There Was A Hole Here, It’s Gone Now: On Horror As A Coping Mechanism
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Towards the end of 2016, I had surgery to remove an infected abscess from my right thigh. For those unfamiliar with the healing process of cysts and abscesses: the resulting wound can not be stitched up due to the cavity left behind by the cyst or abscess. The cavity must be washed and stuffed with gauze daily, so that the wound can grow back from the bottom up. After nearly two months of recovery time, the infection came back. By the time it came back a third time, my surgeon realized he’d need to change his treatment methods. The final surgery came to me the day after my birthday: May 27th 2017, nearly half a year after the first surgery. They took out the abscess, it healed, and it has stayed healed since then. The scar is still fresh and purple, and sometimes I worry that it may come back. But, as with any trauma, there is comfort to be found.
During my recovery period I played a lot of video games. Horror games were the ones that brought me the most comfort. They let me not only see but revel in blood and gore, serving as an exposure therapy for my own gaping wound. They let me face my own mortality in the safe world of polygons and pixels. For all the horrible things we encounter in horror games, we still play them to escape.
The week after my first surgery, I lay in a hospital bed. A nurse had just given me morphine in anticipation of the daily cleaning of my wound. I thought about the friendly faces and soft voices of all the nurses who helped me. There was an almost gross dissonance between how they behaved and what they were doing. Soft and sweet was the man who sucked my blood through needles. Soft and sweet was the woman who probed my open wound with stainless steel tools. Soft and sweet was the woman who mopped the floor and stored away my piss filled urinal. And there I was. Ungroomed. High. Oozing blood and pus. Feeling less than human. Attended to by overworked angels.
Concept Art for Silent Hill 2 by Masahiro Ito
I thought of the hospitals of Silent Hill. Rusty and bloody. They were images of grotesque pain but they reflected what I was going through far better than the ammonia and stark whiteness of the hospital I was in. My situation sucked. It was surreal and bloody and painful. Indulging in games that were surreal and bloody and painful brought me a sense of comfort. They let me see my experience for the trauma that it was. They allowed me to stare viscera in the face, and accept that those images, which were near mythical to my younger self, were now a daily reality.
It was incredibly difficult not to think even more about Silent Hill during my recovery. Not only were the games filled with a surreal and disgusting horror that reflected how I felt about my own body, but Silent Hill 2 is absolutely filled with holes, which reminded me of my wound. James, the game’s protagonist, retrieves a key from a deep dark hole in the apartments, he jumps down five deep holes in the historical society, he smells the horrible stench emanating from the gaping corpse filled holes of the morgue, and there’s that cryptic line the player receives upon inspecting a boarded up window in town, “There was a hole here, it’s gone now.” A line I constantly think of whenever I look at the purple gash of scar tissue across my thigh.
Not only is Silent Hill 2 full of literal gaping holes, but the design philosophy behind most of the monsters are meant to mimic the frustration and confinement associated with being bedridden in a hospital. I thought of that as I took my doctor prescribed walks around the hospital hallways. I used my IV pole like a grotesque walking stick, stumbling awkwardly while I tried to keep the back of my gown closed. The exertion soiled my bandages with more splotches of yellow and red. I felt like a monster.
The images from Silent Hill came to me obsessively. Not to disturb me, but to bring me catharsis. To let me see a grotesque and fantastical version of my pain. My mind retreated into horror games as if they were some kind of reverse power fantasy. I was a monster. High on morphine, dripping blood, unshaven, unwashed, and shambling through endless white hallways. And that was okay.
After being discharged, I fell into a nice rhythm of things. The dressing had to be changed once it was wet, so I would shower just before my nurse arrived. By the end of my shower, my oxycodone had kicked in and I would lie on my bed, dressing half off after being soaked in water, waiting for the nurse to come.
