The Campaign Builder's Guild

I'm curious - what's your favourite horror genre and why?

Breakdown of categories:

Gothic Horror – I like my horror to be resemble the classic tales of terror, full of romance and suspense and creeping dread.  Examples: Dracula, The Monk, most of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles.

Body Horror/Splatterpunk – I like my horror to be intense, grotesque, graphic, and visceral, to fixate on terrifying or disgusting scenes of intense violence or of hideous transformation and degeneration.  Examples: Cronenberg's films, Clive Barker's horror stories and novels, Alien.

Psychological Horror – I like my horror to be ambiguous and unsettling, to dwell on the personal psyche of the characters – their fears, neuroses, phobias, anxieties, and traumas.  Examples: The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, most of Hitchcock's films, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Cosmic Horror/Weird Horror – I like my horror to involve eldritch forces that utterly dwarf humanity, terrifying in their sheer overwhelming sublime indifference, their alienage and alterity.  Examples: the stories and novellas of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and William Hope Hodgson, John Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy," Event Horizon.

Religious Horror – I like my horror to draw on real-world religions and mythologies, to harness a feeling of sacred dread; bring on the Satanic babies, possessed teens, and killer demons!  Examples: The Omen, The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, many of the horror tales of Arthur Machen.

Survival Horror/Apocalyptic Horror – I like my horror to pit the protagonists against the natural world or against seemingly unstoppable odds, forcing them to the extremes of human ability to survive a harrowing situation.  Examples: The Walking Dead, The Descent, 28 Days Later, Deliverance.

Surreal Horror – I like my horror Freudian and non-sensical, nightmarishly illogical and anarchic and unsettling in creative and unexpected and bizarre ways; however it horrifies, it always does so strangely.  Examples: the films of David Lynch, House of Leaves, Alice in Wonderland, some of Kafka's stories.

Horror-Comedy – I like my horror to be mixed liberally with humour, to be both ridiculous and unsettling all at once; the humour can be black, but it's still always present to some degree, and the horror can be intense, but it's always shot through with the absurd.  Examples: Shaun of the Dead, The Cabin in the Woods, Gremlins, Beetlejuice.

Obviously, the above are almost never discrete categories or neat genres, and this list is incomplete: we might add an ever-narrowing series of subgenres like action-horror, science-fiction-horror, backwoods horror, torture porn, etc, but I think the above work fairly well as umbrella terms.  The Shadow Over Innsmouth is Cosmic Horror but also Body Horror and Psychological Horror, The Great God Pan would be Religious Horror and Cosmic Horror and perhaps a bit of Body Horror thrown in at the beginning, The Turn of the Screw would be both Gothic and Psychological Horror, etc.

...

My two top choices are Body Horror and Cosmic Horror, which I think is interesting since they sum up two extremes of scale.  Body Horror is all about personal transformation and infection, about the feeling that something is inside you (and, of course, it's about guts).  When you stop and realize that we are all made of meat and let the implications of that sink in, that's the essence of Body Horror.  It's a "zoomed in" genre, in-your-face and intimate and highly corporeal.

Conversely Cosmic Horror is all about how all-inspiringly gigantic the universe is, and how little it cares about us; it's an existential genre that draws its horror from a sense of monstrous scale and about how utterly other the universe is.    It's a "zoomed out" genre about gulfs of time and space and things that are too big or too inhuman or too abstract to be fathomed.

Those two things, weirdly, are both just kind of everyday facts about the universe that are pretty startlingly obvious but which we don't care to think about much, and both genres rely on exposing those facts and exploiting the subsequent anxieties.

Now, why I like to be reminded of these two somewhat depressing realities is a harder question to answer...

I like fiction that teases out the nastiness in natural human conduct, or in conduct we won't accept as natural even though it happens all the time. I'm talking Elephant or Wasteland or The Act of Killing. It's about the way we treat the things in ourselves and in others that we choose to confront but refuse to examine. When I put "horror" in my games it's usually this.

That fits with your unique sensibilities!  I'd say that broadly speaking the closest subgenre your description resembles is Psychological Horror, although it sounds very social and amorphous, more about politics and the way we build a society.  Still, Psychological Horror, at its best, is about holding up a mirror to aspects of ourselves with which we're uncomfortable, and that sounds kinda like what you're talking about.

My question, too, isn't just about gaming per se; maybe this topic should've been in the Dragon's Den, actually...

Sociological Horror, perhaps.

Yeah, interesting... a big overlap with Dystopian fiction.  Horror is always bleeding into other genres anyway: science fiction, fantasy, mystery, comedy, tragedy, satire.

"Sociological Horror" is a tricky thing to categorize since a lot of documentaries and real-world representations of events fit in.  The kind of horror evoked by something like genocide or slavery seems, to me, of a fundamentally different type than the aestheticized form of horror you usually find in horror fiction; we react to it in a pretty dramatically different way.  There tends to be less delight or pleasure in experiencing horrors of that ilk, I think, in part because they're so mingled with affects like guilt, shame, and pity.

