Gothic Gaming: The Ill Body and the Haunted House in Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy
by Amy LeBlancKitty Horrorshow’s indie game Anatomy has received attention in public facing venues and is considered a haunted house cult hit, but the game is understudied in the scholarly realm. There is, however, a growing body of scholarship about how videogames and disability studies intersect. The haunted house functions as a synecdochical stand-in for the body and generates readings within disability and illness studies by drawing attention to a “reimagined state of agency” which is integral to videogames (Anderson, 2024, p. 4). This article argues that the game mechanics at work in Anatomy constitute a “destructive-creative iteration of Gothic access,” through the game’s use of found footage, first-person perspective and programmed failure, which can represent the flexible subjectivity of the chronically ill body (Herrero-Puertas, 2020, p. 347). I position Anatomy within definitions of the Gothic and Gothic games while providing an overview of gameplay. The following are areas of particular focus: shifting written and audio text within the game, distortions, crashes, glitches and the affective experience of discomfort for players through darkness, lo-fi graphics and the changing home scape. The game prompts affective and embodied experiences for the player which can be read through Adam Daniel and Peter Turner’s analyses of diegesis, found footage, first-person perspective, and programmed failure in horror. Finally, this article discusses Manuel Herrero-Puertas’ framework of Gothic access which posits that “haunted houses have and tell a story” -- just as bodies have and tell stories -- and I propose avenues for future study of the haunted house in videogames and the Gothic which might borrow from queer scholarship (2020, p. 340). Through the frameworks of Gothic access and bodily doubt, Anatomy helps us recognize that the body truly is our first experience of haunting while creating new avenues through which to think the unthinkable and play the unplayable.
Keywords: Anatomy, gothic, videogames, haunted houses, disability, illness, horror, failure, found footage, haunting
Introduction
You stand in a strange and dimly lit kitchen with a cassette player on the table in front of you. The cassette player emanates a blood red glow. Once you insert a tape, a disembodied voice begins to speak: “in the psychology of the modern, civilised human being, it is difficult to overstate the significance of the house” (Kitty Horrorshow, 2016). What follows is a segment of a lecture on the importance of houses as spaces of life and death, celebration and grief, throughout the history of humankind. As you delve deeper into the house, hugging walls to grasp at any sense of the house’s boundaries, you collect more tapes. The first two tapes remain general, but by the third tape, the same disembodied voice shares an analogy that equates the house with the human body: “the living room as the heart, the hallways like veins, the basement being the darker part of the brain” (Signor, 2019).
Bodies and houses are not only sources of pleasure and trouble but are also key fixtures in horror media -- they continue to hold interest through various horrific iterations. However, “mapping the house and body is not a simple relationship of the physical forms manifest in the building’s structures. Instead, the layers of the home, the public main floor, private upstairs and unseen basement, relate to the human experience” (McGreevy et al., 2020, p. 266). The house (and the haunted house in particular) reflects our anxieties and fears back on ourselves. In an interview with Derek Newman-Stille, Michael Rowe says, “the body is our first haunted house. We live in it. We haunt it. We are literally our own ghosts” (Newman-Stille, 2013). Rowe’s assertion that a body is a haunted house is at the foundation of this analysis of Anatomy, which explores the haunted house as a Gothic stand-in for the chronically ill body within a games and disability studies framework. Anatomy provides ample material for reflections on disability, particularly through Horrorshow’s approach to embodiment, disembodiment, or a refusal of embodiment. The house is the body against and with which the player positions their own. Anatomy undoubtedly equates the body with the house and insists that the haunted house is a body as much as Rowe insists the body is a haunted house.
In recent scholarship, Christine Prevas reads Anatomy’s glitches and programmed (or calculated) failure as “a scar, visibly marked on the body of the game and giving rise to new ways of thinking through gender -- and for thinking through the structure of play itself” (2023, p. 135). Prevas’ decision to specify the body of the game is indicative of the power of the body as trope. Horrorshow is a trans developer whose engagement with and representation of the body is complex, as is evident in the myriad theoretical approaches the game seems to generate. While there are many possible readings of Anatomy, the focus of this article is the intersection of disability and illness within Gothic frameworks. I argue that the game mechanics at work in Anatomy constitute a “destructive-creative iteration of Gothic access” through the game’s use of found footage, first-person perspective and programmed failure (Herrero-Puertas, 2020, p. 347). Programmed failure in particular can represent the flexible subjectivity of the chronically ill body as one that does not always behave, cooperate, or act predictably. The game positions the house as a stand-in for the body and by analytically positioning the house as a stand-in for the ill body, Anatomy’s haunted house becomes agential and generative within a disability and illness context. The house and body do not necessarily bend or collapse in response to external pressures or influences, even if the house and body transgress and transform. The haunted house is often considered a site of transgression and transformation through the framework of the wilderness space: “something figured as a region of a wild or desolate character, or in which one wanders or loses one’s way” (Wilson, 2010, p. 200). The ill body is also a site of transgression and transformation -- as in the Gothic, the body “does not retrofit” (Herrero-Puertas, 2020, p. 341). If it bends, it does so on its own terms. The house may be destroyed but it also opens new doors and spaces even in its destruction. The site of Gothic horror that begins in the image of the castle is transplanted to the suburban space of the house, which contains layers of signification just as Gothic texts “[conjoin] ideas of home and prison, protection and fear” to create a sense of isolation within movements across time and place (Botting, 2014, p. 4). Simultaneously, the haunted house is also home, prison, protection and fear.
Horror and haunted house media have historically represented the ill and disabled body as the site of horror in voyeuristic and sensational ways, while it is compulsory able-bodiedness that is a source of horror for those who exist outside of the margins. Dale Bailey writes that haunted houses “often provoke our fears about ourselves and our society, and, at their very best, they present deeply subversive critiques of all that we hold to be true” (1999, p. 6). Reformulating the haunted house narrative to prioritize the non-normative body presents opportunities for new and subversive critiques, new truths, new doors, and new realities in terms of illness and disability in horror. Scholars in Gothic studies can readily engage with Anatomy on a level of gameplay (even as inexperienced gamers), but also through literary and textual analysis of Gothic motifs such as darkness, decay and “the interplay of anticipation and apprehension” (Botting, 2014, p. 5). Game studies scholars can appreciate the ludonarrative dissonance at work as Anatomy places itself in conversation with texts in other mediums, such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials and films such as The Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity franchise.