They’d come, I would sign a form, and they would get to work. Painkillers are a strange thing — the pain doesn’t leave, you just don’t care about it. The feeling of a cotton swab scraping an open wound felt like scratching an itch you couldn’t reach. Over time, my nurses goaded me into looking at the wound myself. I did. It was a coin slot, too dark to even see any gore in. The size of the wound coupled with the fact that the painkillers made cleaning easy made my relationship with the hole change. It became part of me. This was my flesh. Or rather, where my flesh used to be. I was a sack of bones and meat; a thought that had often driven me to existential panic was suddenly not so scary. Eventually I no longer needed a nurse to clean out the wound.
The second surgery came. The wound hadn’t even sealed up entirely when it grew puffy and painful. I had an outpatient surgery to remove another abscess and was sent home. I thought I would go back to the same routine as before, and informed the hospital I wouldn’t require any in-home nursing. The next day, I took my painkiller, hopped in the shower, peeled of my dressing, and then had a panic attack. The small coin slot was gone, replaced by a gaping mouth of a wound. Even stuffed to the brim with gauze I could see the bloody flesh and fat around its walls, and the extra bit of skin that hung limply over it. I stumbled out of the shower and into the kitchen, asking my aunt desperately for help. Thank God she gave it.
I snuck a peek while she cleaned it. It looked like the exit wound of a bullet. Flesh blown open and uneven with the skin above it. There were even black chunks of dying fat. It was only an inch and a half deep, but it seemed to go on forever.
Once the horrible thing was hidden beneath cotton and bandages, I pulled my pants back on and tried to continue my day. I played Okami with an absent mind. All I could think of was the horrible thing beneath only a few layers of cotton and denim. It was there, I couldn’t get rid of it. It was on me, I could no longer consider it a part of me. The bright colors and goofy characters of Okami brought me no solace, I could only see that image of my wound flashing before my eyes. I decided to watch playthroughs of the original Alone In The Dark. A game that is arguably still pretty scary despite its poor aging. It has a strong streak of deaths that are simply unfair. Walk on the wrong floorboard? Dead. Don’t cover the random window in the attic with a cabinet? Dead. There was horror in that, the fact that you could die from danger you had no idea was there. It made me wonder what was wrong with my wound. Why had it come back? At night I watched death reels. I watched Carnby, the main character of Alone In The Dark, die over and over again in new ways. I did this until sleep took me.
After the third surgery, I received a call. They found out exactly what the infection was and how to eliminate it. I needed to be given a certain antibiotic twice a day for nearly two weeks. I couldn’t just stay in a hospital bed for that long so they gave me a new body part: a PICC line. Like an IV line but longterm, the tube went so deep into my veins that whenever I moved, my heart would palpitate from the line’s touch. Now I had not only one body invader but two. The hole was as big as last time, but with no necrosis. It had become no big deal. I had seen a lot of gore since my initial surgery and had even gotten to the point where I would crane my head and squish the fat surrounding the gash to see how the meat inside moved. The missing flesh was once again part of me, and I derived some strange sense of curiosity at the fact that I could comfortably look at the inside of my own body.
Now I had gotten over the wound, but was dealt a new and greater amount of anxiety with my PICC line. Snag it on something and have it rip out? ER. Get it wet in the shower? ER. Overexert myself and cause the tube to snap internally? ER. Now the fear of the visceral had been replaced by a fear of my own mortality. I was fighting an infection that horrified my surgeon and was constantly attached to tubes that could break with the wrong move. I sunk deeper into horror. I needed to see depictions of pain. I needed to relate to others with horrible injuries. I needed that comfort now more than ever.
Enter Fear Effect, a PS1 era horror game involving three playable mercenaries looking for the kidnapped daughter of a member of the Hong Kong Triad. There were monsters, but the game for the most part leans towards feeling like a spy thriller until you get to the final act of the game: Diyu.
One of my favorite parts of the game, Diyu is the Hell of Chinese mythology. Not only is it refreshing to fight against Yaojing and traverse a piece of mythology not often represented in video games, it also has one of my favorite exchanges in the game. At one point, one of the mercenaries named Glas has his arm unceremoniously sliced off by one of the main antagonists. This loss of a limb hits the player not only emotionally but effectively makes Glas unable to dual wield weapons, a feature that is very useful during most fights in the game.