I like Psychological Horror quite a bit, but when it came down to it I'm just more interested in Cosmic and Surreal Horror. The former because I like how it mocks our human need to understand and quantify, and admire how it operates outside those parameters - it leaves me asking why and wanting more even though I understand that knowing those answers would ruin it. It's a terrible temptation that keeps me thinking of it for days on end and makes it linger. I like the latter for similar reasons, but also because where Cosmic Horror can have a certain grandiosity to it, Surreal Horror can be very down-to-earth (no pun intended) and "close." I think it can stem from psychological horror and yet creatively expand upon it with vivid manifestations and strange occurrences. Psychological horror can be subtler, I think, but I like my strangeness to be large and in-your-face and unsettling.

I was tempted to put Body Horror, but that's a genre I "enjoy" in the same manner people might gather around a gruesome traffic accident - horrifying and grotesque, but difficult to look away from. It's a genre I find most unsettling and horrifying in the worst ways, and I have to respect it for that... but whereas Cosmic and Surreal horror I can usually walk away from with my interest piqued, Body horror leaves me wishing I had walked away much earlier.

Psychological and survival. I'm a huge fan of the horror that comes with isolation in my games.

My games tend towards gothic horror more than anything, lots of dreams and undead strangeness, though the large use of sensitives to undead also means there is a psychological element.

My combats often end up something out of SPlatterpunk.

I had no idea there were so many kinds of horror.  This may be partly because I don't have much experience with it - I've read/seen only a tiny handful of the listed works.

I tend to not enjoy horror very much.  "Body horror" in all its types just grosses me out, and isn't enjoyable.  "Cosmic horror" seems to just be an evocation of existential dread, and I can get that just by staring at the night sky or watching Cosmos.  I enjoy some Hitchcock films, but in general "psychological horror" tends to bore me.  I may just not have a terribly refined sense for the genre.

I suppose the variety of horror that appeals to me most is the strange and the unknowable, forces and creatures that are "out of synch" with the world.  I like weirdness, though I think I tend to prefer "weird and wonderful" to "weird and unsettling," or for them to at least coexist, which I suppose is why I like strange fantasy but I don't much like horror.  The horror genre focuses on the dreadful, scary, or otherwise negative implications of weirdness, and I prefer my weirdness to be more positive, or at least more ambiguous than that.

Quote from: PolycarpThe horror genre focuses on the dreadful, scary, or otherwise negative implications of weirdness, and I prefer my weirdness to be more positive, or at least more ambiguous than that.

This is actually why I GM Cadaverous Earth. I was never sold on the "horror" of the setting (sorry, Steerpike!) but it was easy enough to shift from weird and unsettling to weird and wonderful with a simple perspective tweak.

That's OK, SA; Cadaverous Earth may be horrific, but it's not just a horror setting.  More of a weird dark fantasy/science fantasy post-apocalyptic setting with horror elements...

Quote from: Polycarp"Cosmic horror" seems to just be an evocation of existential dread, and I can get that just by staring at the night sky or watching Cosmos.

I think that in a sense this is absolutely right - cosmic horror is just a particularly evocative version of regular-old existential dread.  As usually understood it's about unfathomable, alien entities; sometimes they have contact with humanity, viewing them as vermin or slaves or food or playthings, but they're rarely malevolent in the classic Good vs. Evil sense.  In the words of Lovecraft:

"The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space...  The one test of the really weird is simply this -- whether of not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere the better it is as a work of art in the given medium."

Quote from: PolcyarpI suppose the variety of horror that appeals to me most is the strange and the unknowable, forces and creatures that are "out of synch" with the world.  I like weirdness, though I think I tend to prefer "weird and wonderful" to "weird and unsettling," or for them to at least coexist, which I suppose is why I like strange fantasy but I don't much like horror.  The horror genre focuses on the dreadful, scary, or otherwise negative implications of weirdness, and I prefer my weirdness to be more positive, or at least more ambiguous than that.

You might like some of Algernon Blackwood's stuff.  Try the much-renowned story The Willows (http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/11438/pg11438.html) if you're interested in reading more stuff of that type; it's kind of a horror story, but not really.  Blackwood is essentially an optimist, and is as-or-more interested in wonder and awe as he in horror per se.  He's also just an all-around fascinating guy: a British Evangelical who become a quasi-Buddhist mystic, occultist, and amateur paranormal investigator, traveled extensively in the Canadian backwoods, climbed mountains (and often skiied down them afterwards), and eventually segued into radio broadcasting and early television, all on top of being one of the most prolific weird fiction authors of the early twentieth-century.

You know, I had prepared myself to read the opening post, shake my head, and say "I guess horror just isn't my genre", but I guess I like a lot more of this than I realized I did.

I checked psychological horror on the poll, but I also really like the surreal stuff, and I suppose I'd probably be into a little bit of gothic horror if I ever got around to reading the classics. I do like the "creeping tension of the unexplained" aspect of things.

I have a hardcover complete works of Lovecraft on my bookshelf that I bought at Barnes and Noble because it was on sale for three dollars, and never got around to reading. Maybe I ought to?

I don't dig religious horror because there's always some kind of element in there that makes me roll my eyes. And I know I absolutely don't have the stomach for any sort of body horror, though I guess in a game format where we're talking and reading in prose rather than going to the  movies, I might have an easier time coping with those elements.

Quote from: Luminous CrayonI have a hardcover complete works of Lovecraft on my bookshelf that I bought at Barnes and Noble because it was on sale for three dollars, and never got around to reading. Maybe I ought to?

Lovecraft can be a joy to read.  I sincerely consider him one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century, contrary to some who dismiss him as a hack or who denigrate his purple style as bad writing, as if minimalist writers were automatically superior.

