Fatal Frame II: Horror, Sorrow, Avoidance, and Framing
“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.” — Helen Keller
“It’s actually not scary if you just laugh at it.” — My childhood friend convincing me to watch Deep Blue Sea (1999)
I was a voracious child. I’d watch all sorts of movies, read any book I could get my hands on, and play every flavor of video game. With a long-running subscription to Playstation Magazine, I’d accumulated a healthy horde of demo discs filled with games from Valkyria Profile to Dino Crisis to Mr. Mosquito and everything in between. Despite hiding from most anything and everything challenging, I would even like the scary games!
But I could never bring myself to play the demo for Fatal Frame (2001). I remember popping in the disc, selecting “Fatal Frame,” and walking up to the first ghost and then immediately ejecting the disc. Because the core gameplay loop is to point a special camera, the Camera Obscura, at a ghost, to find its face, and to charge up an attack by looking the ghost in the eyes as it tries to kill you. Then maybe you can damage the ghost by taking a picture of it before it touches you.
I’d played a variety of survival horror games. Maybe a House of the Dead zombie would jump-scare me or a Resident Evil enemy would look really frightening. Scary and unsettling, sure, but the point is to swiftly enact violence on the horror to exorcize it from both the level and from my mortal soul.
But this was a new feeling. In Fatal Frame, you are required to stare each ghost down, giving you plenty of time to consider the emotions on their faces. The game gives you no choice but to watch patiently while (as streamers Jack de Quidt (JDQ) and Kat Brewster (KB) like to phrase it) you wait for the ghosts to fold you up like a pretzel.
In 2021, I overcame my long-held, misguided grudge against the Fatal Frame series thanks to those streamers. For their stream series “Hallowstream,” where they play through a horror video game (or just one that’s generally spooky), KB and JDQ elected to play through Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (2003) start to finish.
This experience with the franchise went differently for me, in part because of the pair’s comedic charm and tendency to pause, do emotional check-ins, and sometimes go on a 10–90 minute discussion on anything from dialectical materialism to Cincinnati Chili (a different kind of horror). But also, of course, I had about 20+ years of emotional development in between. Through a lot of therapy and introspection, I’ve developed the ability to recognize my own feelings, diagnose their cause, and determine how best to exorcize them.
You know… Typical emotional health.
I say all this because I have realized that I developed an instinct to avoid tricky emotions and the situations that cause them. (And also, well, I couldn’t not talk about media if I tried, but that’s not the point) I learned somewhere along the line that if something was sad or scary or infuriating, I could dress it up as funny or wacky or I could just pull the metaphorical disc from the metaphorical Playstation and put it in the metaphorical CD holder until the end of time. By doing so, I never had to deal with the sorrow or the fear or the anger; I just learned to redirect.
But here, now, watching in Fatal Frame II as young Mio try to escape a horrible, haunted village with her twin sister, the point was to experience these emotions. The game wasn’t designed to primarily make the player feel cool or sly or capable. The player or viewer is not supposed to feel like a hero — or even like a victim. Fatal Frame II is a parade of sorrows, of grief and of trauma both collective and personal, and we are witnesses.
We’re supposed to learn what awful things happened in this village. We’re supposed to feel dread at the thought of a cycle repeating itself with Mio at the center. We’re supposed to feel helpless to stop it or to ease the suffering of its victims. And we learn why each and every player in this tragedy acted the way they did.
The point is to see each of these people in their most traumatic moments, as we follow Mio towards her own. And though we experience the past consuming the present as it often does in horror, we don’t experience most of these events firsthand. We primarily experience echoes, impressions of these events upon the world and the lingering emotions of the people impacted by them. The dolls made by a grieving father; the woman who tripped down the stairs amidst the panic; the girl, hiding in the closet. They’re literal snapshots that the player creates in their observation of them — that the player must create in order to play the game. Mio takes a picture and puts it in her little album.
And it’s so sad.
But the way forward isn’t through violence or avoidance. We don’t see the tragic father turned into some murderous beast or the townsfolk turned to horrendous abominations that we can stamp into the ground as we walk to the next level. Instead, the game sends the player to the site of a tragedy for some kind of key. We pick up first-person journals, we learn about why that ghost looks like that, we listen to their thoughts on a haunted radio, we take pictures of ghosts throughout, they drop an item we need to get through the door, repeat.
We literally put the pieces of the tragedy back together to form the tool that lets us move on. That’s the way to process these awful histories: witness-by-proxy, recognize your part in it (but also that you are not at its center), treat the lingering effects, aid the victims, and document. History is made of records and accounts and emotions above all else, and it exists and impacts us whether or not we look at its realities.
But, of course, this is imperfect like every metaphor. Because if you’re in a haunted village built on the top of the gates to hell piecing together that you and the sister that you’re trying to find are going to be sacrificed in a horrific ritual, uh.
Maybe leave.
