'Don't Look … Or It Takes You': The Games of Horror Vacui. (December 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Soderman, Braxton
• Editors: Benson-Allott, Caetlin; Brinkema, Eugenie
• Is Part Of: Journal of visual culture. Volume 14:Number 3(2015:Dec.)
• Page Start: 311
• Page End: 316
• Publication Date: 2015-12
• Subjects: digital media -- horror games -- horror vacui -- looking -- P.T. -- video games -- vision -- visuality; Visual sociology -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals; Arts and society -- Periodicals; Mass media and the arts -- Periodicals; Graphic arts -- Periodicals; Image (Philosophy) -- Periodicals; Popular culture -- Periodicals; Visual communication -- Periodicals; 700.5
• DOI: 10.1177/1470412915607915
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1470-4129

Abstract

While some scholars claim that games are not primarily visual texts, the horror genre is obsessed with vision and practices of looking. The aesthetic concept of horror vacui describes aspects of this obsession. Horror vacui is the fear of empty space that results in the over-marking of visual space, excessive decoration that threatens to overwhelm what is being decorated, the stuffing of gaps and caesura with further representation. Shed of its standard aesthetic meaning, horror vacui could also be used to describe the fear operable in off-screen space, the monstrous unseen that lies outside the frame and constantly threatens to appear within it. Forced to move through this blind space, horror games create the conditions for excessive representation and practices of looking that erupt around the threat of the unrepresentable and invisible. In recent horror games this threat is mobilized by anxieties concerning online and networked culture.