While Anatomy has received attention in public facing venues and is considered a cult hit, the game is understudied in the scholarly realm, which presents challenges and exciting opportunities for critics to bring together scholars from game studies and Gothic studies. In the remainder of the introduction, I provide an overview of key scholarship pertaining to the Gothic in games, disability in games, and the Gothic more broadly. I also analyze the game world of Anatomy as an abject space. In section 1, I offer an examination of gameplay and make intertextual connections between Anatomy and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, which Horrorshow lists as a main influence on the game. In section 2, I position Anatomy within definitions of the Gothic, paying close attention to moments when the game both fits and does not fit current definitions from Chris Baldick, Fred Botting and Cynthia Sugars & Gerry Turcotte. In Section 3, I discuss gameplay in Anatomy with a focus on key elements such as shifting written and audio text within the game, distortion, crashes, glitches and the affective experience of discomfort for players. Such affective discomfort includes navigating through darkness, the game’s lo-fi graphics and the changing home scape. Through my analysis of these elements, I show how the game prompts affective and embodied experiences for the player. I utilize Adam Daniel’s and Peter Turner’s analyses of diegesis, found footage, first-person perspective and programmed failure to explore a framework of artificial authenticity in Anatomy, which I connect to Sky LaRell Anderson’s claim that videogames are ability machines. In section 4, I discuss Manuel Herrero-Puertas’ framework of Gothic Access, which posits that “haunted houses have and tell a story” -- just like bodies do -- and I propose avenues for future study of the haunted house in videogames and in horror media more broadly (2020, p. 340). These avenues of future study may borrow frameworks and terminology from queer scholarship
My analysis of Anatomy offers one possible answer to Jonne Arjoranta’s question in the title of his recent article “How are Games Interpreted? Hermeneutics for Game Studies” by applying his view of hermeneutics within a Gothic and disability studies framework. My analysis of Anatomy rests on a foundation of previous work in the field of game studies: namely Jesper Juul (player effort), Bo Ruberg (temporality and space), Anna Anthropy (definitions of games and communities), Bettina Bódi (agency and choice), Jodi Byrd (power dynamics and positionality) and many others. Ewan Kirkland, Shira Chess, and Greta Kaisen’s scholarship on the Gothic in games is integral to the context of this article as well as Fred Botting, Eugene Thacker, Tanya Krzywinska and Julia Kristeva’s scholarship on Gothic and horror media.
In the introduction to Videogames and the Gothic, Ewan Kirkland claims that there is something inherently Gothic about videogames: “videogames have always featured labyrinthine spaces, patrolling ghouls, locked doors, secret rooms, hidden passageways, arcane puzzles and death” (2022. p. 4). Similarly, Shira Chess writes, “the potential for non-linear storytelling of a video game is ideal for replaying Gothic conventions” (2014, p. 388). Indeed, the trademarks of Gothic fiction find a home in the spatially oriented and narratively charged settings of videogames, where the player explores the game space as a Gothic heroine might explore a ruined castle. The “wish to know [which] presses curious heroines forward” in Gothic narrative is paired with the player’s wish to complete the game or, at least, to move forward within it (Botting, 2014, p. 6). Michael Hancock writes, “both [Gothic fiction and videogames] are at the center of moral panics and controversy; both are known for their somewhat formulaic and mechanical structure; both emphasize intense emotion and violent shock” (2016, p. 166). The intense moments of emotion in Gothic fiction and games are tied to setting and the exploration of a place, as “traditional Gothic stories unfold, [...] develop through and are triggered by their settings” (Kaisen, 2022, p. 181).
In many classic Gothic narratives, the setting is so crucial to the plot that it serves as a text’s eponym. In its own way, Anatomy’s treatment of the house as body creates an eponymously Gothic title for the game -- the house itself has no name but is named after the composite parts of the body: the anatomy. The Gothic mode relies on a reader’s sense of spatiality, which manifests in what Henry Jenkins calls “environmental storytelling” (2004, n.p.). This kind of storytelling “creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience” as “game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces” (2004, n.p). At the game designer’s disposal are a variety of sensorial tools which can prompt affective and embodied experiences; these experiences move players beyond voyeurism and into active and ergodic forms participation. Examining the Gothic mode in videogames prompts discussions of how we occupy space, physically and virtually, and how videogames as a medium may offer new ways of occupying space, particularly regarding disability.
Sky LaRell Anderson, author of Ability Machines: What Videogames Might Mean for Disability, employs the term “ability machine” to argue that videogames “allow players to do things that would otherwise be impossible” (2024, p. 1). The phrase harkens back to Robert McCruer’s theory of “ability trouble” which “highlight[s] [...] not the so-called problem of disability but the inevitable impossibility, even as it is made compulsory, of an able-bodied identity” (2006, p. 10). Anderson claims that videogames are not only vital to our understandings of embodiment and disability, but that they “produce a reimagined state of agency,” -- in this reimagined state, no individual body is normal and no single form of embodiment lies directly within hegemonic notions of normalcy (Anderson, 2024, p. 4). “Ability trouble” similarly shifts the problematizing gaze away from the disabled body and onto the structures that render it disabled. McCruer’s figuration of a stable and able-bodied identity is made manifest in video games where normalizing structures are reimagined. If, as Dale Bailey claims, haunted houses provoke our worst fears, we must examine why the failing or malfunctioning home space (read: body) is so frightening. Through videogames, a player can experience alternate and reimagined states of embodiment. A player can explore their worst fears and examine them from a distance. There are, however, criticisms of video games and gamer culture that call out various forms of inaccessibility -- games can be “demanding in terms of motor, sensory, and mental skills [...] often requiring mastering inflexible, quite complicated input devices and techniques” (Anderson, 2009, p. 2). Games are also a unique form of media and industry in that the player’s sense of enjoyment and fulfilment in playing the game is generally tied to their level of skill, progress, or completion within the game world. Anatomy is positioned within the familiar and domestic space of the home, but it removes the player’s ability to be fulfilled by progress or completion through its digital haunting. The haunted house becomes a site of failure.
