Haunted Thoughts - My Experience with P.T.

Sometimes when I play a game, I don’t end up thinking about the game when I am done. I end up dwelling on things I’ve read or seen before. A game, or more accurately a demo, that was very effective in doing just that recently was P.T. Unless you’ve been living in a cave with no internet connection, you’ve probably already heard about this”playable teaser” and how it’s just a very clever and frightening vehicle to announce the relaunch of the Silent Hill franchise, simply called Silent Hills. I played through a majority of the teaser and now, some days later, I find myself thinking about certain images, sounds and ideas. This blog isn’t so much about P.T. as it is about what it made me remember, whether it was something else I played, read or experienced.

Haunted Houses

Searching out more hallways, more turns, Navidson eventually leads the way down a narrow corridor ending with a door. Navidson and Reston open it only to discover another corridor ending with another door.

House of Leaves p.188

House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski is, at it's core, a haunted house story. While the book itself seems to engender polarized opinions concerning its structure and the author’s writing techniques, I think that it remains an effectively creepy tale. While I found the framing story to be somewhat tedious, the main plot concerning the house was what kept me reading. The house itself seems normal, until the owners find a mysterious room between two bedrooms one day, one that they know wasn’t there before. Measurements are taken of the interior of the home and the exterior, and upon consulting blueprints they realize that the house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. These small events culminate in the sudden appearance of a long hallway that leads further into the impossible interior.

Playing P.T. was like reliving the more intense parts of House of Leaves. The moment it really clicked with me was when I had to walk down the red hallway, my vision blurry and my pace frenzied. It was a neverending loop. Sometimes the bathroom would be to my left, sometimes my right, and I couldn’t escape until I found just the right action to progress the demo. I felt like the house was conspiring against me, an active participant in my terror. The house in House of Leaves is also very much an active participant in terrorizing the characters who live there.

Haunted Time

There's a mysterious time of day; you only notice it if you have a digital clock. Once you've heard the story, you'll know that it's true.

Ghastly Ghost Stories p.38

I collected books as a kid, and my favorite genre was horror. If it had vampires, ghosts or other scary stuff, I was hooked. My aunt gave me a hardcover book for my eleventh birthday called Ghastly Ghost Stories. It’s a collected volume that encompasses two earlier books, Ghost Stories from the American Southwest and Ghost Stories from the American South. All of these stories are very short, barely even a page at most, but I remember one quite vividly. It was called “11:11” and it was about a haunted time of day. Two teenagers who were driving home from a party years ago died in a car crash at 11:11, so whenever you notice the time in your real life, you are actually supposed to be receiving a ghostly message from the two teenagers. Even 20 years later I still see this time and think of that story.

Realizing that time is stuck at 23:59 pm in P.T. is horrifying. In games we are often trying to beat the clock. Missions are timed and you fail them if you don’t come in under the limit. RPGs like Skyrim will make certain quests only available or completable at certain times of day, so the player is forced to make the clock jump forward, either by sleeping or waiting. In P.T. there is no time limit because time doesn’t progress as it logically should. The haunting is of the time of day as much as it is of the space of the house. The game plays with you, letting the clock go to 00:00 only to go back to 23:59 when you loop back through the hallway. Seeing the time 23:59 repeated is another way to let the player know that this isn’t over.

Haunted Bodies

Rosemary Woodhouse: You're trying to get me to be his mother.

Roman Castevet: Aren't you his mother?

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

One of the most personal fears I have is about becoming a mother. I’ve reached the point in my life where many of my friends are taking that next step to adulthood, but I find myself lagging behind. Even before I had a steady boyfriend or graduated high school, I had dreams involving birth and death, always being linked. I think it’s a natural fear for a woman. Part of that fear isn’t just that you or the baby could die, but also that something inside you may not be quite right. In Rosemary’s Baby, Rosemary is impregnated by the Devil. There’s way more to it than that, but that’s the basic gist of the film. When I first watched this, I was probably 12 or 13 years old and had a close friend staying the night. She became frightened and didn’t want to see anymore, so we turned it off. Later, I went back and watched it on my own and loved it. The slow burning paranoia was something I hadn’t yet experienced in a movie. But underneath all of that, there was the fear of the other being inside her the whole time.

