Writing and playing tabletop RPG horror one gets a real sense of what horror is just a little too personal to be fun. There’s a whole lot of safety tools the community has developed (actually crossing over a bit with the BDSM community’s tools for safe consent when acting out a fiction). It’s really common to survey all players with an exhaustive list of all the potential horrors one could potentially bring to a table. The top five that are people’s no gos are sexual violence, harm to animals, reproductive horror, harm to children and body horror.
A lot of horror movie fans are not prepared for how you having agency in the situation of tabletop storytelling can make something you can easily handle watching suddenly effect you even when it’s just being described and can misjudge their level of chill and need to tap out mid game. Typical advice on reproductive horror a’la Alien is don’t even bother writing a reproductive horror that directly effects a player character. Damn near every table taps out for that, if not the player targeted then someone else at the table.
Alien de-gendering that horror was definitely a masterstroke. There’s good reason the chestburster reached cultural saturation.
Let’s not forget that no one on-screen in that specific scene other than the host (John Hurt) was aware that the character was swapped for a neck-down prosthetic, so every single reaction by each actor was genuinely horrific in that they each “saw” a prop explode out of a human body. IIRC, the director went on to pay for counseling for most (all?) of said actors after the fact.
Writing and playing tabletop RPG horror one gets a real sense of what horror is just a little too personal to be fun. There’s a whole lot of safety tools the community has developed (actually crossing over a bit with the BDSM community’s tools for safe consent when acting out a fiction). It’s really common to survey all players with an exhaustive list of all the potential horrors one could potentially bring to a table. The top five that are people’s no gos are sexual violence, harm to animals, reproductive horror, harm to children and body horror.
A lot of horror movie fans are not prepared for how you having agency in the situation of tabletop storytelling can make something you can easily handle watching suddenly effect you even when it’s just being described and can misjudge their level of chill and need to tap out mid game. Typical advice on reproductive horror a’la Alien is don’t even bother writing a reproductive horror that directly effects a player character. Damn near every table taps out for that, if not the player targeted then someone else at the table.
Alien de-gendering that horror was definitely a masterstroke. There’s good reason the chestburster reached cultural saturation.
Let’s not forget that no one on-screen in that specific scene other than the host (John Hurt) was aware that the character was swapped for a neck-down prosthetic, so every single reaction by each actor was genuinely horrific in that they each “saw” a prop explode out of a human body. IIRC, the director went on to pay for counseling for most (all?) of said actors after the fact.