A preliminary glance at most haunted house narratives reveals disfigured relatives locked in attics, uncanny children in wheelchairs, elderly relatives who refuse to leave the places of their death, as well as physical and mental abuse inflicted on those with disabilities and differences. When examining the haunted house within a disability and chronic illness context, it is difficult to overlook the metaphors of autoimmunity -- in the body, the immune system attacks from the inside as the divisions between self/non-self are blurred. In Anatomy, the house haunts itself and unlocks its own doors in the absence of a companion. In both cases, the search for answers and consistency fails despite the feeling that “we are compelled to name a villain” (Ferri, 2018, p. 7). In Anatomy, there are no identifiable monsters lurking around the corner, there are no jump scares, and there is no blood or gratuitous violence. Instead, there are traces and markers which give a feeling of abjection and send a message: we are in danger. The haunted house and the ill body are deeply connected, but this connection can be pushed further through prioritizing the ill and non-normative body in metaphorical representations where the body bites back. Horrorshow makes it clear: “when a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth” (2016).
Both Gothic media and horror occupy a space of abjection where there exists a “violent [revolt] of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” (Kristeva, 1982, p. 1). In a more recent discussion of horror studies, Eugene Thacker’s In the Dust of This Planet builds on Kristevan logic by arguing that genre horror is a mode of philosophy in a world (instead of just a self) that is inherently unthinkable. Thacker writes, “to confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all -- an idea that has been a central motif of the horror genre for some time” (2011, p. 1). He goes on to describe horror as a site where “the unthinkable takes place,” where authors, film makers, and game creators explain the unexplainable (2011, p. 2). If Thacker’s claim about the unthinkable is extended into the realm of game studies, horror games can allow players to not only explain, but also to experience the unthinkable -- to play the unplayable and read the unreadable.
Both Thacker and Kristeva pinpoint our inability to reconcile the familiar and the unfamiliar and locate this dissonance as a main site of horror. In the case of the haunted house, there are visual signifiers of haunting but no specific monster to face, and so players experience “a kind of concept horror -- [the] evisceration of all noological interiority” (Thacker, 2011, p. 129). This kind of noological breakdown results in abjection, where the self is “repelling itself, rejecting itself,” as the self tries to come to terms with its own abjection and destruction in the face of horror (Kristeva, 1989, p. 13). Notice how the language of abjection and of autoimmunity are almost identical. Anatomy is a horror that cannot be named or given shape beyond the looming form of the house. Thacker writes, “the site of horror is not simply that of a physically threatening monster, for at least these can be given names (Dracula, Frankenstein’s [creature], Wolf-Man), and thereby included within that sphere of moral and theological law. This also means they can be destroyed [...] the unnameable creature is also the unthinkable creature” (2011, p. 130). Within the construct of the unthinkable, Peter Turner writes about horror films released after the 1960’s such as, “Night of the Living Dead, Last House on the Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Exorcist (1973), and later Halloween,” which, “shifted the site of horror from somewhere foreign, dark and creepy to the very homes, streets and suburbs that much of the audience were from” (2019, p. 33). In order to fully discuss these homes, streets and suburbs within Anatomy, the game must be summarized in its entirety.
“While a house may hunger, it cannot starve”: an Overview of Gameplay.
Anatomy is a 3D first-person horror game that “pushes you to think about why scary things are scary, what deeper psychology is at work when you’re afraid of the dark room at the end of the hall or what might be behind that locked door” (Muncy, 2020). The player never sees their own avatar -- even in mirrors, which adds another layer of self-destructive discomfort -- but can control them using the W, A, S and D keys on their computer keyboard to walk, crouch and click on objects. When the player positions themselves in front of a mirror, they are met only with a reflection of their flashlight, which makes Anatomy different from other first-person horror games that also feature shifting home spaces, such as the Layers of Fear franchise. The lack of a defined character or avatar allows the player to simultaneously exist in the game space without a body and to superimpose their own body into the game world. Hancock writes that video games are “the symptom of the neo-liberal subject’s recognition of its own lack of self” (Hancock, 2022, p. 166). This lack of recognition manifests through the invisibility of the body and is a familiar language for autoimmunity.
The game begins in full darkness as we hear a VHS tape inserted into a tape player. Within moments, the screen fills with blue and the word “Anatomy” occupies the top right corner. The date, August 18th, 1984, is at the bottom of the screen. As we fumble our way through the halls, hugging the walls of the house to get our bearings in the darkness, we see a red light emanating from the kitchen and find the tape and cassette player on the table. This is the first of twenty-four tapes that provide segments of a monologue that repeats, shifts and amplifies in tension throughout the game. At the end of each tape, a block of text appears on the screen with instructions as to where the player will find the next tape, which will contain another segment of the monologue. After the house has guided us through most rooms, we arrive at the master bedroom. Once inside, the door disappears behind us and a new cassette player appears in the room. This signals a change for the player because, until now, we have brought all tapes back to the kitchen in order to listen to them. The game subsequently crashes.
After rebooting the game, we encounter the same opening scenes and sounds, but the title screen is slightly different. Once again, the player makes their way to the kitchen table where the first piece of the monologue is waiting. But this time there is extra distortion and “Therrrrrrrrrrr re is a tape in the dining room,” appears on-screen following the monologue (Horrorshow, 2016). What follows is a repetition of the first playthrough, but this time, the player has knowledge of the house’s layout and an uneasy feeling that everything is slightly off in this second iteration. At one point, the house unlocks all of the doors and the text reads “There is a ta a. a. aaaaa. A DOOrS ARE UNLOCKED” (Horrorshow, 2016). In one new section of the monologue, the house tells a story of its last encounter with a human intruder by describing a young man whose body is covered in swollen ticks the size of quarters. He is walking through the house and laughing. He urinates on the wall, spits on the carpet. He’s moving through the first floor, “breaking and upsetting things.” The house continues, “I’m angry at him so I slam the door and he falls down. I can feel his bones snapping. The ticks are bursting, losing all their dark blood everywhere. I can feel him being ground up, dissolved and torn, splitting and shredding” (Horrorshow, 2016). This final image solidifies the house’s claim that the basement is a mouth, as it literally swallows the intruder and grinds his bones until there is nothing left but “teeth, and gums, and sinew” (Horrorshow, 2016). Since the player cannot leave the house, we have an uncanny premonition that a similar fate awaits us.
