My vision is pretty bad, and it’s been pretty bad since the fourth grade. My night vision is even worse. I have heard optometrists utter “whoa” during appointments (which, in my opinion, is never a great thing to hear a doctor say). That Twilight Zone episode in which the guy’s glasses break once he is finally alone with an unlimited supply of books is too real for me. These are all things I thought about last night while playing a game called Anatomy, a game in which I spent the majority of my time clinging to the walls of an immensely dark house, unable to see much of the world in which I was immersed.
As Chris Priestman explains, Anatomy opens with the sound of “the flapping plastic of someone inserting a VHS tape into a machine and the whining electronics that play it. A blue screen then flashes before the feature begins. And when it does, and you recognize that you’re peering into this game world from a first-person perspective, you’ll see that the distorted scanlines of a corrupt VHS tape are obstructing your view.” And these scanlines remain as we continue to explore “the tale of a haunted house, or perhaps, a tale of all haunted houses. Your task inside the game, at least on the first playthrough, is to wander a very dark suburban house to find audio cassette tapes. They’re each located in a room that will unlock themselves one-by-one.” And these tapes are what tell the game’s story:
Upon finding each tape, you bring it back to the kitchen where, on the table, is placed a tape player. Inserting the tape will fill the room with a gloomy monologue, it being split across all these tapes, which explains how a house can have an anatomical structure to it, much like a human body. The living room might be the heart as it is the most likely to “beat” with activity, we are told. It typically goes that a room will be explained in this manner and then you’ll have to head off to that room in the game’s house to find the next tape. Without revealing too much, it is this structure that pushes your heart into your throat, as you become so expectant of something monstrous and frightening to be held within these rooms before you even reach them, let alone when you’re inside fumbling around in the black.
It is this structure that causes Claris Cyarron to examine how it is the game explores the manner in which fear becomes “embodied in the objects at the edge of our perception.” And, after playing the game, Cyarron asks, “[W]hat if these objects do not want to be made into focuses for our fear? What if they are aware of the evil transformation that we pray only exists in our mind? What if they resent us for tainting them so? What if, long after people have gone from them, the memories and impulses that live on most strongly are the horrific ones?”
It seems that one of the things that Anatomy makes use of in order to allow for this line of questioning, Cyarron argues, is the manner in which it “evokes the spatiality of darkness: it fills the halls of the House with pendulous uncertainty, misshapes everyday objects into Somethings that are monstrously uncertain…The darkness is as much a creepy, personified monster as The House is.” But the game explores more than just this personified darkness because “[b]eyond the darkness, and the House, and the paranoia, there is another companion travelling with us: the materiality of information itself.” And this invocation of materiality—whether it’s the materiality of information, the materiality of the house, or even the materiality of the darkness that surrounds us—allows us to ask ourselves about the narrative of the game: “[I]n what ways is this real? In what ways is this tangible? Can something as ineffable as our inner thoughts poison the outer world? Can these feelings…escape? Of course they can. Concepts can move unhindered from form to form. And that is in its own way absolutely frightening.” But what also makes this frightening is the fact that it is the house itself that manifests such concepts:
This is a haunted house of opposites: we are the antagonists here, spilling out monstrous thoughts and actions, poisoning the otherwise platonic state of the house; we are the terrifying creature that stalks the halls. The digital and analogue are held in balance for a time but for how long until it all collapses? ANATOMY skillfully rides this wave of horrific juxtaposition, carving and cutting between dreadful moments, each constructed like a spire in glory to one or more of the game’s central themes: embodiment, domesticity, familiarity, guilt, and edifice.
And I think it’s the theme of embodiment, specifically, that I keep coming back to. Indeed, while playing the game, I have thought a lot about my own body, my own eyes, my own sight, my own vulnerabilities. And perhaps it’s this invocation of the body and its fragility that, at least in part, makes horror so horrific.
One thought on “Anatomy: On Horror, Embodiment, and the Haunted House”
This game sounds really interesting. I will have to get it when I don’t have an impending flight to Vienna hanging over me. Seems to be another horror game playing on presence and absence, though very differently than other games that have recently.
This: “Upon finding each tape, you bring it back to the kitchen”, strikes me as particularly interesting for some reason.