At first glance, the 2016 indie horror video game The Survey and Ridley Scott’s 1979 science fiction film Alien do not seem to have much in common, but upon further observation and comparison, certain similarities between both forms of postmodern horror media are revealed. The Survey follows the player character, Marcus Walker, through a seemingly vacant home as he uses clues and instructions from a survey on a smartphone to explore the home and solve the mystery of his family’s past, while Alien follows the the protagonist, Ellen Ripley, and the rest of the crew on the spacecraft Nostromo as they fight back against an alien being who has invaded their ship and is attempting to kill them. Despite these two works’ clear differences in medium and plot, The Survey and Alien are similar in more subtle ways, including the presence of a foreign monster or alien, a sense of anticipation pervading the media where the characters are anxiously awaiting the monster’s attack, and a use of closed and confined spaces.
The Survey is a first-person survival horror game taking place inside of a 13-room house that the player character, at first a nameless protagonist that we later learn is Marcus Walker, cannot leave or escape. Marcus awakes to a notification on his phone saying that he has been selected to participate in a survey that then asks him some strangely specific questions, such as whether or not the house he’s in seems familiar and if he remembers having a family. This prompts the player to begin exploring the house to find notes and scraps of paper providing details into the private lives of the Walker family—including Marcus himself—and the backstory of the game. The horror element of the game comes from the actions that the player character is not in control of: crashing sounds occur from the lower level of the house while the player is upstairs; lights turn out by themselves; items in the house are rearranged; a large porcelain angel that starts out in the living room moves to different rooms and positions, seemingly on its own; and a female monster appears in the darkness of nearby rooms and charges toward the player.
The main thing that makes The Survey unique from other survival horror games of its type, however, is the smartphone interface. The smartphone is how the player answers the survey questions, and it also functions partly as a game menu. It features different widgets, including a clock, photos, mail, settings (that actually allow the player to adjust the game’s display settings), the survey, and timer-based hints in case the player gets stuck. The photos and mail apps provide small clues to the game’s backstory and generally add to the tense, ominous tone and atmosphere of the game world. This smartphone interface is an example of what Ewan Kirkland cites as “digitextuality,” meaning “intertextuality within digital media,” in his article, “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations” (115). The smartphone and the survey itself help to provide “atmosphere, context, and information” in the game, while also allowing for further immersion into the world of The Survey (Kirkland 116).
In addition to the smartphone interface, the game features other examples of technology. There are many television sets in the 13-room house that show channel numbers but play only static, and the player is instructed not to leave the sets on for too long, because, as a cryptic note says, “it makes [the monster’s] ears bleed.” The televisions’ channel numbers are used to solve puzzles within the game, and the numerous radios around the house play different songs and narrate certain aspects of the game’s backstory, and can, like the televisions, be turned on and off.
Furthermore, The Survey utilizes many different examples of what Kirkland calls “hypermediated combinations of diegetic remediation,” such as “paintings and drawings, writing in the form of reports, diaries, inscriptions, text books and picture books, and audio media such as telephones, radio, and audio cassettes” (120). Some examples of remediation that feature more prominently in the game are the forms of writing, mainly through letters and diary entries, and audio media, specifically using a radio. These, in the words of Kirkland, “provide an economic means of conveying backstory, enhance the verisimilitude of fictional spaces in which such media technologies would conceivably be present, and confer a kind of document reality on ludic information contained in virtual texts possessing a physical presence and institutional authority within the game world” (120). Kirkland’s point about virtual texts possessing a physical presence and authority is especially apparent in the player’s quest to collect different documents in order to reveal more information about the family’s backstory and the potential reasons for why Marcus is trapped in the home.
In contrast, the classic science fiction film Alien presents a very different and much less interactive experience for its audience. The film portrays the protagonist, Ellen Ripley, and the rest of the spaceship’s crew as they attempt to fight back against and ultimately escape a killer alien. Like in The Survey, the characters in Alien are trapped inside of an enclosed space, but this space is a ship floating through space rather than a townhouse with an impassable front door. In this manner, the audience watching Alien is distanced slightly from the predicament of the Nostromo’s crew, but watching Ripley battle and try to escape the alien onboard is something that viewers still get drawn into, as they don’t know what’s going to occur.
