Colonial Horror

Someone emailed me and gently reminded me that I haven't updated here for a while. True enough. So what's to talk about?

Let's talk about Colonial Horror. Makes sense, since I'm working on Witch Hunter, which is a game based on Colonial Horror.

Colonial Horror is a term we made up when we first sat down to create Witch Hunter. The idea behind the term was to come up with a single term or catch phrase that encapsulated the feel and themes of the Witch Hunter setting. Sean Molley felt that if we were going to be making a horror game, the first thing we needed to establish was that this was not Call of Cthulhu in the 1600's.

And that was a good call, too, because whenever you make a horror game you inevitably get compared to CoC. And Cthulhu was not what we were going for at all.

What was difficult was that the idea of Colonial Horror is not one heavily explored in our current pop culture. There were a few current films that sort of captured the sense of what we were trying to achieve. Brotherhood of the Wolf, for example. Or even The Village. But they were really few and far between.

What we were trying to capture and describe was the sense and terror that comes about in a world of superstition and wilderness. That, to me, is the most intriguing aspect of Witch Hunter's setting. Normally, in a horror setting, the character have the cushion or foible of reason to contend with. You know how it is - a character sees a werewolf outside of his window and starts to tell everyone. But no one will believe him.

Well, in a superstitious setting, there is nothing like that to fall back on. If someone thinks they saw a werewolf, people tend to believe that person. What is truly frightening about that kind of setting is that you get something like what you had in The Crucible where fear and paranoia get wildly out of control. Which is precisely how witch hunts occurred in the New World. It's also how numerous wars started between the Natives and the colonists.

But a superstitious setting is only one aspect of Colonial Horror. The other aspect behind Colonial Horror is the colonial part of it. This is important to point out, because superstitious horror still exists in other settings. For example: Asian horror movies. One thing I loved about the film The Eye (the original) was that it really did a good job portraying how Asia still is deeply rooted in age-old superstitions.

But Colonial Horror isn't just about the fear generated by living in a superstitious environment, in which creepy-crawlies really do live under the bed and things really do peek in through your window. Colonial Horror is about the fear of living and surviving the New World.

Any colonist, in any land, will have a deep fear of the wilderness, because that wilderness is unknown, unexplored, and totally uncontrollable. For the colonists that arrived on America's shores, when they looked West and saw the woods, for all intents and purposes those woods were deep and endless. There was no "other side" to those woods - a conceit explored excellently in The Village.

The Native Americans, of course, had some degree of fear of the wilderness as well, since nature and the weather was unpredictable. The life and death of a person and their family depended a lot upon luck - whether nature was going to be kind or not. A bad snow storm, drought, or disease could kill you pretty quick. Of course, the Native Americans were used to that sort of thing. So the land wasn't nearly as frightening for them as it was for the European colonists.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be an early colonist in the Americas? Seeing animals that were strange and foreign every day, trying to till strange soil that doesn't respond to your seeds, growing up in a place where even the trees look different? It'd be pretty scary. And on top of all of those things - mix in the fact that all of the science we have now is unavailable. As far as the European Colonist knows - all of these foreign elements are under the control of supernatural forces. Now that is a truly scary place.

All for now.