Christodoulou, C. 2026. The Residential Uncanny: Space, Place, and Post-Industrialisation in Resident Evil & Silent Hill. Horror and Gaming 2026. Falmouth University, Penryn Campus 07 - 09 Jul 2026
| Title | The Residential Uncanny: Space, Place, and Post-Industrialisation in Resident Evil & Silent Hill |
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| Authors | Christodoulou, C. |
| Type | Conference paper |
| Abstract | The Resident Evil and Silent Hill franchises recurringly feature familiar yet threatening spaces and places that function as sites from which to interrogate the boundaries of the home and unhomely; ordinary worlds and abject Otherworlds, and real and imagined memories. As founding examples of the survival horror genre, the development and popularisation of these series is historically concurrent with the the real-world effects of post-industrialisation on urban environments and architecture, integrated as fetishised spaces in these games’ dreamlike and post-apocalyptic settings. Interleaving Freud’s notion of the uncanny and Kristeva’s signifying space of the semiotic chora, I discuss how the fetishisation of post-industrial urban decay frames the womblike environments of video games, simultaneously evoking fear and fascination. These feelings articulate the ambivalent repulsion and attraction of urban uncanniness, compounded by the socio-economic anxieties of urbanised young people in post-industrial societies who form a large proportion of Resident Evil and Silent Hill players. Thereby, this paper extends the existing application of psychoanalysis to the narrative themes and trajectories of survival horror games by focusing on the double fetishisation of uncanny motherhood as the birthplace and dissolution of subjectivity, and the fascination with the post-industrial city as ‘unhomely home’. In this context, it will overlay the genre’s articulation of patriarchal anxieties surrounding the maternal body in its processes and spectacle of reproduction and childbirth onto the aesthetic and ludic significance of abandoned buildings and dilapidated settings in the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series. |
| Keywords | city; post-industrial; survival horror; uncanny; urban |
| Year | 07 Jul 2026 |
| Conference | Horror and Gaming 2026 |