The game crashes at another pivotal moment when the player realizes that the house has unlocked the basement door. This reboot changes the previously established rules, as the player now begins the game in the master bedroom, and the tape contains no monologue segments and only the sound of a screaming woman. Chairs hang from the ceiling, doors open to an endless stream of other doors, different pieces of art are on the walls (many of which are depictions of individual body parts) and segments of the screen are blocked out of view with static. The remaining tapes are mostly unsettling distortion, but moments of the original monologue still come through clearly as aggregates of earlier monologue segments.
Once the house has unlocked the basement and guided the player downstairs, a new tape begins:
Your purpose was to listen, and yet at every turn you have pried, you have prodded, and you have interfered. Have you not been paying attention? Did it not occur to you that as an organism existing within a greater organism, your intrusion would be felt? And still you harassed. And now (teeth begin to grow from the floor and ceiling), like the wayward spider who witlessly stumbles across the sleeper’s tongue, you will be swallowed, because the truth is this: when a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth. (Horrorshow, 2016)
The next crash brings forth one of the most striking moments of the game: the VHS title screen turns blood red and the words “YOU NEVER CAME BACK” appear (Horrorshow, 2016). When the game reboots, the house has fully transformed into a body, with red walls that resemble a stomach lining and passages that are reminiscent of the human digestive system. The player slowly moves forward and a new tape floats toward them before all goes dark. The player wakes with their point of view facing sideways, as though they are lying on the basement floor. The house’s tone softens as it asks, “what happens to a house when it is left alone? When it becomes worn, and aged? When its paint peels, its foundations begin to sink? It goes for too long unlived in. [...] Doors open, shades drawn, hallways empty. Hungry” (Horrorshow, 2016).
These final tapes illustrate a shift, not only in the house’s tone, but also in the subject, as the tapes initially refer to “you” (the player) and now refer to “it” (the house in third person). The transition to the “it” pronoun creates space and distance between the house, the player and the diegetic narrative we experience. It is also emblematic of the house’s inevitable collapse, which Jay Dolmage connects to capitalism and disability. He writes, “collapsing is a way to fall apart as we come together [...] the idea of “collapse,” which has come to powerfully inflect all of our discussions of capitalism, must be thought from disability, and this will save it from purely pejorative readings” (2017, p. 112). He asks, “what is beautiful, useful, inevitable about collapse?” which is a particularly useful question to ask of Anatomy (2017, p. 112). In the final moments of the game, the player’s avatar is swallowed by the house and incorporated into its next haunting. One possible ending places the player outside of the house. They re-enter the basement for the final segment of the monologue.
In the notes that accompany the game download, Kitty Horrorshow writes that the game is dedicated to Shirley Jackson, who penned The Haunting of Hill House with the following opening lines: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream” (Jackson, 1959, p. 1). After experiencing the horrors of Anatomy’s house and its monologues, the parallels between Horrorshow and Jackson become apparent. In particular, Jackson discusses dreams and their role as the antithesis of absolute reality. Horrorshow's monologues provide a counterpoint to Jackson’s quotation: “while poets and psychoanalysts no doubt dread the thought of a dark basement, in truth, it is the bedroom, the waking mind, that place of dreams, which is actually the most frightening of all” (Horrorshow, 2016). Anatomy undermines assumptions that it is the basement (subconscious) that is most threatening -- instead, it is the bedroom (consciousness) that is most dangerous, which has particularly interesting implications for game studies, where choice, agency and consciousness are key elements of what makes gaming different from other forms of media. As an homage to Jackson, Anatomy imbues a house with voice and a body, one that malfunctions and ruptures. In Thacker’s terms, the house allows us to experience the unthinkable in horror -- “the thought of the unthinkable that philosophy cannot pronounce but via a non-philosophical language” (Thacker, 2011, p. 2).
“Its doors unlock themselves”: Horror and Gothicism in Haunted House Media
Barry Curtis’ Dark Places: The Haunted House in Film provides a useful overview of the haunted house and its role in producing horror in film. He writes, “the haunted house is a scenario of confrontation between the narrative of the inhabitants and the house. What haunts it is the symptom of a loss -- something excessive and unresolved in the past that requires an intervention in the present” (2008, p. 34). The visual nature of film offers a bridge between studies of horror and the videogame. The following passage implies a necessary action on the part of the viewer or participant, which is similar to gameplay: “the haunted house must be explored in order to trace and locate the source of the disturbance -- but the exploration is an entry into other than purely spatial dimensions. In films this process of exploration is undertaken by way of the camera, the edit and the design of the often discontinuous set” (2008, p. 35). In video games, this process of exploration is initiated by the player and sustained through their continued commitment to the game’s completion. Even though Anatomy actively undermines player progress, the player may remain committed to exploring the house. Curtis writes, “the journey through the house [is] characterized by visual incoherence and emotional dysregulation,” both of which are key factors in Anatomy and in horror games more broadly (2008, p. 34). To this I would add Adam Daniel’s claim that video games like Anatomy produce “defined embodied experience, one that is altered from the dynamics of cinema spectatorship but one that can be explained by drawing from similar foundational approaches” (2020, p. 157). The complicating factor in this defined embodied experience is that embodiment is ultimately defined by its own absence.
