Why Necromorphs arn't Scary

“Awww, they’re so goofy” was the disappointing, though not entirely unexpected, reaction that my partner had to the first Necromorph of Dead Space Remake. Given the horror title’s legendary status and the Necromorph’s significant part in that, you would hope their first impression would help carry that weight. But the reaction was not unexpected for a simple reason : they are a bit goofy.

Their long limbs make them gangly and unwieldy, and even when sprinting they can’t help but do a bit of a waddle. Their attacks just fling themselves at you, hoping some element of their body will catch you at an obtuse angle and knock you to the floor. They may occasionally shoot acid, but the projectiles move comically slowly, allowing the player to simply walk out of the way of them. On closer inspection, the ways the human body contorts to form its elongated, backwards appendages is undeniably grotesque, doubly so if you manage to catch one mid-transformation. However, the overall impression they leave is often a bit sad. The Necromorphs’ whole deal seems to be trying to kill you, every contortion of their body seems to be built to achieve this goal, but they just prima facie have built themselves in such a way as to not be very good at it.

None of this is to say that they never inspire fear though. They have a habit of only making noise when seen, allowing them to act as a sort of semi-dynamic jump scare. They also love to skulk in the shadows and vents of the USS Ishimura, sometimes retreating back into unreachable locations to hide from the player, only to jump out and sprint at the player at a shockingly high speed. Necromorphs are undeniably animalistic, undeniably predatory, and while they lack meaningful intellect or strategy, they can easily overwhelm in numbers, speed and their sheer force of nature.

So, why arn’t they scary? Did the creature artists of Dead Space simply fuck up? Undeniably not; I only raise the option to explicitly reject it. For one, Dead Space undeniably excels artistically in just about every other area. The Ishimura’s interior, giant and rusting and monolithic and tragic, with it’s matte metals and stark lighting forming a genuine and undeniable triumph. The character designs are top notch, with Isaac Clark’s hulking suit being immediately iconic for its combination of high sci-fi and industrial labor aesthetics, and that’s even without its in-built HUD. More importantly though, the creature designs are good. They are horrific mutilations of the human form, each contortion of flesh imagined and rendered is such terrible detail that one finds themselves compelled to peer deeply into their forms, only to catch some detail so genuinely unsettling that they must immediately turn away.

There’s no deep fault in the Necromorphs’ design, not mechanical, not narrative, not artistic, not animation. So why “goofy”? Why “aw”? Well, let’s revisit that initial Necromorph encounter with some additional context.

Dead Space’s time to Necromorph is about ~5 minutes. In that time, the name of the game, the stated genre, the legacy of the work, the internal narrative and artistic elements and the overall vibes, all point to this being a horror game. The mechanical framework, with a behind the back camera and a lack of dialogue choices or cinematic camera angles or other modes of gameplay, all point to this not just being a third person shooter, but one whose primary focus is on being a third person shooter. So the sense is pretty immediately established that not only are you in for some horror, but that the horror is probably going to be pretty damn shootable. And rather than build any tension around this fact, maybe by trying to pull a bait and switch on the genre or narrative or really anything, the game speedruns its way towards its shootable horrors as fast as it can. You have an opening cutscene, you walk down a big hallway, and you meet your first Necromorph about a minute after you walk into the next room.

This in many ways is a direct copy of horror icon and on record direct inspiration, Resident Evil 4, and while a full diagnosis of how that game’s opening works where Dead Space doesn’t is outside of our scope, it’s worth bringing up here because of how Resident Evil plays with both expectations and pacing. For one, Resident Evil as a series had been, up to that point, mostly about shooting zombies. When your first enemy is thus a largely normal villager, there’s a reversal of expectations that is actually a bit unsettling. Moreover, Resident Evil 4 is explicitly quite camp and doesn’t try to instill genuine, lurking fear in the player until much later with its nighttime village section, in contrast to Dead Space which attempts this immediately. And ofcourse, all of this works better for RE4 having been the first to execute on the formula. Dead Space being “RE4 in space” takes as much as it gives.

