Creeping shadows in the corner of the eye, or piles of corpses littering a dungeon? Gothic literature is divided into two main categories: Terror and Horror. Terror Gothic is exemplified by Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, wherein feelings of helplessness and fear are cultivated by protagonist Emily’s helplessness against the schemes of rapacious Count Montoni and her own uncertain mental state. By contrast, Horror Gothic is found in books such as Matthew Lewis’ The Monk, which evokes feelings of shock and disgust through the violence and transgressive sexuality presented within. Elements of both Terror and Horror Gothic can be found within video games such as the Silent Hill, Castlevania, and Resident Evil series, Alien: Isolation, and the dark-fantasy role-playing series Dark Souls. In particular, the Souls series combines Terror and Horror Gothic to create a new style within Gothic media. Additionally, the Souls games’ use of video game mechanics allow for a deeper experience of the game as a whole.
The Souls games take place in a fantasy world comparable to the late medieval period. Within this world, a plague known as the Undead Curse has broken out. Those afflicted are doomed to be reborn each time they die, gradually going mad from the disease’s effect. Prior to the events of Dark Souls, sufferers are confined to a decrepit asylum in an effort to contain the plague. At the beginning of Dark Souls, the player must escape the asylum and enter a kingdom known as Lordran, which has been completely abandoned to the Undead Curse. There the player attempts to rekindle the First Fire, which will both temporarily cure the Undead Curse and return light to the darkening world. Dark Souls II features a similar mission, as players must explore the kingdom of Drangleic in a quest to “link the fire,” which will again cure the Undead Curse and drive back the darkness.
One of the key elements of Terror Gothic is the creation of a constant sense of uncertainty in both the character and the reader. For example, in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe utilizes the setting of Castle Udolpho to create uncertainty and escalate tension: Castle Udolpho is massive, ill-lit, and filled with ominous noises and strange shapes in the shadows. At one point, Emily is left alone in Udolpho’s dungeon with only a lamp for light. Exploring, she “perceived only a dark curtain, which, descending from the ceiling to the floor, was drawn along the whole side of the chamber.” Emily draws aside the curtain, only to glimpse in the dim light a “corpse, stretched on a kind of low couch, which was crimsoned with human blood, as was the floor beneath. The features, deformed by death, were ghastly and horrible, and more than one livid wound appeared in the face” (Radcliffe 348). Up to this point, Emily has been searching for her imprisoned aunt. Due to the flickering light, she—and the reader—draw the conclusion that the mangled corpse belongs to Emily’s aunt. Other misunderstandings occur due to low light as well, including various characters assuming that a fellow prisoner is a ghost.
The use of light (or lack thereof) in order to create uncertainty in the player is a large element in sections of the Souls games. One notable segment of Dark Souls, the Tomb of Giants, is entirely lacking in atmospheric lighting. Located deep underground, the Tomb dampens any light source within it. The glow of bonfires, the closest thing to a safe space in Dark Souls, extend only a scarce few feet in any direction, a tiny pinprick in an ocean of black. In order to navigate the Tomb, players must equip a lantern in place of their left-hand shield or weapon, trading defense for the simple ability to see their surroundings. However, even this lantern provides only a small circle of light to the player, barely illuminating the treacherous pitfalls and massive skeletal dogs which lurk in the Tomb’s inky darkness. The player is thus suffused with a constant sense of uncertainty: Several paths in the Tomb lead to dead ends, or crypts filled with twenty-foot-tall, hostile, re-animated skeletons. In order to proceed, the player must inch along, avoiding cliff edges and enemies, filled with the knowledge that the darkness surrounding them could hold anything at all. By giving the player a choice between the lantern’s pitiful light—and a slightly-lessened sense of uncertainty regarding the immediate area—but no defense against the unknown, or complete and utter darkness—and a greater feeling of uncertainty—while having a method of defense against the unknown, Dark Souls forces the player to choose uncertainty for themselves. Light comes with more certainty about the player’s surroundings, but lessens their certainty of being able to defend themselves. Darkness renders the player’s surroundings entirely uncertain, but provides them with the ability to defend against what lurks in that uncertain void. This choice makes uncertainty as a whole far more painful, as it is self-inflicted. Additionally, this uncertainty comes late in the game, when players have begun to feel confident in their skills and knowledge, undermining their beliefs regarding their own skill. This creation of uncertainty about the self is particularly Gothic, similar to a sense of uncertainty regarding one’s own sanity, like that experienced by Jonathan Harker in Dracula’s early chapters.
