Resident Evil has never been scary

That's not to say it's a bad series. But people who act like they're freaky games are fooling themselves. Are they atmospheric? Sure, especially REmake which is the closest games get to actually being scary. Truth be told, I find them more charming in just how goofy and ridiculous everything about them is (although RE4 is an action masterpiece and legitimately fun to play). There's not really anything that's scary about fighting a giant tentacled thing with a rocket launcher, and there's nothing very scary about the story either. If anything, the series is the gaming equivalent of a B movie franchise. They're goofy, fun in their own way, but I can't for the life of me understand how anyone finds them to be scary (again, aside from REmake which had some good scary elements like Lisa Trevor, who is a genuinely freaky and disturbing monster in almost every way). I can very easily see the games scaring a little kid, but they are simply too cheesy to be scary. Which is why it's baffling to me when people say that Shinji Mikami was ever the king of survival horror.

He makes enjoyable games. But I'm sorry Evil Within, it takes more than throwing the player around random corpse covered environments to be scary. I enjoyed Evil within and I enjoy the RE series, but in hindsight, they just aren't very scary. EW is a good game because of its mechanics (its "story" barely even qualifies as one since literally everything about it is so underwritten) and RE4 is a classic because of its simple but addictive combat, terrific pacing and just cheesy enough story. Plus its Mercenaries mode remains fun to this day.

Do you agree or disagree?

"Scary" is defined by the individual. I disagree.

I found it scary when I was a kid. But as an adult I found Silent Hill 2 kinda scary and I played it a few months ago.

@Gue1: I think the issue is that it lacks subtlety that series like Silent Hill has (at least the old ones). There's not a whole lot once you get past the somewhat goofy somewhat creepy monster designs.

I can list all the times I' got scared or felt tension in the Resident Evil franchise.

• Once, the dogs in the windows obviously. It was something we were not used to at the time. Such an apparent attack in a graphical game in it's day, the scary thing was we had to react to it, it wan's going to win itself.
• Resident Evil 2 when a licker jumped out the interrogation room two way mirror, so unexpected,a also felt a bit of tension on the dog boss at the end as I was expecting it to be hard. It looked intimidating it was monstrous and seriously wanted to murder you, it set the tension and you knew if you screwed up with the jaws on that thing you'll die in a horrible way. Turned out 2 shots of the magnum I was saving meant game complete. Till I found out about new game+.
• Res Evli 4 had those things that creep towards you, regenerate stupidly fast and required accuracy and thermal imaging to take down for good. Fantastic creature.

Since then... Nothing. Not trying to hate on the things new. They just lost the scare factor, totally agree. I feel like the answer to everything is guns and even if i am bad with ammo the game is sure to spawn more for me to save me from save game deadlock. I can't possibility fail.

Everybody's take on horror and things that are scary is different, Therefor Horror games cover a wide variety where some games might not always seem scary to one person, yet the things that person finds scary might not be to someone else.

For instance, some might find the Silent Hill games scary but they didn't bat an eye when they played Slender. Or some didn't find PT all that scary but they find Condemned : Criminal Origins to be.

its all about The Atmosphere.

But I'm in it for The Co-Op....

I'm actually thinking about getting Revelations 2.

Scary is a highly subjective term and while you might not see Resident Evil as scary others might.

So i can't agree.

These days, no horror game is scary to me, I can't be scared by a video game. But, I was pretty unsettled by Resident Evil 4 when I was 12 or so. Which, a game can still unsettle me if it has good atmosphere.

Although, I was legitimately scared by Majora's Mask for a little while when I was 7 or 8. Man, I feel like that game should not have been rated E.. :p

@Jacanuk:

I'd like to add that Everything about Horror is near Subjective...... but the survival is pretty consistent...... its essentially limiting options and resources....... not partucularly good from a gameplay perspective.

I never found the series scary myself but I did grow up on horror movies, so I was desensitized to horror at that point. But some of the games did a good job of creating tension.

