The trajectory of horror is escalatory. Or, at least, it can be. Any horror fan will recall the countless YouTube videos with clickbait titles promising the “most disturbing” entries from a given medium. At times, this can seem like the metric for what is worth checking out in horror: notorious films, books, albums, games that may have been banned at one time or another for their depictions of depraved and sadistic acts. The most explicit, unflinching, gonzo-style approach to representing cruelty, even down to the inclusion of ghastly source material. A race to the bottom in which we are often disappointed by hoaxes or apocrypha.
The trajectory of weird fiction, that strange subset of horror, is also one of escalation, though in a negative direction. S. T. Joshi remarks in Evolution of the Weird Tale that Lovecraft’s writing has “a near-complete absence of the standard monsters of horror fiction,” suggesting that the exploration of horror as feeling—and, indeed, weird fiction can be said to investigate horror in addition to evoking it—requires a shift in terrain. The normal cast of characters won’t do; they’re too familiar they’ve become tropes already. Instead, we must look outside the world. Hence Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos is born.
The problem with this move is that it creates another version of the same category. In a way, like so many other movements in the arts purporting to reinvent or reinvigorate a genre from within, it seems that weird fiction aspires but fails to avoid becoming a genre unto itself. Epistemological horror is still a type of horror. A cursory glance at media today shows us how thoroughly eldritch beings—otherworldly creatures whose very formal makeup is threatening because they are incomprehensible to humans—have become stylistic tics. For example, in video games, eldritch beings are so often stopgaps to clear up a plot discrepancy or introduce a bit of “atmosphere.” The recent fishing game Dredge forces the player to fight against madness during nighttime and catch increasingly Lovecraftian sea creatures. In Dead by Daylight, otherwise a cartoonish-but-gritty slasher-style survival game, the mysterious Entity consumes players unlucky enough to be fatally hooked by the killer. Even a masterpiece like FromSoftware’s Bloodborne—the best example of a Lovecraft-inspired game I know of—relies on this trope, though it makes good use of it precisely through indifference: it’s not simply that these beings are indifferent, but the game and everything in it appear indifferent. There’s only horror and pain, and even when there are explanations, there seems to be not much of a point, or perhaps the point is that the point is not the point.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes differentiates between studium and punctum. The former denotes our general engagement with a photograph along historical or cultural lines; it might be considered what the photograph is “about.” The punctum, on the other hand, is the detail, “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Materially, the punctum is possible in a medium like photography largely due to an element of chance. To some extent, every photograph—at least in Barthes’s time—is a snapshot, whether candid or posed, because something unexpected is always liable to intervene in the moment of capture. This is not to say that we can’t encounter a punctum in works from other media. Rather, they will simply be constituted differently, and will require a certain flexibility of the concept. Perhaps we might say that the punctum is found, properly speaking, in works that record or register a moment in time.
One aspect that gives pause in the logic of the punctum, especially when transferred to other media, is its relationship to the whole. Beyond merely denoting a detail, the punctum is something that resists assimilation in a general sense. If we are speaking of games, this would be a detail that is unexplained by or incongruous with the game’s overall plot or lore. Details like this can be exhilarating, even shocking, when discovered. And these details may qualify as puncta even if they ostensibly find a home within a larger narrative structure. But the punctum forces us to take it out of context, especially when we come upon it for the first time. More properly speaking, the punctum takes itself out of context. Despite the vast gulf separating video games as a medium from photography—above all, their relationship to temporality is entirely other—they can serve as excellent case studies for thinking through Barthes’s concept, precisely because of the interactive (and therefore incomplete or infelicitous) nature of gameplay. In terms of attention, my playing of a game across successive instances will vary to a higher degree than would my gazing at a photograph or reading of a novel, as it will compared to another’s playing. What this means is that I can approach a game, even one I’ve played time and time again, with a certain naïveté that opens me to impressions that might not be possible otherwise.
Set in the 1960s in the fictional Japanese town of Ebisugaoka, Silent Hill f is a recent game that rewards this line of inquiry. Like the other entries in the series, it consists of disturbing and shocking depictions of various shades of body horror, all seemingly in service of articulating the protagonist’s psychological trauma. With such striking and extreme elements, one might assume that any particular moment, and therefore potentially no particular moment, could be deemed a punctum. It is a game that arguably is all punctum, all wounding. Contextually, however, the fever-pitch of the game, which from its early moments is frequently heart-racing in a real sense, belongs to its overall plot and tone—this would be something like what Barthes calls the studium. These moments fulfill my expectations as a player even when they surprise and scare me: These effects are what make it aesthetically and narratively consistent.
