Scary Movies
I am firmly of the belief that more PCs should own casual wear. What kind of yahoo lazes about the house in full plate with a golf bag of assorted weaponry? Grab a hoody for Pete’s sake!
Also of note, I feel like the practical implications of fear immunity are too often overlooked. Your paladin’s fight or flight response? When level three rolls around it’s reduced to “just fight.” Suddenly rollercoasters lose their savor. Haunted houses are always lame and disappointing. And when it’s time for scary movie night, your awesome class feature just makes you miserable. Thanks no thanks.
Fortunately for the rest of us, horror movies remain an excellent source of entertainment. And more importantly for GMs (especially during this spooky time of year), they remain a great source of inspiration.
Alien and its many sequels have inspired a thousand and one derelict spaceship sessions. George A. Romero is responsible for any number of (un)dead adventuring parties. Some of my personal favorites for steal-the-plot-and-turn-it-into-game night include The Hills Have Eyes, Jeepers Creepers, Cube, and (if I’m feeling especially silly), Slither. I’ll usually pair that last one with a little Voltaire for flavor.
What about the rest of you guys though? When it’s time for your annual Happy Halloween session, what’s your go-to horror flick? Share your favorite titles so that the rest of us can cut up, sew together, and Frankenstein our own scary-movie plots down in the comments!
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“Tucker & Dale Versus Evil”! Man that movie is fantastic.
Fun fact about me, I’m actually in Paladin’s shoes most of the time. It’s not that I don’t find horror scary, or that I find it too scary, I just don’t find it fun… at least not on its own. Some of my favorite movies (and stories in general) are horror, but mixed with something else.
For movies, Aliens, Tucker & Dale v. Evil, A Cabin In The Woods, and the first two Resident Evil movies were all great fun. I loved Stranger Things and Supernatural and Castlevania, and I was liking the Scream series on Netflix before it lost me for unrelated reasons.
For video games, the Resident Evil series has been my main source of horror gaming. I also love the Flood levels in Halo, though only the first such level in each game can really be considered at all “horror”. Dead Space 3 was fun action-horror until a combination of the game repeatedly crashing a new enemy type that rendered my carefully built weapons mostly useless made me drop it.
For webcomics, Parallel Dementia remains one of my favorites (though sadly, only about the first half of it is still functional on the website), as does its more action oriented spiritual successor Sword Interval. I just got caught up on Erma, and highly recommend it if you like combining the spooky with the adorable. I’m The Grim Reaper is more ‘edgy’ than ‘horror’, but is still worth a look. And a webcomic called Shifters Redux was looking quite promising before it went on indefinite hiatus.
Lastly, books/web-serials. Worm, by Wildbow, comes highly recommended from me, though the horror elements are relatively light in that story. Not so in one of his other stories, Pact. I’m currently reading the original Dracula, which would probably be more engaging if I hadn’t spoiled almost every single plot beat for myself by watching summaries of it on YouTube (I recommend Overly Sarcastic Productions’, incidentally).
How does one go about turning Cabin In the Woods into a session? I would think it just looks like random tables in practice, lol.
Make each player design their own monster (giving it a few strengths and weaknesses to make things fair) in secret. Then either pick randomly from what they made, or apply all of them at once.
To discourage the players from abusing meta-knowledge of their creation, tell the player to keep the fact they made the monster a secret, otherwise the monster will prioritize them as a target.
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Colin: “Chef’s kiss.”
Laurel: “Our fans are cool.”
For movies, John Carpenter’s The Fog is a mainstay for Halloween, along with Tremors for that cheesy monster movie goodness. And, of course, Halloween is never complete for me without watching Nightmare Before Christmas.
As for GMing, I have yet to run a horror game, one shot or otherwise. But I have always wanted to try my hand at Call of Cthulhu or running a World of Darkness campaign using elements of creepypasta stories for story elements.
The purity of “the monster movie” is so good for session structure. In the case of Tremors, the real key is that there are multiple creatures that attack in wildly different situations. Compare that to single critter encounters where the GM is forced to contrive a reason for the creature to get away so it can came back in later encounters.
Well I did rewatch Cabin in the Woods recently. My favourite horror film, but I doubt that it can be turned into an adventure without sacrificing several elements of the plot.
Maybe one could pretend to run a bog-standard Haunted House adventure (Curse of Strahd starts with one I believe) and then slowly revealing inconsistencies.
