Recently there have been a handful of previews for Shinji Mikami's new survival horror game The Evil Within. There have been very mixed reactions, with most critics commenting on how the game seems to mix classic survival aspects with a lot of scripted scene shifting that almost feels like an entirely different game. One preview very specifically mentioned not liking how he was unable to fully explore an area after the game decided to whisk him away to some other location once he hit a specific trigger. These types of comments made me think about a film that many consider to be the greatest example of horror fiction ever created, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.Bare with me as I explain what it is that makes The Shining such a masterful piece of horror.

There have obviously been dozens, if not hundreds of interpretations of The Shining over the years. What makes the film so great, though, is that it actively defies any and every attempt to explain it. No matter how you try to explain any aspect of it, there will be at least one scene, or one line that contradicts that theory. To give an example, almost everyone believes by the end of the film that Danny's finger friend Tony is some sort of supernatural entity. The main argument for this is that if Tony did not exist then how would Dick (the black chef that Danny speaks to at the beginning of the film) know that the family was in trouble? The thing is that people merely assume that Dick knows the family is in trouble. At no point in time does Dick actually claim he is trying to rescue the family. People tend to assume he is hiding his psychic link from people, but not once does Dick actually admit to having any sort of link with Danny, and he is killed as soon as he gets to the hotel. Therefore the entire supernatural element of the film can be explained away very simply by saying that there is never anything beyond a hint that anything supernatural is occurring in the hotel. The conclusions audiences draw from the film are based on similar sequences in other pieces of fiction. Kubrick uses those assumptions to draw the audience into making possibly false conclusions.

Another famous example are the twins seen throughout the film. Many assume these twins are the ghosts of the murdered daughters mentioned earlier in the film, but again this is Kubrick using people's expectations against them. The murdered daughters are very specifically mentioned as being different ages. Therefore they could not be twins. Virtually everything you think you know about The Shining can be deconstructed in this way. Did Jack nearly strangle his son to death? Plenty of people can point to very specific reasons why he did or didn't. Yet every single one of those reasons on both sides of the argument come from assumptions people make that are never confirmed or denied in the film itself.

It isn't only the story that is filled with contradictions upon closer inspection. The very hotel the movie takes place in makes no sense whatsoever from a purely physical perspective. Even the most cursory examination of the possible layout of the hotel shows a building that defies the realms of physical possibility. Rooms seem to overlap one another. Hallways lead to nowhere. In the opening of the film guests come and go from the shot to and from halls and rooms that simply can't exist. And even when you think you have something figured out, Kubrick will purposefully place a room in a spot that is so obviously incorrect that it simply cannot be a mistake. The Torrance's room, for example, somehow has a Window leading to the front of the hotel when the door that leads into the room is off a hallway that seems to be in the back of the hotel. Many claim that it is a goof that there is snow outside the window yet no snow is shown from the inside at the end of the film(this is even listed under the goofs section on IMDB). This is not a mistake. It is Kubrick's way of making something that does not make sense make even less sense.

Maybe the scene that most defies explanation is the scene where Jack is locked in a pantry at the end of the film. Some say that this scene is the undeniable confirmation that someone or something else exists in the hotel beyond Jack and his family. Yet the room he is locked in is a room that doesn't seem possible. At the beginning of the film Dick shows the family the pantry in the kitchen and this pantry's door is located on the corner of the room. Yet the pantry Jack is locked in at the end (a different pantry) is located on the exact same corner. The door is just on a different wall. So the pantry he is locked in, again, cannot actually exist. There is simply no way to explain this climactic scene. Kubrick seems to have ended the film intentionally with a scene that defies every explanation of the film one could come up with up to this point.

So what does all this have to do with games and The Evil Within? Well in a game players expect a set of rules that remain largely unbroken throughout the course of the game. If something works once then it should work again. They expect a map of a location to not only make sense, but be accurate and useful as well. Yet the scariest thing for most people is the fear of the unknown. It is the basis behind religion, behind science. We as a species demand to understand the world around us. We want an explanation. We want an answer, and we would prefer some sort of nonsensical magic to no explanation at all. And games, even horror ones, tend to give us this information. And for good reason. Pacing is the most important aspect of a horror film or horror game. And pacing is ruined entirely if the player cannot figure out what to do or where to go. And that right there is the basis for why horror games seemingly have to fail. To be truly scary a game must not follow its own rules. Yet by not following its own rules the game will almost certainly cause a player to lose his way, therefore ruining the tension and pacing that are so important to horror stories.

I don't know how to solve this problem as it is a problem that seems inherent to the ways games are made. But I would be interested to see a developer successfully break the rules of a game consistently without hindering the pacing.