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Online casinos are not known as places of fright and suspense. Yet its games are increasingly leaning towards the horror genre, and the two have more in common than you may think.
The hair pricks the back of your neck. Your muscles go tight, you pivot to the edge of your seat. Yet you suddenly find that you are not watching a horror movie, nor are you playing a game of slots.
In fact, you are doing both. Horror themes are now a staple of modern online casinos, with both genres lending from each other. So why has the world of ghouls and ghosts infiltrated online casinos?
Modern Horror Gaming in Casinos
Online casino games, particularly slots, rely heavily on genres and their tropes. This provides variation to titles. A fairly innocuous slot game with bars and fruit symbols can be overhauled if it is reskinned and delivered with vampiric themes.
Yet it also goes much deeper than this, with modern horror titles in the genre providing interesting mechanics and bonus rounds linked to their concepts.
A perfect example can be found at Jackpot City. Here, the vampire-themed games alone are plentiful, with titles like Blood Oath II and Vampire Beast being available. Yet games like Vampire Riches Doublemax use new ideas like cascading reels, which can string together huge chains of wins, increasing the volatility of horror games.
The Balance of Tension and Release
Aside from the graphics and imagery, there is a very real similarity in how both genres work: tension and release. This is a trope used everywhere in entertainment, including music. Yet it is even more pivotal to the success of gambling games and horror movies.
When you watch a scary movie, you are always on edge, waiting for the next gruesome event or fright. The same happens in slots, though with this, people are waiting and anticipating the next payout on a reel. Both provide a type of endorphin rush, as the body builds towards an on-screen climax.
Both directors and game developers use this in different ways. Consider the classic sci-fi horror Alien, released in 1979.
The monsters are only on screen for a total of four minutes, which is 3% of the movie’s total run time. This leads to big build-up sections, with explosive on-screen action.
Yet in more modern movies, these ideas have changed, and horror characters and antagonists may spend more time on screen, with less impact.
This can be compared to volatility in slot games. Titles that have low volatility pay out regularly, but in smaller amounts. Those with high volatility are like Alien, paying out infrequently but with huge, explosive wins when they do.
The Similar Graphical Themes
Even without this, horror imagery and concepts connect to slots in a way other themes may not. Take the Big Bass franchise, for example, which is a fishing-themed game. It is immensely popular, but the elements endemic in horror connect with casino gaming in a way fishing never could.
The first is its atmospheric immersion. Dim lights, black, purple, and red color palettes, and symbolism like blood and skulls quickly create a very identifiable world.
This is something not easy to replicate with other ideas. Fishing may have the ocean, but the world of angling does not have the popular culture resonance.
Then there is its music, which plays just as much of a part in the world-building experience. Horror music and its harmonies are built into physics, with musical intervals like the flattened fifth and dissonance being utilised throughout history.
Composers like Camille Saint-Saëns embodied this in compositions like the Danse Macabre, and it was later built upon in the soundtracks of movies like Psycho.
All of these have proven invaluable as slot games have moved toward more narrative storytelling concepts. They are no longer just isolated, casual games of bars, sevens, and fruit symbols.
These games have stories to tell, with characters like Riche Wilde and ideas taken from mythology. This means that horror lends to them extremely well.
Horror Licenses in Casino Games
It comes as no surprise that many actual horror movies have slot games of their own. Eighties slasher ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street‘ is one of the most popular, which also delves into the nostalgic era of eighties video nasties.
What this game does really well is capture the nightmare-like dream state of the movie, with a bonus round that incorporates a survival challenge in the “Never Sleep Again” vein.
John Carpenter’s famous ‘Halloween’ movie with Michael Myers is another iconic venture that has its own outing.
Thus, slot games and horror really go hand in hand. They provide a gothic tilt on the genre, and both horror in cinema and gaming have a lot in common.
There is no doubt these games will continue to flourish as the industry grows, and we may soon see slot games featuring the newest horror characters.
