Have been reading a lot of reviews of Dead Space 3 lately, and although I am not terribly concerned about it – mostly because it is not on Steam, and these days if it’s not on Steam I’m not gonna bother buying a game, frankly – but there are a whole lot of people who are apparently really pissed that the franchise is no longer really a horror story but is morphing into an action series. It’s understandable to be peeved, because if you like something when it is one thing, you might want more of that one thing than of another thing. But in the case of Dead Space‘s narrative progression, there is no choice: so long as you want the story to continue, then the horror aspect of it has to eventually end.
Consider: the first installment of most horror franchises is all about fear of the unknown (which, whether said unknowingness is derived from shock or suspense, is the most effective type of fear in a dramatic sense). In Alien, for example, the fear is generated by the characters genuinely having no idea of what they have found re: the crashed spaceship and the aliens therein, and then having no idea of the capabilities of the alien itself. In Dead Space, the characters are ignorant of everything at the start of the game and have to gradually learn what the monsters are, why they kill people and consume corpses, what happened on the ship, et cetera, and what is “known” to the player is only known because of genre osmosis (spaceships have artificial gravity, asteroids can fuck up your spaceship, and so on). In fact Dead Space neatly inverts several tropes to play against the player’s “knowledge” early on – for example, shooting the space zombie monsters in the head actually does nothing (you have to shoot off their limbs instead), which makes a player’s first encounter with the uglies more tense when the space zombies aren’t behaving as space zombies ought to behave according to the rules they already know. But those rules are arbitrary, and Dead Space gets that, which is why it works as a horror narrative. Often the scariest moments in the game are those times when one of your allies’ radios clicks on and shocks the hell out of you because you are primed to think “monster jumping out” whenever you hear something you weren’t expecting.
But when we progress to the second installment of a horror franchise? If your protagonist from the first installment has survived (and due to the inherent nature of sequelitis, they probably have done) you can’t rely on lack of knowledge to provide horror, not entirely, because now both your audience and your protagonist know stuff about the monsters. The answer to continue to create horror, then, is generally a combination of two things: firstly, add some more stuff the protagonist/audience didn’t get a chance to learn the first time out and use that to create fear of the remaining unknown, and secondly take what is already known and recontextualize it in a manner that presents new challenges and threats – fear of the known. In Aliens, we find out that the Aliens are basically an insect race and that they aren’t simply mindless killing machines because they can organize ambushes and evade traps (fear of the unknown) and we also get to find out what happens when there is a lot more than one Alien to deal with, even if you have lots of guns (fear of the known). In Dead Space 2 we find out what the space zombies can escalate into (it is bad) and that there are more varieties, including some which are just not conventionally kill-able like all the rest (fear of the unknown) and we also get to fight the space zombies in new locales, and also there is that bit where you have to stick the needle into your own eye (fear of the known). And this blend usually-but-not-always works.
However, by the time you get to the third installment of your horror franchise, you are pretty much out of “unknown” unless you just start making shit up that might technically work within the narrative from a logistical standpoint but which isn’t exactly aligned with everything you’ve done so far. (Some people accuse Lost of having done this, and although it is not a horror show per se, they had kind of a point.) Given that the fans of your story will generally resent the out-of-left-field “unknown,” all that leaves you with is fear of the known – and at this point your protagonist has suffered so much in the first two installments that they’re not going to be credibly scared of any of it any more. (Not a horror example, but consider how John McClane changes in the Die Hard movies – in the first couple, he frequently desperately prays that some plan of his will work and that he won’t die, and then as the third and fourth progress he is increasingly blase about the insane things he is doing, because his fear has died.) Fear of the known can usually be planned for and dealt with, and when one has to improvise, one knows what will and won’t work within reasonable limits. (The obvious exception here is Cthulhu-style horror where knowledge of the enemy is either actively dangerous to have or completely meaningless because the enemy is too powerful for it to matter, but as a general rule, protagonists in that milieu don’t last past one story for reasons which are fairly obvious.)
In other words, the difference between a horror movie and an action movie is, mostly, the protagonist’s degree of knowledge. Which means as any horror narrative continues and develops, it by necessity has to gradually drift towards being an action movie (or something else, but action is the easiest progression because the two genres are so similar and both strive to hit the same adrenalin-producing nerve in the viewer), simply because the protagonist will learn more and more – you can see this even in many regular horror movies within the three-act structure where the hero, in the third act, finally confronts the baddie. That progression is practically a staple of slasher flicks, and so slasher flick franchises generally invert the formula and remain horror films by having new protagonists in each installment while keeping the same baddie around. Of course, then you run into the problem with that formula, which is that each iteration will feel more and more repetitive until you decide to put Jason in space because what the hell else is left to do?