![]() ![]() I gasped to myself, feeling my breathing turn more frantic, as I paused the game and immediately turned the lights on in the room. The lights came up suddenly and there was a creepy doll walking towards me with a distinctly sinister look on its face. Walking down a dark corridor, hearing a baby's cry again, feeling ever so slightly.no, that couldn't be uld it? I turned a corner, and walked straight into some creepy paintings that I didn't expect to be so in my face. It didn't seem so life-changing at the time. Perhaps my heart rate had increased without me even realising. Another time, I'd hear a baby crying softly in the distance. I'd backtrack and suddenly the room layout would be entirely different. The game had thrown a few 'scares' at me before. I've experienced far worse things late at night after all. The prime time to be alarmed, right? Not usually for me. I played it late one Friday night with the lights turned off. The kind of thing that makes you question if you really did see something in the corner of your eye or not. ![]() It promises jump scares, creepy moments, and general weirdness. It's the tale of a father whose artistic ambitions slowly destroy his family's happiness, as he descends into madness. On an adventure gaming kick of late, I never considered it scaring me. It was Layers of Fear that brought it to a head. Contextually, it was such a dormant emotion. It was hard to acknowledge what was reconnecting for me. Later, I watched Alien 3 with a friend and found a few moments ever so slightly.unsettling, I guess. Mentally, it was almost imperceptible, but it was there. I watched Get Out at the cinema and found myself jump at one brief moment. In the past year, I felt little twitches. I felt like an emotionless alien for a moment. I looked on in wonder in cinemas when everyone around me would jump at the surprising scare. Emotionally, I improved, fortunately, but fiction continued to leave me unfazed. ![]() Like I was missing a core part of my being.Īs the years went by, I assumed this was it. That was when I realised that this wasn't exactly a good thing. I was thoroughly disappointed that I felt nothing towards it. My brain wasn't very well.) I'd spent years perceiving The Shining as my Everest. Saw films were laughable (okay, they ARE laughable, but that's how much of a wimp I used to be), and The Shining felt like a fairly lacklustre thriller with some interesting ideas. I tested the theory and watched films I'd normally avoid. A game or film though? That didn't count. Except, of course, it was afraid of so much more than ever before. A creepy mannequin could move towards me and nah - it was as if my brain lacked that ability to be afraid. I discovered this almost by accident by giving Condemned a shot, and realising that I felt nothing towards it. Weirdly though? Games and films no longer scared me. Everything about life had the potential to alarm me and it was utterly exhausting. Strange noises at night, or ambulance sirens, would understandably unsettle me massively, but so would having a friend turn up unexpectedly or the ping of the microwave. Because, really, if someone can go from healthy to convulsing to dead in a short space of time in the middle of the night, why would you feel safe about anything ever again? It throws your world off-kilter, leaving you unable to trust in anything. It's incredibly emotionally gruelling and horrific. Turns out it's even worse than you can imagine. In the space of about 30 minutes, I went from a fairly regular 23-year-old to a temporarily broken husk of a person. My dearly loved father died suddenly, and it was beyond awful. It wasn't the end of the world, but it did make me feel a bit daft that I hadn't grown out of such fears.Īnd then the world actually ended. Things I would have clearly loved because of a great storyline, like The Shining or the Silent Hill games. That's how absurd it was.Īs a teenager, I avoided many films and games. Walking past Aliens action figures in Woolworths scared the life out of me, simply because I'd played five minutes of Aliens on the Commodore 64 and it was far too atmospheric for my overly imaginative mind. Red Skull in the very dodgy early 1990s version of Captain America terrified me for some unfathomable reason. ![]()
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