What's in a House? The Horror of Anatomy
Don Everhart, Contributing Editor
The first time through Kitty Horrorshow’s ANATOMY, some cassette tapes gently, didactically explain how a house is like a body. The kitchen is an easy analogy for the stomach, the living room for the heart, bathrooms for bowels, but the head, the mind… well, that’s difficult. Does it live in the bedroom, slumbering, dreaming away?
If you would like to experience ANATOMY without my interpretation, head to that link above. Play it a few times. Ready?
Homes are ideal settings for horror. They are intimate and familiar to characters, audiences, and players. They are weighted with expectation and shorthand. We have ideas of how furniture should be placed and how rooms ought to be connected, and ANATOMY plays on these expectations. The first time through, players find themselves alone in a dark and empty house. Furnishings are sparse, but there is a tape recorder in the kitchen, illuminated by the red light of its “record” button. With each cassette that the player finds and plays, a hint appears about the location of another. These basic directions point only to rooms of the house.
I found it easy to navigate to the next tape. The layout of the house was familiar, even though it was shrouded in darkness. Bedrooms were upstairs and the door to the basement was in the kitchen. The living room was by the front door, adjacent to a dining room that was across the hall from the kitchen. There was a downstairs bathroom situated on the hallway and under the stairs. The house was calm and still, but there was something disquieting about the way I was being led around with such ease. After all, ANATOMY is a horror game, so anything could be lurking in the darkness.
But nothing made itself known. There were many opportunities for jump scares, but none were taken. Behind each door there was just an ordinary room with minimal furnishings. A television with a blue screen in the living room, opposite a couch. Tables and chairs, beds and bedside tables, empty shelves. I played the last tape. Click. The game quit. The end.
Or rather, not quite. Like a few of its recent contemporaries, ANATOMY invites players to play again. And, similar to more widely-played games like Doki Doki Literature Club (which followed ANATOMY’s 2016 release in 2017), the software and its world degrade the more that you play it. This begins with the tapes. There is more hiss, and some sections are drowned out. Tapes end early, cutting off mid-sentence. Their contents are out of order. Kitty Horrorshow plays on the fragility of media, with flickering simulated film grain and scanlines matching that audio distortion. Play the game again, and the objects of the house become distorted in more digitally familiar ways. Furniture clips through the walls, is partially copied, hovers in midair. The game appears to be falling apart.
The game still progresses in the same way. Its tapes are always in the same place. But what’s “the same place” when the bedside table is stuck halfway through the floor, rotated, halfway in the dining room? The television and its colored light change, and so does its message. The basement seems to be enlarged, with empty rows of wire racks lining the walls. Then the house expels you out into the street. It bubbles and expands, reaching and fluctuating, veins and nerves exploding outwards into a neighborhood of empty concrete streets and surreal cages of steel girders.
In this late scene, the implicit menace of the house as a body becomes overt. Its ordinary, carpentered angles turn into fleshy, electric nets of those nerves. It bubbles outwards in globules of viscera and random, tentacular masses. This is foreshadowed throughout by how the audio contents of the tapes change from their original lecture on the house as a body, through glitch and distortion, to screams and cries. The house is not just a body, but a creature that writhes, shrieks, and breathes.
What is a house, when it is left abandoned? It sits, crouching, still, and empty; gathering dust, its residents gone, with only a few pieces of furniture that remain. What’s a place, shaped by and for humans, once our expectations and perceptions are withdrawn? What remains? In ANATOMY, Horrorshow plays with genre, too, blending psychogeography and body horror. The effectiveness of her approach lies in how unsettling it is to not only voyeuristically observe a digital space but to be a largely unknowing participant in its transformation. Players haunt the house, collecting and playing those tapes, a narrative device so familiar from the pervasive audio logs of the last twenty years of the medium. Turning on and off the television, searching for a hint of anything immersive and interactive. We’ll keep coming back. We were always coming back.