So when a Necromorph first appears, you’re not just not particularly shocked, you’re probably ready to get going with both the shooting and the being mauled. But instead, the Necromorph’s first appearance is behind glass in a scripted sequence. While it slowly kills a character who wasn’t even present in the opening cutscene, and while your player character does his standard idle animation, you have plenty of time to first react to and then really fully consider the Necromorph in question. Given everything we just said, your first thoughts about the necromorph probably go something like this:

“Ah, the enemies are here! I guess the game proper has now started…” “And I seem safe, it can’t get through glass…” “God it’s got so much stuff to hit, those big ass limbs, I wonder if I can just snip them off…” “And it doesn’t even look that threatening! All its limbs point down, I’d have to be pretty close to its to get hit…” “And I’m wearing this giant ass metal suit! I’m sure it can hurt me, but how much trouble could those spiky little elbows be? Surely I’ll be fine…””And now he’s just waddling away all slow… awwww” “What a freak…. what a goofy little guy!”

To be fair, cut to 45 seconds later when a couple of Necromorphs are chasing you down a hallway and your reaction gets amended with a “Oh shit they’re fast” and “I really would prefer not be near them”. Certainly there’s never any doubt that between being in a room with a Necromorph and a room with nothing, you’d prefer to have the nothing. But regardless, I don’t think any of those initial reactions are untrue or unfair. The base Necromorph is a little goofy, is a little tragic, and is these things in part because they are a tutorial / grunt enemy. The player is given all this time to consider them because soon they will be running away from the monsters, and soon after shooting at the monsters, and the devs thought the player might need a bit of time to acclimate to them (time not granted to subsequent Necromorph reveals). And of course more terrifying, dangerous Necromorphs do lurk in the game: The initial Necromorph stands in intentional contrast to them by being lesser than all the rest. Its design needs to seem kinda threatening, kinda dangerous, but also something that in time will give the player a false sense of security that “Hey, maybe this game isn’t so scary after all.”

In some ways, one has to feel bad for this jobber Necromorph, because this read of it being goofy, even quaint, isn’t entirely deserved. It only happens because of the aforementioned context, being that the player knows they are about to embark on a multi-hour Survival horror adventure. Just imagine if the Necromorph appeared anywhere else, be it the single slasher villain of a horror movie, or the subject of a special news report, or just bursting of the door in a kids TV show. Sure, maybe after watching it walk around for a bit you might still see something goofy in it, but undoubtedly your initial reaction would absolutely be one of “What in the ever loving FUCK is that?”

Again, we can note how the initial Resident Evil 4 villager enemy functions in a very similar role of tutorializing basic mechanics and player expectations, but by being so explicitly unhorrific, they manage to subvert themselves and become scary and iconic in their own right. There is almost something too scary about the initial Necromorph, a design that so explicitly evokes horror yet also so explicitly educates the player that the overwhelming sense of having been designed detracts from the whole.

The Necromorph in turn elucidates something about the nature of the horror creature in a ludic context, a terrifyingly un-horrific contradiction laid bare: While the horror creature must be scary in visual design, in ruleset and in deployment, it must also be “trackable” in some sense, allow itself to be broken down into understandable chunks of behaviour and function. We cannot just find a horror creature scary, we must be able to categorize its individual components as individually scary, and this analysis threatens the whole. For as indescribably horrific as it may be, it must inevtiably be wikiable.

So consider the necromorph. The necromorph is an alien and parasitic mutation of the human form, inflicted by a sect of religious zealots on an unwilling civilian population. The result is a hyper aggressive and predatory creature, without care for nor even sense of the self, whose very body is a weapon. Would we really call any of that goofy? No, not really. But then consider the Necromorph. The jobber enemy, vital for the limb cutting tutorial that the game will deploy over its first 30 minutes. It’s the initial demonstration of Dead Space’s lighting, flesh and gore, animation and AI systems, and is in turn a major element of what we judge when we consider Dead Space as a critical work. And it knows that, and has been specifically designed to meet all of those purposes, responding and conforming to player expectations. Would we call any of that goofy? Well yeah, at least a little.

When we talk about horror creatures, whether we are designing them or critiquing them, we cannot help but talk about them in these two modes, and the latter will always threaten to overwhelm the former. Designers must be careful to keep these two notions in balance, less their horror icon become a silly guy.

Unless you want your horror icon to be a silly little guy, which is, in many ways, the ultimate fate of the horror villain. In which case, just have fun with it.