In the introduction to The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales, Chris Baldick writes of the materials of Gothic tradition: “the merciless determination of the feudal tyrant to continue his family line, the threat of domestic extinction [and] the confinement and persecution of a vulnerable heroine in a sinister labyrinthine building” (2009, p. xvi). This sense of confinement also manifests in Fred Botting’s chapter on the “Monstrocene” in which he reads the Gothic mode in relation to darkness and the unknown. Botting claims that “stories and metaphors matter [...] stories, names, and figures matter in the process of giving form to the life of things, relations, and notions as yet out of reach” (2022, p. 318). Through his analysis of “Dark Ecology,” he concludes that, “the spectral reality of the Anthropocene comes to dominate all existence and every horizon, sucking all darkness into the consuming dark-depressions, dark-uncannies, and sickly dark-sweetnesses of dark ecology” (2022, p. 322). Anatomy’s house is shrouded in darkness and the “sinister labyrinthine building” of the house itself can be considered a Gothic eco-system (2009, p. xvi). The haunted house can also be what Christine Wilson considers a wilderness, but within the Anthropocene, the human will always position itself above the non-human. This is particularly important regarding the house’s later monologues, which will be analyzed in section 4. Alternatively, Cynthia Sugars & Gerry Turcotte provide the following definition of the Gothic:
The Gothic, as a mode, is preoccupied with the fringes, the unspoken, the peripheral, and the cast aside. It is populated with monsters and outcasts, villains and victims, specters and the living dead. The Gothic is located in a realm of unknown dangers and negotiates both internal and external disquiet. It is a literature of excess and imagination, but one that is used as well to reassure and compartmentalize unreason. It is therefore a literature that both enacts and thematizes ambivalence. (2009, p. xv)
When considering these different definitions, Anatomy is not a perfect fit within each definition of a Gothic text. There are no trapped heroines wandering tunnels beneath the house and there are no monsters, tyrants, or even characters in the game beyond the player’s invisible avatar and the house itself. However, the house manages to occupy the space of both victim and victimizer, as is made evident throughout the monologue tapes, and the player is there to witness the house’s destruction and collapse but is also implicated in the house’s destruction because of their intrusion. We continue to reboot the game and try to make progress, even when it is clear that the game does not want us to. Baldick also connects the house and the body by stating that Gothic fiction is obsessed with “old buildings as sites of human decay. The Gothic [house] is not just an old and sinister building; it is a house of degeneration, even of decomposition, its living-space darkening and contracting into the dying-space of the mortuary and the tomb” (2009, p. xx). Within this definition of the traditionally Gothic house, fragments of Anatomy’s house can be seen as places where the physical space becomes the player’s dying-space as they fumble through the darkness, degeneration and decomposition of the game’s mechanics. In a way, we have always been dying in the house. In contrast, a game like Gone Home (which is discussed in more depth in section 5) provides a backstory and a semblance of a life outside of the house. Images of the decomposing house and the decomposing body (both of which are still living) present an emotional and affective horror that places bodies at the centre of the conflict and force a reckoning with one’s own inevitable collapse and lack of bodily certainty.
Game scholars who focus on horror, such as Tanya Krzywinska, provide frameworks which bridge Baldick, Botting, Sugars & Turcotte’s definitions of the Gothic and the ways that horror tropes are employed through gameplay. Krzywinska writes, “horror games explore ways to play with, and against, game media’s normative expectations of mastery and its concomitant representational, symbolic, and emotional contours” (2015, p. 293). Anatomy denies players a normative experience, and instead asks them to repeat the same experience under slightly altered circumstances while the house uncannily begins to break down around them. The immediately recognizable form of the house increases the affective potential of the narrative by taking a location that is safe and familiar and turning it into a site of anxiety, repression and transgression. Our view of the house as a familiar site -- and of the body as a reliable one -- is undermined throughout our gameplay experience in Anatomy, and this creates anxiety. “Gothic fiction is a way of [exercising anxieties],” Baldick writes, “but also of allaying them by imagining the worst before it can happen and giving it at least a safely recognizable form” which calls back to Thatcher and Kristeva’s claims about the unthinkable (2009, p. xxii). For both the haunted house and the chronically ill (particularly autoimmune) body, the most recognizable form and the worst imaginable possibility can take place within the same space. In Anatomy and in haunted house narratives more broadly, the sense of horror is increased because the house is no longer a safe place. It is easy for us to forget that it never was.
In one of the monologues, the house describes our bedrooms where we are at our most vulnerable:
Anything might stand beside us, watch us, keep us company until dawn, and we would never perceive it. We can only pray that the house will not let such things carry on as we sleep. In this way, during these hours, the bedroom seems less like a mind, and more like a mouth. For it is here that the house is most likely to betray us, it is here that we place ourselves most at the house’s mercy and spend each night hoping that it will not bite down. (Horrorshow, 2016)
The safety of the house (and of the house as ill body) reminds us of McCruer’s ability trouble, which “highlight[s] [...] the inevitable impossibility [...] of an able-bodied identity” (2008, p. 10). In Anatomy’s case, the house is denied any kind of bodily certainty, as the game cannot exist within an able-bodied worldview which would require linear and predictable experiences for the player. The player is denied bodily certainty by being denied a body -- and the house takes enjoyment from our struggles. But, as Anderson states, “videogames are vital to understanding our bodies and abilities,” which means they are also vital to understanding how we may glitch and malfunction (2024, p. 4). In her article “Haunting and the Ghostly Matters of Undefined Illness,” Alissa Overend writes about illness and how it “comes to exist (and be experienced) as a haunting trace of the barely visible, as a possessive force consuming the body it inhabits, and as a specter of death haunting positivist ideals of bodily certainty” (2013, p. 63). The ill body and Anatomy’s haunted house do not feel like a home because neither of them can experience bodily certainty. This leads to intellectual and noological uncertainty -- the body and house are unheimlich, in “the realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread” (Freud, 1919, p. 123).
