#9 Video Gameplay — Research

     Me and my friends played a video game together to try and get a feel of what it's like to experience horror first-hand, the closest to that we can get without having to spend like 60 bucks in a haunted house or a horror themed escapee room is to play a game. The game was about staying in a motel, and it was packed full of mystery, topped off with a wild turn at the end.

     This game started off very strong: a suspicious setting, eerie music, weird people... Like this one. This random guy just opened our motel room and said it was his room; we were room 6 and he was room 9. The thing that made us suspicious of him is because how did he open our door without our key? We also went to check the reception desk, and the door to the room that was supposedly his was still there. How does he not have his room's key?

     We never got this guy's name, so his name was quite literally "Suspicious Neighbor", even though he wasn't the suspicious one. We first met him because he was playing his music super loudly, we heard it all the way from the other side of the motel. Can you believe this guy? But later, he was really sweet and warned us about the motel and told us that many people have died there. He was helpful but at the same time, he wasn't. He just made us a little more worried and cautious, because why would you ever tell a random stranger that? As if the motel itself wasn't a huge scare factor. Then, he died! We thought someone killed him because they found out that he warned us about the killer, but it was not that.

     The motel manager was pretty nice too, a nice balm for the tension. But oh-oh. Plot twist! He died too! Who kept killing at the people that were the actual good ones. It did not help that there was some random guy with his head stuck in a literal pot. I thought he was the crackhead killer because he never popped up except for only one scene, but no, just a businessman that appeared throughout the whole game only once. He was quite literally irrelevant.

     I had a screen recording of us running away from the actual perpetrator, but it didn't work because the file's too big. I have to work on that. The twist was that the actual murderer wasn't anyone at all that we suspected, it was some random wendigo that came from nowhere. In the end, it was a super-natural horror. The actual monster itself wasn't the scary part of the game, it was more the chase itself and the timer it gave us to stay safe until backup arrived. We ran super slow and the wendigo was a lot faster than us; that was the real horror.

     This game showed me exactly how I can structure my 2-minute film opening. The psychological part--making us worry about the suspicious neighbor and the motel manager--was a perfect slow burn. I want my film opening to do the same: spending the beginning building human based mystery and tension, leading the audience to suspect the wrong person, much like the game did with the "businessman in a pot." The game's real impact came from when the supernatural twist (the wendigo) appeared. The chase is the real gold. The true horror wasn't the monster's design, but the feeling of being outmatched in a race against the clock, and that's the intense energy I want to capture in my opening.