Spit on Your Grave which is about a rape victim who comes back from the dead to exact revenge, though I'd understand why you wouldn't want to watch that.
There's also The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service which is all about a medium who speaks to corpses. It's aq pretty solid manga.
I read that as "The Kumquat Delivery Service" for a second...
Whenever I hear "Revenant" I think of these assholes:
:V
I sure think so. Lovecraft himself might be on the inconsistent side, but the kind of horror he practiced, especially in his earlier days, was hella cool.
This, this, this.