The ill house and body engage closely with Havi Carel’s theory of bodily doubt, which undermines the “ongoing tacit certainty about our bodies (e.g., that we will be able to digest our lunch, that our hearts will carry on beating, that our legs will carry us, etc.) that is not rationally justified” (2013, p. 179). Instead, Anatomy and the ill body have lived knowledge of bodily doubt which is not “just a disruption of belief, but a disturbance on a bodily level. It is a disruption of one’s most fundamental sense of being in the world. Bodily doubt gives rise to an experience of unreality, estrangement, and detachment” (Carel, 2013, p. 184). This connects back to an unheimlich existence that makes us question and re-evaluate our own position in relation to reality. If bodily doubt gives rise to unreality, then bodily doubt is also a way to experience the unthinkable. This disruption is not only imposed upon the ill body but is also an outcome of the ill body occupying abled spaces -- the ill body disrupts linearity and norming as much as Anatomy’s house does in its glitches, crashes and reboots. Anatomy provides players with a unique experience that does not necessarily lend them insight into the ill body, but nonetheless does take away some of their agency and bodily certainty the way that illness might. On a first playthrough, the player does not have a sense of the rules, the linearity (or lack thereof), or the expectations. According to Krzywinska, as much as games give players agency, it is also “possible to take that agency away to generate a strong and direct sense of loss and vulnerability”, which Anatomy utilizes and exploits for affective potential (2015, p. 296). When we lose that sense of agency, the stakes are raised and the embodied experience of the game changes. On a second, third, or fourth playthrough, the player can begin to piece together the rules of the glitches and anticipate them -- but this only comes from the experience of navigating the house and the game.
“[We] spend each night hoping that it will not bite down”: Affective and Embodied Iterations of Gothicism in Anatomy
If we view a videogame as an “ability machine” like Anderson does, we can enter into larger conversations about embodiment. Anderson writes, “I want us to reimagine our bodies through videogames, not because we can but because videogames require it. They change what we understand about our bodies and abilities, whether we want them to or not” (2024, p. 177). As I have already discussed, Anatomy denies players a visible body, but players still encounter various forms of embodiment through gameplay -- namely, through the experience of unexpected failure. The player experiences failure as a precursor to advancing through the game because the game itself “fails” on numerous occasions. Daniel writes, “as the game progresses into its various iterations through a forced “reboot,” the tone of the voice on the tapes shifts, and the messages become sinister and threatening [...] each time you reload the game (until you reach the final level) the VHS tape which appears to be recording (or replaying?) your actions is further degraded” (Daniel, 2020, p. 162). Players choose to continue the game by rebooting it instead of passively moving forward. The degradation tells us that the tape has either been overused or overplayed, which implies an audience or spectator. This complicates the first-person perspective of the game -- we are watching ourselves play while also exhibiting agency in the player’s movements, but without a body. There is also an inevitability to the actions that players are undertaking. If we consider that we are watching an event that has already taken place, we must consider that our choices within the game are limited and prescribed before we ever began playing (although we do make the choice as to whether or not we keep playing). This feeling is Krzywinksa’s “direct sense of loss and vulnerability” as agency is taken away (2015, p. 296). We have always been -- and will always be -- in the house.
Daniel describes how games like Anatomy destabilize the player, or make players feel unease, and intensify feelings of anxiety and fear through affective aesthetics of horror. This same matrix of affects can be trademarks of the Gothic genre. Daniel’s chapter opens with a first-person account of his experience playing Anatomy. He writes:
A black computer screen. Before I see anything, I hear a sound that is familiar to those of a particular age: the nostalgic clunk of a VHS tape being loaded into a player [...] I am suddenly transported to the foyer of a darkened house [...] my light source only stretches a few feet into the darkness. With trepidation, I begin to investigate the house [...] As I explore, the static of scan lines intermittently rolls up the screen. It should signal to me that the experience is only a fiction, but somehow it adds to its authenticity: my exploration feels like it is simultaneously a recording of sorts [...] I can’t risk going to the centre of the room. The light does not reach back to the walls. (2020, p. 157)
Daniel mentions a feeling of nostalgia before he even enters the house -- the sound of the VHS tape alone is enough to transport him back to a memory of other VHS tapes -- but he also notes his immediate trepidation when he is faced with the prospect of exploring the house. This juxtaposition of nostalgia and trepidation creates what Daniel calls “the destabilization of the player’s knowledge of the space and time of the story-world,” which “[leaves] the player with the residual of a deepened feeling of unease and apprehension that is the mark of horror’s affect” (2020, pp. 161-3). One online gamer, John Wolfe, turns to the camera while playing Anatomy and says, “I don’t want to go down there” when the game instructs him to go to the basement. He also asks, “what have I gotten myself into?” at various points during gameplay (2016). Anatomy occupies the affective space between fear (of the unknown, the dark, and of what might be lurking) and comfort (of a house that might remind of us our own and the sound of the tapes) to pull the player in multiple affective directions at once. In other chapters, Daniel describes cinematic iterations of horror and found footage films, but he clarifies the difference between film and video games as mediums. He states that the “active identification of the player as participant in the diegetic world” forces the player to be responsible for their own decisions and participation in a different manner than in horror cinema (2020, p. 157).
The found footage framing lends verisimilitude to Anatomy’s narrative. Verisimilitude is a technique that horror creators have used in the past to “[defy] conventional interpretation” (Wilson, 2010, p. 202). For example, Jay Anson’s 1977 book, The Amityville Horror, was marketed as a non-fiction account. Another literary example, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, is a bricolage of fictional found texts, some of which show the actual dimensions of a house changing, becoming labyrinthine and wilder, which necessitates the help of wilderness explorers. Wilson writes about House of Leaves, “it is impossible for the reader (and the inhabitants for that matter) to ascertain the actual nature of the house because it is under constant interpretation by Navidson, the explorers, and the frame narrator(s)” (2010, p. 202-3). Blair Witch Project is an example of this framing in film. It uses a found footage framing device that creates what Turner calls “artificial authenticity.” Like House of Leaves, Amityville, and The Blair Witch Project, Anatomy takes away our confidence in diegesis (Turner’s use of the term is meant to convey the importance of narrative control), because the house is constantly changing and these changes keep us from ascertaining the house’s true nature. Control does not rest with the player. Instead, control rests with the house as an ever-changing, sentient being.