That said, the big things that can be a turn-off when it comes to Lovecraft are (1) the almost complete absence of dialogue in all but a few of his stories, (2) the undeniably racist anxieties that underlie much of his horror writing (check out "The Horror at Red Hook" sometime and see if you can get through it without throwing the book across the room; Lovecraft wrote it during his miserable time in New York, when his racial neuroses reached their fever peak).

Since the collection is complete and there's no order to the tales I'd try At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, or "The Call of Cthulhu," as those are the highwater marks in my book.  The Dunwich Horror is pretty good, too, and The Whisperer in Darkness is creepy and fun in a kind of cheesy 1930s B movie sort of way.

EDIT: If Lovecraft doesn't work for you but you find the idea of cosmic horror intriguing, Ramsey Campbell is great, too, but more modern (and better at dialogue) than Lovecraft.  I actually like a lot of his entities more than Lovecraft's.  Although that might be because there's often an element of body horror in his stuff.  His later stories stray away from the cosmic a bit - I think he sort of exorcised Lovecraft as an influence in the 1970s...

I appreciate Lovecraft's imagination but I got burned out on him pretty quickly.  The stories always struck me as really repetitive; once I had read a few, I'd basically read them all.  I think part of this may have to do with the subgenre itself, because "cosmic horror" is almost by definition a plot-free zone - the "cosmic horror" has no personality, no discernible goals, no characterization.  It's not really good or evil, nor is it really a protagonist or antagonist; it's just there, which is sort of the point, but means it forms a more or less inert part of the backdrop.  The Lovecraft stories that are best known or stand out often evoke horror within the plot primarily through other means (e.g. the body horror in The Dunwich Horror), and existential dread is just a re-used set piece.  It doesn't seem like very fertile ground for more than a short piece of evocative writing (though fortunately for Lovecraft, that's exactly what he did with it), and it doesn't help that the writing itself can get repetitive.  Take a shot every time you see the words "cyclopean" or "nameless" and you won't just have a wild night, you'll end up in the hospital.

Quote from: Lmns CrnI don't dig religious horror because there's always some kind of element in there that makes me roll my eyes.

I feel sort of the same way about this.  Religious horror often takes the form of "sinister Catholicism" which seems faintly ridiculous; maybe it's more credible among those whose knowledge of Catholicism is limited to "weird dudes in robes speaking ominously in Latin."  I very seldom see examples of religious horror that are not either explicitly Catholic or Catholic-fantasy-equivalent, so maybe I'd enjoy it more if it was based on a tradition I was less familiar with.

Quote from: PolycarpTake a shot every time you see the words "cyclopean" or "nameless" and you won't just have a wild night, you'll end up in the hospital.

:D

A chapter of my dissertation actually focuses on the repetition of the word "nameless," and on what namelessness means for Lovecraft, how it operates in his fiction (specifically with regard to disgust and cosmicism).

It's true that too much Lovecraft in a short sitting can get repetitive, and that "pure" cosmic horror can be sort of empty-feeling unless it's mixed with something else.  This is why The Shadow Over Innsmouth is all kinds of awesome, in my opinion: it's a story that's not just about the vast, abysmal horror of the sea, it's got the creepy, possibly diseased, possibly degenerate villagers and a brilliant action-oriented set-piece and a long, rambling interlude from an old, crazy drunk, and all sorts of other stuff that makes the story work.  But you're quite right that plot isn't the important thing for cosmic horror, atmosphere is.

As for religious horror, there's just not much of it that's any good.  The Catholic thing is interesting; arguably it could be a hold-over from the strong anti-Catholic streak that was common in England in the 18th & 19th centuries, especially among some of the early Gothic writers, but a lot of religious horror these days (especially in film) sort of validates the Catholic cosmology.  My personal favorite for religious horror (at least on film) is Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, but it's kind of a deconstruction and isn't really pure religious horror, exactly; there's definitely a Lovecraftian element to it.  Although I must admit, the remake of The Omen was quite (http://media.kino-govno.com/images/omen666/omen666_3.jpg) pretty (http://phimvang.com/uploads/www/2012/11/14/the_omen_2006_1600x1200_746174.jpg) to look at...

My favorite horror is what I guess you would call abandonment horror. I guess it would almost be considered a combination of psychological and survival horror. It's the concept of being cut off from any help with no hope of rescue (generally while the monsters are coming for you). You see it in a number of thriller novels as a sort of dark cloud of possible horror hanging over the protagonists (one example of this is Jurassic Park). One of my favorite stories that utilizes this heavily is Stephen King's The Langoliers. The SCP Foundation site also as a number of these sorts of stories SCP-432's (http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-432) expedition links are a good example of this.

Yeah, you've mentioned that before - that kind of horror of loneliness thing.  It's that moment when the radio stops working or the power goes out - that moment when someone says "We're cut off."  This is why islands and rural settings work so well for horror.

Or that moment in "The Children of the Corn" when the protagonists enter Gatlin and find absolutely no one there, but there's a tremendous feeling of being watched, a palpable sense of dread that's amnbient and non-specific.  There's something Very Wrong but you can't point at what it is, exactly, or where it's coming from.

Nomadic, have you read House of Leaves?  You might like it.

Also you should check out the upcoming horror game The Forest (http://survivetheforest.com/), which looks to be all about isolation (awesome trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQgVj9tBQG0)).

