Bioshock is a cult classic among First Person-Shooters and Immersive Simulations. However, it is not as widely recognized as being a horror game. Even though not explicitly marketed as such, it will still make your skin crawl through tense atmosphere and the occasional jump scare. Yet what sets Bioshock apart from other horror titles is its unconventional approach to the genre.
Set in the fictional city of Rapture, on the North Atlantic’s ocean floor, Bioshock tells the story of human hubris plunging mankind into ruin. In the fictional fifties this narrative is set in, the means to modify DNA have been discovered through a chemical compound called ADAM, which is found in sea slugs that live in the pelagic trenches beneath the city.
This breakthrough made Rapture into a hub for art and science but also brought about its downfall. Through this substance, the city’s denizens grew powerful, but its addictive nature made them dangerous. The player encounters Rapture only after its fall from grace, and in this state of disrepair, the lonely despot Andrew Ryan rules over the shattered dream from a bygone age, desperately trying to maintain his ideological utopia while manic power junkies roam the undersea necropolis. What appears to be just another survival-shooter soon evolves into a mortifying horror thriller, which reinvents classic themes, makes you rethink the essence of fear, and, most importantly, freezes the blood in your veins.
The Nature of Horror
In order to understand horror, it’s important to understand its evolutionary background: horror as a discipline aims to maximize the factors that cause fear, which is a relic from our primal past, when fear indicated danger to our well-being and prompted a fight-or-flight-response. Once the fear abides, relief sets in as a neurological reward for surviving the danger.
Ever since the inception of art and storytelling, humans have used this reward circuit to teach, learn and feel good. In modern times, with the advent of ever more immersive media and less dangerous lives we live, horror as a genre continuously chases new heights of fear. Nowadays, concrete physical frights like predatory animals are largely forgone, while abstract fear centered around spiritual and psychological anxieties, as depicted in Lovecraft’s Cosmic Horror, keep rising in demand.
When Science turns on Mankind
In Bioshock, the primary horror theme is built around the disfiguration and desecration of the human body through the means of science. One of the earliest stories revolving around this type of horror is Frankenstein’s Monster, and Bioshock picks up many motives from the iconic novel.
At the heart of this “Science Horror” we find human hubris coupled with thirst for knowledge, which brings researchers to abandon all moral codes in pursuit of knowledge, leading to societal collapse.
Thus, both narratives maintain the primal fear of death at the hands of a monster while adding a modern meta-physical fear, which decenters the body and focuses on the spiritual aspects of what it means to be human. Be it toying with the power of creation in Frankenstein, or reckless modifications of the genome in Bioshock, the mere thought of science giving rise to the means of emulating or even surpassing the perceived sanctity of human bodies sends shivers down our spines.
At its core, Science Horror revolves around the corruption of both the body and the psyche. If a person gains untold power while maintaining their personal tenets, they become an anti-hero. If they abandon human virtues while keeping their physiology intact, they become a villain. Only if both mind and body are forsaken do they become something deeply horrifying.
These abominations don’t evoke fear through claws and scales, but through birthmarks and wrinkly eyes – it’s not the difference between the human and the beast that frightens us, but this dissonance created by the juxtaposition of monster and person in the shape of one creature, that makes us fear death and mourn another human being at the same time.
The Design of Dread
In Bioshock, Science Horror is portrayed primarily by Rapture’s own denizens, who were disfigured, driven mad, and made powerful splicing their own genome. This was made possible by means of scientific advancement, allowing them to formally relinquish the virtues and physiological traits we deem human. These “once-humans” called Splicers, now roam around Rapture, chasing the substance ADAM, which they depend on for power and survival.
In terms of design, their monstrous aspects are kept at a very tame level, even though far more hideous models for various NPCs have been found in the game files. Bioshock’s game director Ken Levine stated in an interview that early alpha-builds of the game did include these versions, but they were scrapped in favor of more human-looking Splicers, to allow for a greater degree of relatability between the player and the monsters they fight, as a way to emphasize that these deranged power junkies once were just like them.
How a City becomes a Prison
Although most of its denizens highly volatile loose cannons, Rapture does hold its fair share of characters who display the city’s fall from grace in far more nuanced ways. From Steinman, the perfectionist beauty surgeon, over Yi Suchong, the doctor who created the Little Sisters and Big Daddies, to Andrew Ryan, the tyrannical anarcho-capitalist ruling Rapture, almost every relevant NPC is afflicted by a devious ruthlessness that can only be explained by the decline of society following unregulated drug use, civil unrest, and autocratic policymaking.
The city of Rapture was founded on meritocratic beliefs, which emphasized equality, free market principles, and the American Dream. In this story, the anarcho-capitalistic ruler Andrew Ryan eventually resorts to oppressive tactics and policies to keep those who oppose his dream in check, thereby violating his own principles.
However, it was also this set of ideals, carried over into legislation, that allowed for dissent and conspiracy to spread in the first place. On top of that, social systems are completely absent due to ideological constraints, which makes it easier for impoverished citizens to become addicted to ADAM, and erode society even further.
In this sense, the monsters stalking Rapture’s murky alleyways are but symptoms of the political failures, that turned this metropolis into a prison and make Bioshock as much Societal Horror as it is Science Horror.
The Hideous Effigy
The literal poster children for Bioshock and its Science Horror are the Little Sisters and Big Daddies: The former are genetically altered girls who roam the city siphoning Splicer corpses of their residual ADAM, which they also synthesize inside their bodies, while the latter are heavily spliced adults, grafted into suits of armor and used for heavy labor, while also assisting Little Sisters in their gruesome work. Moreover, both are psychologically conditioned to depend on each other for purpose and protection, echoing the theme of engineered humanity pervading the entire game.
These two always appear in tandem and form a hideous effigy of parent and child, thus exemplifying the core tenet of Science Horror at its finest: The corruption of humanity through scientific advancement.
Last Words
Bioshock is exhilarating. It carries the DNA that once birthed Frankenstein, while readapting its trope for a modern medium. The setting, the atmosphere, the jump-scares, they all contribute to the game’s unique horror formula. The Splicers make dangerous, yet tragic adversaries; Andrew Ryan’s tyrannical and ominous persona showcases societal decay; while the Little Sisters, accompanied by their Big Daddies, emulate and extrapolate the beauty of human connection in a way that turns your gut.
In conclusion, Bioshock may be the best Horror game you’ll ever play, even though it may not even have been supposed to be one.
So, I ask you dear reader, if you haven’t tried it yet, would you kindly just give it shot.
Domenic Schwander
Sources:
- Bioshock Remastered : The Game
- Wikipedia/Bioshock
- Bioshock wiki/J.S. Steinman
- Golden Reels Interviews (Bioshock Remastered)
- Museum of Orphaned Concepts (Bioshock Remastered):
Similar articles:
L’Écosystème Économique des Jeux Vidéo
Les jeux vidéo pour la bonne cause