I too never found them scary....like scary in an EXORCIST movie kinda way.

However, playing the original Silent Hill, was enough for me. And from what I can remember, I "failed" to save my daughter. It wasn't scary EXORCIST level, but some of the imagery and design were just disturbing, to me. This is coming from a guy who still listens to Slayer. LOL.

Resident Evil has always come off to me as a parody of the horror genre, way too goofy for me to take seriously (outside of the occasional jump scare). Although, the only game that has legitimately scared me has been Silent Hill 2, that's horror at it's absolute best.

RE1 was creepy because it was very new and many of the ideas in the series had never been done before (or at least that most people had seen). Pre-rendered graphics meant for cinematic camera angles and graphical fidelity greater than pretty much anything else out there outside of an adventure game. The atmospheric music (or areas with no music at all), the sound design with your echoey footsteps clanging in the halls, and the jump scares all made for something new and insteresting, The horrible voice acting and writing was distracting but the good parts were genuinely scary for the time. I would equate RE1 to the first Blair With movie. Scary as a product of its era but kinda laughable by modern standards.

RE2 refined the fomula considerably. Veronica even moreso with much greater production value and technology behind it (fixed camera angles but with 3d graphics). Nemesis started to move the series back into the "camp" category and RE4 was hardly a horror game at all.

-Byshop

Oh, and I hated Evil Within.

-Byshop

Fear is the product of the speculation of the mind. Strange noises at the end of a dark alley in Resident Evil 2 are scary. A dog crashing through a window or a zombie jumping out of a fridge are just plain stupid. Too bad the franchise is mostly the latter.

Oh and while we're at it, anyone who thinks Five Nights at Freddy's is scary should probably go eat a hand grenade and spit the pin out.

@Black_Knight_00: The early RE games had long stretches of nothing or the occasional slow-witted zombie, punctuated by surprise moments before the series devolved into action. It's not exactly masterful horror, but it's more like a slasher movie. Still effective in its own way.

-Byshop

To be fair, if a dog crashed through my bedroom right now, and landed at my feet, it WOULD kind of scare the shit out of me.

Same would probably work if you threw a rock through my window right now. Sure, it wouldn't be the same KIND of fear. But i'd still be scared. Just as if I were to turn around right now and see the Candyman standing right behind me. Or, like, if it were just a random hobo who were standing right behind me.

There's a difference between "startle" and "dread". Japanese horror is great at dread, that sense that something is just around the corner that wants to eat you but the longer you don't see it the worse your imagination makes it. This is the opposite of jump scare heavy games like Outlast or Dead Space.

-Byshop

If I were to turn off the lights and sit behind you, then tell you that sometime in the next 5 minutes I'd be screaming in your ear without warning... yes, you would be feeling tense, but you would not be frightened or scared. You would only be bracing for the inevitable sudden loud noise.

That is not horror, its... what's it called? Ah yes: crap.

OMG this is like 10,000th time i've heard this! Survival horror games were NEVER primarily about being "SCARY"! NEVER NEVER NEVER! i've already made a thread about this topic before,i implore people to stop pretending like it is!

Unless you're only talking about "Horror" games which is only about scaring the player with cheap jump scares and stupid visual effects and i don't find them scary either! they're just annoying and lacking in something i call "Fun" survival horror games on the other hand is about making the player vulnerable and pitting them against insurmountable odds that you have to overcome with your brain.

The "Scary" parts are mostly scarce in survival horror games but they are still better the scripted B.S of these try hard "Horror" games,i much prefer the ambient feeling of dread you get just by being lonely rather than being forced to sit through a scripted jump scare.

"Which is why it's baffling to me when people say that Shinji Mikami was ever the king of survival horror"

lol what is baffling to me is why people think being scary is all there is to a video game!