Arcane Eyes recording the group and disappearing after a perceptive player notices them for a moment, demonic spores which overwrite the PCs flaws & personality traits (deployed every time they make a rational or sound decision) and finally a secret pathway and Massive Tenser’s Floating Disc which delivers the group to the Undermountain (specifically the clean, metallic workshop aesthetic of Trobriands Scrapeyard).
It turns out that Halaster, his remaining pupils, a few select guests and Dweomercore students are enjoying the tortures of the PCs as some bizarre mix of reality TV and live-snuff film (which brings us dangerously close to Hostel territory).
It’s up to the players to deal with the offenders or to discover a second layer to the whole thing (namely that the Shadowdusk family has been using the accumulated despair, horror and pain of the previous victims of Halaster’s Super Fun Time DeathPainHour to feed the unfathomable entities of the Far Realm)
Also with the release of Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden it’s easier than ever to run arctic horror adventures like The Thing, AMC’s The Terror, Alien vs. Predator, At The Mountains of Madness (del Toro’s unreleased film) etc.
Just watched Cabin last night as part of a triple feature. The mind-affecting thing forcing PCs to live up to horror movie stereotypes could translate well.
Ive always read the paladin’s fear immunity as being immune to being crippled by fear. They can still get a sense of “this is dangerous and i dont want to be here”, they just can keep going anyway.
As for movies, i dont really watch horror films. Im both jumpy and twitchy, which tends to combine for a poor watching experience on something designed to provoke those reactions.
That clearly means all paladins are danger-seeking daredevils. I’m sorry you’ve been playing it wrong. 😛
Can’t go wrong with a bit of Aurelio Voltaire! Or the toons he made songs for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rfHoFU_AUs
Catch him every year at Dragon Con. 🙂
Or at least, every year but this one. 🙁
Favorite Halloween movies/flicks/shows:
Nightmare Before Christmas
Beetlejuice (and recently, the Beetlejuice musical!)
Ghostbusters
All the Addams Family movies
Horror sessions that I want to play, but have yet to:
Carnival of Tears (one-shot horror-carnival module for Pathfinder)
Curse of Strahd
Carrion Crown
Strange Aeons
Die Laughing (B-movie horror where the goal is to play a corny and funny horror movie, complete with stereotyped characters and mechanics that encourage you to get your characters killed in spectacular ways by monsters)
Monster of the Week (Powered by the Apocalypse)
Horror sessions that I did play:
Call of Cthulhu
Die Laughing sounds like a good one to pick up for Halloween one shots. Is the system easy to pick up?
It’s interesting to interpret whether or how Paladins and similar ‘immune to fear’ classes react to actual fear.
They obviously can’t get shaken, panicked or cower before adversity – their soul and wits just don’t react negatively to this kind of fear.
But you can still ‘scare’ a Paladin, make fear enter their heart, or at the very least, justified worry (but not enough to make them lose their composure). The worst fear for a Paladin might not be death or the sight of a horrible monster, it might be something as simple as ‘your soul will be damned once we trap it and have this demon consume it’, or ‘As you lay here, trapped, I’m free to slaughter your family and steal their souls’.
How does a Paladin respond to such threats, such despair? There must be some fear or doubt in their actions, as sometimes they can do desperate or evil acts and fall as a result.
What does Sorcerer’s shirt say under that +1 comfort robe? ‘Burn Babau Burn’?
Laurel says, “If you love something, set it on fire.”
Mine isn’t a movie, but I love stealing the general plot of [i]Dead Space[/i]/[i]Resident Evil[/i] and creating scenarios where the group has to explore a creepy abandoned location filled with formerly human monsters and use the clues remaining in the environment to piece together what exactly happened. My favorite kinds of horror are the ones like [i]The Thing[/i] where shit has clearly gone down before our heroes arrive on the scene, but the only information they have are the clues that can be gathered from the aftermath. I find that the necessity of solving the mystery helps avoid the natural “Why don’t we just leave and nuke it from orbit?” response.
All that being said, I bet [i]Saw[/i] could make a cool adventure. Or is that basically just what a dungeon crawl already is?
Also, I need to know: does today’s comic imply that Handbook-World horror movies aren’t actually scary on their own but rely on supernatural fear effects for their spooks?
