Mascot Horror, Sanitization, and the Innocence of Childhood
How the false conception of innocence negatively impacts horror
Children and Horror
I mentioned it in my piece about Slasher Horror, but humans are drawn to horror, whether it’s something they think is horror, or something everyone else thinks is horror. It’s almost magnetic, the pull we have to confronting what scares us through the safe lens of fiction. And there’s a group that that pull is stronger in than most, and yet that group is one more shielded from horror if the outgroup can manage it
Children. Notably, I’m referring to children aged between about five and fourteen.
Children are morbid. That’s just a fact. They have the ability to develop uniquely fixated obsessions over disturbing topics. And that’s partly in how young children learn, in that they primarily learn through fixation and repetition. So, when they first start being able to conceptualize of more “disturbing” topics, they tend to fixate, and repeat.
I say conceptualize because such fixations tend to begin rather young, around the age that children know what death is, but don’t fully understand its permanence. Of course, the fixation and repetition to learn about darker topics isn’t the only reason children find themselves drawn to darker topics. There’s another reason, one that’s rather universal. Safety in fictional fear. Because of the fictitious nature of horror, it provides a medium to safely confront your fears, and to examine them, and attempt to overcome them.
Naturally such a reason is more universal, but from what I’ve seen, it’s a stronger pull to horror for children than adults or older teenagers. And I think it’s because children both know less than those groups and have experienced less than those groups. Adults and older teenagers have the information to understand their fears, either past or present, as well as having had experience with trying to overcome them, if only by the sheer nature of being older than younger children.
The nature of that draw even causes media to be made around fears, amplifying the nature of the fear to horror. Scary Stories to Tell in The Dark is one such example. Goosebumps, another. We can even see the draw toward the unnerving and disturbing in school yard chants. London Bridge is Falling Down, Ring Around the Rosie, Great Green Gobs of Greasy, Grimy Gopher Guts, London’s Burning, Lizzie Borden, the list goes on.
Which brings us to the year 2014.
The Birth of a Genre
It’s the 8th of August, and your name? Scott Cawthon. Motivated by a negative review on Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. you coded a new game, one themed around animatronics, like you might find at a Chuck E Cheese. As you press the button to upload it to Desura, you have no idea what’s to come.
For the time, Five Nights at Freddy’s was… well, to put it plainly, it was unconventional. At the time, horror games were, to put it bluntly, running simulators that were laden with jumpscares around every corner, Sure, FNaF had jumpscares, but it was distinctly different than others of the time. Forcing the player to stay in one place? Making their defenses something that runs out? Something that you should use sparingly? It was a breath of fresh air.
It didn’t hurt that it was wildly successful, in part because of the let’s-play Youtubers who had decided to play it, rocketing it to virality. The sequel released the same year, on the 10th of November. FNaF 3 came not even half a year later, on the 3rd of January 2015, and the last of the initial four games releasing April 27th, 2015. Of course, those next three games were similarly successful. And, with wild success, comes people attempting to recreate said success, to recapture the lightning in a bottle.
And so, Mascot Horror was born.
Now, that might sound like it’s just horror that has a mascot, but it isn’t. It’s specifically horror that, for the most part, has a mascot feature, either as an aid, or as a main force of horror. Specifically, children’s mascots.
Five Nights at Freddy’s has Freddy Fazbear, face of Fazbear Entertainment. A game released in 2015 by the name of 123 Slaughter Me Street finds its mascots in puppets, based off of Sesame Street, their maker named Tim Denson. Tattletail, released the next year, finds its mascot in Baby Talking Tattletail, and a recalled toy called Mama Tattletail. The next year, Bendy and the Ink Machine, its mascot the Little Devil Darlin’, Bendy himself, an animated character and mascot for Joey Drew Studios. The same year as Bendy, Duck Season, the mascot a duck-hunting dog. The next year, Baldi’s Basics in Education and Learning, its mascot, the titular Baldi.
You might have noticed a pattern, with these examples. The animatronic of a pizzeria. The puppets from a children’s show. A child’s toy that talks and plays with its owner. A cutesy animated character. A duck hunt based dog. The main figure of a child’s edutainment game. And there’s a reason for that pattern. One I’ll expound upon later, after the downfall.
An Icarian Fall
Because much like Slasher’s had a golden age, and a plethora of awful movies to contrast the good, the same can be said of Mascot horror.
An example that would be contemporary to the others is Hello Neighbor. Now, Hello Neighbor is a bit of an oddity, when it comes to Mascot Horror. While it does have a cartoon-y, more child-friendly mascot, it doesn’t fit into the pattern of the prior games, nor the main body of Mascot Horror. The game itself is… troubled. When it first released in 2015 as an Alpha build it went viral. Not for lack of a good reason, the Alpha was a genuinely good game. It had a unique code system for the antagonist, the Neighbor. He would learn where you hid, trap the places you lingered in. It was a refreshing concept, when faced with similar break-in style horror games.
Then the Beta came. It was… rough, to put it lightly. The art style grew more cartoonish, the house - originally decently sized, making exploration while avoiding the Neighbor a fun challenge – grew in size, the puzzles became more convoluted, and the Neighbor’s AI went neglected.