Anatomy plays with the same literary techniques employed by Danielewski and Anson, but the visual and interactive nature of the video game make the experience at least as visceral as watching The Blair Witch Project, if not more so. Visual media like Anatomy have changed the contours of the Gothic into more technological dimensions -- in discussion of the TechnoGothic, Justin T. Edwards writes, “the ghosts that haunted the dark spaces of modernity are no longer liminal, shadowy figures that remain elusive. Spectral forms and figures are now pervasive: they appear in cell phones, videogame consoles, television screens, computer monitors” (2015, p. 11). The embodied nature of playing videogames has deep implications for illness and disability, which I will explore within Manuel Herrero-Puertas’ framework of Gothic access.
“Every room becomes a mouth”: Iterations of Gothic Access
Anatomy repeatedly positions the body and the house as points along the same spectrum, as is evident in one of the game’s most unsettling lines: “when a house is both hungry and awake, every room becomes a mouth” (Horrorshow, 2016). These words are spoken when the player is in the basement before the third crash. The metaphor of the mouth and its application to every room breaks from the player’s previously established expectations -- until this moment, the mouth has only functioned as a metaphor for the bedroom. This terrifying moment in the basement and the subsequent crash clarify what players are beginning to suspect: there is no certainty in this haunted house as the game world collapses. Manuel Herrero-Puertas’ framework of “Gothic access” is one of the most useful frameworks through which we can read the collapse and regeneration of the house (and house as body). He describes Gothic access as “a series of hauntings that help us collapse and reimagine everyday life’s unhaunted -- yet inaccessible -- built environments” (2020, p. 333). He writes, “the Gothic contributes [an] unlikely [...] arsenal of tactics for questioning uncritical framings of access today as well as proving its entwinement with other fronts of inequality” (2020, p. 335). He concludes that “we need to re-read Gothic fiction as something other than a way to access the repressed: a way to stop repressing bolder forms of access” (2020, p. 349). Gothic forms of play (including Anatomy) can contribute to these bolder forms of access and the creative-destructive process of reimagining. Herrero-Puertas believes that haunted houses have and tell stories (Herrero-Puertas, 2020, p. 340). Anatomy’s monologues exemplify a type of embodiment through story which manifest in auditory, visual, sensory, and embodied experiences of Gothicism for the player. These experiences of Gothicism further cement the videogame as a medium through which we can better understand our bodies and our sense of agency.
In the Gothic genre, the representational frame is integral to experience and interpretation of a text -- Anatomy draws attention both toward and away from its representational frame, which makes it different from other horror media. In many works of horror, the author and text attempt to disguise the representational frame, “which helps to mark it out as fiction as a powerful means to intensify its affective affect, a trick that requires novel textual deftness to mislead hermeneutic expectations” (Krzywinska, 2015, p. 294). In some ways, Anatomy does attempt to disguise its narrative frame through the use of VHS motifs, static lines and on-screen text, but it also draws attention to its own frame through a series of crashes and reboots. This leaves the player in an unsettled space where they can view the image of the house as “matter in motion and the exposure of the lie through which we think materiality as a stable baseline of limited plenitude” with a stable baseline that is as much a fiction as the concept of bodily certainty (Mitchell et al., 2019, p. 8). This middle space is one of discomfort, where the player does not know whether they should buy into the fictional frame of the game or view the house as separate from that frame. Their decision might be impacted by the degree to which they identify with the house on an embodied level (i.e., their own degree of access). Whether or not this identification takes place, the player must choose to continue by rebooting the game each time it crashes -- this choice is different from how to explore the house, how fast to move, or how close to hug the walls because it takes a different kind of effort. Jesper Juul defines “effort” as occurring when, “a player exerts effort in order to influence the -- outcome -- of the game” (Juul). After the first crash, the player begins to understand that their role in the game is not to influence the outcome of the game, but to allow the game to play to completion, even if it means they are walking to their own destruction. The game reminds us “[our] intrusion [is] felt”, but we enact effort and choose to continue, thereby creating an ending for the house and destroying ourselves within the game (Horrorshow, 2016).
Herrero-Puertas describes the generative possibilities within “the creative-destructive force of Gothic access,” which takes advantage of the shifting semantics of the word “access” for its foundation (2020, p. 336). Herrero-Puertas introduces the modern English definition from the OED where “access” means, “the power, opportunity, permission, or right to come near or into contact with someone or something; admittance; admission.” This definition supplanted an older English one which (in medical terms) describes “an attack, or the onset (of fever or disease)” (2020, p. 335). To further characterize this shift, Herrero-Puertas states, “there is something genuinely Gothic in [the] productive destruction of space” because “haunting’s transgressions of matter upset [those] for whom monolithic spatial designs safeguard a social and economic status quo” (2020, p. 340). This creative and generative destruction is central to Anatomy’s gameplay -- the game’s moments of failure and destruction are what allow the player to move forward (even if they are moving toward their own destruction). The social and economic status quo are also central to Universal Design in disability scholarship and McCruer’s theory of “ability trouble”: the social and economic status quo creates and maintains spaces that disable specific bodies. Through a creative and generative destruction of space, the dissolution or wreckage of a space can create an opening where a more accessible space emerges. Anatomy’s moments of self-destruction create generative possibilities for new forms of unbounded access.
Herrero-Puertas also describes Gothic access in terms of “haunting as misfitting -- [which] drives an estate toward a gradual, at times brusque, disintegration, one eventually noticeable from the outside, its impact transcending the domestic into the social” (2020, pp. 339-40). His use of the term “misfitting” is a direct response to Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept,” which describes Gothic spaces as a “malleable construct in which unbounded bodies, spirits, and objects rethink access beyond localized scenarios” (Herrero-Puertas, 2020, p. 336). This visual breakdown of space and estate also applies to the ill body, which can (at times) fit into abled notions of personhood, but frequently refutes those notions through its own embodiment. Herrero-Puertas’ claim that “while body-house isomorphisms grant continuity, misfitting thrives toward collapse” is particularly interesting because Anatomy does present us with body-house isomorphisms, but it is not the normative, abled body we see reflected and mapped back through the house (2020, p. 340). The malfunctioning body -- the glitching and collapsing body -- engages in creative-destruction, which is what moves the game forward.
