I am fascinated by horror origin stories, maybe because my own is a bit complicated.
I grew up in a house where the genre wasn't really allowed, if you don't count Munsters reruns and the scarier parts of Disney movies. My parents kept my early childhood as free of scary stories as they could, hoping that doing so would minimize trauma, sleepless nights, and boogeymen in my closet. But despite these restrictions, I was not especially sheltered from the wider world. Therefore there were always little leaks of horror, cracks in the wall my family put up, through which fascinating things seeped like rivulets of blood.
Most of these leaks were mundane and brief, gaining a tenuous grip on my mind at best. My friends at school would see Freddy and Jason on TV at home, then come back and tell stories. They'd read Goosebumps, dress as ghoulish things for Halloween (I had to be "good guys" for trick-or-treating), and even collect Pogs splattered with cartoon gore. It was all interesting to me, but nothing about it kept me up at night, or stuck in my brain so deeply that it started to grow roots.
Until The 7th Guest came along.
The now-legendary PC CD-ROM game was released in the spring of 1993, but I didn't become aware of it until the next year. I was in third grade and my oldest cousin (four years ahead of me) had grown obsessed with it at his own house, where content restrictions were looser. I'm not sure to this day if he showed me the game in an effort to deliberately scare me, or if he was just so into it at the time that he didn't care if I was in the room while he played. Either way — those pixels on that chunky old PC screen had an immediate, devastating impact on my psyche, and there's still a smoking crater where it fell. Whenever I try to trace the various elements that made me a horror fan, they all lead back to that moment, a chance encounter with a free motion video (FMV) packed CD-ROM game and the ghosts which lurked within.
Now considered a breakthrough in CD-ROM entertainment that, along with Myst, elevated the whole medium into a booming new corner of gaming, The 7th Guest is, mechanically at least, a puzzle game. You move through a spooky mansion as the "seventh guest" of the title, solving various macabre puzzles that include everything from beating hearts to coffins in the cellar. Looking at it now (there are numerous playthroughs on YouTube), you can see all sorts of wonderfully spooky touches, including a cursor shaped like a skeletonized hand, a puzzle built around gravestones floating atop a cake, and much more.
But it was the video elements of the story that sank their claws into me and wouldn't let go. The backstory of the game involves a sinister toymaker named Stauf (rearrange those letters and you get "Faust," it's not subtle) who was a homeless drifter until one day he murdered a woman for her purse. This unplanned blood sacrifice set in motion a series of visions of toys and puzzles, which Stauf dutifully hand-carved. He became a local celebrity and a master toymaker, rich enough to build his own mansion — itself the product of a final, overarching vision from beyond. As Stauf rose, though, the children who bought his toys began to fall ill and die, leaving the toymaker to retreat into his house on the hill and for the rumors to circulate.
This is all revealed in a prologue sequence that unfolds through a series of video clips, and from the moment I first saw it, a chill went through me that seemed it would never warm again. Looking back at it now, the video prologue isn't some towering monument to great performances and effects, but it is spooky and for an eight-year-old boy who'd never really been exposed to horror elements like that before. It hit like a truck.
To get why, it's important to understand the context of when and how I encountered this game. In the early 1990s, PC games with this level of graphic sophistication and FMV incorporation were a relatively new thing, and because my family didn't own a computer yet, it was probably the first time I'd ever encountered not just lifelike figures, but real people filmed by a camera inside a video game of any kind.
As the game progresses beyond the prologue, you meet more of those people, in the form of ghosts haunting the house, forever cursed to live out a long-ago party in the Stauf mansion in which they all turned on each other and died under mysterious, gruesome circumstances. This meant that the game was not just violent and dark, but convincingly violent and dark to my third-grader brain.
And my parents never heard the end of it.
I went home from my cousin's house with visions of the Stauf mansion and those ghostly FMV figures floating through my brain, troubling my sleep. The scream of the woman Stauf murdered echoed in me, the horror-host cackle of the game's narrator cast a spell which I couldn't break. Anyone who's either gone back to look at this era of gaming or who grew up with it knows that the video elements aren't exactly pristine, but something about their grainy, beginner-level nature only added uncanny strangeness to their allure. It made you want to lean in closer, to study every gesture, every facial expression, looking for clues to the reality or unreality of what you were seeing. Those pixels are burned into my brain.
They burned into my brain to such an extent that every night as the sun began to set, I would think about The 7th Guest, no matter where I was or what I was doing. I would try to put it out of my mind (I have a vivid memory of once asking my grandmother to make me s'mores because I was thinking about the game and wanted a distraction.), but it would linger, and when the lights went off, that old house would come to life again. It frustrated my father, who had to put me to bed each night, to no end, and it truly did keep me awake night after night.
Then something amazing happened: I went back. Whether it was because I wanted to prove I could endure it or because I wanted to see if my imagination had inflated the game beyond the bounds of its own atmosphere, I went back. I asked my cousin to play it for me again, to show me those strange figures in that haunted house. Eventually I stopped losing sleep, stopped bothering my parents about it, and it just existed in my mind, a rich vein of new feelings and interests and pure, concentrated darkness that I, slowly but surely, grew to love.
We all become horror fans in different ways, whether we're brought up with ghost stories from loved ones or plopped down in front of the TV for a marathon of classics. Sometimes it's a trickle, sometimes it's a flood. For me, though there are other early horror experiences that proved deeply formative, my real, visceral relationship with what the genre could offer begins with The 7th Guest. A door was not just opened in my mind that day, but kicked clean off its hinges, whether I was ready for what lay beyond or not. And despite those sleepless nights, I'm forever grateful for it.
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