Glas loses consciousness after his arm is severed. When he wakes, he finds himself hanging on a meat hook in a freezer, his stump of an arm covered in soiled bandages. He unhooks himself, grabs his gun, and jumps down a hole in the floor to find himself in Diyu. He soon meets up with one of the other mercenaries: Deke. But Deke is dead, and Diyu has punished him for his past crimes associated with his mercenary work by turning him into a mass of corpses. They have a short conversation in which Deke explains what happened to him and Glas delivers one of the most organic and sympathetic line deliveries in the game; “Oh, shit…. I’m sorry, Deke”.
Here we have two of the protagonists of the game, one without an arm and the other turned into a mass of rotten corpses. Glas’ line is so simple and crude and it feels perfect because there is no better way to describe the horrific trauma they both endured with anything other than “Oh, shit…I’m sorry”. Glas’ blunt line serves to normalize this horrific trauma in a way that made me feel like I was right there with them. My physical trauma couldn’t compare to either of theirs of course, but that’s not what this is about. It’s about me and these two fictional characters realizing we are mortal and made of meat and bone that can rot and be cut and infected and saying “this sucks”.
Another game I played was Dead by Daylight, an asymmetrical multiplayer game where four survivors must escape a fenced-in area being patrolled by a serial killer. The game has a wide variety of playable killers, four of which caught my eye. There’s The Nurse and The Doctor, once again images of respite that had been gnarled and twisted to be as frightening (to patients) as the work that medical professionals did. There’s The Hillbilly — a reference to a certain cannibalistic chainsaw-wielding killer. He has a disfigured face, ratty hair, and on his back, prominently displayed to the player in the lobby: lumps. Abscesses. There’s The Trapper: a Jason inspired killer that has open slices all over his flesh. Here were symbols of my ailment in video game form. People who shared and treated my pain. And they were serial killers.
Upon reading the backstories for these killers, most of them boiled down to becoming a killer due to some past trauma involving physical mutilation. I wished for better lives for these “monsters”. There was no reason they had to be evil. No reason they had to hurt others. It wasn’t how trauma worked and it demonized those in real life who bear very visible scars or disfigurations or genetic mutations. Despite this, I was comforted by these characters just like how I was comforted by the nurses and Lying Figures of Silent Hill, and the rotting heap of corpses that was Deke in Fear Effect.
The strange relationship I developed with Dead By Daylight kept growing. I became very attached to a certain survivor character named Claudette Morel, a young botanist bookworm who wore pink pleather jackets and colorful head scarves. She became my main, and my maternal instinct kicked in; I wanted to get her out of there safe. Yet, I was playing a game where I would eventually see Claudette hanging from a meat hook screaming bloody murder, or see her head caved in with a hammer, or her belly slashed open with a knife. Sometimes, these deeds would be done by myself if I decided to play the killer. Despite not wanting to see Claudette in pain and covered in her own gore, I couldn’t help but get some comfort from it. Seeing a character I loved getting killed over and over again had a certain existential horror to it that made me feel even more comfortable with being a creature of flesh and blood. I’m mortal, life has victory, and it has pain, and they weren’t always doled out in equal measures. But Claudette was my avatar of freedom. When she escaped I felt victorious and when she died I felt sympathetic.
With time, even the PICC line became normal, and my days were spent high on painkillers playing Dragon Quest VII in my underwear. The sight of my wound was no longer terrifying, and administering antibiotics became mundane.
It may be strange to think of horror as a comforting genre, yet it is. To see the painful parts of life blown up and caricatured brings me more catharsis than the soft faces of nurses, the clean white walls of a hospital, and the flowers and balloons brought by loved ones. Those things make it all bearable, yes, but when you’re staring down a black bottomless hole, or a bright red oozing wound in your own body, jumping in and wallowing in it can sometimes be the most comforting thing in the world.
