New Weird

New Weird

Before this class I had heard the term new weird a little, but never really understood what exactly it was. But I think I understand it now, in that its taking and reworking as well as developing new tropes to fit our world and link the horror aspect to the newer generations. Annihilation did a good job of getting that across with its environmental horror, while other films play a bunch on a wide array of tropes, tweaked and twisted to fit this new generation. Ill be honest I don’t read a lot of professionally published material, mostly due to the monetary costs to upkeep my pace, and stick to a bunch of smaller authors that write mostly for fun. One of my favorite micro genres of horror that I feel falls very well into New Weird are short two sentence horror stories. They are a little hard to find unless you are looking very hard for them on line, but they are some of the best.

And New Weird is not just limited to literature and movies. 

In the realm of games there are so many horror games that work hard to really nail the feeling of terror, and having to tweak it to fit our new age desensitization to the horror elements of our forefathers. One way games have achieved this is by limiting what the player can do, its harder to not be scared when your only options are run, hide and distract. Alien Isolation, and the original outlast games do this extremely well, even if they don’t stray too far from traditional horror elements. I personally turned the game off halfway through the prologue of the first outlast game cause my heart rate to skyrocket extremely quickly. PT, I believe it is called, is a game demo that did an even better job, due to it pulling in a bunch of different elements from both traditional and modern horror tropes and was absolutely terrifying to play. This game specifically covered your player character walking through two hallways repeatedly with different things happening each time. to progress you had to figure out just what to do all while a malevolent presence resided over you. Another game that I enjoy that takes some of those New Weird horror ideas and plays with them is Dead by Daylight, which is one of my favorite games. It’s a survival horror competitive game, where you go into matches of four survivors, each with unique perks that you can mix match and customize, and one killer who has the majority of the power. The actual gameplay can be unnerving but for the most part it pulls forth the minor adrenaline high of fleeing some giant creature.