Before the final reboot, the house states, “Your purpose was to listen, and yet at every turn you have pried, you have prodded, and you have interfered. Have you not been paying attention? Did it not occur to you that [...] your intrusion would be felt?” (Horrorshow, 2016). At this moment, the game reminds us that we have assumed a sort of access -- we have taken for granted that we have the right to rifle through the house and that we have a right to extract the house’s stories for our own purposes. By the end of the game, the house’s creative-destruction feels warranted -- we are powerless and trapped in the basement as teeth begin to grow through the floor, preparing to bite down. It is our exploration of the space and our assumed right to access that has led to our own destruction. The game’s programmed failure confirms Herrero-Puertas’ assertion that “the Gothic does not retrofit; it collapses (2020, p. 341).
Ruberg & Love: Queer Bodies, Ill Spaces and Future Directions
Bo Ruberg writes, “speed runs and walking simulators [...] offer opportunities for gameplay that stand at the intersection of temporality, spatiality, sexuality, gender, agency, and resistance -- an intersection at which the very ontologies of video games begin to break down” (2020, p. 186). The “break down” of ontology can be further extended to video games like Anatomy, which intentionally break down to create affect and unease. The game breaks down on a mechanical level, thereby moving breakdown beyond ontology and into the realm of affective game design. Using Ruberg as a definitive source, it is difficult to describe Anatomy as a walking simulator. Walking simulator games (such as Gone Home, Dear Esther, and What Remains of Edith Finch), “invite a slower and more contemplative relationship with the games’ rich visual and material environments, a relationship that is often structured around strolling, stopping, and seeing” (Ruberg, 2020, p. 201). That said, Gone Home in particular seems to have been an influence on Anatomy, even though the games offer very different manifestations of the body and of environmental storytelling. In Gone Home, players have a sense of a character (and backstory) and a clear body to inhabit as they move through the game. However, both games draw attention to our clear intrusion into a house and our inability to leave, “which is reminiscent of the Gothic trope of a heroine confined in a castle” (Kaisen, 2022, p. 183). The hallways are well lit in Gone Home as we move through the house, picking things up and putting them away (or not), but Anatomy’s darkness is what prevents players from strolling, stopping, and seeing. Gone Home is overtly queer in its narrative expression, but the queerness in Anatomy is conveyed as an undertone. Kitty Horrorshow’s interaction with the Gothic, the house, and the body (or lack thereof) can be read as an attempt to remove abjection from the body and superimpose it onto larger structures, like the house. In their discussion of the game’s glitches, Prevas writes, “Anatomy creates a language of refusal and a space of trans possibility without ever directly invoking gender” (2023, p. 135). The house as a space of refusal is evident in the game’s glitches, but also in its locked doors, darkness and dialogue.
Anatomy cannot be defined as a walking simulator because it does not allow the player to stroll, stop, or see. However, Anatomy’s house can be read in the context of queer scholar Heather Love, who Ruberg quotes: “understanding queer lives and their relation to history requires “dwelling” in the “dark places” [...] refusing to move on, [...] and instead choosing to linger so long in the past that these dark places become a kind of residence” (Love qtd. In Ruberg, 2020, p. 188). Love’s use of the word “dwelling” is noteworthy because the word can operate as both a noun (a place to live) and a verb (to linger in that place). To play Anatomy and attempt to occupy the space between noun and verb through a lens of cripness allows a view of the house as not only a living place (a dwelling) but also as a sentient body whose illness and discomfort constitute “[a] creative-destructive force” when its boundaries are crossed (Herrero-Puertas, 2020, p. 336). From this perspective, instead of a sense of agency experienced by the player, this agency is experienced by the house.
Love and Ruberg’s descriptions of queer temporality and of living against chrononormativity are deeply rooted in the experiences of queer bodies but can describe disabled and ill bodies as well. Disabled bodies also dwell and linger, occupying time in different ways that may be in opposition to timelines of hetero- and chrono-normativity. When reading Anatomy through a lens of cripness, it is important to acknowledge how the haunted house complicates notions of compulsory able-bodiedness as we dwell in the darker places of domestic space. These places are not the prettiest or most inviting. The darkness might hide some things, but it allows other things unimpeded access. Anatomy presents us with an avatar who moves within the house, but it is the house itself that “linger[s] so long in the past that [the dark becomes] a kind of residence” (Love qtd in Ruberg, 2020, p. 188). The allegorical segmenting of the house into body parts is representative of a “form of taking back control [...] claiming some sort of power over a chemical, mental, and physical whirlwind of pain, anger, fear, and confusion” (Tremblay, 2018, p. 13). This whirlwind of emotion is seen in earnest toward the end of the game as the subject of the house blends with the flexible subject of the body.
“Doors Open”: Conclusion
While Anatomy may not feature jump scares, blood, monsters, or gore, the gaming experience is filled with apprehension, horror, fear and discomfort. We encounter a space that makes us feel unsettled because of its darkness and programmed failure. In some ways, we want to be frightened through more traditional means -- it might be more cathartic if we encountered a monster or a jump scare. Instead, we encounter a game that fits within Bernard Perron’s third category of horror games: scary video games, which “take fear explicitly and intentionally as an object” (2018, p. 4). Daniel notes that Perron “chooses ‘scary’ over ‘horror’ to accentuate that the main design intention in these games is the elicitation of fear” (2020, p. 158). Anatomy certainly elicits fear and this elicitation manifests in the body of the player. As much as there is a house-body isomorphism in Anatomy, there is also a game-body connection which results in palpable anxiety, tension and discomfort in the player’s body. The body is what allows us to play the game, but it is also the vessel through which we feel our apprehension. Through the frameworks of Gothic access and bodily doubt, Anatomy helps us recognize that the body truly is our first experience of haunting, while allowing the player to think the unthinkable and play the unplayable.
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