Just taught this article in one of my classes. You might dig it:
http://web.mit.edu/~21fms/People/henry3/games&narrative.html
Narrative architecture turns out to be as useful for GMs as VG devs.
I’m trying to read this, but as it’s obviously written for people with prior knowledge it’s a bit difficult to read sometimes. The topic does fascinate me, however; I don’t suppose you could be troubled to refer more introductory material?
Some closely-related concepts in this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwlnCn2EB9o
I’ve done a lot of “creepy abandoned location what went down here” stuff over the years. It’s a very flexible trope – I had a campaign that ran on the players finding lots of notes to piece together how the evil magic science facility was overrun (“Oh, THAT guy was Ulken!”), but I also once made an interactive mystery project for a website that had no monsters or anything – just a guy wandering around, trying to figure out what happened to all of his coworkers
Aura of Courage isn’t “You cannot feel any fear”, it’s “Creatures in the aura are immune to the Frightened condition”. Frightened isn’t just regular-fear, it’s a fear so overwhelming that it renders everything you do at disadvantage, and you’re unable to bring yourself closer to what’s causing it.
Paladins can experience fear, but it just doesn’t overwhelm them.
Yes, that’s how I always play them too — it’s not that they’re immune to fear, it’s that they’re immune to panic, they can control their fight/flight response. Of course, turning fight/flight into a reasoned decision does slow ones natural reflexes, for better and for worse…
Also it should be noted that all of DevoPal’s buddies are within 10′ of him, so his aura should be ruining their watching experience too by the comic’s logic.
Pathfinder rules, bro. That’s why I hyperlinked it.
Paladin’s shirt: “I’m not your Paladin, guy”
I believe I know this reference.
I approve of Paladin. Not that he needs my approval.
Credit where it’s due: The shirts are all Laurel. She is in charge of sight gags for the comic. And also South Park references.
I’m generally not super-big on horror stuff, mostly because I hate the “oh god oh god it’s somewhere around here probably right behind me any moment now it’s going to jump out and get me” feeling and absolutely despise jumpscares.
What horror I’ve actually enjoyed tends to be of the slower variety. Stuff like the Alien movies, or games like Limbo or Inside. The sort of thing where you can see the scary stuff coming instead of it jumping out of a closet going “abloogy woogy woo”.
I’m guessing you didn’t care for the flamethrower scene in Alien.
I dunno, I could see Fighter lazing about the house in his full plate with his +2 (Beers) Helmet of Tankards. He seems like that guy.
I draw from a lot of stuff… my campaign, Shifting Shadows, basically has a ton of villains in it, and who’s actually the villain changes based on where the party’s allegiance lies.
I think you will know most of this list. If you ask ‘why is that there,’ think about it about how it would be if it had been a horror movie instead of a comedy.
Army of the Dead
Karas
The Goonies
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The Thing (John Carpenter’s)
Pirates of the Caribbean (All)
Star Trek Movies (All)
The Brothers Grimm
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Metal Wolf
Dog Soldiers
The Blob
The Birds
That’s a decent list without getting crazy. 🙂
Dog Soldiers! Hell yeah. Love me some serious-face commandos reenacting Home Alone vs werewolves.
Yeah, Dog Soldiers was awesome. Seriously underrated.
Metal Wolf is cheesy as hell, but they actually tried something interesting there and I think the concept is great.
Never heard of Metal Wolf, and not much luck googling for it. Throw a nerd a link?
I ran a game based loosely on It, entitled Them and dealing with plant blights and their gulthias tree with a tragic backstory a few years back. That’s the only horror game I’ve run at Halloween… most of them seem to come up at Christmas, often quite inadvertently.
On another note – Voltaire? Colin, my respect for your musical taste grows greater with each passing week…
Wait a minute… Isn’t Them a giant ants movie?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them!
How interesting to note that you answer from your mobile phone.