Quote from: Steerpike
Yeah, you've mentioned that before - that kind of horror of loneliness thing.  It's that moment when the radio stops working or the power goes out - that moment when someone says "We're cut off."

Or that moment in "The Children of the Corn" when the protagonists enter Gatlin and find absolutely no one there, but there's a tremendous feeling of being watched, a palpable sense of dread that's amnbient and non-specific.  There's something Very Wrong but you can't point at what it is, exactly, or where it's coming from.

Nomadic, have you read House of Leaves?  You might like it.

I haven't read house of leaves. I suppose I will have to get my hands on a copy. I suppose there's just something enjoyable in a twisted sense in that whole idea of being trapped and alone while the horror of the unknown closes in around the main characters. There are a few real world examples of this, my favorite being the Odessa Catacombs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odessa_Catacombs).

Edit: That game looks awesome.

Can't say I'm really partial toward any sub-genre. Cosmic and psychological horror probably interest me most out of these options, but that may just be due to their subject matter rather than their actually being more enjoyable to read/watch. Never seen much appeal in gothic horror, although my view may be too fixed on cliches and tropes recycled in pop culture. Horror-comedy I see as being enjoyable mostly for the comedy part, it's just so hard to get into a proper mood to appreciate the horror aspects. Body horror I find tends to invoke feelings of revulsion and disgust more so than feelings of dread.

Quote from: Polycarp
I very seldom see examples of religious horror that are not either explicitly Catholic or Catholic-fantasy-equivalent, so maybe I'd enjoy it more if it was based on a tradition I was less familiar with.

Wouldn't familiarity with the source religion be required to understand what is supposed to be so horrific there, though?

That's an interesting question, Ghostman, about religious horror.  I'm trying to think of some counterexamples but so much horror either uses a Christian cosmology or an invented one.  Arguably something like The Great God Pan would qualify as pagan horror, and I do think it helps to be familiar with Greek mythology to fully appreciate it.

Very interesting that psychological horror is so high on the list, body horror so low.  You guys are a cerebral bunch.

Quote from: Steerpike
That's an interesting question, Ghostman, about religious horror.  I'm trying to think of some counterexamples but so much horror either uses a Christian cosmology or an invented one.  Arguably something like The Great God Pan would qualify as pagan horror, and I do think it helps to be familiar with Greek mythology to fully appreciate it.

Very interesting that psychological horror is so high on the list, body horror so low.  You guys are a cerebral bunch.

This makes me curious: for the settings on the CBG considered to be under the horror umbrella, how might each be classified? Cadaverous Earth has already been mentioned, but we must have at least a handful of other settings that can be labeled as such.

EDIT: I guess this applies more to instances of horror, given that a setting might not be solely about running from zombies or being brain-devoured by Cthulhu. So, when it comes to everyone's projects past or present, what kinds of horror would you say you were going for? What kind did you actually achieve (if any)?

Quote from: GhostmanWouldn't familiarity with the source religion be required to understand what is supposed to be so horrific there, though?

Horror sort of requires unfamiliarity, though.  The mundane does not have the capacity to horrify unless you twist or change something about it.  Some familiarity is probably helpful - pseudo-Catholic religious horror is probably better if you know a little bit about the Christian worldview and Catholic traditions.  With too much familiarity, however, horror of any kind seems destined to turn into parody.  To me the Catholic Church is just a really old bureaucracy, and it's about as credible a setting for horror as the Internal Revenue Service or the local homeowner's association.  

I mean, I'm sure you could pull off some IRS/HOA psychological horror, because you can pull off psychological horror anywhere you have people, and there are people in our neighborhood homeowner's association who genuinely are soulless monsters.  But "religious horror" is not just psych-horror that happens to be set in a church, it implies that there is something about religion itself that is fertile ground for horror.  To me that's not really true for Catholicism, which seems to be the common subject of a lot of religious horror.

This might be a little like the concept of the uncanny valley, where the height of discomfort is not experienced with no familiarity or total familiarity, but somewhere in between - the object is familiar enough to remind you of normality but just unfamiliar enough to for you to know that something's wrong.

Quote from: HoersThis makes me curious: for the settings on the CBG considered to be under the horror umbrella, how might each be classified?

Spaceships, Sixguns, and Cyclopean Horrors is cosmic horror.  The second adventure I ran for it, "A Fistful of Tentacles," also had some disgusting body horror elements.

Fimbulvinter was designed to have a survival horror/mytho-religious horror element.

Tempter isn't horror exactly, but again it has elements of religious horror.

With regard to some other people's settings, Polycarp's Clockwork Jungle comes to mind - it has some lovely body horror elements with the Saffron Peril.

Quote from: PolycarpThis might be a little like the concept of the uncanny valley, where the height of discomfort is not experienced with no familiarity or total familiarity, but somewhere in between - the object is familiar enough remind you of normality but just unfamiliar enough to for you to know that something's wrong.

Freud has a lot to say (http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf) about the uncanny and horror.  Subsequent critics have made much of his theories of the uncanny, for good or ill.

Quote from: SteerpikeVery interesting that psychological horror is so high on the list, body horror so low.  You guys are a cerebral bunch.

Me, personally, I'm just squeamish.

