"Recreating That [Unaccountable] Feeling:" The Folklore & Folkloresque of Fatal Frame¶

Jennifer Gonsalves
Final Project for ANTH S-1663: The Supernatural in the Modern World
Prof. Lowell Brower
August 4, 2023

Introduction¶

For my final project for ANTH S-1663 The Supernatural in the Modern World, I chose to focus on one of my personal academic passions: digital worlds, or more specifically the cultures/communities and folklore that emerges from digital worlds. As the topic of this class focused on supernatural folklore, I chose to focus on the world created in the Fatal Frame series.

Fatal Frame is a Japanese video game series that is set in a fictional, modern Japan\(^1\). The game has third-person exploration paired with first-person style combat. In each story, the player guides one or more characters through an abandoned environment that is haunted. Something terrible has happened, a curse has fallen on this location, and the protagonist(s) become trapped and need to unravel the mystery of the location. To facilitate their adventure, the player guides the characters through the environment from a third-person perspective. In third-person, the player's view comes from behind the character, giving the player a wide-lens, forward-facing perspective of the environment.

While the player leads the character through the environment, they will be attacked by various kinds of ghosts. In order to defeat ghosts, the characters primarily make use of a camera, known in the game lore as the "Camera Obscura"\(^2\). The player uses the camera to take pictures of the ghosts, stealing spirit energy until the enemy is defeated. When the player makes use of the Camera Obscura, the view shifts to a first-person perspective, and mimics a situation of the player looking through a camera to take pictures. This removes peripheral view, narrowing how much the player can see of the environment, making them more vulnerable while increasing both dread and stress.

The creator and director of this series is Makoto Shibata. In a blog post Shibata wrote for the PlayStation.Blog site, he describes wanting to create a game where players would experience, emotionally and physically, the sensations one has when they encounter a ghost in real life\(^3\). Shibata felt that the console hardware, originally the PlayStation 2, would give him the tools to recreate his own experiences of the supernatural\(^4\). This is one example of many where Shibata talks about his own paranormal encounters, as well as dreams, Japanese folklore, and horror traditions that served as inspiration for the narratives and encounters in the Fatal Frame series.

My Project: The Folklore Catalog¶

While reading these articles, I realized this was a perfect opportunity to catalog folklore that went into the creation of something folkloresque. The folkloresque, as Foster describes the term, "can be thought of as the popular, vernacular, folk conception of folklore"\(^5\). The folkloresque draws from many sources of folklore\(^6\), producing an often commercialized product that "smells like folklore"\(^7\). The Fatal Frame series is consciously drawing on folkloric sources to intentionally create an atmosphere of the supernatural. I did not so much have a thesis with this project as I had curiosity: from the creator's point of view, what do those processes look like? Further, is that process not itself a kind of folklore?

To facilitate this catalog, I first collected as many interviews, blog posts, and articles I could find, via Google, about Shibata and his teams' inspiration and sources for the games, as well as their experiences during game making. I am limited to English language articles as I do not read Japanese. While there is a large treasure trove of interviews in Japanese, there are plenty to be found in English as well. After collecting the material, I read each one carefully, taking note of any folklore items such as legends and memorates, as well as noting instances where inspiration came from dreams.

Using these folkloric items I collected, I began constructing this catalog using a tool called Obsidian. Obsidian makes use of markup and has a number of community built plugins and tools. I made use of one of these tools to generate the markup files into something that I could publish online, and the results of that are what you see here.

Some things to note about each entry:¶

The top line of each page is the "File Name" for the entry. File names are constructed in two parts:
1. The year in which the source document was published.
2. A key phrase taken from the folkloric item collected, making it easier for me to identify what the content contains.
I have given each folklore item a genre, or "Folklore Type". These link to keyword files that contain a simple definition for each type. Obsidian makes use of mapping tools that create visual webs of links between files. This enables the user to visual patterns of connections between key concepts. I created the keyword files to take advantage of that feature while for future research.
The "Contents" section is the quoted folklore item that I am cataloging.
The "Context" section provides information to contextualize the nature of the folklore item.
The "Source Information" section contains the source citation, as well as additional information about the type of source and when it was collected.
The "Links" section contains links to related files. Some articles produced more than one folkloric item, and in that case, I've included those links in this section.

Ouroboros: Folklore to Folkloresque to Folklore¶

The work that went into putting this catalog together was a fascinating journey exploring the intentional folklore that went into making a folkloresque series. There are several examples within the catalog of Shibata sharing memorates and pieces of legends, which are themselves folklore. As with other examples of digital folklore such as Slender Man, more of the development processes are available for others to see and participate in. As academics, we are fortunate to get a look behind the curtain and see the process of legends being born.

