A zombie, clearly.

(contains minor spoilers for Silent Hill 2, 3 and Resident Evil Zero)

It is difficult to tell what does not count as a defining element of survival horror, to distinguish perifery from focus. The genre has tried to sell horror in a playable context over the years; as such, its play mechanics and themes have been reinvestigated successively, but not always successfully. For all the virtuoso explorations of psychological and body horror that inhabit it, there are also plenty of mistakes. The most disappointing of all might be the notion of what a survival horror game “should” be. This is not endemic to the format but, with the exception of role-playing games, has probably affected it more than it should; a genre that welcomes Dead Space and excludes System Shock is pointless at best.

So, what is the horror imperative at work here? As the term suggests, it combines aspects of survival (sparse resource management, difficulty) and horror (which can go from a pervading sense of unease to disorientation or outright fear). But just as StarCraft II is not survival horror because it urges players to manage resources, neither is Dead Island simply because it presents players with crowds of zombies to deal with. These artificial taxonomies obscure other potentially important elements in the structure of horror, and where the genre can look to for inspirations.

In particular, those of one old Atari game.

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