Yeah, I agree with that.  Which is why I find Steerpike's categorization of the Saffron Peril as "body horror" to be amusing - I mean, I guess it is in the same way that zombies are "body horror," but I usually think of body horror as being a bit more grotesque or bizarre than merely the walking dead.  Maybe zombies are just over-exposed these days.

I read passages like this and definitely see body horror:

Quote from: PolycarpThe Peril itself expands only slowly, but when it corrupts a plant, this plant's seeds and fruit become carriers of thousands – perhaps millions – of tiny spores. A fruit corrupted by the Peril may look fine on the outside, but inside the flesh is putrefied and suffused with vile spores. It takes only a single careless bite for an animal to be infested.

An animal so afflicted will experience horrid pain as the moss grows within flesh. Its hair will fall out and its skin will start turning pale and yellowed. In several days, its skin will begin sprouting moss. This is more than most creatures can bear, and typically the victim is driven into agonizing madness as the moss corrupts even the mind. Wracked by pain and insanity, the creature will inevitably die or be put out of its misery by another – and then the Peril can truly work its evil.

To me the Moss is creepy not because it produces zombies, but because it gets inside you, under your skin, and then slowly consumes you.  The idea of your skin sprouting moss is just beautifully unwholesome and horrible.  It's the transformation process that really brings the Moss into body horror territory, I think.

I'd agree with steerpike there. I always liked the idea of the Saffron Moss because of the body horror idea. Horror is often horrific because it presents a loss of control in which the character is at the mercy of something they have little to no say over. With body horror this can often present itself as what you almost might call a loss of control over your own body to something nefarious. The Saffron Moss is a perfect example of that. How horrific must it be to a creature to have something like that invading its body (a place many would consider their most sacred space) with the ultimate goal of "stealing" that body from its owner.

Right.  A lot of horror depends on things that threaten our conception of what it means to be an individual, a subject or "self."  This is why we find disgusting things disgusting: they threaten our boundaries in some way.

Fair enough.  Incidentally, that part of the Peril was almost accidental - in my original conception it merely "grew over" dead things.  That had some rather peculiar cultural and ecological implications, though (e.g. this would create a world in which virtually everyone was cremated), and ultimately I decided to make it what it is now.

It was mostly scary to me for the "cosmic horror" - a weird infestation that is literally one big entity with one mind.  As I mentioned with cosmic horror, it functions best as part of the scenery, something that's threatening and unsettling in the background but which doesn't really form part of the active "plot" as such.

I suppose I tend to associate the term "body horror" with a sort of gory gratuitousness, and maybe that's not a fair characterization.  There are a lot of "horror" things that I just find gross rather than compelling, but things like parasitism show up a lot in my writing (particularly in the CJ, I think), so maybe I'm a little more partial to it than I thought.

Yeah, I think there's a scale of sophistication in body horror.  On the one hand there's your Hostels and your Saws - ugly, lowbrow gorefests that at are really only aiming for shock value and crude nausea.  And then on the other end you have things like Alien or Hellraiser or even something like May (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwytTsUy0kg).

May was a delightfully creepy little flick. 8/10 would watch again.

One thing about campaign settings and horror that's kind of strange/unique is that frequently, horror doesn't take place in an invented world but in our world, in the here and now - in part, perhaps, because seeing the familiar world get disrupted or violated or rendered unfamiliar is more jarring than seeing the same in a fantasy world.  Freud claims that "The imaginative writer may have invented a world that, while less fantastic than that of the fairy tale, differs from the real world in that it involves supernatural entities such as demons or spirits of the dead. Within the limits set by the pressupositions of this literary reality, such figures forfeit any uncanny quality that might otherwise attach to them."  I think there's some truth to this claim.

Okay. I'll be the hick here.

Horror-Comedy gets my vote:

Tucker and Dale v. Evil
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1465522/
Absurdly hilarious slasher-genre spoof

Army of Darkness

Some of the non-trashy "Scary Movie" movies.

-
I can't really take most horror movies seriously. I laughed during most of the Exorcist and Signs and Gremlins.

I found John Carpenter's The Thing more interesting than frightening.
and Dog Soldiers was more of an action movie than a horror.

The ones that aren't ridiculous are boring.

Saw was interesting and the first one at least was neatly put together, but it was not innately scary...I did find parts of it disgusting, however- so that's a reason I don't watch much horror- I don't particularly want to see blood and gore. I can "stomach" gore, but I'd rather not have those images in my head.

So... I suppose I avoid most general horror movies because they either seem as thought they might be long and plodding and boring; or they're too bloody and annoying to watch.
-
If I hadn't only voted for one, for my second, I would have chosen "No Horror genre" or possibly "gothic horror", because it's silly...but once again, I only enjoy the gothic/cosmic pieces that don't take themselves too seriously- like Lovecraft or Poe or Hawthorne.

--
That probably should come as no surprise to those of you who are familiar with my contributions to the CBG...

Well, Gremlins you're supposed to laugh at, and Signs is kind of so-so as a movie.  But I take your point.

Gothic is pretty silly, sometimes.  The Castle of Otranto is practically Pythonesque in places.

You run Call of Cthulhu sometimes, don't you Light Dragon?

Yes indeed I do run Call of Cthulhu!

I suppose you're getting at asking what type of horror I focus on with those types of games.

Isolation is a focus; the horror knowing that those with you are humans, yet that inside those humans is the capability for 'monstrous' acts is another- I set the characters up with pre-sets who have reason to backstab others at convenient times.

