Sorry, Abigail

Recently started replaying Supermassive Games' interactive drama horror The Quarry. I'm not sure why. I would have said, when Chris and I played it two years ago, that I had no desire to play it again. Not because I didn't enjoy it; it was the opposite, really. I had so much fun with it - despite my occasional frustrations - that I didn't want to overwrite my memories of it by starting again. It felt done.

But I picked it up this week. It's been a topsy-turvy time for me. I wanted something to take my mind off things. It's October! I should be doing something scary. So I decided to take another outing with these teenagers. Wondering if I would make the same choices again this time.

The premise of The Quarry is this: you play a bunch of camp counselors at the end of summer camp, a premise that I, as a British person, find to be a novelty. Because of the actions of some knobhead unable to move on after a breakup, the teens are stuck there for one more night. Unfortunately, there's a chance they could all be dead by morning.

The Quarry is what I need at the moment. I find it quite comforting in a bloody, brutal sort of way. It's a little bit janky, too, on the PS4. When you're making decisions, the game will give you a minute to figure out what to do. The character will have a little think. Which makes them look spectacularly gormless. Like this:

Or this:

How you can make some of the most beautiful people look like this I have no idea. It's fun though. It makes me laugh every time. Which in a tense moment sort of pulls you out of it, but I don't mind too much.

Sometimes I crave the kind of horror that creeps under your skin and lingers there: like the subtle, escalating terror of books like Dark Water. Or the quiet intensity of games like Iron Lung. Or the full-blown visceral physicality of films like Talk to Me. Sometimes I want something that is going to pop into my head, completely unbidden, months or even years later.

There's probably some psychological reason behind it, why humans want to have a little poke at the darkness, to dip their toes into brutality and then quickly whip them back out again. Years ago I was thinking about this idea of Halloween and 'safe danger'. We like to be reassured that we're actually safe, so we look for things that scare us, and then we feel relieved that we're alright. I'm probably massively oversimplifying that but you get the gist.

I think it's something else for me. My life is very normal. I go to school, drop off the kids, write for a while, run errands, pick up the kids, make dinner, clean up, maybe squeeze an hour of something relaxing into my evening, and then I go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. Something I've been thinking about recently is how you stop yourself from getting too comfortable if every day is the same. I think horror fills that gap, albeit briefly. A bit of an adrenaline rush without actually having to put yourself out there too much.

But occasionally, I don't want anything too dark. Sometimes I want a bit of cheese. A bit of 'nudge-nudge, wink-wink, this is ridiculous'. A bit of silliness. I want to be scared, occasionally, but I also want to laugh, and roll my eyes, and enjoy the camaraderie of everyone being in on the joke of it. As much as I love twisty-turny psychological horror, I've got a lot of love in my heart for lovely, comforting, silly horror.

Which I think is why I like The Quarry so much. It's got everything. Stupid teenagers making silly choices. Snark. Romance. Gore. Plenty of opportunities for you to yell 'Oh noooooooo!' when they do something like fall over a tree root or fumble with their keys or whatever. It's got a million references to classic horror. It's got Tarot cards! It's got jumpscares! It's got Ted Raimi! What more could a girl ask for?

It's a testament to the writing of The Quarry that it feels so much like an old-school teen horror movie, the kind you don't really get anymore (unless I'm massively out of the loop here). The snark is actually funny, verging on obnoxious but not really tipping over the edge into actually annoying. The main story is scary but also ridiculous (who would run a summer camp under these conditions? Who?). And by the end, you do become attached to specific characters, ones you would rather not die, if possible.

One of the criticisms of The Quarry is that it does feel, sometimes, that your choices don't matter at all, or that the outcomes don't seem to align with what you've chosen. (Chris and I killed one character by locking her in a fridge right at the end, a decision we thought would keep her safe: the genuine outrage we felt at the nonsense of this made us go back and do the ending all over again.) Compounding this is the fact that I don't always make good decisions under pressure. I accidentally killed Abigail in the most gory way imaginable. Like you would not believe how grim it was. Because I couldn't come to a decision quickly enough and I just - I panicked.

