Wendigo, vampires and Lovecraft: Intertextual monstrosity and cultural otherness in video games

Abstract

Civilization has, since its inception, employed mythical or deified entities in place of the unknown. Folklore and mythology are the culmination of such beliefs, providing lessons or logic behind behavioural patterns within the society of the time, with the Epic of Gilgamesh (Anon. c.2100 BC) producing a narrative precedence that ‘[n]ature is the opposing pole of the human’. However, the roles of such tales, and hence their monsters, have adapted as humans came to understand more of the world around them. Tchaprazov suggests that Stoker’s Dracula (Stoker 1897) emphasizes ‘that the Slovaks stand both culturally and geographically opposite to the West’, producing social narratives relating to a cultural ‘Other’. Within this article I explore how monsters, based on regional folklore, within video game adaptations such as The Witcher: Enhanced Edition (CD Projekt Red 2008) and Metro 2033 Redux (4A Games 2014) are depicted as a nature-based ‘other’, especially as opposed to the player-character. Furthermore, I look at the cultural implications of contrasting modern depictions, such as the wendigo within Until Dawn (Supermassive Games 2015) and other transmorphic entities. Finally, I suggest that the intersection of culture and folklore within the ‘brickmaker’s village’ in The Witcher: Enhanced Edition is a hybridized adaptation which simultaneously adapts Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth (Lovecraft 1931) and the Slavic folklore of the vodyanoy, whilst also challenging what Švelch calls a ‘conceptualization of monstrosity’.