Information imbalance at the heart of horror?
I loves me some Trail of Cthulhu. I ran a one-shot for Halloween that I think was pretty successful. I'm thinkin' of writing up the scenario for some form of publication, I liked it so much. But that's not what this post is about.
In the ToC rulebook, Ken Hite recommends several Lovecraft pieces as especially appropriate background reading for the game, and I made a point of hitting all of them as part of my summer reading. I think that reading did a great job of informing the Halloween session I was so pleased with, but again that's not what this is about.
While reading all that Lovecraft, it struck me that... well, Lovecraft is hard to read, I think for several reasons that multiply each other:
- Multiple decades of style development renders most writers somewhat hard to read. Pick up just about anything from the '20s, '30s, '40s, and there will be a bit of challenge. Of course there are writers who cut through the haze of decades, even centuries, easily, but they're the exception, not the rule. And Lovecraft wasn't one of them.
- Lovecraft really wanted to be a 19th-century author, so he deliberately imitated a style even older than his own timeframe. That is, he intentionally increased the above problem.
- Lovecraft liked to be elaborate, and notoriously like big, obscure words. He liked big, obscure sentence structure, too. He wasn't big on clarity.
- He was writing a certain flavor of horror, in which he dragged out the suspense for dramatic effect, trickling out information at a maddeningly slow rate. It's a deliberate choice, and often effective, but it does make it harder to read.
Anyway, that's not what this post is about, either.
I noticed that, in spite of the things Lovecraft isn't very good at, he was a master at framing a certain set of information for the reader, and keeping it very separate from the set of information in the possession of the protagonist. The protagonist, who is often the speaker, has a certain (usually very scientific, enlightened) perspective of the events he (never "she," in Lovecraft's stories) experiences. But the reader knows it's a horror story, and that invariably informs the reader's perspective. And Lovecraft plays this to the hilt. As the protagonist discovers increasingly strange facts and events, always searching for the reasonable explanation at the core, the reader knows the protagonist is driving towards something horrible and supernatural that the protagonist just can't see. Lovecraft may not have been the greatest writer in many ways, but he had amazing control over this dynamic of information.
So, it occurs to me that this may be the core of horror. Think about this the next time you experience a horror story, especially a movie. The viewer has more information than the protagonist -- if nothing else, the viewer knows it's a horror story, and the protagonist doesn't. That, I think, may be the key to horror. We watch in dread as the protagonist moves unknowingly into danger, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. That's it, plain and simple.
In action movies, the protagonist often has more information than the audience. Before the big showdown, the protagonist tells his cohorts, "Okay, this is the plan..." and then the shot fades into a preparation montage. The action story moves the protagonist into a dangerous situation, leaving us to wonder how the protagonist will get out of it, and then the protagonist surprises us (that's the plan, anyway) with a clever solution.
I really think (at least right now... I have a pet theory every week) this is what makes horror horror. I think this may also be why I find horror hard to replicate in a roleplaying game.
If horror is defined by the viewer having information that the protagonist doesn't, and watching helplessly as the protagonist moves into danger, then this gap is impossible to replicate in an RPG. Because the audience of an RPG controls the protagonist. The audience can have more information than the protagonists (I've experimented with this quite a bit), but they always control the protagonist. A good player might get a sense of accomplished verisimilitude or even glee when they guide their unknowing character into the jaws of the nightmare, but it's not the same as not being able to stop it. We can borrow the scary trappings of horror, the tone, the monsters, the psychopaths. We can make our players feel a risk, a thread, even suspense. But we can never make them feel exactly that sense of helplessness, that experience of screaming at the screen "Don't open that door!"
Can we?