‘Haunting Ground’: An Overlooked Feminist Survival Horror Masterpiece
In the year of our lord 2023, I am grateful to say googling the phrase “feminist video game” actually returns a number of genuine results, and not just the perfunctory “female heroine” who has guns and giant boobs. In my formative years of the 90s and 2000s however, there were slim pickings for girl gamers who were tired of only having female characters that were clearly made with the male gaze in mind or were so saturated in conditioned hyperfemininity it would give you a cavity.
I was grateful for games like Resident Evil 2, but there is a game from 2005 that managed to not only scratch the itch of a resonant female experience but seemed to subvert the tropes of a female game character by giving them to us in the most extreme way. The game is Haunting Ground. It’s a quiet masterpiece of not just feminist storytelling, but survival horror games in general.
However, Haunting Ground fell through the cracks into the kind of obscurity that leaves it so hard to find it’s worth hundreds of dollars on eBay, due mostly to the fact that it was released by Capcom at the same time as franchise staple Resident Evil 4. Plus, critical response calls it derivative of the Clock Tower games from which it openly derives inspiration. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to argue whether one is better than the other—they’re very apples and oranges of each other, and I’m a diehard RE girlie. But if I’m asked which had more depth to it and is more deserving of its place among landmark video games, it’s gonna be Haunting Ground.
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From the onset, Haunting Ground doesn’t seem like it’s going to be breaking too many barriers. The player assumes the role of Fiona, freshly 18, college-bound, and very much a puritanical conservative idea of a pretty girl design (white, doe eyes, short skirt—honestly a lot like Ashley in RE4) as she is riding in the car with her parents. After an accident, Fiona wakes up inside a creepy old castle with little to no memory of what happened and has to navigate her way out.
All the while she has to evade a series of stalker villains: Debilitas, a hulking groundskeeper with the mind of a child, Daniela, a stoic and cold MILF-y maid, and Lorenzo, who keeps inexplicably appearing at different ages. As you move through the game, Fiona learns that her body carries a mysterious alchemical element sought after by the keeper of the castle Ricardo, the ostensible main villain (or IS he??). There’s a lot more alchemical jibber jabber in there, along with something to do with cloning and wombs, but I could spend this whole piece just describing the game and I’m not here to do that.
Oh, but also, you befriend a white German shepherd named Hewie who becomes your sidekick for the rest of the game. It’s a game mechanic sorely missing from more titles since (even though the developers only added the dog because they feared a female protagonist wouldn’t be something players wanted. Sigh).
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So yeah, it’s a conventionally pretty “just legal” dainty white girl terrorized by monsters over, essentially, the autonomy of her body. No wonder this got passed up (by yours truly as well). But spend some time with Haunting Ground, and you realize just exactly what’s going on beneath the surface. I’m reminded of how Paul Verhoeven used Starship Troopers as an indictment of fascism inside of a Hollywood blockbuster, not by delivering some moral message, but by presenting a perfect fascist world. Haunting Ground does something similar by crafting a perfect, near-exaggerated male gaze in order to run it through a meat grinder. The results are something truly unsettling, particularly for this survivor of sexual trauma. But really, it’s going to ring true for any feminine-presenting person having to exist in a world of men.
The villains all view Fiona in different aspects of violent objectification, pulling from various aspects of the misogynist lens of a patriarchal culture. Debilitas, a literal man-child, views her as a doll, a plaything for his pleasure and destructive abuse (though, ironically, he is the only character who can grow and learn, moving from villain to neutral observer).
Daniela (revealed to be a non-human entity) views herself as an incomplete woman for not being able to conceive, wishing to take Fiona’s uterus for herself. Whether or not this can be read as a transphobic trope, or simply a statement on the historical medical experimentation on women including forced sterilization, is truly the ripest meat of discourse. Regardless, she represents how other women will sacrifice their own gender in order to maintain the dominance of the men to whom they attach themselves; if you’ll pardon the term, a ‘pick me’ girl.
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Riccardo, who is revealed to be a clone of her father, wishes to use Fiona for his own rebirth, adding an all too familiar threat of rape, and familial assault. And Lorenzo wishes to use Fiona’s body, and the alchemical element inside her, to gain immortality—a reflection of older men preying on young girls.
Haunting Ground is drenched in the sexualization of a feminine body, that lustful and penetrating eye that inescapably begins to follow you right as you first start puberty. The game simultaneously places you as the objectifier and the objectified. Fiona—and the player—is made into a sex object, a vessel, and a victim all in one. All the while, control is constantly given and taken away—when you’re playing, you are never fully able to feel like you can be safe. This intersection of subjectivity, violence, and desire is what elevates the game beyond any other horror game of the time; as Leigh Alexander put it back then, “it’s precisely that off-putting sexuality […] that sharpens Haunting Ground’s fear factor to a knife in the gut.”
Haunting Ground twists this knife by often shifting to a voyeuristic perspective, the fixed camera all too frequently taking on the eye level of someone possibly creeping around a corner or staring at Fiona through the trees. More directly, there are instances when the player is placed completely in one of the villains’ POVs, forcing you to observe the situation of her torment as her tormentor; essentially, the viewpoint of a rapist. One cut scene particularly stands out, as Fiona is backing away from you on the ground as you leer above her maliciously. It’s horrifying no matter what kind of gamer you are.
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When I consume a piece of media, I can’t help but view it through the lens of my own experiences; childhood sexual abuse by a family member, assaults by men (even those I considered friends) as I grew up, even the violation of my body by (cis) women when I came out as gay. Horror games can tap into this fear for me, and can even allow a catharsis through extreme means (like a rocket launcher in Resident Evil 2). Haunting Ground, however, allows no catharsis, no real happy ending, no respite. The gaze is omnipresent on Fiona, and even as the castle crumbles, the way forward is ambiguous. Thank god for Hewie.
Despite not receiving the status of other horror game staples, Haunting Ground is a landmark example of how a video game can transcend into the realm of art, weaving a pointed social critique inside of a polygonal landscape of horror tropes, and somehow understanding the feminine experience enough to realize it in gameplay. I am reminded of Amy Holden Jones’s inversion of the slasher flick in Slumber Party Massacre, or even Diablo Cody’s iconic line in Jennifer’s Body: “Hell is a teenage girl.”
Categorized:Editorials
