We’re exactly 16 days away from the spookiest night of the year, and this past week we’ve been catching up on the horror genre, which led us to consider: what does horror even stand for? It depends on the person you ask, doesn’t it? To some, horror is something inherently scary - something that rustles their jimmies for whatever reason. 

What horror means

In my part of the world, horror means a lot to a lot of different people, but is most often tied to the otherworldly, especially those things that riff off Orthodox Christianity or Christian beliefs in general. Think Latin-named demons turning crosses upside down and leading people astray. I’ve heard many different stories, real-life stories, of people going through the same as the families in The Conjuring series or experiencing anomalies akin to Insidious and its host of hellspawn. 

To me, though, horror is deeply grounded in reality and what we go through day after day without even thinking about it. But once faced with the grim facts of our own world, we go into fight or flight mode, and it is within this alert state of consciousness that we find what I believe to be the crux of the horror genre. Horror, thus, is existential. It asks questions of soul, of existence, of what comes after all comes to an end, of what was there before the end began. It pits you against the unknown, forces you to ponder what hides in the dark, to consider whether the void is truly vacuous. Whether emptiness means the absence of presence, or the presence of absence. 

When boiled down to a smaller scale, we get video games like Hideo Kojima’s P.T., which places the player in exactly that position of having to go through a seemingly menial reality that slowly begins to unfold before them

P.T. remains the pinnacle of the genre  

Last week, Destructoid wrote about this new port of P.T. to PC which, believe it or not, runs natively on the platform now. Thanks to the genius programming skills of community modders (and some help from AI, which, whether we like it or not, is now omnipresent in the tech world), we can play Kojima’s fabled playable advert for his Silent Hills game which Konami later cancelled. Both Kojima and his co-creator Guillermo del Toro had nice things to say about our coverage, and Kojima even interacted with it from all of his accounts, both in Japanese and in English. 

And with P.T. now out and about like it was 2014 all over again, we took to examining what it means to us in our modern day insofar as it pertains to horror as a genre. I mean, it’s October after all, so if you were to get scared by something, might as well make it one of the best horror experiences to date. 

P.T., like I’ve said above, traps you in a loop. Everything is apparently normal, apart from the fact that you’re going through the same hallway over and over and over again. Things begin to break after a while, and we can view that as the protagonist slowly dipping into insanity as he fails to reconcile illogical non-Euclidian geometry. The room keeps repeating even though it shouldn’t, and strange events begin to emerge along the way, which, to some extent, could imply the protagonist’s desire to, well, populate this repeating space with substance and context, to make himself believe that he is still grounded in a physical reality. His failing to do so gives rise to an enemy that then pursues you, as well as to events that scare you in more traditional ways through jumpscares and ramping music and atmosphere and everything in between. 

And when you think about it, 12 years on we haven’t really seen a game pull this off to such an extent. Sure, we eventually wound up with Outlast (the devs might be working on a third one) and Alien: Isolation and had Amnesia: The Dark Descent do much of the same before. But P.T. put things into a condensed container, trimmed the extra fat, and left us with a lean, focused, and horrifying encounter with a man’s feeble mind. 

Whatcha playin’, Destructoid?

But what about you, Destructoid, what’s been spooking your skeleton this past week? Last time we asked you, you told us you were checking out RetroSpace, a first-person horror game set on a space ship swallowed up by an actual black hole. Now that takes in space no one can hear you scream to a whole new level. One person said they were getting horrified by C-Span, and with the state of US and global politics taking us toward a new global conflict, I’ve gotta say I can see the logic. 

If you want to let us know about what you’ve been getting spooked by, do check out our new poll.