Taking a look at more current games, we have Egghead Gumpty, where you explore an abandoned, procedurally generated juvie, trying to survive attacks by a broken egg-person. Or, perhaps, Garten of Banban, a series of games released by the people behind Egghead Gumpty, where you explore a kindergarten, trying to survive its mascots. Or Muzy, where you explore an abandoned industrial complex, running from a monstrous version of a children’s toy.
Sensing a pattern yet?
Looking at these… less than stellar entries to the genre, on the surface, we can see two main things. Walking/running simulators, and monstrous versions of child-related things. Looking closer, after playing some of the games, those that aren’t inherently flawed on a mechanical level have a… fixation of sorts. Trying to have complex lore and using that to be popular.
You see the pattern with games like FNaF, and Tattletail, and Duck Season is rather simple. Nostalgia. The Mascot Horror games that are used as examples of how it could be done right are influenced by, or direct reimagining’s of what the developers are old enough to be nostalgic about. Duck Season is a reimagining of Duck Hunt, the killer a mascot suit of the dog summoned from the game. Tattletail, a twist on the Furby. 123 Slaughter Me Street a darker idea of the Sesame Street puppets. Freddy Fazbear, meet Chuck E. Cheese. Joey Drew, Walt Disney. Baldi’s Basics? Any ‘90s edutainment game.
The other key aspect that is missing from the attempts to recapture FNaF’s original success is the ambience. A lot of the horror of FNaF is found in the environment, in having to let the danger come to you, and being unable to stop it, only outlast it. So when people tried to recreate it, the only thing that drew their attention were the mascots. And so we returned to the walking/running simulator
The horror of those games, besides the ambience, isn’t in “Ooh, spooky design!” It’s in the familiar aspects of childhood being twisted to horror, and not for the sake of popularity, but for the sake of wanting to see what you can do, how you can twist it.
And that’s where Mascot Horror so often fails. So often, it merely uses mascots and childhood as an aesthetic, as a veneer to hide its supposedly dense lore behind, hoping and praying to be noticed by a theorizing youtuber to become successful.
But none of that answers the question of how Mascot Horror unintentionally sanitizes itself and Horror as a concept, nor the relationship the genre has to the innocence of childhood within the modern day. So let’s talk about that, shall we?
Fear, Marketability and the Impulse to Protect
Childhood, by and large, is viewed by most as a sacrosanct period of innocence. One that should be preserved when and where possible. Of course, we’ve established already that this isn’t quite the truth. Children are morbid, and rather love to interact with, and consume morbid material. But the truth of the matter is rarely what truly matters to most. Instead, what matters to many is, instead, the lie they tell themselves. But parents still find themselves wishing to fulfill what wishes a child professes to them.
So they search for something cartoonish, something child friendly, something that is horror, yet doesn’t offend the sensibilities and artifices they’ve built up in their head about childhood. And they find horror centered on mascots, on characters and concepts that are, in their minds, inextricably linked with childhood.
So they give their children access to Mascot Horror. And another domino falls in this chain of events. And this is where we find ourselves looping back around to the age range I specified at the beginning of this piece. 5 to 14 year olds. Let’s narrow in on the younger end of that age range, shall we? Let’s focus closer on the 5 to 8, maybe 9 year olds.
Very young children are a ripe demographic to market towards. Primarily due to the fact that they can’t really tell when they’re being marketed to. Psychologically speaking, their brains aren’t developed to the point of distinguishing between what they’re watching, and he advertisements between each piece of media that they consume. So, naturally, laws are made to regulate advertisers to ensure that they can’t have a negative impact on their psychological development. But those laws and regulations were intended for movies and television, not the modern state of videogames.
So we have Mascot Horror games that children are playing on their tablets and phones, downloaded from the Appstore, for free. Except, the developers want to make money on their creations. So they implement adverts, either popup or in game. But advertiser companies are… fickle about the sorts of content they let their ads be hosted on, leading to the developers making Mascot Horror that fits within the bounds of their whims.
They sanitize their content, forcing horror to be tame, removing the elements of horror that elevate a piece from simply scary or a jump scare running simulator into media that has a genuine impact on the person consuming it.
And in that sanitization, in that effort to make content more “family-friendly”, we find something else. A possible spillover, a chance that that sanitization will begin to be applied to all horror. The chance of terminology and phenomena from a site, or genre, has spilled over into the real world. The Museum of Pop Culture, in all seriousness, used the word “unalived” in a placard about Kurt Cobain. The use of “unalived" began as an effort to circumvent algorithms that would detriment creators that use words such as “killed” or “died”. Is it such a stretch to say that one subgenre’s phenomena might spill into the rest of the genre, when a similar effect spilled into the real world?
A Conclusion
At the end of the day, Mascot Horror isn’t the true issue when it comes to Horror games, and the sanitization of those games. The problem is morally bankrupt developers and advertisers who find themselves acting under false pretenses surrounding childhood. The solution? Treat children like actual humans, and allow them to explore scarier, horror based content that hasn’t had all of the horror blended out of it like the taste being boiled out of an unseasoned, boiled chicken.