Ho. Ly. CRAP.

Man, what can you say about the Japanese? Of the various notions of horror that exist as a genre, it is the Japanese who have perhaps the most unique take on the topic of making people wet their pants.

Having just put Fatal Frame II away (once and for all, I hope) I am once again reminded that the Japanese have an innate understanding of what it is to afraid; a two major components of their perception are The Unknown and Helplessness.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the series, Fatal Frame is a series of loosely connected horror games that have a common element of a device known as the Camera Obscura. In this case, it’s a camera with a special property; it can take photos of things spiritual and otherwise invisible to the living, and can exorcise hostile spirits. Unfortunately, for the camera to work at its best, this usually means having to let said hostile spirits get reeeeeeeeally close to you before taking a shot, which, when viewed through the viewer of the camera, makes for an extremely nerve wracking experience.

There are currently three games in the series, all of them using their own physically unimpressive (though cute) main female protagonist. The real star of the show however, has to be the amazing design work of the environments. In full lighting, the various period Japanese buildings would just look run down and in need of a major renovation, but put it in the dark, feebly lit by only a single flashlight, or dim candles, throw in some curtains, and add in the occasional baby cry, weeping or insane girlish laughter and suddenly these rundown spaces become an exorcise in horror so acute that many gamers cannot play these games alone, in the dark, for more than a few minutes before the stress becomes too much to bear.

It’s this lethal combination of having a likable though essentially helpless girl, and dark, shadowy places that ooze of menace from beyond the grave that make the series so effective, and quite possibly the single scariest experience legally available for purchase to consumers. I will admit that certain writers like Stephen King and Clive Barker have managed to scare me. And certain movies, The Exorcist and Poltergeist creeped me out beyond all reason, but games bring something quite special to the table that these other media cannot. They put you IN THERE, right in the middle of the action, virtually speaking, and that extra layer of involvement, that knowing–in a weird sense–that it’s not a character in the story, it’s YOU, adds an extra degree of fear, especially when you play these things in surround sound and those whispers start calling out in all directions. Suddenly, you are the person in charge, and if you know there’s something bad behind the door, you don’t have to open it, but there’s no guarantee that walking down the hall and turning the corner won’t reveal something worse, that also wants to kill you, because you are alive and it is not anymore.

I have played quite a few games that have an element of fear, but my opinion is that the Fatal Frame series shines above the rest because it doesn’t resort as often as other games to that cheapest of scares; the jump scare. Resident Evil is a perfect example of this. I’m going to spoil it now to some degree for complete unknowns, but the RE series, in its very first game, created one of the greatest scares in gaming, when, while walking through a quiet hallway, a dog bursts through the window and starts attacking you. For the most part, RE and many other games constantly resort to this easy tactic of just having something suddenly come out of nowhere, with appropriate shrieking sound effects and music. It’s a jolt, and it works, but only once.

Where Fatal Frame and to a somewhat lesser degree the excellent Silent Hill series excel is not in surprising you, or even grossing you out with gore (neither series is particularly excessive in terms of graphic depictions of bloodshed), so much as creeping you out. They don’t provide that jolt of fear that comes from reacting to something sudden or excessive, but slowly build up a sense of dread; you know you are surrounded by evil, and there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. The Silent Hill series does this by literally bringing you into a nightmarish, rusted, hellish insanity rooted in psychology and fetish. Fatal Frame does it by giving you only one weapon, your camera, and then throwing you into what–for westerners–is pretty unfamiliar territory; abandoned, haunted, period Japanese buildings. This all complemented by some amazing sound design, which, it’s no exaggeration to say, probably constitutes half the effectiveness of the fear. It’s only after a few replays and some measure of calm that you begin to understand exactly what the developers have done, combining extremely high-pitched tones, clattering of metal, the sounds of animals, pain, sadness and others for a truly unsettling effect. Then you tack on the ghosts themselves; these are not gored victims with their guts hanging out of their eviscerated body cavities. In one example, you fight a woman who has fallen and broken her neck. As a result, she stumbles towards you with her head lolling loosely on the base of her shoulders as she tries to look at you. In another example, I watched in horrified fascination as a pale hand pushed up the lid of an old trunk, and, very slowly a scarred, broken woman painfully, slowly, crawled up and out of the box, taking her time to fall to the floor and get up again, before trying to kill you. In each instance, there is no sudden jump and shrieking of violins; the game lets you see exactly what’s going on, painfully slowly, and then almost seems to ask you “What are ya’ gonna’ do NOW?”

That feeling of drea
d and helplessness is something that nearly all Western games have completely failed to capture. For example the scariest game on Western shores right now, dubbed F.E.A.R (which stands for First Encounter Assault Recon) is a first person shooter. Yup, you’re a big tough guy, with guns, grenades and all manner of destructive weapons at your disposal. The game then throws this Asian style of ghost at you, but more liberal amounts of blood and–yep, you guessed it–a lot things suddenly jumping out at you.

It’s a shame too, because it’s an enormous waste of potential. Games, more than other medium, have a capacity to get an adrenaline surge out of the player, whether it’s fear from failing/dying a segment of the game, or the more ambitious goal of making a player afraid to sleep with the lights off. The Japanese have found a way to take small amounts of the supernatural and tease it just enough into a more realistic setting (most importantly, with more realistic people) that even when you turn the game off, the experience lingers. In the West, for the most part, once the excitement of shooting and having things jump out at you wears off, it’s easy to walk away from the experience with only a vague recollection of the excitement that was had, as opposed to the irrational terror You Are Not Safe Anywhere that games like the Fatal Frame and Silent Hill series manage to convey.