Hideo Kojima‘s Silent Hills game or P.T. before Konami pulled the plug, looked pretty scary. Now that he’s set up his fantabulous studio and has some awesome PlayStation backing. We’re wondering why his current project Death Stranding, is not a horror game.
In an interview with IGN, Kojima revealed why he’s not interested in going back to horror – at least right now. “I get scared very easily,” said Kojima. “Actually, this is true of Alfred Hitchcock as well as Steven Spielberg. Because they scare easily, because I scare easily. It’s actually easy for us to make something that is scary, because we understand what is scary.
“But while in that process, we’re constantly imagining, like, terrifying situations so it ends up giving me bad dreams. That’s the reason why I don’t want to make a horror game.”
In the IGN interview, Kojima said he thinks the most effective way to scare people is to show them something that is “slightly out of the ordinary.”
“Slightly off, but at first glance, they don’t know what it is about it that is unusual. When you do something like this, it confuses the mind, and that becomes unnerving for the person who sees it.”
“Also, the unknown. When there’s no information available for something, it’s more frightening. An example would be a bungee jump. If you’ve done it more than one time, it’s never as scary as the first time. Something that no one has any preconceptions about is the scariest thing.
“A good example of that is the original Alien. Everyone knows the design now, the famous design by H.R. Giger, but in the original movie, you don’t see it for most of the movie. You just see, like, quick cuts and little pieces, so you don’t know the shape. You don’t know the exact size. Until you see it at the end, and it’s like “oh, it’s shaped like a person. Somebody is wearing, like, an outfit, like a mascot.” So it’s not scary at that point, but until that point, because it’s this unknown entity. It’s very scary.”
So there you have it. It’s unlikely we’re going to get anything akin to the P.T./Silent Hills game. That fans are hoping would be done. But in the mean time we have Death Stranding which has both confused and intrigued me.