The ghost in P.T. is named Lisa, and she was pregnant when she was murdered. In the sink, when you gain access to the bathroom for the first time, you find what looks like a deformed fetus. It moves and cries like a human baby, or something frightfully close to that. The door locks and you’re trapped inside with the wailing… thing, until the demo deems that you have had enough and can leave. Most people during the Spookin’ with Scoops live stream mentioned Eraserhead, and I can see why. I’ve never seen the movie myself, but I know that it there is a deformed baby in it, perhaps even similar in appearance or sound. My mind, however, dwelled on the thought of whether what was in the sink was what was inside Lisa when she died. Is it the world of SIlent Hills deforming the baby, is it the haunting that does it, what makes it look like that and why? It was an arresting image not just for me, but also for my husband, who happened to mention it no less than three times the next day after watching me play the demo.

Haunted Minds

One pulls out what appears to be a gun, but it’s just a water pistol, and shoots the man right in the face. It is a red foam, almost liked aerated meat. Suddenly, everything is tinted red. The man turns psychotic. The foam slides down and his face looks like it is covered in blood.

Dream Journal Excerpt - 5/10/06

I kept a dream journal for many years. I started at the end of 1998 and continued until August 16, 2007, the date of my last entry. I lost focus and I stopped writing in it regularly. I still dream frequently, though the dreams are less vivid and usually involve more mundane activities. One of the things that I always remembered in lurid detail were my nightmares. I always considered myself to be more prone to bad dreams than other people based on conversations I had with friends and family, but I suppose it could have just been that I was better at remembering the details and writing them down.

Color takes the main focus in many of my dreams. Reds are sickeningly vibrant. Scenes are tinted in shades of blue, yellow or red. Dark rooms are filled with almost palpable inky blackness that can pull you inward and eat you alive. I looked through the second volume of my dream journal (I tried to locate the first but I’m not sure where it is) and saw that color is mentioned many times, especially in dreams that take on a sinister dimension. This excerpt was from a dream that started with the scene being tinged blue. As soon as the man was shot with the toy water gun filled with red foam, everything turned red. It gets much weirder than that, but the crux of the terror came from that sudden change in color.

Like those dreams I wrote down, P.T. plays with color and changing color to elicit emotional reactions. The warm incandescent light you come to expect as you walk the hallway multiple times is suddenly replaced with demonic red. Later in the demo, you could see green, blue or yellow. Different people experience different occurrences of color, although the red lights and the red, blurry hallway occur as a normal part of the demo for everyone who plays. In my playthrough, I saw the red lights, hallway, and then as I tried to solve the final puzzle, the room was tinted green by my flashlight. All of these changes, especially seeing the red lights for the first time, caused a great deal of stress and fear. I didn't want to walk towards the red light, but I knew that I had to. I didn't want to keep running down the red hallway, but I had no choice. It's amazing that such a little change in the lighting can cause so much apprehension.

The End of It All

There are other things that I thought of while playing P.T. I remembered playing Amnesia: The Dark Descent for the first time and how frightened I was whenever I heard footsteps coming closer to me from somewhere in the dark. I remembered watching Home, a fourth season episode of The X-Files, and seeing the deformed Peacock family and thinking about just what they were and how they lived. I remembered long nights spent reading collections of urban legends and trying not to look at the illustrations in Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The fantastic thing about P.T. is that it plays with so many horror ideas and does it so well. I hope that the new Silent Hill game will be even half as scary as the interactive teaser. If it is, I will have many sleepless nights and many more disturbing images to lock away and remember on a stormy, darkened night.

You mentioning the color of your dreams has made me realize the lack of color in mine. Not that I dream in black and white, just that there's never anything vibrant about the colors in mine. Huh.

Anyway, nice write up here. I was never really big into ghost stories or anything, but I enjoyed PT. Looking forward to what the final game ends up being.

Also, that thing in the sink in PT is honestly one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen in a video game. Ugh.

