Silent Hill 2 remake’s narrative designer thinks one of the advantages to horror is that it’s cheaper
As anyone who’s ever glanced at some of the better entries at r/twosentencehorror will tell you, the genre thrives on restrictions. Here’s a creepy good ‘un: “‘Please, God, don’t let it look in the closet,’ I silently prayed. ‘Please, God, don’t let it look in the closet,’ it parroted back from the next room.” You can’t do that with baby shoes, you anonymous hack!
Silent Hill 2 remake’s senior narrative designer Barbara Kciuk reckons this principle extends to much bigger productions. “It is a bit niche, but actually, the interesting part about horror is that it is one of the best ratios when it comes to the cost of production and the earnings,” she recently told TheGamer’s Rhiannon Bevan.
“If you take Paranormal Activity, it cost pennies and it made millions,” Kciuk continued. TheGamer follow up in their article with The Blair Witch Project, Get Out, and Terrifier 3 as examples of low budget horror films that made a lot more than they cost. Get Out, for example, was the highest grossing debut based on an original screenplay in history as of 2017, raking in over $250 million worldwide on a budget $4.5 million.
“This is one of the genres in both film and games where you actually can take very little resources, and the game or the movie looking cheap might actually be an advantage,” Kciuk went on, citing the success of Buckshot Roulette. “It’s a very small game, and it was done in like a month or two, and it earned millions of dollars. Horror tends to have those breakout hits from very small teams, or even solo developers.”
I imagine that Kciuk doesn’t actually find spreadsheeting to be “the interesting part” about making horror. More, as she alludes to, the freedom to make some very effective work with limited resources. The proliferation of PSX-style horror speaks to her assertion that “the game or the movie looking cheap might actually be an advantage”. I’m reminded, fittingly, of how the original Silent Hill 2 turned short draw distances into an aesthetic with that game’s iconic fog. There’s some great examples of horror cinema turning restrictions into innovation, too, like Sam Raimi’s shaky cam and travelling shots in The Evil Dead 2.
Still, this is also might be somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy based on how few truly big-budget horror games actually gets made. Outside of Capcom’s Resident Evil series, and the occasional outlier like Alien Isolation, the fact that horror appears cost-effective might just be the result of small budget horror making up most of what’s available. There are also big games that suggest the opposite, like the recent Alan Wake 2 – one of my personal favourites from recent years that’s still struggling to recoup development costs.