Looking more towards the future of my research, I'm also fascinated by the processes of the folkloresque once again becoming folklore. The Fatal Frame series has a very active fan base who have gone on to co-create new folklore based on the narratives found in the games. Just by doing some light web searching, you'll find many examples of:

People cosplaying their favorite characters or ghosts from the games.
People who insert themselves into the digital environments or physically recreate scenes from their favorite game.
Fan art.
Fan fiction.
Fan wiki pages dedicated to unraveling the lore of the games.
Internet memes.

There's really no end to the fan-created content and ostensive behaviors. My favorite example of this comes from the first game in the series which features an abandoned location called "Himuro Mansion"\(^8\). The first game was advertised as having been based on real events and a rumor began on the internet that Himuro Mansion was also based on a real location in Japan. If you do a search for "Himuro Mansion" on Google you will come across a number of examples of people stating this is a real place. Use it as a search term on YouTube, and you will find at least a couple of examples with people exploring the supposed location. While Shibata would incorporate locations inspired on real places in Japan in later games (see 2021-Inspired_by_Aokigahara), Himuro Mansion is not likely an example of this. What this is though is an example of how a rumor (a kind of pseudo-ostension) born out of a folkloresque narrative gives rise to even more folklore and ostensive behaviors.

How We Play, or Co-Creators in these Digital Realms¶

Considering some of the potential processes involved in the folkloresque generating folklore, I consider how my own folk groups engage in video gaming. Many of my close friends and family are avid video gamers, and while gaming can certainly be a solitary endeavor, with us it tends to be something we do with others. Take the Fatal Frame series for example: we've played these games more than once, and each time it's been as a group. We elect a victim, or should I say "player," who leads the characters through the mysterious and dangerous environments of the Fatal Frame universe. The rest of the group, far from passive in the endeavor, become active participants in the gameplay and narrative. We react to jump scares, help look for clues to solve puzzles, or figure out where the character needs to be guided to next. While this is all unfolding, spirited discussion of the narrative and lore unfolds in the group as we piece together the scattered bits of story and ponder the mysteries left in the narrative.

The engagement with this secondary world doesn't stop when we put the game down. We reminisce about playthroughs, debate meanings and missing lore, and tell others about our experiences. Sometimes these experiences are themselves supernatural folklore: the time we heard a voice where we hadn't in previous playthroughs, or the ghost that appeared in a place it hadn't been before. There's something compelling about this world that we want to return to again and again, not just for the visceral experience of being scared, but to return to this digital world and narrative that we find so intriguing. Shibata may have set out to create an experience of the supernatural that was tangible to those who haven't themselves experienced it in the "real" world, but in the process he created a world with real weight and substance.

This is the future of my questions and research. Here in this liminal space between real and imagined worlds, and between the loose definitions that make up what folklore and the folkloresque are. What is so compelling about these kinds of folkloresque narratives, particularly for digital worlds? What is the implication of "it smells like folklore"\(^9\). We know these folkloresque and fictional worlds are "not real," but as fans, we engage with them in ways that make it seem as though they are. Is it a safe place with well established boundaries where we can go to escape, or is there something else happening here? Where does folklore end and folkloresque begin? So while I bring this part of the project to a close in order to meet a class deadline, I am aware that these questions just scratch the surface of what I'm interested in and I have so much more to explore.

Notes¶

Shibata, Makoto dir. Fatal Frame series. Tecmo, 2001-2023.
Shibata, Fatal Frame series.
Makoto Shibata, "Fatal Frame: Behind the Lens of the PS2 Horror Classic," PlayStation.Blog. May 1, 2013. https://blog.playstation.com/2013/05/01/fatal-frame-behind-the-lens-of-the-ps2-horror-classic/.
Shibata, "Fatal Frame: Behind the Lens."
Michael Dylan Foster, "The Folkloresque Circle: Toward a Theory of Fuzzy Allusion," in The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, eds. Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert (Utah State University Press, 2016), 41.
Michael Dylan Foster, "Introduction: The Challenge of the Folkloresque," in The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World, eds. Michael Dylan Foster and Jeffrey A. Tolbert (Utah State University Press, 2016), 4.
Foster, "The Folkloresque Circle," 51.
Lucia, "The Many Legends of Himuro Mansion: Unraveling the Truth of Japan's Infamous Fatal Frame House," The Ghost in My Machine. March 21, 2022. https://theghostinmymachine.com/2022/03/21/the-many-legends-of-himuro-mansion-unraveling-the-truth-of-japans-infamous-fatal-frame-house/.
Foster, "The Folkloresque Circle," 51.