For halloween our intrepid heroes delve deep into the gothic with a look at Layers Of Fear. Beneath the game’s beautiful exterior lurks a dark, worm-ridden subtext, but like the best of the genre there’s a perverse pleasure in coming back for one more taste…
Spoilers for Layers Of Fear and its Inheritance DLC.
References and Recommended reading:
Carol J. Clover. Men, Women and Chainsaws; Gender in Modern Horror Film
Vivian Sobchack. ‘Child/Alien/Father: Patriarchal Crisis and Generic Exchange.’ in Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction
Barbara Creed. ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine; An Imaginary Abjection.’ in The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis
Linda Williams. ‘When the Woman Looks.’ in Horror, the Film Reader
Barbara Creed. ‘Dark Desires; Male Masochism in the Horror Film.’ in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema
Peter Hutchings. ‘Masculinity and the Horror Film.’ in You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men
Brigid Cherry. ‘Refusing to Refuse to Look; Female Viewers of the Horror Film.’ in Horror, the Film Reader
Dale Townshend (Editor), Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination
In which our heroes discuss the way parents are represented in recent games . . . or not represented most of the time, if they’re mums. Questions on our minds were: how do divorce rates and single-parent families affect representation in games? Does the in-game patriarchy reappropriate ‘female suffering’? Daughters, hot or not? Do daughters sit in judgement on the decline of patriarchy, or inherit the power-baton from dear ol’ Dad? What’s progressive about these games and what might they be saying about the role of women in hyper-masculinised landscapes?