 James Sunderland killed his wife, but now the memory is repressed. Of course, this is only a revelation that dawns on both him and us at the end of the game, and so for the duration of our dalliance, we share in his confusion. He is drawn to the town of Silent Hill by a letter from his deceased wife. His curiosity only tempered by the haunting inkling that what he finds will only lead to his ruin. United in our disorientation, the player in James wander the fog-cloaked streets of Silent Hill, a town that manifests every person's worst nightmares. To get him to the realization that it was he, not tragic circumstance, that murdered his beloved, Silent Hill has a plan. Pyramid Head, an invulnerable monster, stalks our protagonist, an imposing phallic presence introduced to us violating some mannequins. Its jarringly animalistic indulgence in its baser instincts is not arbitrary shock-surely. This is a Japanese horror game. There is symbolism to go along with the sadism, right? Regardless, Silent Hill 2 expertly walks us through the many circles of hell-only guilt that could manifest. He wanders the streets aimlessly looking for direction, confront creatures whose presence is telegraphed by the shrieking of a radio. Conditioning is real even though the hell-scape of Silent Hill is not. We meet many others walking through their own personal renditions of purgatory. But it is only when we meet Maria, an eerily similar facsimile of our dead wife Mary, that our sins become clear. James killed his wife because she had a terminal illness. Pyramid Head is a walking metaphor for his repressed desire, an invalid wife could never satisfy. Dignified death and euthanasia are euphemisms that are only temporary remedies to the truth that is murder and guilt, a burden only solved by amnesia. Silent Hill 2 is not a heroic quest of mythological proportions, its monsters are not lovecraftian freaks of cosmic horror. This is a character study. After coming to the accommodating realization, both James and us have some options. We can kill ourselves, surely an admission of defeat. We can leave accepting what we have done, something even armchair psychiatrists would recommend. Or we can leave with the new and improved version of our dead wife, an act that simply repeats the events of the past. Silent Hill 2 is fascinating in that it bridges the divide between eastern and western forms of fear. In his GDC talk on the game, producer Akira Yamaoka talks about how the game was meant to be a Hollywood style horror experience, but the development team's Japanese roots inevitably seeped into the design. He claims that the difference between eastern and western horror is that the former has stories of sadness, loneliness and contemplation, whereas the latter has monsters and gore and more overt types of terror. Design wise, eastern horror is usually about lonely surgeons through wide open space, eliciting fear through more subtle means, whereas western horror has more jump scares. Silent Hill 2 does both though, it has horrific creatures of the night, but there are symbolic expressions of the protagonist's mind. Silent Hill is a space for existential contemplation, but there are still dynamic jump scares littered about. It has western protagonists, but its themes and story have an undeniable Japanese charm. He also suggests that ambiguous storytelling and confusion is an integral part of eliciting fear in the player, and music that does not prompt resolution but is intentionally discordant is how we prime paralysis. Silent Hill 2 wheels these tools with expertise, blending cinema and music and the design of space itself to perpetually keep players on the precipice of madness. Horror games have become entrenched as one of gaming's most prominent genres, starting with Alone in the Dark, but then driven into the mainstream by games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. These developers have also established themselves as the most prominent purveyors of fear, but this seems an anomaly of our medium. In his essay, Screams on Screens, the author shows how horror literature's most prominent voices are all from the western canon, whether Bram Stoker or H.B. Lovecraft. In cinema, early movies like Frankenstein set a clear template, but German expressionists and the film noir tradition consolidated a distinct aesthetic. However, the essay also highlights how the horror of every era is always somewhat an expression of the anxieties of the culture it arises from. Horror after World War II and the Vietnam War were not the same as before, with more biological and nuclear and psychological themes becoming manifest. Think of the anxieties exemplified by the hills have eyes, versus night of the living dead or a psycho. Japanese horror shows its own trajectory though, and is also rooted in its own cultural anxieties. In his essay The Anthropology of Fear, the author explains the origin of the many themes we see in Japanese horror. After World War II and the dissolution of state Shinto, many small groups splintered off creating what we now refer to as cults. Shinto has as a part of its ethos the idea of kami, of ghosts and spirits, and if we look at seminal works of Japanese horror like The Ring, we see these themes play out overtly. In Fatal Frame II, an unapologetically Japanese-Japanese horror game, you play as disempowered girls fighting ghosts in the midst of fanatical cults, synthesizing all these strands of Japanese horror. Japan had many other anxieties as well, most prominently the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the Kobe earthquake of 95, which is where the tropes of being apprehensive about the excesses of science in Resident Evil come from, and the theme of separation, of a realm broken apart, came from in Silent Hill. Horror has now gone universal though, the strands of East and West being intertwined in ways they never could be before, Soundal 2 is a perfect example of this, but there are others. Bloodborne, a