The Monstrous Victim in the Wilderness in Horror Video Games
By Morgan Pinder, Deakin University
Some of the most effective story-driven horror video games rely on non-player characters made monstrous by trauma and isolation in the wilderness. These tragic characters are often a key ingredient in videoludic narratives of the revenge of nature. These ecoGothic narratives have the potential to both destabilise and reinforce the perception of humans as superior or separate from the broader ecology. As a consequence of problematising human specificity, writers, designers and developers subvert ideas of passive victimhood and complicate notions of monstrosity in horror video game narratives. Until Dawn (Supermassive Games, 2015), Blair Witch (Bloober Team, 2019) and Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (Capcom, 2017) are notable examples of the form and genre that feature victims exposed to Gothic nature, undergoing monstrous changes that engage with anxieties about the non-human intertwined with excesses of human trauma. These videoludic depictions of ecohorror deploy conventions of contemporary American Gothic to both empower and destroy the traumatised, monstrous victim. When the victim’s suffering merges with the ecoGothic and the supernatural, the victim mutates, becoming a monstrous predator. This process of corruption coupled with immersion and isolation in the wilderness hybridises the body, manifesting as the decay and the mutation of the human into uncanny manifestations of non-human biology. This hybridity challenges human specificity and exceptionalism, exposing the false dichotomy between humans and the environment.
Until Dawn is set in Cree country and relies heavily on the appropriation of the Native American story of the Wendigo. The Wendigo is depicted as a spirit that roams the wilderness possessing people and causing them to commit acts of murder and cannibalism. The Wendigo in Until Dawn manifests when two sisters fall to their apparent deaths down a mine shaft. However, one sister survives, and in the cold and isolation of the wilderness, Hannah is possessed by the Wendigo and eats her sister’s corpse. Through this act of cannibalism, she becomes monstrous and joins the other Wendigos unleashed onto the world by the exploitative processes of radium mining on the mountain in the 1950s. She becomes a vessel for the revenge of nature, and we see her unconsciously wreak a terrible, inadvertent revenge on humanity for the violence perpetrated on the land. By transforming into an unfamiliar visage with elongated limbs and sharp teeth, Hannah problematises our presumptions about the specificity and stability of the human form.
(Supermassive Games, 2015).
Through cannibalism and the supernatural, she becomes ‘abhuman’; a compromised, and consequently less than, human form. Her isolation in the mineshaft is compounded by excesses of trauma; the trauma of her sister’s death, the trauma of the lives of miners lost, the trauma of the Cree tribe and ultimately the trauma of the Earth itself.
Blair Witch also engages with a narrative of victimhood and the ecoGothic that extends far beyond the 2019 game. The mock-found footage documentary The Blair Witch Project (Sanchez & Myrick 1999) that sparked the legend was released in 1999 and has been the inspiration for sequels, video games, books and a whole host of community-created content. In very brief detail, the legend is that an Irish woman named Elly Kedward was cast out of the Puritan town of Blair under suspicion of witchcraft. She purportedly died of exposure in The Black Hills Forest in the dead of winter (Morgan 2001, p. 141). She became the Blair Witch, integrated with the forest and seeking continued vengeance on those who stumble into her densely wooded labyrinth. Elly’s exile and isolation in the woods at the hands of the Puritans draws on the wealth of tales of the historical trauma of the witch trials. These stories of atrocity are compounded by a pervasive fear and mistrust of the wilderness (Morgan 2001, p. 147-148).
The game takes place years after the original film and focuses on a man called Ellis as he searches for a young boy in The Black Hills Forest. Not only do we have the monstrous spectacle of the Blair Witch, an enraged ecoGothic entity driven by vengeance, but her supernatural influence; which, when combined with his traumatic past, make Ellis extremely vulnerable to corruption. Carver, a similarly wayward soul who fell under the witch’s thrall acts as her minion, and if Ellis does not make the right choices the player may end up with the ‘bad’ ending, in which he replaces Carver as the witch’s servant.
This cycle of victimisation and indoctrination is echoed throughout the extended Blair Witch lore. In the 2019 game, the Blair Witch uses the forest as a stage to play out the trauma at the heart of Ellis’s character. Through his journey through the otherworldly labyrinth of trees, she evokes the post-traumatic stress and guilt he brought back from the war, the accidental shooting of a teenager while on police duty and the disintegration of his relationship with his partner Jess. The Blair Witch uses the wilderness, the site of her own trauma, to break Ellis down, and due to the multilinear nature of the story and the agency afforded the player, there is a very real chance she will succeed.
Not all of these games utilise the inherited trauma of place to develop their ecoGothic monsters—sometimes the trauma makes its way to them, as in Resident Evil 7. Whilst Until Dawn uses Cree mythology to explain the monstrous transformation and Blair Witch relies upon the metatextual witchcraft lore to explain the ‘something evil in the woods’, Resident Evil 7 uses scientific experimentation and hubris to explain the monstrous contagion that turns victims into ecoGothic monsters.
The Baker family were living a quiet life on an isolated former plantation on the Louisiana Bayou when a ship crashed ashore, bringing with it an engineered bioweapon in the form of a young girl named Eveline. Eveline was a victim of scientific experimentation from her inception, cloned from human and fungus DNA, but still desperately desiring the affection of a family. It is to this end that she infects the Baker family with fungal spores that become growths on their brains. These fungal growths transform the matriarch, Margarite Baker, into a grotesque parody of a nurturing mother and attentive hostess. She feeds her family human flesh and begins to birth insects.
The patriarch, Jack Baker, has also become a mutated serial killer who poses a multi-stage reoccurring threat to the player-character. Jack, in his role as the victim, manifests through a dream sequence in which he appears lucid and apologises to the player character. Unfortunately, we do not get such a vision of Margarite, but environmental storytelling in the form of a letter from a doctor warns of fungal growths on her brain which seem to be affecting her personality and cognition. In infecting the Bakers, Eveline is perpetuating the cycle of victimhood and monstrosity that was inflicted on her. In the context of the Resident Evil franchise, it becomes clear that Eveline is bringing the Bakers into a cycle of victimhood, monstrosity and weaponised ecology that traces back over a hundred years. Through viruses and fungi, the corrupt rulers and corporations of the Resident Evil franchise contaminate, hybridise and mutate populations for the purposes of power and control. Resident Evil 7 shows the consequences of meddling with nature goes awry.
Through an examination of these ecoGothic monsters, cycles of victimhood and revenge begin to emerge. Horror video games rely on the monstrous and the ambiguous to scare and captivate players, and these tragic monsters, which are inextricably connected to their ecologies and trapped in unending cycles of trauma, are compelling examples of ecoGothic in modern horror games.
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Author Biography
Morgan Pinder is a private tutor, freelance writer and PhD candidate at Deakin University, Australia. Her research focuses on the ecoGothic and post-apocalyptic in video games. She is particularly interested in mutation and monsters, and she has recently been published in the ‘monster’ issue of M/C Journal.