One I ran had the players near Srebrenicia in July 1995. I had a UN soldier, a serbian scholar, a serbo-croatian army deserter with a plan, a bosniak who was trying to pass for croatian, a kidnapped Chinese Ambassador, and a reporter all holed up in a castle during shelling while the horror that happened in real life was going on just outside. They were menaced, in turn, by forces of nature as a storm arose, animals (the UN soldier had a bit of a nasty run-in with a bear), loss of power, their own backstabbing agendae, military shelling, bloodthirsty troops, cthuluesque powers hidden in the rotting castle, and more. Several players ended up killing each other before the night was out. I can't say that anyone was frightened by it or disturbed, but they did find it exciting and I hope that some reflected on human nature... they created their own hopelessness... the scenario was survivable if they could work together, but they were, by their pre-set personalities, almost doomed to fail. I think a few walked out alive, but only a few... the reporter and the serbo-croat I think were the only ones who made it out alive.  The game did have its own amusing interval... when the UN soldier went mad, he latched onto a simple garden toad that had freaked everyone out because I kept describing the **** thing every few minutes as it hopped around. The soldier kept insisting that the toad had special powers. This got him gutted because he was in the words of one player: "beyond redemption" after he started licking the toad and carrying it around on his head.

--
Cannot say I was previously familiar with Otranto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_of_Otranto, but the description does seem mildly comic. I also find parts of Gormenghast amusing- it's so seriously GRIM that it's hilarious in the over-description.

Quote from: Light Dragon
The game did have its own amusing interval... when the UN soldier went mad, he latched onto a simple garden toad that had freaked everyone out because I kept describing the **** thing every few minutes as it hopped around. The soldier kept insisting that the toad had special powers. This got him gutted because he was in the words of one player: "beyond redemption" after he started licking the toad and carrying it around on his head.

Could you let his player know that they're my hero. This is amazing (you too for successfully instilling toad-driven chaos into your group).

Interesting, Light Dragon.  It sounds like for that game political-military concerns were almost more important than the Lovecraftian horror elements - is that a fair assessment?

Also, was that player Coyote Camouflage by any chance?

Quote from: Light DragonI also find parts of Gormenghast amusing- it's so seriously GRIM that it's hilarious in the over-description.

Definitely an amusing novel.  The Twins in particular crack me up all the time, as does Fuschia.  Although I don't think Gormenghast is very horrific, much as I love it with an all-abiding passion.  Weird, yes; surreal, yes.  Maybe some of Steerpike's machinations (especially when he really goes off the deep end) might come close to horror.

"Boy in Darkness" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_in_Darkness) is horror, though.

Quote from: SteerpikeSince the collection is complete and there's no order to the tales I'd try At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, or "The Call of Cthulhu," as those are the highwater marks in my book.  The Dunwich Horror is pretty good, too, and The Whisperer in Darkness is creepy and fun in a kind of cheesy 1930s B movie sort of way.

I would absolutely second all of these; Innsmouth and Whisperer in Darkness especially.

Quote from: PolycarpThe stories always struck me as really repetitive; once I had read a few, I'd basically read them all.  I think part of this may have to do with the subgenre itself, because "cosmic horror" is almost by definition a plot-free zone - the "cosmic horror" has no personality, no discernible goals, no characterization.  It's not really good or evil, nor is it really a protagonist or antagonist; it's just there, which is sort of the point, but means it forms a more or less inert part of the backdrop.

Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath is sort of a nice subversion of the norms of standard-issue HPL cosmic horror. It's got a much more goal-driven protagonist, and the story has more of a point to it than "some guy discovers bad shit is happening and slowly discovers the supernatural nature of said bad shit before said bad shit shows up to ruin his day."

Quote from: PolycarpI feel sort of the same way about this.  Religious horror often takes the form of "sinister Catholicism" which seems faintly ridiculous; maybe it's more credible among those whose knowledge of Catholicism is limited to "weird dudes in robes speaking ominously in Latin."  I very seldom see examples of religious horror that are not either explicitly Catholic or Catholic-fantasy-equivalent, so maybe I'd enjoy it more if it was based on a tradition I was less familiar with.

It's funny, but the mythos depicted always seems to have more in common with certain Evangelical Christian elements than with Catholicism. I think Catholicism's popularity has mostly to do with its iconography, ceremony, and hierarchical nature. But the horror very frequently deals with possession, demons as a source of sin, and an apocalyptic focus. It might be interesting to tweak the focus onto some other theology (like predestination or the idea of people being born elect or not-elect) or iconography (like from Orthodox or Evangelical Christianity).

Quote from: HoersThis makes me curious: for the settings on the CBG considered to be under the horror umbrella, how might each be classified? Cadaverous Earth has already been mentioned, but we must have at least a handful of other settings that can be labeled as such.

EDIT: I guess this applies more to instances of horror, given that a setting might not be solely about running from zombies or being brain-devoured by Cthulhu. So, when it comes to everyone's projects past or present, what kinds of horror would you say you were going for? What kind did you actually achieve (if any)?

The Arm has a bit of body horror or body-horror-based slapstick at the moment, despite being overall more weird fiction in a fable milieu. Hopefully that captures the gist of what I'm going for, though I'm not sure it will.