Yeah the thing in the sink was by far the worst visual. On my original playthrough, I kind of tried to laugh it off, but the more I thought about the animation and sound, it just was supremely unsettling. On top of that, it was the one thing that I kept talking about the next day. I think the only other thing that really reached that level, was the refrigerator and the point in the demo when it's violently swinging back and forth because the sounds coming from it are just the worst. Crying, screaming noises. Ugh. I shouldn't think about this before going to bed for the night!

I hadn't realized myself that color came up so frequently in my dreams until I played and then went to my old journal. I actually was looking for things to relate back to the fetus thing, since I can recall two dreams I wrote about that deal with that fear / issue head on, but I couldn't locate those entries for some reason. I ended up reading a bunch of other entries and realized that when I remember something horrible, it's always the color that I seem to describe first, followed by the events and other details. Then I thought about how the game plays with color and how that effective those moments were. I surprised myself. I think the younger me had some really messed up images rolling around in her head for some reason. Maybe it was all those scary stories I read or the movies I watched!

I think what made PT so effective was that everything about it felt dreamlike. There was no logic to the hallway, and the way it kept shifting and the way it would emphasize certain elements over others (that weird croaking sound for example) allowed the game to ratchet up its effectiveness at playing with the player's imagination.

Your diary looks like it came straight out of some horror game. Like I can imagine finding something like that in the middle of an abandoned mansion, probably placed there as a riddle to some locked door puzzle. I think it's the handwriting (not saying that it's bad). 4. itchy. tasty.

Great post! Something I realised while playing the PT was that it really felt like a nightmare you couldn't wake up from. Also felt like some of my own nightmares, where entering a certain door and ending up in another place feels like it could be real but when you think about it (later) is simply impossible. Also being in a space you can't escape while something is haunting you felt somehow familiair to me, I know I had these kind of dreams, but they are but faint memories now.

Did you write those dreams up the following morning or directly when you'd wake from them (in the middle of the night)? Because I tend to forget about them in the morning most of the time.

@jadegl: Not to turn this into a discussion about dreams, but after thinking about color in dreams, I kinda made a subconscious effort to be more aware of the color in my dreams last night and....nothing. No vibrant colors or anything. I have pretty boring dreams, actually (aside from a few details that I don't think are appropriate to share on forums, but not what you think I mean). Oh well.

I'll also echo the dreamlike feeling. The whole thing starts from a closed-off room, that makes about much sense as the repeating hallway. Also the speed up part felt very dreamish to me and also like something that I've never experienced in a videogame before, in a very good way. For some reason it reminded me of the effect used for those twisty demonheads in Jacob's Ladder, which again worked as an inspiration for Silent Hill. Perhaps just an odd coincidence...

@joshwent: I really like your points about different types of fears. I think that's part of what made the demo so effective. It really played with a lot of ideas and managed not to make it be too much for the player. You could play something and have it be ineffective because it's so over the top and gratuitous that your suspension of disbelief is shattered, but P.T. managed to have crazy stuff happen and root it in the realistic. I think part of that is the absolutely fantastic graphics. This is the first time playing a game this generation where I was blown away by the graphics. It was almost like living a movie.

I remember watching Home for the first time and thinking it was a really gross episode, that something about it was just wrong. Looking back, it has staying power because it was so real and the idea was something you could easily see on the local news. The funny thing is I didn't even realize it was pulled from the air after it originally aired because there wasn't the online back and forth like there is today. I didn't even have a computer until 1999, so I couldn't have looked it up even if I wanted to! I now have the first 5 seasons on DVD and I have been slowly rewatching them in order, but have not gotten to that one yet.

@thunderslash: I appreciate your comment about my journal. Hearing that it looks like something that you may find in a game is a high compliment, even if it sounds weird to say!

About the dreamlike quality of the game, I agree totally. Maybe that's why it was so unsettling. It felt like you should be able to do certain things, and the game made sure you couldn't. Also, the puzzles were very obtuse, and while I think a full game of something like that may not work, it was great for a bite sized experience like this and really made it feel like something other-worldly.

