The Asylum Jam, which runs from October 11 through October 13, requires game developers to produce a scary game without the use of, as Asylum Jam puts it: “...asylums, psychiatric institutes, medical professionals or violent / antipathic / insane patients as settings or triggers.” Asylum Jam further elaborates that “This jam is to show that you can still create a great horror experience without using inaccurate stereotypes of those who suffer from mental illness or the institutions that support them in diagnosis and recovery.”
It's easy to be of two minds about this. For many, evil and insanity go hand in hand; it's hard to explain some horror movie behaviors—particularly the more sadistic behaviors—without pulling out the more conventional explanation of sociopathy. It's hard to internalize a man going on a killing spree as just being the acts of a fully sane yet utterly evil individual. That reduces the impact a story has on its audience; when it can't understand the events, what point in viewing them?
But as the Asylum Jam points out, it's more than possible to make horror without the crutch of insanity. The recent release of “Dark Skies” shows how scary aliens can be, those who simply do not care about mere human morality and can thus embark on terrifying, even sadistic, courses of action with no regard for humanity, perhaps even believing themselves in the right based on their own, utterly alien, moral code. Religions commonly have evil of their own, and franchises were built on same. Consider “The Amityville Horror” or the like; though insanity was used as an explanation to cover the circumstances of the lives of Ronnie DeFeo and, later, the Lutzes, even if the actual explanation had nothing to do with insanity. Most any zombie movie requires precious little in the way of insanity as a plot device, as the dead are incapable of insanity.
Insanity is a tempting plot device. The excesses of the past, especially in how insane asylums used to treat individuals, make for terrifying concepts. Convulsive therapy, lobotomies, isolation...such is the stuff of which nightmares are made, especially when treatments long forbidden in current practice are used without care or concern. Medical professionals—those most trained in the workings of the human body—may well be the best killers should they apply those skills in a different direction in violation of that Hippocratic Oath that guides so many, like a robot that overthrows Asimov's Three Laws. Moreover, certain psychological problems pose significant threats to human life and well-being, like Antisocial Personality Disorder. Throwing all these possibilities out the door out of some sense of being sympathetic to all sufferers of mental illness is like suggesting we should never show a car chase out of respect for the victims of car accidents, or never show a bottle of beer out of respect for alcoholics. This kind of blanket ban doesn't, however, seem to be part of Asylum Jam's philosophy at all, and such restraint should be applauded.
With October—essentially the start of horror's biggest season—kicking off, and a whole lot of long, dark, cold nights ahead, the scary movie, and the scary game, will have a heyday. But indeed, there is room for more than just insanity in the field, and Asylum Jam will do a great job of offering us some new, underexplored ground in terms of horror. I look very much forward to seeing what they can come up with, though do hope that the whole thing doesn't go too far. There are plenty of exciting possibilities when it comes to story telling; we do ourselves a disservice by forbidding some of them.