Quote from: beejazzDream Quest of Unknown Kadath is sort of a nice subversion of the norms of standard-issue HPL cosmic horror.

I agree with this (although Dream Quest isn't one of my favourites, it's still a good story).  When Lovecraft wrote it he was going through what some critics have thought of as his "Dunsanian phase," when he was really, really into Lord Dunsany to the point where he was kind of writing pastiches of Dunsany stories, with all the weird quasi-Asian deities and King James Bible phraseology.  Dream Quest is the last great Lovecraftian story in the style and mode of Dunsany; after that he really exorcises Dunsany's influence to a large degree and starts writing what we tend to think of as more classically Lovecraftian fiction, i.e. the Mythos.

Quote from: Steerpike

Quote from: beejazzDream Quest of Unknown Kadath is sort of a nice subversion of the norms of standard-issue HPL cosmic horror.

I agree with this (although Dream Quest isn't one of my favourites, it's still a good story).  When Lovecraft wrote it he was going through what some critics have thought of as his "Dunsanian phase," when he was really, really into Lord Dunsany to the point where he was kind of writing pastiches of Dunsany stories, with all the weird quasi-Asian deities and King James Bible phraseology.  Dream Quest is the last great Lovecraftian story in the style and mode of Dunsany; after that he really exorcises Dunsany's influence to a large degree and starts writing what we tend to think of as more classically Lovecraftian fiction, i.e. the Mythos.

I haven't quite read all of Dunsany, but between Tales of Three Hemispheres and Gods of Pegana, I think he's got a few of the same issues that make Lovecraft less accessible. His wanderers, unlike Randolph Carter, are a little more aimless and touristy by comparison. I wasn't aware of the timeline, but I kind of wonder both why he picked up such a goal driven character in aping Dunsany, and dropped that model in his later work.

In general I think that, for Lovecraft, character doesn't really matter much.  What matters are the grand vistas of weirdness, the unease, the atmosphere, the sense of wrongness; characters, people, humanity, are kind of besides the point, at some elemental level of things.  In Dream Quest I think the protagonist's quest is basically an excuse for Lovecraft to describe a bunch of strange lands and creatures - as opposed, say, to the way that Elric's character is important to Moorcock's writing, or Conan's is to Howard's, or something.

You are the master of punctuation.

Quote from: Steerpike
In general I think that, for Lovecraft, character doesn't really matter much.  What matters are the grand vistas of weirdness, the unease, the atmosphere, the sense of wrongness; characters, people, humanity, are kind of besides the point, at some elemental level of things.  In Dream Quest I think the protagonist's quest is basically an excuse for Lovecraft to describe a bunch of strange lands and creatures - as opposed, say, to the way that Elric's character is important to Moorcock's writing, or Conan's is to Howard's, or something.

If I read the ending right, Carter is one of the few Lovecraft protagonists to actually change something on a cosmic scale. Sure he's just an excuse for the travelogue most of the time, but he's far from insignificant.

[spoiler]I was pretty sure Nyarlathotep sort of tricks Carter into taking the sunset city back, thereby forcing the gods of earth back onto Kadath. It's been a while though.[/spoiler]

That's true, beejazz, and is a moment that's strangely "plotty" for Lovecraft.  "The Dunwich Horror" - a personal favourite but one which some critics quite malign - in some ways has a similar ending.  I like it when Lovecraft's protagonists get little victories, even if there's a sense that in the big scheme of things they're pretty irrelevant.

Steerpike is quite the wordsmith; but, the real master of punctuation:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1997/06/09/1997_06_09_110_TNY_CARDS_000378543

(Keep in mind that the web content is shortened from the original... thus the inappropriate ellipses)

I will try to respond to the rest later. :)

Alas, all the punctuation skill he had had had had no improving effect upon his legibility.

Mine has to be Cosmic Horror, if I'm reading that correctly: things from beyond.

That sums it up.  Cosmic horror is horror of the unfathomable, the unknowable, the unkennable; things are certainly central to it.

I don't think "unknowable, unfathomable, unkennable" is the whole of it. For me, cosmic horror works best when the threat is tremendously remote (or unapproachably massive) but potentially comprehensible. When the entity is genuinely "unknowable", I find it difficult to differentiate them from forces of nature, like extinction-level comets or the slow decline of our Sun. Such inevitabilities are a little depressing, but not particularly frightening.

Yeah, those words aren't perfect... what I mean is, cosmic horror tends to be about things that exceed our understanding in some way.  A comet or a dwindling sun are perfectly understandable even if they're motiveless.  The Great Old Ones are in some sense "beyond" us, at a metaphysical and epistemological level.  They're mysterious - maybe "potentially comprehensible" at times, although usually understanding them brings its own dangers.

Quote from: Nomadic

Quote from: Light Dragon
The game did have its own amusing interval... when the UN soldier went mad, he latched onto a simple garden toad that had freaked everyone out because I kept describing the **** thing every few minutes as it hopped around. The soldier kept insisting that the toad had special powers. This got him gutted because he was in the words of one player: "beyond redemption" after he started licking the toad and carrying it around on his head.

Could you let his player know that they're my hero. This is amazing (you too for successfully instilling toad-driven chaos into your group).

The player very much appreciated hearing that from you!

And thank you to for the other comments.