So some folks seem to be missing my point. The games mostly lack subtlety. Yes, the first one (Remake moreso) has those moments of long silences to build it up, but the games don't really do all that much to really get under the player's skin. They're startling at points, but unlike other games like, say, Silent Hill or Condemned, they're too... grounded. Every monster looks like a mutation of some real world thing (hell, look at the giant snake boss). Everything looks like it came from a (fucked up) natural habitat. It doesn't do enough to warp the really really familiar into something nightmarish.

I'm aware of that, but they're both "scary" in completely different ways. Both still qualify as "fear".

Fear, yes. Horror, no. As ZP mentioned in a review if a spider falls on him he'll jump but that doesn't mean the spider is the next Clive Barker.

-Byshop

Horrible analogy. Why? Because by telling me in advance what you're going to do, you've led me to expect it.

Now, that kind of CAN work in horror. In fact, that's ultimately my favorite kind of horror. But you've just illustrated that even that kind of horror has limitations. You've just described something that is the OPPOSITE of a "jump scare". Rather than forcing the unexpected on me, you've outlined exactly what you're going to do. This means that once you actually do it, it's more along the lines of "fearing the inevitable." But that only kind of works when "the inevitable" is actually something bad rather than just a minor annoyance.

Let me draw a comparison here. might not be the best comparison since a lot of people say that the movie sucks, but think of something like The Ring. The movie very quickly sets up that if you watch the movie, you will die SOMEHOW within a very short amount of time. Now, jump scares happen IN the movie, but that's not what the movie is about. As in, at one point a dude gets scared to death because a demon girl unexpectedly crawls out of his TV screen. But telegraphing in advance that some demon girl would crawl out of his TV screen would not be a sufficient version of "anticipating the inevitable" because the inevitable in that case would be kind of mundane on its own. But DYING within the next week? That's in a whole other league. Having your soul get sucked to hell for all eternity if you don't find a way to lift the curse? that's also pretty fucking scary.

But the point is, if you're utilizing the tactic of "say in advance what's going to happen", then the stakes sort of have to be high enough for it to actually be a big deal. I mean, if Freddy krueger appeared in your dreams UNEXPECTEDLY and screamed at you a little bit, that'd be scary simply because you had no idea that would happen. That doesn't work if everyone tells the myth of this demon pedophile serial killer named Freddy Krueger, who appears in your dreams and then just kind of screams at you a little bit. Freddy Krueger might be able to pull off some dumb jump scares, but there's a reason why the legend behind him is "he'll gruesomely murder you in your sleep" rather than "he'll jump out at you and scream at you in your sleep, thereby possibly just annoying you for a bit."

Stating in advance what's going to happen only works if the stakes are high enough. If the stakes are low enough (as in, the worst case scenario leaves you exactly the same but just maybe a little bit startled), then you DON'T say that in advance because that's more suited to a "jump scare".

When was I talking about "horror"?

The title of this thread is "Resident Evil has never been Scary."

The post that I replied to (Black Knight's) mentioned "fear' and "scary", but didn't once make any mention of what makes up "horror."

My argument is simply that unexpected things such as jump scares most certainly CAN be scary. If you disagree, then I'll bet that someone could EASILY scare the shit out of you just by hiding outside of your home and then jumping out at you at the right moment. Now, whether those kinds of scares make for GOOD HORROR is a different matter, but that wasn't even what I was talking about.

@MrGeezer: The point is not being told before, the point is that the tension generated by a string of jump scares (aka "loud noises") has nothing to do with horror or fear. It's just a cheap tactic to give the "illusion" of fear in people who don't know what good horror is. Hence the success of that awful bear game.

"Wow! My heart is pounding, that was scary!"

No, it wasn't. It was startling.

Actually, foreknowledge is a big component. You can "tame" a lizard or a snake or a fish through mere habituation, but that doesn't negate the fact that what it considers harmless or inconsequential actually used to legitimately scare it enough to induce a "fight or flight" response.

