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.