Alone (and quiet) in the dark

It's strange how the horror genre can have, and I'm probably not the only one to feel it, a comforting dimension. When I reread IT or The Shining, it's not to feel anguish, let alone horror; when I watch In the Mouth of Madness for the thousandth time, it's not to die a slow mental death like Sam Neill's character, gradually realizing that the nature of reality is much, much different, and much darker, much crazier than anything he could have imagined. Who would want to do such a thing to himself? Every man seeks happiness, even the one who is going to hang himself, says Blaise Pascal. When I consume, to use an ugly word, horror, it is to feel good. To find a good old aesthetic, good old themes, a good old time, a good old something to which this genre reconnects me and which obviously I miss in everyday life. But what is it exactly?

By the time I find myself once again in that attic where Alone in the Dark begins, the feeling is complete. Isn't it a beautiful attic? Neat, tidy, the kind that should smell of wax and old books, and where any child would want to spend time rummaging through boxes and furniture looking for treasures? This was one of my hobbies as a kid; my grandparents didn't have an attic, but one room in their house, unused, was furnished with old chests filled to the brim with junk like only grandparents of yesteryear had (what do they have in their Ikea drawers, the ones today? Fluorescent pink anal plugs?) as only the grandparents of the past knew how to amass, never throwing anything away, because you never know...

In short, I spent a good part of my time as a child rummaging through old furniture looking for any mysterious object from the past, or failing that, something I could snatch up that might be useful - thus, as a teenager, I found a box of antediluvian cigarillos that I appropriated and smoked methodically as I wandered the streets of my town, finishing the box, I remember, while discussing the death of our friend Jerome with a mutual acquaintance. And the death of a teenager in a car accident is a horror that no pixelated video game can beat. And Jerome was the only kid around here who had a PC running, among other things, Alone in the Dark – because it all ties together.

This attic where the game begins reminds me of all this, as well as of dreams I may have had, and which I have noted down. Like the cellar, the attic is in the symbolic language of the psyche a powerfully important room: it is the head of the house, the place where memories are stored, the ancestors... There may be shadowy areas, but the attic is a place of intelligence, memory and consciousness. The cellar, on the other hand, is full of shadows, humidity, dirt, it is the place of impulses, of evil, of shame, and Alone in the Dark, voluntarily or not, proposes to us quite intelligently to go down from the hyper-civilized attic of the 20's where the detective-hero lives, to the basement of human and even cosmic history, where ungodly dirt swarms.

I never really tried to finish the game; the Lovecraftian monsters don't interest me that much, in fact, they are there for me, in the end, almost only to accentuate, by contrast, the attractive and comforting side of the world of the 1920s - like the quasi-discrete tentacle on the cover of the 4th edition of Call of Cthulhu, where stands a superb old American house, which I confuse in my imagination with the one of Alone in the Dark, visible from the outside in the cinematic which opens the game.

In truth I find this house adorable, it is in a thousand ways the old archetypal house, where one feels like at Grandma's house, the house where I have never lived but where I feel like I have countless memories, and which I miss. It is in this house that I imagine myself returning to live one day to finish my life, knowing that it will never happen. Next to all this, Yog Sothoth is a pale shadow.