My point: that's also the LOWEST form of "fear", it's the kind that even goddamn reptiles understand. And even reptiles stop being afraid of it once you throw it at them enough. But that doesn't negate the fact that it absolutely IS legitimate fear. It's potentially enough of a legitimate fear to result in rational human beings resorting to their "reptilian" instincts of "fight or die". This is precisely why I'd wear a Jason Voorhees costume on Halloween, but wouldn't dare wear a Jason Voohees costume on July 4 and then try to scare the shit out of someone. Do it on Halloween, and it results in a good laugh. Do it on July 4th, and I'm likely to get killed in self-defense.

Now, I agree that it sucks when it comes to GOOD HORROR, because that kind of fear aspires to nothing more than triggering our "reptilian brains" and exploiting our instinctual "flight or fight" response. It's the absolute LOWEST kind of scare that you can go for, because it's the kind of scare that even lizards and snakes understand (and then subsequently get bored of). But to say that it doesn't induce ACTUAL FEAR is kind of wrong. That kind of shit can easily cause enough legitimate fear to get someone to kill/stab/punch your ass in self-defense. Again...hide out on someone's property at night, then jump out him when he gets home. Then try to tell HIM that he wasn't experiencing real fear.

We're sliding into semantics and technicalities here. "It can technically be called fear", sure, fine, that's not what I'm interested in: my point is that as far as horror in visual arts goes, jumpscares are the lowest, vilest, most cretin form of "it", and I use "it" very loosely, as I maintain there is no horror in a jumpscare, just tension because being startled sucks.

The bottom line being that if a jumpscare is horror, then this is horror.

@Black_Knight_00:

LOL.... that penguine is a massive asshole !

I wasn't talking about horror. I was talking about the fact that "jump scares", despite being the lowest form of fear, are ABSOLUTELY (potentially) a legitimate and valid form of true fear.

Their use in VISUAL ARTS is a separate topic. But even then, one could easily argue that it's not that "jump scares" are INHERENTLY not scary. But rather than so many "jump scares" are done in the same way that it's easy to tell when a "jump scare" is going to happen. And that IF a "jump scare" occurs, that it likely won't have any real consequences.

But like I said, that's just habituation. The same thing that gets your pet snapping turtle to stop biting you after you've spend six months picking it up. The problem isn't necessarily that 'jump scares" don't induce fear. The problem is that jump scares only work when they're unexpected, and it's really freaking hard to provide UNEXPECTED jump scares (that also work within the context of the movie). It can't be RANDOM or else it feels cheap and unearned. There has to be some BUILDUP to the "jump scare". The problem is...by building up to the jump scare, you've already telegraphed in advance that a jump scare is gonna happen. And that kills off the entire benefit of the jump scare.

Resident Evil 2 is a great example of that. First (and only) Resident Evil game I played. So while I was familiar with jump scares before that, I didn't know that jump scaes were going to be utilized in that game. The absolute first time I was casually walking down a hallway and a monster jumped through a window and attacked me, that scared me because i wasn't expecting it. And that only worked once. Once I knew that that's how the game played, then i was expecting a jump scare at every available opportunity. And jump scares DON'T work when you expect them.

Another example: I've talked at length about how this is precisely why nothing in Alien:Isolation is scary. People say that they hate the flamethrower because that lets you ward off the Alien and diminishes the risk of death, but I disagree. You can still ABSOLUTELY get killed while using the flamethrower. It's not a get-out-of-getting-eaten-by-the-Alien card. It USUALLY works if you have ammo, but I've totally had instances where I doused the Alien in flames and then it ran around me and impaled me from the back. That's still not THAT scary, since the flamethrower USUALLY works. but it's still more scary than BEFORE getting the flamethrower. Before getting the flamethrower, I knew that EVERY instance of being seen by the Alien would get me killed. That expectation kills all the fear since it's a video game and rthere are no consequences to dying. That's a KNOWN outcome with little-to-no punishment, so it's probably actually LESS effective than a jump scare. At least when I got the flamethrower, I wasn't sure what the outcome would be. And that uncertainty made those encounters MORE scary than earlier when encountering the Alien meant instant death.

