If you are one of those folks that prefers to mark tonight with scares instead of laughter, then IGN Retro has a series of classic vids you should check out between opening the door and dropping fun-sized candy bars into waiting buckets.
If you have a Master System in the attic, dust it off and slide in Ghost House, which shipped not on a cartridge, but was instead one of the handful of cards that occupied the eventually unused slot on the front of the console. Ghost House stars Mick, a young man with hair that enters the room before he does. Mick has just inherited some family real estate and according to legend, the titular house is full of jewels. Unfortunately, those precious stones are locked inside coffins spread around the mansion. And keeping those gems company is none other than Dracula.
To force the coffins open, Mick must defeat enough enemies to locate a key. But before staging an attack on Dracula, Mick really needs to get some better protection than his massive fist. By activating secret traps, Mick can jump on flying knives and then use them to stab away at Dracula. Another secret: While Dracula is flying around the screen, jump into a light bulb on the ceiling. The screen flashes and Dracula freezes for a few seconds. Use this window of opportunity to slash Dracula (or punch him in the face) repeatedly so you can claim the gem.
Is Ghost House really that scary? Maybe not, but it does have all the right ingredients for a Halloween game: Bats, vampire, haunted houses, reapers, and mummies.
Or, if 8-bit isn't your bag of candy, you can reach farther back to the Atari 2600. Now, you know right up front that due to the 2600's, uh, limited visual capabilities, you're not going to be spooked by anything that looks particularly scary. And so designers had to rely wholly on atmosphere to create their horror games. Xonox's Ghost Manor is the most successful of the 2600 horror games (Texas Chainsaw Massacre is hardly a scare). At the start of the game, your significant other is kidnapped and taken to the heart of a haunted house. You must follow a ghost around a graveyard in the shadow of the house to collect crosses. Once you have enough, you approach the front of the manor, which is guarded by an axe-wielding maniac. Then you must explore the interior of the manor, avoiding sliding walls that can crush you. Finally, at the top of the manor you use a cross to keep Dracula at bay while you rescue your loved one.
Despite the downgrade in graphics from Ghost House, Ghost Manor is actually the creepier game. For one thing, the game opens to an appropriately crunchy theme. And the sound of the axe coming down is certainly severe. The stakes are also pretty high, as death is almost certain around every corner -- and there is nothing cartoon-y about it.
In 1981, the 2600 hosted Haunted House. This is another horror game that relies on invoked atmosphere to craft its chills. You have been summoned to the estate of Zachary Graves. To escape, you must collect three pieces of a broken urn that have been hidden inside the pitch black house. Since the house is advertised as haunted, you must watch out for ghosts and spiders that wander the halls. You can keep these monsters at bay with a scepter. But since the house is enveloped in darkness, how do you find a scepter?
This is one of the coolest parts about Haunted House, save for the hero being represented as a pair of eyes that actually look in the direction you're moving. By pressing the button on the joystick, you light a match and can see your immediate surroundings. This lets you spot the scepter, urn pieces, or the needed key for unlocking doors. The match only lasts for a few seconds at a time.
Beyond Forbidden Forest has been mentioned a few times on IGN Retro, and Halloween is the perfect occasion to spotlight the game again. This horror game for the Commodore 64 and its brethren is a creep classic. You are an archer alone in a haunted forest. The forest occasionally erupts with some monster action, like a giant bug dropping from the canopy or a worm leaping out of the ground. And should one of these beasties manage to touch your archer... well, the results are not pretty. When you manage to kill one of these monsters with your arrows, you earn a golden arrow that is stored for your final encounter with a multi-headed monster underground.
Now, the grim backdrop and monsters set the horror stage just fine, but what really slays in Beyond Forbidden Forest is designer Paul Norman's stunning soundtrack. (Listen to clips of it in this episode of RetroCity.) The music is intense, which really amps the fright factor of the whole game. It's the kind of score that serves to either tighten your reflexes or scare you into making mistakes.
The Rescue of Pops Ghostly is one of the few games ever released for the Action Max, a light gun console that used VHS tapes instead of cartridges. The light gun reads flashes from on-screen circles and then tallies your score on a small box. The Action Max was created by Worlds of Wonder, a defunct toy company that was responsible for Laser Tag and Teddy Ruxpin, two major nostalgia kickers from the eighties. (Check garage sales for one of these -- they are a total gas.)
In Pops Ghostly, you must actually help a family of friendly ghosts banish some nasty specters from their house. These mean ghosts are terrorizing some kids, too, so you your good deed of the day affects both the worlds of the dead and of the living. The ghosts are just puppets that were filmed and then super-imposed over a tracking shot through the mansion, with the exception of this strange trip through a spectral gate that will remind most viewers of dropping into TRON or the stargate toward the end of 2001. The effects are cheap but completely charming.
Finally, round your evening off with Chiller. Now, unlike other games which are recommended for their nostalgia or cleverness, Chiller deserves nothing shy of scorn. This light gun arcade game by Exidy is violent and gory. Since the game came out in 1986, the blood and guts is not necessarily graphic in comparison to what we see now, but the game itself is mean-spirited and disgusting.
Check out the opening scene in Chiller. You are peering into a torture dungeon. Naked people are chained to walls. A woman is trapped in a guillotine. A man has his head in a vice. Your goal is to kill them all. Shoot the blade to behead the woman. Blast skin and bone off the bodies on the walls. Deeper in the torture chamber, you're lowering women into a river of blood that's infested with crocodiles and stripping the flesh off people chained to racks.
The only point of Chiller is to shock, and in 1986, it certainly did. The game was banned outright in the UK and received limited distribution here in America. So if you consider torture flicks like Hostel and Saw to be real examples of horror (remember when those were the zeitgeist?), then Chiller might be right up your bloody alley. Otherwise, view this as the kind of game that helped lower the bar in videogames. Strange how this game went largely unnoticed and it took Night Trap and Mortal Kombat a few years later to finally yard the industry up to Capitol Hill.
Heh. Night Trap. Now there's a game that will scare kids. They'll cower as you tell them tales of spending $300 on a SEGA CD for the privilege of playing this FMV disaster.