Also, you might want to know that your markup doesn’t recognize exclamation points as valid part of a hyperlink. Removing the .m (if you’re on mobile, wikipedia will redirect you automatically) and encoding the exclamation point (which most browsers should also convert automatically), the URL should be:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them%21
I like the whole group clothing. Sorcerer’s hoodie is simple yet it keeps his style. Barbarian’s RAGE t-shirt fit her. So does Oracle’s Ask again later. To how many people must she have said that? But Paladin’s I’m not your paladin, guy! shirt… i don’t get the joke. Other than that it’s fantastic 😀
I don’t know why people think that their character are 24/7 armor clad. Our’s only use armor when expecting trouble. So midnight ambush on the camp? Time to roll initiative on undies guys, oh, and please make sure your characters use underwear this time. A fight in the dungeon? Who is stupid enough as to go to the dungeon in a hoodie? Still the challenge can be interesting. Like in Fable: The lost chapters, when the hero can take the “No armor” boast to get a better reward. No armor, and clothes count as armor. And this can be useful. Once in a game the DM told use to roll initiative for a surprise attack during night. I talked with another player, we rolled our pcs initiative, all normal, but they didn’t appeared to fight. After one or two rounds our two characters appear. Mine in just underwear, his in nothing but mine’s pc shirt. After the attack was defeat it was time to tell what those two were doing. They were “busy” and couldn’t get before to repel the attack. Also while armor is nice and all, clothes can speak more of the characters tastes and personality. IF the player got some imagination. But then again, people that thinks that people is in armor all the time, inn, bed, temple, ball, aren’t that imaginative 🙁
“Paladin – i don’t get the joke.”
I could be wrong, but it could be a shout-out to either a 2016 movie or the public reaction of an American actor shortly after the 2016 elections.
It’s about the tendency of people to latch onto some representative member of a group and then, to
– decide unilaterally this guy (or lady) is their best friend and present them around as such
– and/or decide unilaterally this guy/lady is their confessor and continuously tell the poor guy/lady how you are not at all a bad person and notably not against people from his/her group
And in both processes, reducing that someone to only one of his/her attribute – the same way racist/sexist/x-ist people do.
tl;dr: it’s about people latching onto someone as a moral prop, and avoiding the heavy lifting of calibrating their moral compass themselves.
Something like: “This is my Jewish/Gay/Black friend, so i am not a bad person because i got a friend of such a group”? o_O
Yep, i think in that case Paladin wouldn’t be something like that 🙂
But also Paladin isn’t the best example of paladinhood normally so it could be another thing too 😀
https://youtu.be/m1JakODvYhA
So that it was. Thanks 😀
But please, i don’t like South Parks examples 🙁
Casual clothes are something I’ve been thinking about now that I’m making my first character. I mean, do fighters and paladins go supply shopping in their full armour? I guess they have to if they’re travelling around to towns they don’t have a home in. I’ll probably find out when I play.
As for horror movies, I like me some Shining. Can’t do it all the time, though, or it loses its impact. I’ll go for some John Carpenter, some Wes Craven, a bit of Sam Raimi, maybe some Asian horror. I can always fall back on some cheesy slasher flicks. I’m no connoisseur.
What elements of The Shining? The psychic madness? The isolated hotel?
The descent into madness and isolated atmosphere are great, but what I like most is the way it’s shot. The odd angles and the way the scenery is used make even the normal things feel unnerving.
I hate scary movies. I also hate clowns. Those are very much related. I was about 6 years old at the time. My cousin and I were in my parents’ room watching the little antenna TV. As it was the 90’s, there were no child blocks on antenna TVs. So when we changed the channel, there was nothing to stop a certain Stephen King movie from playing. A certain clown popped out of a shower drain and a certain 6 year old ran out of the room screaming.
Aw, come on Shozurei! We all float down here. Don’t you want a nice balloon? We got all colors!
So how DO those scrying devices/ScryPhones work anyways? I am trying to make a magitek type setting (think Golarion but in the year 3000) and I am interested in this sort of thing as a whole.
How would you stat it /price it in PF game terms? Since that is more-or-less the default for Handbook World.
PS: Remember that a smartphone/internet/etc. is part of a worldwide network of infrastructure, not individual objects IRL. So on the topic of that, does Handbook World have satellites or magical cell towers? 😉
At its cheapest, spell-casting-as-service costs Caster level × spell level × 10 gp, so you’re looking at 7 (minimum cleric level) x 4 (minimum Sending level) x 10 = 280 gp to place a very short call. The balanced version probably looks like a the Eberron scystone:
https://eberron-hok.obsidianportal.com/items/scrystone
…or the teleplathy version of the crystal ball:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/c-d/crystal-ball/
That scrystone is less expensive than the “unlimited plan” custom item with a continuous activation (Spell level x caster level x 2,000 gp = 56,000 gp) or the 5 calls/day Command Word version (Spell level x caster level x 1,800 gp = 50,400 gp).