The Alien world may not have the modern technology of smartphones, but the film is rife with many different types of technology that all play large parts in the story, and the most obvious (yet most easily overlooked) of these is the ship itself. In his article “In the Belly of the Mechanical Beast: Technological Environments in the Alien Films,” Steffen Hantke writes, “The one single piece of technology that dominates Scott’s film is the space ship itself in which the events take place, the technological environment through which the protagonists move and parts of which they interact with. That all traces of nature are erased from this environment is treated as a given, which explains why the Nostromo hardly registers as a machine for most viewers” (524). The ship is a “fully technological environment” in which the only natural, non-mechanical beings are the crew members themselves (Hantke 522). This is obviously not the case in the suburban house setting of The Survey, as can be seen in the contrasting images between it and the setting of Alien.
However, when examining both The Survey and Alien more closely, these two works of postmodern horror do have some similarities. First, both works feature some form of monster or foreign creature who is following and attempting to kill the protagonist. In both The Survey and Alien, the image or physical appearance of the monster itself can be analyzed; Cosimo Urbano outlines this representation of the monster as one of the four representational strategies of the modern horror film in his article, “Projections, Suspense, and Anxiety.” He focuses on “numerous scenes in which the monster is the true object of both the characters’ and the spectators’ gaze without it being at that point an actual and immediate source of threat… films such as Alien… seem at times literally obsessed about observing and investigating the monster’s body, driven to look at it, mesmerized by its monstrosity” (Urbano 891). The same can be said for the monster in The Survey; there are a few moments in the game where the player can hear her crying or see her simply standing and waiting before she eventually runs toward the protagonist and attacks.
Along these same lines, an element that borrows from the traditional horror film and also features in both of these works is “a stretched-out anticipation of the monster’s attack” (Lev 32). Though this may be more immediately obvious to the viewer during certain scenes of Alien than to someone playing The Survey, the two forms of horror media utilize the audience’s fear of what is to come to add a sense of unease to the fictional worlds these characters are inhabiting.
The final similarity between Alien and The Survey is both works’ use of closed and confined spaces in order to restrict the protagonist’s movement. In the case of Alien, “the main set is the human spaceship, with a few minutes spent on an uninhabited planet and in the alien ship” (Lev 32). This adds to the suspense and horror of the film because the viewer knows that Ripley and the rest of the crew are trapped aboard the Nostromo with the alien and must somehow either escape the creature or end its life. The same is true for the player in The Survey, who is being followed and repeatedly attacked by this monster inside of a house that the protagonist cannot leave, adding to the tense and uneasy feel of the game. However, a difference here is that the player has no method, weapon, or option with which to fight back against the entity as Ripley does, and must therefore keep evading the monster in order to gain an understanding of the protagonist’s own past. Hantke is specifically discussing Alien when he writes, “there is no escape because there is, properly speaking, no outside… there is no safe ‘outside’ to which the characters can escape,” but his words ring true when thinking about The Survey as well (540). This is especially potent when the player learns toward the end of the game that the protagonist, Marcus, is in a coma, doomed to relive a horrific personification of his guilt over neglecting his sister, and that therefore the entire storyline of the game has been Marcus experiencing his own personal hell.
These two works of horror media, when examined closely, have various similarities that function to make each individual work more immersive, more ominous, and more horrifying. The comparison of these seemingly disparate texts also serves to reveal some of the ways in which the horror genre functions, whether it be through the medium of film or video games. Ultimately, both of these works aim to shed light on aspects of humanity, and whether that is achieved by having one protagonist in a coma being tortured by his own guilt and grief, or by having another protagonist shoot a killer alien out of an escape pod, both The Survey and Alien reach this same goal in their own unique—and memorable—ways.
Works Cited
Hantke, Steffen. “In the Belly of the Mechanical Beast: Technological Environments in the Alien Films.” The Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 3 (2003): 518–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-5931.00020.
Kirkland, Ewan. “Resident Evil’s Typewriter: Survival Horror and Its Remediations.” Games and Culture, vol. 4, no. 2, Apr. 2009, pp. 115–126, doi:10.1177/1555412008325483.
Lev, Peter. “Whose Future? Star Wars, Alien, and Blade Runner.” Literature/Film Quarterly 26, no. 1 (1998): 30. http://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1297376881?accountid=10427.
Matheson, T. J. “Triumphant Technology and Minimal Man: The Technological Society, Science Fiction Films, and Ridley Scott’s Alien.” Extrapolation 33, no. 3 (Fall, 1992): 215. http://ezproxy.lib.davidson.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/1304235353?accountid=10427.
Urbano, Cosimo. “Projections, Suspense, and Anxiety: The Modern Horror Film and its Effects.” Psychoanalytic Review 85.6 (1998): 889. ProQuest. Web. 21 Feb. 2019.