The Campaign Builder's Guild

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 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, which looks to be all about isolation (awesome trailer).

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.

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 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.