Once again it's that time of year. The time of year when mutilated pumpkins appear on doorsteps, black plastic bats hang in windows and I sit in the living room with the lights off, hiding from trick-or-treaters.
Trick or treating is just robbery in fancy dress. So far as I can make out, kids in the 21st century have it easy: the average noughties brat has a better phone than I do, greater disposable income, more spare time and a chauffeur driven 4x4 to ferry them from place to place. The modern child has everything, so I'll be damned if they'll take my last Haribo.
Like most western festivals, the religious and pagan meanings behind Halloween have been roundly forgotten. And just as Christmas is now most commonly understood to be the only day in the year when you can start drinking at 10am without being labelled an alcoholic, so Halloween is simply the day when people dress like morticians and watch one of those pointless Saw movies.
The Saw films, like most recent horror movies, are not scary. They're dark and often unpleasant, but this doesn't make them frightening. The best horror movies - and horror literature - tap into some forgotten primal instinct; the animal part of us that still vaguely remembers the blind terror of being chased by a ferocious predator. At some point, our great, great, great ancestors, clad in animal skins and still struggling to invent the axe, were hunted by sabre tooth tigers, lions or packs of hungry wolves. Horror books and films are our way of dealing with the trauma that is our unwitting inheritance.
This is why the best examples of horror make almost no logical sense; horror appeals to the viscera, or the part of the brain that deals with blind panic, the part of us that is eternally a child checking under the bed for monsters.
I can't play horror games, because I'm a terrible coward. I still remember the moment, well over a dozen years ago, when I first experienced the scene in Resident Evil where a pair of hounds come crashing through a window. It's become a video game cliché now, but in the nineties, with the lights off and the sound turned up, it was a genuinely scary scene. Embarrassingly, I wasn't even playing - my best friend was. In my defence, the lights were out and I'd been drinking, but this in no way excuses the fact that I screamed like Fay Wray in King Kong.
Perhaps traumatised by that moment, I've been wary of potentially frightening games ever since. I can sit impassively through hideous scenes of grue and torture in movies. I can lie in bed reading a Clive Barker novel and titter at his kinky, schlocky take on the genre. But there's something about horror games that leaves me a quivering wreck: the level in Quake that forced me into a dark, gothic sewer full of zombies was a waking nightmare. I've never played beyond the opening scene of the original Silent Hill because those first few moments lost in the fog were more than I could bear. And as much as I loved Bioshock, there were moments where, lost among the tall shadows and Art Deco mayhem, I began to freak out.
A friend of mine once lent me a copy of Condemned 2 for the 360, a first-person horror shooter where, I'm told, you play an alcoholic cop who has to kill possessed tramps. I never played it. One glance at the artwork on the box told me this was a game that would strike me dead with fear, so I left it lying around the house for a few weeks and then gave it back.
I'm terrified of horror games because they tap into that primal fear I mentioned earlier; you're not passively imbibing the entertainment from a chair as you are in a book or film. You're an active part of the terrible drama, running for your life, or bashing in a zombie's head for all you're worth. The term ‘survival horror' couldn't be more apt.
So this Halloween, as I sit in the dark eating my Haribo, I'll be playing Bubble Bobble or something equally sunny. And occasionally my eye will take an involuntary glance at the window, praying the hounds don't crash in.
From my weekly blog over at Den of Geek