@dussck: I trained myself by first trying to write them down right after I woke up. I was really into dream interpretation as a kid and I started writing stuff down sporadically in middle school, and then really obsessed over it in high school. I managed to keep it up for almost a decade. I found that over time you gradually become better at recall and can hold onto the details better even hours after waking up. Of course, writing dreams down as soon as you can is best, otherwise you may forget a detail and not ever realize it later. I find that even now, after getting out of practice of keeping a journal, I can remember quite a few details of my dreams, especially nightmares. The best thing, if you want to get started, is to commit to it. Even if you don't do it right away, just write what you can remember when you get a chance. It's all a skill that you can improve with time and dedication, at least that's what I found.

@glottery: Ugh that twitching! I saw the ghost in the hallway, at one point, and her head was twitching. It was really messed up. My better half was watching me play and when I saw the ghost I instinctively turned around to run. He goes "Walk up to the ghost" and I'm all like "Fuck no" but I ended up slowly walking up to it anyway. It ended up rushing through me. I thought I was safe, then it grabbed me and I ended up in the dark room with the talking meat bag. The next day, my hubby said that he couldn't believe I actually listened to him and walked up to the ghost. It was so funny, I told him I only did it because he said to do it. I guess having someone in the room with me made the horror a little easier to handle, but not really. It was still way too stressful. 10/10 awesome demo, would not play again.

Great blog -- I have to respond to your ending thought in agreement. The problem with the teaser is that it creates hype for the game which may or may not be met. I'm hoping for the best, but the high quality of P.T. makes me think they won't strike genius twice. There's too many questions. How indicative will the teaser and its ideas for horror end up being of the final product? Will the actual game be first-person? If so, can it sustain itself for the length of an entire game? As much as I hate to say it, I feel the chances for disappointment are huge. This is true of any new or rebooted property, but factor in the unforgettable experience of the teaser, and the damn thing could actually work to the detriment of the final game.

I have the same worries. P.T. felt like it vaguely hit some Silent Hill notes, but it was still a very unique experience. After the "good ending" when you finally walk out of the house and see the town in full, I was actually a bit disappointed. Thinking, "Oh yeah, that little thing was amazing, but is it now time for some frustratingly awkward shooting and getting lost not knowing what the next objective is thus removing any tension and fear the game evoked?"

I love a lot of the Silent Hill series, but it's always had its problems. And in a way P.T. felt like they were removing that stuff entirely, which is good, but it also worried me that they didn't really address those previous issues directly.

Basically, once the actual trailer comes out with the guy shooting monsters, I'll be pretty disappointed. Here's hoping!

@joshwent: @feels: I agree wholeheartedly with your concerns. I have never played a Silent Hill game, though I want to go back and do so, the main reason being that I didn't own a Playstation when the first and second game were released, and without playing the first two I felt like I couldn't play the others. However, I know that they are much beloved by their fan-base and this teaser is a big departure from those games in gameplay and style, but maybe not so much in overall tone. I hope that they find a good way to marry the two and make a compelling and horrifying game that makes old fans and new converts happy. I don't know if they can, though.

Still the demo got me excited, even if I never want to experience those feelings again!

@jadegl: Holy cow do you have nice penmanship! I can't stand to write it, but it makes me sad a lot of school don't teach cursive anymore.

Man your dreams are totally different than mine. Color is never a thing at all in mine. Usually my dreams start off indistinguishable from real life in appearance.

My bad ones usually involve something bad happening to somebody I love, usually my fault in some way. Or I relive some of the worst moments of my life. Or me being betrayed in some way. I have a reoccurring dream where I'm the leader of a Rogue Squadron-esque space fleet that's been marooned through some wormhole, and invariably I suffer a mutiny in it and am left to die drifting in space without any fuel.

But most of my dreams are either happy or just strange. Usually in subtle ways, I had one about a month ago where every one in it had no right arms or legs, instead they had 2 lefts although in the proper sockets.

@slag: Thanks for the compliment! I often think my penmanship is messy, mostly because I have a quirk where I don't go back and dot my Is, which caused some issues in middle school. I remember writing the first draft of a paper in 7th grade and getting it back with every i dotted by the teacher. Guess what? It didn't change my writing at all. In fact it kind of made me angry. :D The great thing is when I got to high school and college no one cared at all. I guess all my teachers and professors had seen worse, so I never heard anything bad about it again.

