Videogames, Erotic Horror, and the Politics of the Grotesque
Horror likes to blur the lines between what repulses and arouses us. This is too often informed by how society paints certain bodies as worthy of revulsion
There’s a review of the new horror game Agony going around describing the game as toxic and misogynistic. I’ve been watching a let’s play of the title as I prepared research for another piece, and can’t help but agree. The game promises a visceral and shocking depiction of hell, and while many reviewers have praised the game for at least delivering on those fronts, my hot take is that it does neither. Agony’s depiction of hell is tragically routine and boring.
The Red Goddess (depicted above) feels like your stock succubus character you might see in any typical RPG-fare, vagina-head not withstanding. Maybe I have just been on the internet for too long, but red demon-women with horns and vagina faces just don’t shock and frighten me all that much. Furthermore, I don’t find the game’s endless depictions of violent rape all that shocking. Your Great-Aunt Carol watches that kind of violence every week on Game of Thrones. For whatever reason, Agony thinks that the same tired level of violence against women we see in just about every video-game and television series is shocking or somehow new.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand what the game is going for. It’s been done before, and arguably well in some cases. There is an entire genre about blurring the lines between what we find seductive and horrifying. We are repulsed, even as we are inevitably drawn further in. It’s unfortunate that gaming’s failed attempts at evoking this complex emotion are often just very boring depictions of BDSM-lite.
The sexism at play here would be offensive were it not so yawn-inducingly typical. The game is horny but wants to be treated like an intellectual for it. It’s like the guy at a party who wants you to have a threesome with him while tripping acid because the experience will enrich your consciousness or whatever. If you go home with him, you’ll likely just be bored and be thankful the experience was so unmemorable you know you won’t remember it come six months time, which is what I predict will happen to Agony.
I’m being unfair. There’s more to Agony than that. Going back to the design of the Red Goddess and some of the demons in her thrall, it’s clear that we are meant to be as frightened of them as much as we are meant to be titillated. Neither is effective sadly due to the limited imagination at work.
This is a problem that occurs in the genre at large. Dario Argento’s Master of Horror entry, Jenifer features a young disfigured woman who becomes the object of lust and attraction for the police officer who discovers her. She is depicted as a monster, a woman with an attractive body but a mutilated face who seduces many men throughout the film before violently murdering them.
Like Agony, Jenifer is very routine when it comes to what is meant to be seductive about her character. Her body is thin and youthful and frequently on display, and her hair is long and blond and pretty. Disfigurements aside, she fits your average cisheteropatriarchal white supremacist standards for feminine beauty.
It’s where she diverges from that format where the film’s ugly politics start to show itself. In addition to her facial features, Jenifer is mute, and the film uses an ugly ableist slur to describe her as likely being mentally handicapped. It’s these qualities that first define her otherness as monstrous, and are what causes those who are not seduced by her to warn the police officer to stay away from her.
Finally, the male protagonist breaks free from her spell and begins to abuse her, violently dragging her out into the woods to kill her, until he is killed by a hunter who sees nothing but a man brutalizing an attractive white woman. The man moves to comfort Jenifer, as our protagonist did in the early parts of the movie, indicating the cycle is to once more repeat itself. Like Agony, this film presents the female form as a monster responsible for men’s destruction, even as the imagery objectifies and demands ownership of female bodies.
Films like Jenifer are even worse, and they are far more common. Sexism is at play, but they are also host to a form of other bigotries. Erotic horror has a frequent problem where it paints the attraction to non-white, non-cis, or disabled bodies as grotesque and horrific, even as those bodies are fetishized for the consumption of a straight white male audience.
Sometimes this concept of repulsive sexuality is used as a weapon against the audience, rather than something for them to get off to, but can be just as full of societal bigotry. In Clive Barker’s Jericho, there is a boss fight against Cassius Vicus, a Roman general. He is naked and fat and suspends his body from chains as some do in extreme BDSM circles. He assaults the player by literally tearing open his stomach to spill his guts onto you. His fatness is depicted as a weapon.
Furthermore, Cassius is openly bisexual. Before the fight even begins, he struts towards you, gallivanting obscenely through piles of blood and dead body, reveling in his own decadence. He delights how you have brought him witches, and how long it has been since he has tasted of both sexes.
His queerness, nakedness, and fatness are all delivered with sensuous delight. His sexuality is meant to be repulsive to us, as his body is. It’s an entire sequence that looks at fat queer men in mockery and says, yes, you should be repulsed by these kinds of men. You should be horrified. Now shoot them with your big guns.
Cassius is of course not the only naked fat man villain in a videogame. There are many more. While I don’t have the data to back it up, I’d argue a good portion of naked men in videogames are fat badguys meant to illicit disgust in the player so we can justify violently gunning them down. It’s certainly the majority of fat bodies in videogames period.
Our stories and our imagery is not free of the politics in our world, or the bigotries and systemic injustice present. What we think of and present as grotesque, especially when it comes to other people’s bodies, can reinforce societal oppression. This is especially true in gaming, where the grotesque is often used as visual short-hand for bodies that need to be violently eradicated.
You can support Dorian’s writing at patreon.com/doriandawes. Their science-fiction novel Mercs is currently available to buy from Smashwords, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and from the publisher’s website, Ninestarpress.com