But there is a moment in Silent Hill f that stands out as jarring even among the grotesque and haunting violence of its world. In the later stages of the game, the player must navigate through a three-tiered nightmare version of the protagonist Hinako’s family home, dodging enemies and doubling back recursively to solve puzzles and advance. At the heart of this area is a fundamentally useless room, one that is unexplained, relatively unthreatening, yet for all this the setting of perhaps the darkest moment in the game. Inexplicably, Hinako enters a room and finds a totem-pole-like structure with a single yellowed eye. Though it does not speak, it is clearly unwell, with a splintered wooden “head” on top exposing what looks like flesh; it seems to be in pain and can only follow Hinako’s movements with its gaze. This is nowhere close to the game’s most gruesome moment—the game’s ritual shrine levels feature Saw-like events with chilling implications, including one instance when Hinako abandons one of her friends in a dark room, ostensibly sealing her within it forever, and another when she cuts off her own right arm—and there is no combat or real gameplay danger here. But, because of this, and because it seems to have no impact on the game at all, this room disrupts our sense of narrative coherence. The totem pole should not be there, and appears completely without explanation, which is especially odd given the game’s overwhelming volume of journal entries and documents explaining nearly every aspect of Ebisugaoka and Hinako’s life. The room is essentially empty: relatively speaking, there is nothing to do, no threat or fight, no reason to be there, not even a cutscene (in fact, Hinako’s only reaction upon interacting with it is to think “…I should leave right away”).
And yet it’s full: the massive totem pole, which dwarfs Hinako, seems to have crashed through the wall and is jutting into the room, meaning that it’s even larger than what the player can see, not to mention its apparent non-physical “size” for Hinako. It’s surrounded by hundreds of smaller versions of itself, which likewise litter the hallway outside the room.
YouTuber Tericho notes that in Silent Hill f, compared to the game’s earlier installments, “it isn’t some ancient being, all-powerful god we should be scared of; here it’s just essentially Hinako’s mind.” This means that whether we treat the totem pole as an objective being within the game or as an unconscious manifestation, the point is the same: It is inscrutable, just like much of the story, and this obscurity persists throughout the game’s entire structure, even when we are given an explanation. For instance, there is no essential reason why Hinako’s fear of her impending arranged marriage—which is in large part responsible for much of the game’s action and enemy design—should be represented through branding, self-mutilation, and the permanent affixing of an actual mask to her face after her features have been cut away. Silent Hill f deconstructs, in a way, this difference identified by Tericho: Though there is a possible supernatural element, it does not signify in the same way as earlier entries in the series, making Hinako’s story somehow more psychological. The final turn of the screw is that, within a psychologized game, the totem pole appears to be unassimilable even to a psychological explanation. Our first instinct is likely to associate it with Hinako’s father, who seems to be the most consistent threat within the narrative. But the question, formulated almost as a kind of negative wonder, is: If this is meant to stand for her father, why this form and not some other?
At the heart of Algernon Blackwood’s 1908 story “Secret Worship” is a demon whose name, Asmodelius, is unpronounceable for the protagonist, Harris, about to be sacrificed to him. Blackwood was a contemporary of and influence on Lovecraft, but his stories generally don’t include Lovecraftian eldritch beings. Asmodelius is no exception. It’s a figure, a gigantic empty outline of a man. In its blankness and abstraction, what is truly horrifying about it is its contradictory relationship with scale, space, and proximity: The protagonist feels that it is just as close as the men in the room with him, and at another moment it seems to enter the room without moving. Even as Harris is moments from dying, it isn’t necessarily the threat to his life that makes this demon strike fear in the reader, or even in Harris himself—in fact, he seems essentially resigned to his fate. But what he remarks upon, and what stays with us, are the impossible ways in which this unreadable figure bends space. It’s a true moment of weirdness, not because the figure is from out of this world, but because it cannot be read within the context of the story, even down to its face, which is described as “so austerely sad.” Like the totem pole in pain, which Miss Chalice calls “pure inexplicable weirdness” in her YouTube video on the game, there is a profoundly human element to this figure’s sadness even as it remains forever just out of reach.
For a game about the pressures on a young woman coming of age in postwar Japan, Silent Hill f’s enemies, locations, and sequences can feel a little on the nose. Just as the wife-murdering James Sunderland is forced to beat down countless sexualized enemies in Silent Hill 2, an obvious interpretation presents itself at each point in Hinako’s story, with the various male and female enemy types seeming to suggest dark associations with Hinako’s imagined understanding of marriage. And yet, this interpretation might fall short if we take the game seriously and come to terms with the twists and turns of the plot and the perspective. Coming of age isn’t always so complex, but there is something about it that might not be representable, or whose representation is illegible or illogical. Even if every single aspect of the game is Hinako’s unconscious at work, or (as the first ending suggests) a series of drug-induced hallucinations, there’s still an obfuscated translation inherent in the way forms emerge and act on the player throughout. It is this knowledge that allows us to experience the punctum in the game, as Hinako might have seen it.
Bryan Counter
Bryan Counter teaches in the English departments at Framingham State University and Babson College. He is the author of Four Moments of Aesthetic Experience and co-hosts the podcast Authors Die Twice with Nathan Wainstein.