The toad has become a bit of a running gag in our Cthulhu games. I think it's been in about  5 sessions and it has only actually been magical in one, though I switch up its roles from time to time. Toads have been magical, natural, familiars of witches, and statues; so, the players never know what to expect--that keeps them 'concerned', if not afraid. Never knowing what to expect (the unknown) is a good tool to have when creating a work of horror.

For example, we did a 1902(?) post-Boxer-Rebellion Mummy/Indiana Jones-esque session in Xi'an, China (home to the tomb of Qin Shihuangdi and the terracotta warriors).  In that game, the players had some intel from farmers and they headed off to excavate the tomb. The players were a Diplomat/Supervisor from Great Britain who was looking to make a grand discovery, an insufferable anti-monarchist Russian Professor/Archaeologist who was brought along for his historical expertise,  a sham/cheat Missionary/Guide who knew the area and who could 'deal' with the locals, a Mercenary from Texas for protection "Tex", and an Arab Merchant/Fence who funded the Diplomat's mission because the Diplomat, in the wake of the boxer rebellion, had been specifically forbidden from this type of exploration. After making it past the tomb's defenses, some later-built Buddhist sutras hidden in man-made caves above the structure and crawling down into it, they came across the statues of two massive stone toads (there are statues of this sort in parts of China), which had gems pried out of their eyes. (The gems, and skeletons of the thieves, were found later)... After falling through rotten wood, the players came across the river of jade and the river of oil, which led to the tomb. The players eventually dodged the rare Chinese wildman, the Mongolian death worm, Terracotta warriors, and other thematic nastiness, but the toads loomed large in the players' minds.

Maybe I should start a thread where people talk about one-off settings for Cthulhu. Is that something that would interest people? I've always found that the historical one-off format has been good for Cthulhu.

Quote>>Also, was that player Coyote Camouflage by any chance?

Good guess; but no--it was someone else.

Quote>>Interesting, Light Dragon.  It sounds like for that game political-military concerns were almost more important than the Lovecraftian horror elements - is that a fair assessment?

I can see how you came to that conclusion from what I wrote; but, I'd say they were balanced. To some extent, people have control over their politics and how they react, but to a greater extent, Lovecraftian cosmic forces and determinism comes into effect- the players have a difficult time working together and therefore they become truly alone. The house was haunted, bats flew, people were hypnotized (by the vile professor), and there really was an ancient alien artifact hidden in the castle that distorted time/space dimensions and acted as a portal of 'weirdness', changing the subatomic interactions in the area and allowing animals to pass through walls, allowing cats in boxes to be both alive and dead and stinking profusely of rot, allowing the executed massacrees screams to be transposed several km distant and echo in the players' ears.

On the subject of Lovecraft-
I will admit, I did find one of his works borderline frightening, but part of that was I set up an excellent tone setting in which to read it.
http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/dreamswitchhouse.htm

Dreams in the Witch House.

Classic scary story of a haunted house.

I read it in a log cabin at 2 in the morning in the middle of nowhere by a lake. I couldn't sleep. I got up from bed, cracked open a jacketless book that was musty and was printed in the 70s. Its color was red. Its paper smelled like rot. And it had only been checked out twice before, according to smudged stamps on the library card that was inexpertly glued to the back cover and which was peeling off. The mustiness of the book and the squeaking of actual rodents and the raging thunderstorm outside made that experience quite savory.
-
The first Lovecraft novel I read is one that most people would hate- the Dream Cycle. I wouldn't really recommend people to start with it unless they are fans of old school 1E DnD. Reading that and seeing the ghouls transported me back to old DnD gameplay, where you go through the dungeon, interact with weird ghuls and other creatures in a Gothic-Dunsanian-landscape.

My least favorite Lovecraft piece- Call of Cthulhu... there's nothing too special in it. Music of Erich Zann does some things better thematically with its calling attention to the madness of artists and their connection to the unknown. And for scale- at the Mountains of Madness, which is like a pulp John Carpenter's The Thing- does scale so much better. At the mountains of madness is one of my absolute favorite tales... and the RPG supplement Return to the Mountains of Madness is likewise excellent. The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, is my other favorite. Lovecraft had range in style. My three favorite of his works are very different types of literature. One is ghost story horror, another, a sci-fi mystery adventure-horror, and the third is more classic Americana Hawthorneian horror (If I recall properly).

Dreams in the Witch House is pretty great, and I can see why it might keep someone up (is that just the cat, or is that Brown Jenkins at the foot of the bed, scuttling around in the darkness?)

Quote from: Light DragonI read it in a log cabin at 2 in the morning in the middle of nowhere by a lake. I couldn't sleep. I got up from bed, cracked open a jacketless book that was musty and was printed in the 70s. Its color was red. Its paper smelled like rot. And it had only been checked out twice before, according to smudged stamps on the library card that was inexpertly glued to the back cover and which was peeling off. The mustiness of the book and the squeaking of actual rodents and the raging thunderstorm outside made that experience quite savory.

Goddamn, that is like the best possible way to read Lovecraft.  That or like a creepy attic or an abandoned building in Providence somewhere.

Have you read "The Lurking Fear"?  It's an early one but I quite like it.

I tend to concur that The Mountains of Madness is a high point.  I still like "The Call of Cthulhu," particularly some of creepy investigation scenes with the artist and in Louisiana (racist/anti-miscegenist undertones aside, though they're kind of hard to miss, those scenes are quite evocative) - but I agree it's not his best.