And that also provides another point. There's a problem with using jump scares IN FICTION. And here's the thing...written stories have to make sense, events have to be earned. This is different from real life, in which totally random and seemingly nonsensical things ABSOLUTELY happen. So IN FICTION, jump scares tend to not work. The nature of fiction makes it have to MAKE SENSE. Therefore, unexpected events have to be EARNED. This allows people to anticipate unexpected events IN ADVANCE. That makes those events STOP BEING UNEXPECTED. But real life does not conform to those rules, because random shit happens in real life all the freaking time. Try to pull a "jump scare" on Some in real life, and you very well might get shot.

So I don't really think that you and I are really disagreeing here. "Jump scares" ABSOLUTELY can work as a totally valid source of genuine fear. But there's a difference between fiction and real life because fiction has to make sense. That makes a lot of jump scares IN FICTION stop being unexpected. And unfortunately, jump scares ONLY work when they're unexpected. Still, jump scares CAN work. It'sw just really really hard to pull off.

But no one is talking about real life here, we're talking about videogames (and movies). In a fiction context, a jumpscare, even perfectly timed to be effective, is still crap.

An example: in the movie Sinister (an ok movie almost ruined by jumpscares) there is a scene in which Ethan Hawke is standing in the dark and a ghost appears behind him and stops just inches from him, without him noticing. Now, they could have done that in complete silence, making the scene creepy and unsettling. That's horror. Instead they chose to go with a loud orchestra sting and the ghost popping up to startle the audience. Which is crap. It's cheap, it's effortless, it's insulting to the audience.

Any idiot can go "BOOOO!" and startle you, but it takes talent to make you feel a sense of fear.

Never seen that movie, but your description isn't really selling me on the horror. So a ghost appears behind him and he doesn't notice? Okay...why is that supposed to be scary?

Never mind jump scares. Can we agree that most ANY SCARES aren't scary since it requires a specific set of circumstances, assumptions, and setup (or lack thereof) in order to induce the appropriate emotional response in the viewer?

And back to your example: if that were the standard way to handle scares in movies (as in that's the tactic employed by most horror movies), how do you think that would affect the efficiency of that tactic?

But that's the point: good horror is not in what the movie shows the audience: it's in what the movie doesn't show while still providing enough hints to allow the mind to work on it and create its own horror. Good horror does not aim at scaring the audience, it aims at stimulating our imagination, to make us speculate on what's behind the curtain, or what's hidden in the shadows. That's what produces a sense of dread. Which is why the endings of most horror movies (even good ones) are disappointing: because oftentimes in our mind we had come up with something better than what the filmmakers chose to go for, so that when the cards are flipped and we see what was lurking in the shadows, we end up being disappointed.

Believe it or not, the thread is not just about what -you- were talking about.

Jump scares are a tool in the "scary movie" toolbox, but too many games/movies rely on using them alone to try to make a horror move or game and as a result. Dead Space is a great example of the overuse of jump scares basically ruining the "horror" experience. With horror, often less is more because the anticipation of something happening can create even more tension than something actually happening. The Silent Hill games (the early ones, anyway) were pretty good at this. Even the early Resident Evil games didn't have that many real jump scare moments and they worked better for it.

-Byshop

@MrGeezer: I can't recall a jump scare in anything ever that was actually effective at being scary. They are always startling. It's the easiest, cheapest way to go about trying to elicit fear, but the usual response is "that was startling, but it's over now." Sometimes the equivalent of the jump scare is used in, say, a movie to great effect (ie the heist scene in Drive) but it's in a completely different context and the goal is to shock, not to scare. Too many games and movies (FNAF, The Conjuring) rely almost exclusively on jump scares. The reason FNAF is so "scary" to some people is because of the anticipation not of being caught by the monsters but because of the anticipation of the scare itself. You come to dread not the events on screen, but the loud noise and sudden image that is going to pop up.