According to Judith Halberstam, “Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity” wherein “boundaries between good and evil, health and perversity, crime and punishment, truth and deception, inside and outside dissolve and threaten the integrity of the narrative itself” (Halberstam 2). This subjectivity makes it impossible for Gothic characters (and readers of the Gothic) to determine precisely what is real and unreal. Similarly, the Souls series constantly manipulates the line between dualities, toying with the player to create uncertainty. For example, in Dark Souls II, the player encounters two wanderers, Mild-Mannered Pate and Creighton of Mirrah. After gaining his trust, Creighton warns the player about Pate, saying that Pate lets others die in order to loot their corpses. Similarly, Pate claims that Creighton tried to kill him for no reason after walking into a trap Pate warned him of. The game itself is unclear which of them is truthful—the player can side with either Creighton or Pate when the two finally clash, and no matter who wins, will be directed to a booby-trapped “reward,” which implies that the player’s choice was incorrect. This blurring of truth and lie, real and unreal, and other dualities, is a theme maintained throughout the Souls series. Factions within the game will tell the player entirely opposite things, leaving the player to decide for themselves what to believe. Such an atmosphere of uncertainty has been created by the games that nearly four years after the first game’s release, elements of the plot have still not been fully clarified. Players who chose to let darkness sweep over the land argue that darkness represents freedom from the failing gods of fire, while those who chose to rekindle the First Fire believe that darkness is the embodiment of evil attempting to devour the feeble light of humanity. From this narrative uncertainty can be a drawn a connection to Sheridan Le Fanu’s “The Familiar,” wherein the exact nature of the tale is left unsettled, no matter how much textual examination might take place. Dr. Hesselius lacks the complete picture of what happened to Captain Barton, and so too does the reader, just as players of Dark Souls do.
Such a choice between light and darkness is an excellent example of the manipulation of agency found in the Souls games. First, however, it is important to differentiate between player agency, reader agency, and character agency. A character in a novel may possess varying levels of agency, but their agency can only be experienced vicariously by the reader, and is thus psychically distant. The reader’s agency is very limited: They may continue reading the book, stop reading the book, or skip to the end. Player agency is far more involved than character or reader agency. Someone playing a video game actively affects an ongoing story through their actions, meaning that not only do they have more agency than a reader, their agency is also weightier than that of a character, due to the direct involvement of the player and the player’s psychic closeness to their agency.
One method in which the Souls series approaches agency is a constant theme of confinement, both literal and metaphorical. Alison Milbank describes the trope of the Gothic prison encompassing an entire nation, where London itself is a Gothic structure of imprisonment. (Milbank 149). In the Souls games, everything is a prison. The player begins Dark Souls trapped within their own body and mind by a disease which will not let them die. They are also locked in a cell: Escaping the cell, they find themselves still in an asylum, warded by a thirty-foot-tall demon. After leaving the asylum, the player enters the kingdom of Lordran, which is a quarantined plague zone entirely dominated by the Undead Curse and its sufferers. Immediately, the player’s goal becomes to reach the walled city of Anor Londo, which is empty, inhabited only by a frail moon god trapped by his father’s orders. Also within Anor Londo, the player can find a massive painting which encloses an entire world designed to contain a half-dragon, half-human child—a prison painting within a prison city within a prison country. Even at the end of the first Dark Souls, when the player receives a moment of agency which will decide the future of the entire world, the setting is a prison. The player’s quest brings them to the Kiln of the First Flame, a location designed to contain the heat of the flame which lit the world. Inside the Kiln stalks the hollow husk of the previous kindler of the flame, trapped there until the player’s arrival. If the player chooses to rekindle the flame, they remain in the Kiln, their entire journey an exchange of one prison for another.
The theme of imprisonment is also expressed in the Souls series’ use of prophecy and fate. Both Dark Souls and Dark Souls II feature prophecies regarding the player character. In Dark Souls, a non-player character states, There is an old saying in my family... Thou who art Undead, art chosen... In thine exodus from the Undead Asylum, maketh pilgrimage to the land of Ancient Lords... When thou ringeth the Bell of Awakening, the fate of the Undead thou shalt know...” Similarly, in Dark Souls II, a non-player character tells the player, “Are you...the next monarch? Or... Merely a pawn of fate?” Other characters make reference to fate and prophecy as well, strongly implying that no matter what the player chooses to do, it was foretold in prophecy. The player has complete agency in how they progress through the story (and whether they succeed at all), but the surrounding lore indicates that there is no real agency present whatsoever, and that their overall actions were dictated by the whim of gods.