If you’re talking Pathfinder 1e, there’s this assumption that long-distance communication is difficult. When you take away that complication, you remove plots like “warn the king,” “seek the sage,” or “cut off from help.” That last one is kind of on-point for today’s comic. Just think of how many horror movies are required to start with “the phones are dead” so that the protagonists are forced to rely on their own resources.
That said, if you want a system where instant communication is commonplace, I’d just make it as cheap and ubiquitous as modern cell phones. Upgrade plans (as per the crystal ball’s remote viewing / true seeing / detect thoughts versions) could still cost extra. This is more or less what people have to deal with in d20 modern games.
For purposes of Handbook-World, if a modern cell phone can do it, a Scry-Phone can do it. They work on the same principles as divination in general, meaning that each device has a tiny, telepathically linked Steve Jobs homunculus inside furiously creating images, doing impressions, and otherwise relaying communications to its owner.
A good reference for a fantasy would with sensible telecommunications is this business:
http://cryptorpg.com/
I’ve only ever glanced over the rules, but it looks like an intriguingly different kind of experience.
Honestly though, if you’re looking for Golarion in the Year 3000, you’re literally describing the premise of Starfinder. Like the wiki says…
https://starfinderwiki.com/sf/Communication
…”Personal comm units are inexpensive devices that are capable of communicating with each other on a single planet, or to a spaceship in orbit. They are small enough to be carried in a pocket, and are generally integrated into most types of armor.”
Even modern smartphones cost like some 500+ dollars– which is more-or-less affordable for everyone at like 3rd level or so (assuming 1 dollar = 1gp).
This is the sort of mechanic that is a GM fiat situation– which is just as well, since this is the sort of thing you need to be fluid about in devising the concepts and execution.
On the topic of Starfinder, it’s not really Golarion 3000. It’s more like time travel because of all the Gap nonsense. Golarion 3000 would be Golarion progressing through time unassisted by plot-convenient meta events, like CthulhuTech. Nice insights, in any case!
PS: What Scryphone plan does the main party have again? 😉
They’ve foolishly appended their names to a contract with the eldritch entity Vayerizzon.
One of my campaigns has an android PC, and we’ve had some discussion of what “immune to fear effects” means. Since that character is a nanite-augmented human with substantial nanite-inflicted brain damage (including significant amnesia, 5 CHA, 8 WIS and the loss of whatever morals he had left), the argument that he literally cannot feel fear is actually someone plausible.
Weirdly enough, I don’t like horror, but I actually have some things to note here, because I have some experience both writing and DMing it. My first real campaign as a DM was basically a horror campaign. It mostly fell on basic survival horror (since the party was shipwrecked on an island where the sun was eternally blotted out, most of the plantlife or mutated was dead and ghouls were on the bottom of the food chain), but the later parts I eventually realized had a very Resident Evil feel to them – overrun mad science/magic facility, mutated scientist monster, dramatic fight on a freight elevator. I think the most effective aspect I had was the documents scattered around the facility that allowed the party to slowly piece together what happened – Madrian’s secret cannibalistic insanity, Yukesia’s death in a suspicious accident (and the insanity it inflicted that meant that after she was resurrected, they decided to put her down again) followed by spontaneous resurrection, the negative effects of the facility’s pollution on the staff’s health, and, finally, the realization that the staff’s slaves had been manipulating the scientists into making the uncontrollable demigod the slaves couldn’t make on their own. My players noted how the documents they found had good verisimilitude – memos that sounded like actual announcements, private communications between elites, reports the head of security wrote up for his off-site boss. It all helped the players say “Hey, that monster was that guy Ulken we keep hearing about!”, which they seemed to enjoy. Oddly enough, the original blueprint of the campaign was more “supernatural” (as if evil wizards are not supernatural), with a portal to the Negative Energy Plane slowly driving everyone insane and/or mutating them. The PCs would show up way after that has gone down, and featured cut antagonists like the druid driven mad by the mutant plantlife, a community of shipwrecked sailors who worship the massive sea monster that patrols the island, and a construct Paladin made by a long-dead wizard still striving to kill every undead – or potential future undead – it came across.