Back to talking about the demo and dreams, I think the reason why I found it so frightening was the fact that it was very dreamlike. Seeing all of the comments here, and also reading some pieces online that have been written in the past few weeks, I have solidified that idea in my head. It's also why, I believe, the sanity effects in Amnesia were so disturbing. Specifically, I remember walking into a room and seeing painting of a man that looked normal, then later after some more exploration, I came back and the person in the painting had changed into a horrifying monster. It was one of those moments where you really get hit in the face with just how messed up everything is, and that there is nothing you can do about it besides continue the game to restore your sanity. In P.T. you just have to keep going and hope that with the next loop the hallway will return to some semblance of normalcy. Or that the more horrifying elements will disappear.

I mentioned in the QL thread that the loop that has the refrigerator swinging violently back and forth was one of the moments I almost gave up on the demo. The combination of the red light, visuals of the rocking fridge, and the sounds coming from it were unbearable. I was ready to give up. I think that that is a considerable accomplishment. There have been moments in other games, like Amnesia, that I powered through, but I never had a moment of complete and utter defeat. That was what this teaser did to me. It almost broke me, and I kind of love it for it.

It's like in a dream when I know something bad is happening and I just have to accept it. There is no real choice in the matter because, more often than not, you will be forced down the same corridor or forced to perform a set of actions that will lead you to the same conclusion. This demo made me feel like that. And like I said, I kind of hate it and love it because of that.

@jadegl: Heh, well comparatively speaking yours is better than 80%-90% of what I've seen. I think the key is you have nice spacing between letters and words which makes it legible.

re:dreamlike- Sure that makes sense. Oh man, some games are clever about changing things when you aren't looking. It's the subtle changes that have the most impact I think.

And that makes it sound like a game I'll definitely never want to play!

Just watching other people play P.T. convinces me that I really do not want to play it. I will chicken out after like ten minutes. Jesus. But it does make me look forward to Silent Hills all the same.

@hailinel: I watched Patrick play on Spookin' with Scoops before I tried it, and even that didn't prepare me for what that demo makes you feel. This is probably the strongest negative reaction I've had with a game, which I think is just awesome. I would say that if you watch it and go "nope" than that's probably fine. I watched it and found it really frightening, but I also had that sick little voice in my head telling me that I just HAD to try it myself. But yeah, those reactions are real. I knew what to expect at some points and I still found it pretty much the most frightening thing ever. :)

Was the time in the teaser ever actually 12:59? I was pretty certain it flipped between 11:59 and 00:00, but subtly inferring an impossible chronological state seems like something P.T. might do.

@dark_lord_spam: I meant to write 23:59! Sorry about that. I totally messed up that it was in military time. I just recalled a 2 and my mind just wrote in 12 instead of 23. I can't believe I didn't see that mistake before, good catch!

@jadegl: Ha, no problem! I was wondering whether they had gotten super sneaky with the details.

Now that you mention that time I realized that this whole setup is one of the corniest ever. Some ghost starts to haunt the mansion at 0:00, really? Who expected that :P.

It somehow reminded me of the movie The Machinist, where the main character is seeing a digital clock going back and forth at a certain time. Oh and he also has a fridge drenched in blood .

@dussck: It is kind of corny, but it is a time of the day that comes up frequently in folklore. I mean, it is "the witching hour" which is supposed to be the time of the day where ghosts and other-worldly creatures are at their most powerful. So I get why they used that time. I mean, the murders / suicide could have taken place at that time and that would be the logical explanation of the haunting, but they could have also just chosen that time because of it's cultural resonance.

From my own personal experience, I knew that that time was something that comes up in stories just in general, and looking it up I found various mentions in urban legends, literature, and other sources.

It's an interesting thing. The game throws all kinds of weird stuff at you that you don't expect (the thing in the sink, the talking bag, the Swedish radio transmission) but it also seems to do stuff that is very true to the genre, like a ghostly haunting at the stroke of midnight.