And where there are gods, there are monsters. It is here that the Souls series slips from Terror into Horror. In his text The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll identifies five major types of monsters within horror and Horror Gothic: Fusion (disparate beings merged into one stable being), fission (beings which change back and forth between two separate, distinct beings), magnification (beings which are larger than they are in reality), massification, (hordes of something small), and metonymy (the association of a non-disgusting being with something disgusting) (Carroll 43-52). Enemies fitting each of these categories exist within the Souls games. In Dark Souls II, players confront a fusion-category boss known as The Rotten, a giant, sluglike enemy composed of dozens of screaming corpses which writhe in pain as The Rotten moves. The Dark Souls boss known as Pinwheel repeatedly divides itself into identical copies, each of which acts independently of each other, revealing it as a fission-category monster. Magnification is the category which the Souls games utilize the most frequently. Dark Souls alone features giant wolves, moths, and golems, while Dark Souls II contains giant rats, spiders, and frogs, as well as literal giants. Additionally, almost all of the Souls bosses are at least twice the size of the player avatar and dominate their environments. By contrast, massified hordes of small creatures scarcely make an appearance, in the form of one boss consisting of a horde of large rats. Finally, there are monsters such as the warrior Velstadt, who was a king’s bodyguard so dedicated that he followed his master into a living grave. But Velstadt, though outwardly appearing to be one of the least-horrifying bosses in Dark Souls II, was corrupted by darkness, and attacks with unholy magic. Velstadt, and similar bosses throughout the Souls series, are prime examples of metonymy. By featuring such diverse sets of enemies and bosses, the Souls games are able to frighten and horrify any player. If a player is not afraid of shambling corpse-conglomerations, they may harbor a phobia of spiders, or the sinister corruption which hides behind societal masks.
However, Carroll neglects a major aspect of Horror Gothic in his catalog of the macabre. Matthew Lewis’ The Monk was not decried merely for its violent content, but also for its depictions of transgressive sexualities, particularly rape and the violently sexual. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud notes one reason for feelings of the uncanny may result from a fear of castration (Freud 232). Castration, particularly in the guise of vagina dentata, is a particularly violent form of sexuality. It is no coincidence, then, that in a gaming market which has long catered to adolescent and college-aged males (though this has changed in recent years), Dark Souls would feature such castration-reminiscent imagery in the form of the Gaping Dragon. This boss is a massive dragon whose chest is split vertically in a manner reminiscent of female genitalia, and edged with rows of sharp teeth. The Gaping Dragon will rear back onto its hind legs and attempt to crash down upon the player with its fanged chest, a literal engulfing of the player in a violent unbirthing. This perversion of the feminine can also be encountered in the Bed of Chaos, a boss enemy which was once a woman, but was transformed through chaotic magic into a writhing mass of tree-trunk-sized vines. In order to defeat the Bed of Chaos, players must enter a tunnel below the Bed and destroy the monster’s heart. Much like with the Gaping Dragon, elements of violent unbirthing can be encountered in the Bed of Chaos’ design. A womb-like tunnel under a tangle of vines is strongly reminiscent of vaginal imagery, meaning that the player is entering the Bed of Chaos’ womb in order to kill a creature which was once a woman famed for mothering several powerful witches. In order to progress, the player must kill the Bed of Chaos, just as with the Gaping Dragon, meaning that violence and sexuality become inextricably intertwined.
In fact, the Souls series relies heavily on imagery of violence, death, and the grotesque for its horror. As Freud notes, death and funerals are some of the events most strongly associated with a feeling of unease and the return of repressed, unwanted emotions. Additionally, Freud makes reference to a human dread of a boundary between life and death which is not fixed in one direction (Freud 241-242). The idea that the dead can return to life is one which can be found in many cultures, and it is the founding mechanic of the Souls series’ gameplay. Every person in the Souls universe who is infected with the Undead Curse defies that one-way passage between life and death, returning again and again from their rightful place. Corpses, skeletons, and amalgamations of the dead (such as The Rotten), litter every location in the Souls games. Often, such enemies are surrounded by other, non-animate remains as well. This leads the player to constantly question whether the boundary between life and death is malleable and fixed in each instance. And indeed, the division between life and death is extremely fluid throughout Dark Souls and Dark Souls II: Each time the player avatar dies and is returned to life, so too are their undying enemies. By taking this video game trope (that of the player avatar possessing “lives”), and applying it across the game world, the Souls series creates a looming sense of horror. The same pattern of death and resurrection has driven every other person suffering from the Undead Curse slowly into some degree of insanity or another. The same will inevitably happen to the player character if they do not succeed in their mission. Additionally, such repetition is part of what Freud links to the birth of the feeling of the uncanny (Freud 237). By this combining two elements which contribute to the uncanny, death and repetition, the Souls series has created a mechanic which will inevitably foster in the player a sense of déjà vu and looming dread: “I’ve died there before. I won’t die there this time. I know he will move in this manner, and I will react in this manner, but what will happen if…?”