game developed in Japan, has its lore rooted in the works of Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft, authors of the Western canon, and a game like Outlast, although very Western in its jump scares, has elements of cults and disempowerment more reminiscent of the East. How do we conceive of the elements of design in different horror games as existing under a unified rhetoric though? In his essay on Forbidden Siren, the author calls the elements of interactive fear horror affordances, and this perfectly illustrates how interactivity adds an additional layer of agency to the design of fear. In Forbidden Siren, the resource scarcity, the difficulty of the game and the disjointed narrative structure, both in space and time, only serve to enhance its ability to terrify us. In Fatal Frame 2, you have to fight off ghosts, specters of the night that haunt you at every turn. But to do this, you have to use a camera whose effectiveness only increases the closer they get, inviting players into the choreography of terror. In Amnesia the Dark Descent, we are wandering dark hallways, being driven to the edge of madness, and so we have a mechanic called a sanity meter. If we spend too much time in the dark, more macabre manifestations of the mind are conjured. However, we also need the dark to avoid monsters. The affordances of risk and reward in games is used to craft an aesthetic. In PT, all the developers needed was a single corridor, and a suite of embedded symbolic motifs and storytelling devices to amplify the encroaching dread. We enact a quasi-ritualistic process through every turn. The simple movement through space can be instrumental in the construction of abject terror. As a spatial medium, video games seem perfectly situated to exploit this. Horror is sometimes referred to as a body art, because our physiological responses to it are a part of what makes it so compelling. This prompts an uneasy question that underlies all this, though. Why do we love to be terrified? The evolutionary utility of fear is that it gets us to avert things that might kill us, but yet audiences across cultures seek to activate this impulse. We could invoke the famous tragic paradox Aristotle clued into, where we voluntarily confront anxieties in the safety of play and storytelling to gain control over chaos, to enact catharsis. In his book, The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll proposed an answer to this paradox. If we are actually afraid, why don't we run? His solution is the cognitive theory of fear. We are both afraid and not afraid, afraid psychologically, but unafraid in that our body knows that it is not really real. The way to solve the paradox, apparently, is paradoxically. And so, by reveling in this paradox, horror affordances from the conventions of different mediums, as well as the conventions of different cultures, can be leveraged by the authors of terror. When horror becomes cognitive, though, it is no longer an impulse grounded in our evolutionary heritage. Fears of fear that permeate culture and individual experience start to arise. There is now room for anxieties, both personal and universal, to manifest. For a space where something like Silent Hill 2 can exist. Fears from around the world are now starting to cross-pollinate. No one is safe anymore. In his talk, Yamaoka pontificated about the future of horror games, and he suggests that technology is less important than the emerging new technology might afford. The original Silent Hill had to work around the constraints of the PlayStation console, and so limited draw distances were obscured with fog. However, this actually served to enhance the atmosphere. The same can be said for games like Resident Evil, where strange camera angles, weird controls and unclear directions actually work to the genre's benefit. Technology and horror have an interesting relationship, then. Agency actually enhances the fear we can leverage, but too much agency can actually minimize it once more. It needs to be an aesthetic of deliberately minimized agency. Resident Evil 5 and 6 veered more towards action, towards empowerment and control, and this alienated many fans. So what do they do with 7? Technology lowered the scale, brought it into the first person, reintroduced disempowerment resource scarcity, and the tension of intimate and wide-open space, uniting the Texas chainsaw massacre with the cultish elements of Japanese horror to bridge the divide between East and West once more. However, it is also wise to remember that technology is not just a hindrance, it can be used intelligently as well, to realize more immersive worlds, more fully realized characters, but also to facilitate the formation of fear. Alien Isolation Xenomorph uses complex AI systems to respond to the tension felt by the player, creating new forms of dynamic fear that only technology can afford. At the end of his talk, Yamaoka talks about how we need to find ways to use the medium to communicate metaphors. In writing, we can use illusion for shadowing symbolism, but with games, we have yet to understand our medium's language well enough to craft the subtlety that horror requires. And yet, Silent Hill 2 does do this. It plays with the medium's layers of identity to unite both us and James on a quest of revelation. It uses the medium's encoding of space to explore the psychology of confusion, disorientation and existential reverie. Its monsters are beasts in the conventional sense, but they are also symbolic, metaphoric, expressions of the psyche of our protagonist, whose quest unifies horror in all its disparate strands. In play, we are actively confronting horror. It is the voluntary confrontation of our anxieties, personal, cultural, and now universal. Silent Hill 2's horror is not just arbitrary, or crass, or mired in its own self-indulgence, it is ultimately therapeutic, not just for James but ourselves. In games, horror may have found its true calling, its new home.