Exchange of Realities

Another way of inspiring fear in an audience is taking away associations of safety or harmlessness. The brain can only process so many things at once; overload it and you tend to work people into a panic. This goes double when they know that something is going to happen, but not when or how. To compensate for the wide variety of inputs, people will figure out what they can tag as safe/harmless and relegate it to the background, allowing them to focus more on the things that are still potential threats.

Now, imagine someone is already using that sort of process, keeping a close eye on most of the scenery around him. Except for that harmless little rock in the corner. Which turns out to be a camouflaged or shapeshifted monster, which jumps out and attacks him.

Yikes!

If the character survives, he’s not going to look at rocks the same way again. And whether he keeps the storyline or hands it off to another character with his last breath, we as the audience aren’t going to look at rocks the same way again either. Our notion of safety, or at least harmlessness, has been proven wrong. And not only is the rock no longer a harmless/safe thing, but we can’t be quite as sure if anything else we see as harmless/safe is either. This gets people back to trying to process more inputs at once than they generally can, and that puts them on edge.

It doesn’t even have to matter if we’ve already been hit by this before. Consider the mimic; in how many different games, both video and roleplaying, have people been attacked by treasure chests, doors, or random statues? And yet, the first time in each new world, it still manages to startle us.

So you decide to take advantage of this tendency, and prey on the safety reflex; at this point, you have to figure out how. While some people, once they’ve started using this trick, go so far as to make every innocuous object deadly, I don’t recommend this; the audience gets overwhelmed enough to be jaded, making it lose its effect. Others only employ seemingly safe/harmless things as dangers a few times, letting their audience’s paranoia carry them the rest of the way. And still others only do it, or only need to do it, once. After all, if they’ve done it once, it might happen again, and the audience is probably looking around waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Some people even set up the world as a place where innocuous things are dangerous before bringing the audience into it. I was once in a game run by The Vorpal Tribble, a monster designer known for twisting the safe/harmless (this is someone who I remember for creating a killer creek, let’s put it that way). And when you’re already expecting the harmless things to jump up and bite you, even things that are clearly safe but show signs that they might not be (the entrance to the inn having teeth, for instance) can cause no small amount of consternation. I’d always known that prey animals (particularly horses; my relatives the horse people talked about this all the time) had a tendency to divide the world into “I can eat it”, “It’s like me” and “IT’S GONNA EAT ME!”, but never before that game had I gotten to see what it must be like to think like that. It’s an enlightening experience.

Have you ever used this trick? What sort of application works best for you (or on you)?