And it is through combining two existing elements that the Souls games prove their worth. By taking the aforementioned aspects of Horror and Terror Gothic, as well as many other aspects which were not discussed, Dark Souls and Dark Souls II have formed a new division of the Gothic, one which utilizes Horror and Terror tropes in equal measure. The player learns to fear both the unknown hiding in the darkness just as much as the known waiting in the light, knowing that whatever the darkness conceals is as grotesque as anything they have encountered face-to-face. Additionally, the interplay between Terror Gothic tension and Horror Gothic shock results in a constant pendulum of unease and disgust. Moments where the aura of Terror Gothic holds sway create tension, only to be brutally shattered by instances of Horror Gothic’s gore, before returning to the low background hum of Terror Gothic once more. By interrupting tension with shock, Dark Souls and Dark Souls II essentially create a “heartbeart” within themselves, one which never quite keeps to a steady rhythm, creating patterns and then destroying them to shatter any sense of security the player may have derived from a relatively calm section of play. This change in rhythm can also be caused through game mechanics. To return to the example of the Tomb of Giants, players become accustomed to one type of enemy or one specific gameplay mechanic, only to have a new enemy or mechanic thrown into the mix, shocking the player once again. In the case of the Tomb of Giants, that new mechanic is an impenetrable darkness which forces the player to abandon the usual playstyle of shield in left hand, weapon in right. This change of mechanics adds a second layer of tension to that which is derived from exploring Tomb of Giants in utter darkness, achieving an interplay between mechanics and Gothic aura.
This new interplay between Horror, Terror, and game mechanics can also be seen in the underlying mechanics of the Souls series. Tanya Krzywinska notes that horror video games (a category including both Terror and Horror Gothic elements), and video games as a whole, grant the player a greater sense of agency than can be found through reading a novel or watching a movie. Krzywinska posits that this interaction creates a greater sense of interaction with the medium: “Looking in games can mean that the player encounters danger, as with Old Dark House-style horror films, yet the difference is that (outside cut-scenes) the player is encouraged to assert an active, rather than passive, mode of looking” (Krzywinska 21). What this means is that the player is encouraged to foster their own sense of uncertainty, to take away their own knowledge of what is happening. Each time the player enters a new area of the game, they are rendering themselves entirely uncertain about what the location holds, whether that be enemies, treasure, certain death, or a friendly face. But this uncertainty is entirely in the hands of the player. By placing control over the level of uncertainty within the player’s grasp, the Souls series forces the player to gamble their agency—derived from their grasp of the game’s mechanics (dodging, attacking, observation of surroundings, reaction time)—against their inherent uncertainty regarding what the next locale holds. Such a risk-versus-reward calculation often results in players proceeding slowly, exploring areas thoroughly rather than dashing through to get to the next action set-piece, soaking in the game’s ambience and atmosphere more completely. Wise players of the Souls games will often scour every corner of an area, searching for every scrap of equipment or hidden path to a difficult boss that can be found. They will speak to each and every friendly non-player character, hoping for a piece of advice which will help them defeat an enemy or point out the next destination along the way. In the process, the player absorbs information about the setting and story, forging an emotional connection which is strengthened by the travails of beating the game. And it is this emotional connection, forged through terror and horror, tension and shock, frustration and success, which has contributed to the popularity of the Souls games, just as it drew so many readers to The Mysteries of Udolpho and other Gothic texts.
Works Cited
Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror. Routledge: New York, 1990.
Dark Souls. From Software. 2011.
Dark Souls II. From Software. 2014.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Trans. Alix Strachey. 1925.
Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows. Duke: London, 1995.
Kavka, Misha. “The Gothic on Screen.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: New York, 2011. 209-228.
Kryzwinska, Tanya. “Hands-On Horror.” Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Ed. Bernard Perron. McFarland: North Carolina, 2009.
Le Fanu, Sheridan. “The Familiar.” Oxford: New York, 2008.
Milbank, Alison. “The Victorian Gothic in English Novels and Stories, 1830-1880.” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Ed. Jerrold E. Hogle. Cambridge: New York, 2011. 145-166.
Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: New York, 2008.
