The Cutprice Guignol

If you’ve been anywhere near the horror genre in video games in the last ten years, you’ll know one thing for sure: mascot horror rules all.

Well, there are a few movies in the mascot horror vein too, but, for the most part, this sub-genre has flourished best in the video game world. Though it doesn’t have a formal definition, I would describe it as a horror story that uses some kind of anthropomorphized mascot or product as a central part of the story in some way, usually as an antagonist but sometimes fulfilling other roles such as helper characters too.

Though there are a few examples of these stories scattered through games prior to the 2010s, they exploded in popularity with the release of Five Nights at Freddy’s in 2014 (I hopped in around 2015, living in my first apartment all alone and convincing myself I was hearing that Toreador theme every time I pulled the shower curtain shut), and have pretty much remained a staple in the ten years since. They famously vary wildly in quality, with some more recent games like Garten of Banban labelled the nadir of the genre, but, regardless, they continue to maintain exceptional popularity in the world of horror gaming. Often characterized by episodic releases and a sometimes-absurd amount of lore, mascot horror is still going strong, with ongoing franchises such as Poppy Playtime and Bendy and the Ink Machine pulling in impressive fandoms and profits.

And I’m always really interested to take a look into why certain horror sub-genres surge in popularity at certain times – and, as someone who’s been playing horror games for the better part of twenty years now, I can’t think of a time when I saw such a domination by a specific type of video game in the horror genre before. So, let’s talk about why the mascot horror genre has been so successful – and what real-life horrors might be hiding out in these stories, too.

There are a few factors that influence the success of the genre, and I think the most obvious one is that these games are often relatively child-friendly due to the mascot characters at their heart, and the lack of human antagonists lowers the amount of gore or violence you’re likely to encounter as a result. It’s a pretty unique aspect to this genre, with most major horror video game releases (like The Last of Us) landing squarely in the adults-only M-rating, and that uniqueness has created a profitable and almost endlessly-exploitable audience of kids looking for a safe but popular way to get into the horror genre, a place to test limits and explore video game horror.

Though the ratings of some of these games has been hotly debated (Poppy Playtime is reccommended for players eight and up, and I can firmly say that I would have shit myself inside out in terror playing that game as a nine-year-old, though your mileage may vary), the cut-off generally falls around the young teen age group. Even those aimed at slightly older players, such as the Bendy series, have developed a fandom within a younger audience, due to the cutesy, kid-friendly design of many of the characters (or so the creator opines).

Throw into this the genre’s interesting symbiotic relationship with YouTubers, and it all starts to fall into place. Five Nights at Freddy’s was one of the first games to really become a phenomenon thanks to Let’s Play creators (such as Markiplier) on YouTube featuring it prominently in their content. As many of the genre’s big hitters came from indie studios, the relationship between these social media Let’s Play-ers and their fandoms and the game’s creators were often closer than they might have been for a triple-A title in a similar vein. These more intimate interactions created a really strong connection between fanbase and studio, with some of the more prominent video game YouTubers earning cameos in the games they covered or even in the movies adapted from them. That community feel, I’m certain, was a big part of why the games remained attractive beyond just an initial playthrough.

Well, that and the lore, of course. As a great woman once said, I am a whore for lore, and when I was first getting into mascot horror, the allure of the dense backstories that inhabited a lot of these universes was what kept me sticking around for more and re-playing games in the hopes of discovering new secrets or details I might have missed before. It’s become a staple of the genre now, with breathless speculations on what that one poster you saw back at the start of chapter one might mean about this VHS tape you have to play in chapter nine, and there is something supremely satisfying about uncovering a story piece by piece in the way these episodic games often allow you to. It’s also another mark in the box of the community around these games, with subreddits and discussion forums popping up to dissect every detail and string together a theory about what the hell was in that bloody box, anyway.

From the perspective of creators, there are obviously some more cynical angles to consider, such as the marketing opportunities offered by something like mascot horror. It’s right there in the name – you’ve got a mascot featured heavily as part of the game, and, for a lot of these releases, it’s a mascot that is in-universe aimed at kids. Handily, that means out-of-universe here in the real world, it can be aimed at kids too. The first time I became aware of Poppy Playtime was when I saw a Huggy-Wuggy doll grinning at me out of the front of a comic book store, and it’s far from the only franchise to capitalize on merch like this. Five Nights at Freddy’s topped out Funko’s most profitable property of the year in 2017, and Garten of Banban famously feature their merch store on the title screen. Cynical? Yes, probably. Do I still want that Catnap plush from Poppy Playtime Chapter 3? Yes, I do. Look, it works, alright? It’s probably one of those obvious merchandising opportunities any company is ever going to be handed, and I don’t totally blame them for taking advantage of it (though the Poppy Playtime NFTs are another thing entirely).

And on the subject of cynical capitalism, I’d like to talk a little about why I think the content of these games has been so popular since they first rose to prominence in 2014. There’s the obvious answer, of course – that anything that blends symbols of childhood with horror is generally really unsettling, and that’s absolutely a huge part of why the games work so well (I think this video touches really succinctly on why they are so effective in that regard).

But one of the common factors in these games, buried in that dense and sometimes impenetrably complicated lore, is the failure of companies to do the right thing, and the often catastrophic harm that comes as a result. More than ever in the last ten years, we’ve been privy to the harm that huge corporations have done, to everything from their employees and to the environment, and I think that’s reflected to an extent in these mascot horror games. So many of them feature in a huge way the unscrupulous actions of a business owner in pursuit of greater profit or notoriety as an instigator for the horror the player experiences; I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

As we as consumers become more uneasily aware of the ruthlessness and harm that’s caused by people who pursue huge amounts of wealth via business, it makes sense that we’d see that reflected in horror in some way, and mascot horror is the perfect place to do that. With the antagonist mascots usually being born as a result of unscrupulous experimentation to further profits margins or raise the notoriety of the company in question, they’re literal products of this cynical corporate greed in the most hideous and twisted form imaginable.

But that’s just a theory. A – no, I shan’t say it. But I am interested to hear about your experiences with mascot horror – do you enjoy the genre, or is it something you’ve grown tired of? Do you think it’s reaching the end of its heyday or is their still some steam left in it yet? What do you think the popularity of the genre represents (if anything other than just trend-hopping, opportunistic creators)? Let me know in the comments!

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(header image via Thirsty Mag)