In my more recent campaign, the PCs reached The Flickering Hallway Where Four-Armed Alien Skeletons Crawl Out Of The Walls, and one of my players immediately declared “This is some Dead Space shit!”. Which I think was meant to be positive. I wonder if my apparent talent at writing horror-related things (despite not liking the genre for my personal consumption) is because I lean more into the mystery and suspense side of it, rather than trying to overwhelm my audience with gore or jumpscares or whatever. I’m also good at both manipulating and surprising audiences. My horror also leans into unsettling ideas rather than body counts – I find a… thing staring at you from a distance without moving to be WAY scarier than a lunatic chasing you with a machete.
For inspirations, I mentioned the Resident Evil aspect (which I think was more from osmosis than directly playing them). The island campaign (especially the original, not-mad-science one) was inspired by the Dark Souls-like platformer video game Salt and Sanctuary. I also had a big SCP Foundation period many years ago that’s affected my writing, though probably more on the science side than the horror side. Speaking of which, it probably loses its spooky power in a magical world, but it would be cool to make something in a campaign along the lines of SCP-1981 ( http://www.scpwiki.com/scp-1981 ), the only SCP that ever made me actually feel uneasy, despite (or because of) the fact that it never actually does anything. Maybe an inhuman entity that lives in the paintings of a rich family’s mansion, only appearing to certain people?
Lastly, one of my unused case concepts is literally based on this My Little Pony villain fansong about an immortal monster queen coming to menace a town every night when the sun sets:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egCbpWdZ_Dc
I’m not sure you dislike horror. I think you just have a subgenre preference.
You say you went through an SCP phase. It sounds to me like you’ve internalized the tropes.
I’m not a horror person, and I don’t tend to run special holiday games after one pretty bad Christmas game. I don’t really have much of an answer to the prompt.
I love Oracle’s casual look though. The updo and her T-shirt look great! Very well-designed on Laurel’s part.
Clearly, Oracle has been swapping spells with Necromancer: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/dominate-hair
Redcloak (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0372.html, panel 6) has the same idea.
Goddamn I need to go back and catch up on GitP one day. It’s been years….
Every Halloween I watch the first 3 Evil Dead films and the first 4 Scary Movie films and the Rocky Horror Picture Show
My actual horror movie collection is much larger, but those are the ones I generally watch on Halloween itself, with the Ghostbusters movies and the Brooksfilm horror spoofs (Yound Frankenstein, Dracula Dead and Loving it, and High Anxiety) sometimes added or swapped in. In contrast I usually START the horror movie season with Club Dread, as that;s a very summery horror movie
I was never part of the shadow cast as such, but you bet your ass I know those callouts.
“Chucky Gray! He’s OK! But he’s got no friggin neck! Oy!”
Choosing a favourite horror film is like cutting off my own face, and replacing it with a laughing antler’d noggin of questionable use.
But if I had to choose one, warning, everything, and I dunno if it’s strictly a horror film…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gwRG9uForA
Question for you, Colin! (I know, I’ve commented too bloody much – please don’t feel obliged to respond to all of it? I’m just waiting for a call and going through the archives; it’s been a real help.)
Of the (good taste, once again) motley of films you listed, what elements appeal to you, especially as conduit for spooky halloween gaming?
For me, the simple elegance of an almost stage-play like plot, the grotesque and crushing industrial ambience, the use of monochrome, the gore… It all creates an inexorable, inescapably modern feeling.
Horror you can’t outrun, in a place you’re trapped in. Simple as.
Even in non-horror games, it can actually be stripped down into other feelings?.. A kind of melancholy, even. And the biological horror aspects, much like The Thing, can work well on making any ordinary encounter a lot more tense… Even if played down for a group that maybe doesn’t want a horrific experience, but wants a little more than the random encounter table is giving them.
Also I just like it, a lot. Bahahaha!
I teach a class called “Constructing the Moving Image” at Georgia Tech, and my students just voted for “spooky” as the semester’s theme. It’s a smart choice because the horror genre has such a strong sense of tone. When you’re in a horror scenario, you know exactly what you’re trying to evoke. It opens up a trove of tropes, but my favorite is the generally-oppressive atmosphere. It’s a change of pace from the usual giggle and cracking-wise that I like at my tables (assuming that you can get buy-in from the table). It’s the same biz I talked about back in this one:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/creepy-ghost