Maybe the whole 'tripping over a tree root' cliche does make sense, actually.

Paradoxically, I think what elevates The Quarry over other, similar games I've played is that I do care about the characters quite a lot. The performances are excellent. (And yes, the mouths look absolutely bananas on the PS4 sometimes, but the performances are so good you can almost ignore it.) The issue with having really well-developed, movie-like characters in any video game is that they might want to do things that you wouldn't want them to. And I suppose there's a balance there that feels a little bit off, sometimes. How close can you walk the line between game and movie? How much control are you willing to actually give to the player when you've got a story to tell and a well-established, deeply-rooted genre format to follow? (Interestingly there is a Movie Mode in this game, which allows you to essentially set up a formula for how well the characters will cope, and then watch it unfold: I did consider doing this so I could experience the game again while doing the ironing, but ultimately thought this would take away from the scariness somewhat.)

But even if something feels a bit off about some of the decisions you have to make, this is still a game about choices, ultimately. A young couple choose to head to summer camp a little early. A lovestruck boy decides to deliberately break a van, unknowingly dooming his friends. A devoted son opts to defend his family to the point of madness and death. Horror is about the darkness of humanity but sometimes, it's just as poignantly about our stupidity, or our seemingly incessant need to follow our hearts instead of our heads. Sometimes our choices are so painfully human that they are the literal undoing of us.

Anyway. I'm glad I'm playing this all over again. This time I'm making amends by trying to keep Abigail alive for as long as physically possible. That's repentance for you.

I'll leave you with a fun horror memory: when I was a teenager, my friends and I settled down into the classic I Know What You Did Last Summer, partly because we were all in love with Freddie Prinze Jr. We lived in an ancient, crumbling, spidery cottage at the time, with ceilings so low that taller visitors had to duck to get around. My dad had a mad idea, which he sometimes has. (Often when he has these ideas he just suddenly acts on them without thinking, which might be where I get it from.)

Anyway. Whatever the reason, my dad found himself standing outside the house in our quiet village on a hot summer's night, tying a balloon to a long stick and attempting to cover it with a bed sheet. His idea was to fashion a kind of ghost that he would wave outside our window, knocking gently, and we'd look up and see a floating shadow and freak out. It wasn't a bad idea, necessarily. We were almost certain the house was haunted anyway. He probably just needed more time to think about the execution.

From our perspective, what we heard was a loud POP (which did make us jump) followed by a voice that was obviously Dad muttering 'shit, shit, shit'. And then a few seconds later, a gentle tapping on the window. We looked out to find him standing on his tiptoes banging the balloonless stick on the glass, sweating with the effort. It was one of the top five most adorable things he's ever done. And it made us laugh so much we missed a good chunk of the film. I'm still not sure how it ends.

I wrote in my first ever newsletter (two years ago! Ah! But more on that another time) that I spent my late teens and all of my twenties being taught that Halloween and, by extension, horror, is something to be looked at with a bit of suspicion at best, and full-blown judgment at worst. Which is funny, because I have so many good memories attached to things that are at least tangentially related to horror.

Like the time Chris introduced me to Silent Hill 2 in his garage in a thunderstorm and I was too scared to go home, every roll of thunder or rustle of leaves in the garden making me jump out of my skin. Or the time I went to see The Grudge (the Sarah Michelle Gellar one) and my friend kept trying to cover my eyes because he knew I'd be scarred by it forever (which I was). Or the time that I read Stephen King's Duma Key, alone in my bedroom at what I thought was the grown-up age of 18, and got so freaked out I had to read it with the duvet pulled up over my head like a child sneaking in another round of Tetris when they should be sleeping. Every time, delicious waves of terror rolling over me. Alone, or with people. There's just something nice about it, weirdly. Something innocent, even. It sounds impossible but it just is.

Anyway. Hope you enjoyed this little meander down memory lane with me. Next week I might even get this out on time. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.