RE post DC code veronica is dead to me.

Back in the day, Resident Evil was scary. Today, what made them scary is lost with different graphical standards.

Don't try to make this about me. My post that started this whole exchange was in reply to a specific quote by Black Knight in which HE wasn't talking about "horror". He mentioned "fear" and talked about whether or not other games are "scary". And I took big issue with that, because yes...cheap-ass jump scares can ABSOLUTELY induce "fear" and be "scary".

You can try to change the parameters of the discussion all you want and say that good horror really isn't about being scary, and I wouldn't even necessarily disagree. But the discussion was about "scary" before I ever posted, so don't try to make this about me. If you're talking about "effective horror", then now you're talking about a completely different issue.

And yeah...the Silent Hill games weren't "scary" either. Yet, I've always gravitated more to Silent Hill than Resident Evil (I've even bought the shitty PS3 Silent Hill games in the desperate hope that I'd enjoy them, while I've never played a Resident Evil game after RE2 because I absolutely LOATHE that kind of "horror"). So...no disagreement on that part. The (more) psychological horror of Silent Hill is more effective than the jump-scare horror of RE2 (I don't know if other RE games are as bad, that's the only one I've played). Or in movie terms: There's a reason why Alien is considered a horror movie even though there's only one Alien, and why Aliens is considered just a straight-up action movie (albeit an effective one) even though the protagonists have to face an arguably much bigger threat. So yeah, I totally get it.I'm just saying that none of my posts have been arguing that jump scares make for good HORROR. This was precipitated by someone stating that jump scares aren't SCARY, and me disagreeing. Yes, jump scares most certainly CAN be "scary", but as someone mentioned above, "good horror" rarely strives to merely be "scary." Why? Because "scary" wears out really freaking fast. If we're saying that jump scares don't make for good horror, then I have no issue with that stance. But that most certainly IS a completely different issue than what was discussed.

@Black_Knight_00: Lol

I'd argue that once I got old enough to see what was going on with "horror" (as in, the psychological basis of why it's "scary"), NOTHING in fiction ever scared me. This includes both "psychological horror" like Silent Hill or Jacob's ladder, as well as "jump scare horror" like Resident Evil.

This is why, as Black Knight said, the BEST horror doesn't really aim to SCARE people. Sure, Alien scared me back when I was a little kid, but all of the "scary" parts stopped being "scary" by the second or third time I saw it. And that's why Alien is so well-receivewd to this day. Whether or not the filmmakers intended it, the ultimate product was less about being scary and more about being about the dangers of the unknown. If Alien had JUST been abourt how scary the monster is, then the movie would cease to have any relevance once you saw it the first time, because that shit is fake. But the fear that progress will lead to our ruin because the universe is horrible and death waits just beyond our doorstep? That theme is TIMELESS. You can apply that broad theme to so much shit, that Alien will NEVER lose relevance.

But still...most fiction IN GENERAL isn't "scary". Even GOOD HORROR isn't scary. Don't get me wrong...Alien, The Excorcist, The Shining, early Silent Hill games...they're all GREAT. But they're also not scary. The reason why they're so well loved is because they're great despite not being scary. If "scary" was what they were bringing to the table, then they would have been at best mere historic artifacts in game/movie history. You know, the kind of thing that you appreciate for being influential, but that you have no desire to watch again and get no satisfaction from watching again. And if I'm wrong, then give me some suggestions. If it's the case that ANYTHING in fiction is really scary, then by all means suggest it to me. Because I think I've lost the ability to get that feeling from movies and games, and I would really LOVE to get that feeling back.

It's only your opinion

@MrGeezer: I guess scary was the wrong word to use. When I say scary I meant just being effective at horror. Atmosphere, unsettling, disturbing etc.