David Lynch's works were a big influence on me despite the fact that I didn't watch any of his work until my sophomore year of college. His television show, Twin Peaks, co-created with Mark Frost, premiered in 1990, and ran for two seasons before its cancellation, getting a prequel of sorts in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me in 1992 (not long after the end of the show) and a much-later followup in 2017 with Twin Peaks: The Return, effectively a third season that leaned much harder into the surreal side of the show, likely because of the increased clout Lynch had to wield.
While surreal horror is a much broader genre than just the works of David Lynch, I think he's a good person to look at when considering the aesthetics and nature of the surreal horror, even though I suspect that he might take issue with my using such a term to describe his works.
At the heart of surrealism is incongruous reality. Things appear in ways they are not supposed to, or rather in ways that they don't in our waking experience. While not all surrealism makes this a direct line, the surreal typically takes on the logic of a dream. The things we see are not literal, but metaphors for something else, and the way they behave has its own logic that, at least while experiencing it, appears consistent even if it ultimately isn't.
The connection between dreams and storytelling is a rather obvious one. Just like dreams, stories operate on their own logic, sometimes eschewing realism in the name of serving the deeper thematic purpose.
However, I would draw a bold line here between storytelling and dream-logic, in that a story is constructed with intention, and the meaning of its metaphors is something that can be discerned through study and analysis. There is certainly a case to be made that A: not all metaphors or thematic connections are intentional, and thus can be discovered by critics (meaning those engaged in artistic critique, rather than those judging a work good or bad) even if the author was unaware of the connection and B: the imagery and themes of dreams could also be based on internal, perhaps subconscious metaphor, and thus could also yield more concrete meaning with sufficient analysis.
Surrealism as a storytelling style, then, plays with this, and can take different forms depending on how deeply the author wishes to delve into that dream-like nature. Because art is created for others to experience, there are two layers on which art can operate: there is art for the audience's perspective, in which all that we can consider is that which exists in the text, sussing out meaning and subtext using only the work itself, and, in the second layer, the deeper meaning for the creator.
In the first case, the symbolism of surrealism is almost a sort of puzzle that the audience can work out - and is often the realm of dream-sequences in otherwise straightforward narratives. The second case, though, can create a serious sense of disorientation.
What I think makes Lynch such a fascinating artist is that he seems to conjure up imagery and metaphors that even he does not know the meaning of. Yet his imagination allows him to create this imagery in a way that is fascinating and compelling to watch.
The difficulty in adapting this style of storytelling to any interactive medium - from video games to tabletop games to other forms - is that a game (or other interactive medium) requires some kind of consistent rule set for players to feel like they are doing something meaningful.
This series is about the Ravenloft setting, and building adventures into different subgenres of horror.
Well, one thing we haven't touched on yet is just what makes surreal horror distinct from surrealism.
And the answer, unfortunately, isn't readily apparent. In simple terms, it is about nightmares rather than dreams.
A nightmare is a dream that fills us with fear, or less commonly, other unpleasant emotions. But this is not a total dichotomy, as dreams can often be just sort of weird and confusing, rather than being the pleasant counterpart to the nightmare.
However, I think one of the major elements of surreal horror is the breakdown of the barrier between a predictable, mundane reality, and the illogic of dreams, to the extent that one might be put in danger by this breakdown.
I hesitate to cite it given that I'm less than 100 pages in, but Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves seems (to the extent that I've read) to be another example of surreal horror - there is a nested narrative of analysis that goes into the details of a non-existent (within the narrative) documentary about a house that has spaces inside that seem to grow and expand despite the house seeming to be the same size on the outside.
In one of the cited scenes in said documentary, the family living inside discovers a passageway between two of the bedrooms that hadn't been there before they left on a vacation, and then they discover that the passage is 3/8 of an inch longer than it should be compared to the house's exterior. But the family learns to live with it and the matriarch builds a bookshelf using the walls of the passage as bookends. When one of the books falls off what had been a perfectly packed bookshelf, she screams, and I, for one, experienced a chill down my spine, reading it.
Surreal horror uses dream logic to turn things that ought to be mundane and unremarkable things into monsters as frightening as ghosts and vampires. The great monster of Twin Peaks, at least in its original run, was an entity named BOB, who appeared like a normal, middle-aged guy in a denim jacket with long, stringy grey hair.
Lynch, always ready to seize on an instinct, created the character after one of the set-dressers accidentally got trapped behind a bed on one of the sets, and so Lynch simply cast him as this otherworldy creature who ultimately turned out to be the possessing spirit behind a cycle of horrific murder and abuse (spoilers, I guess, though I feel like spoilers don't really apply to Lynch stuff.)
I find that Cosmic Horror often works well with Surreal Horror. The distinction between Lovecraft's creepy crawly alien entities and traditional demons and evil spirits is more about the framework within which we see them. Demons, for instance, in the Christian view, are understood as beings who rebelled against God, a perfect, eternal, and invincible nexus of all that is good and right. This makes demons very frightening, as beings who chose to rebel against that, but also creates a framework by which they can be opposed, with the strong implication that victory against them is guaranteed as long as you keep up the fight.
Lovecraft's monsters, though, exist within an uncaring and godless universe - or worse still, his most vast creatures are the true gods of the cosmos. But beyond that, while the Christian view of God still holds that He is something that cannot ever fully be understood by anyone but Himself, He's benevolent enough to give us a set of rules and guidelines to ensure that we can act in a harmonious way with Him. In Jewish tradition, he is less anthropomorphic than in Christianity, yet is also all the more logical and reasonable - a sufficiently wise and thoughtful person can argue with God and come to a better understanding.
Meanwhile, Lovecraft's conception of these god-like beings is that there is no simplified language that allows humans to commune with or converse with these entities - communication will inevitably shatter human minds, which are insufficient to address the complexity of these entities.
But Cosmic Horror renders this, often, with a kind of regressive aesthetic. Reason is abandoned and instead we have a return to pre-rational understandings - cults and magic and demons.
Lynchian Horror, though, suggests that we must go on a journey to discover a new language for understanding the forces at work.
Ok, but this is a gaming blog, and I've rambled on for a long time about this genre. What about practicalities?
The notion of a darklord is pretty core to the Ravenloft setting, but an antagonist is also somewhat less important to the subgenre. Instead, I think the key thing to emphasize is how unreal the Domains of Dread are.
Remember that Barovia and the other domains are not on the prime material plane. While there is the appearance of a physical reality that operates on real-world logic, in fact the Demiplane of Dread is more like a preserved nightmare afloat in... um, the Ethereal Plane or the Shadowfell. I'm going to let Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft answer that definitively.
And in that way, I think that one needs to remember that the real and the illusory are one and the same. Indeed, this is actually connected to earlier lore, where illusion magic was deeply tied to the Plane of Shadow and later the Shadowfell. If you want to heighten the sense of weirdness, consider making momentary impressions persist.
To take a page out of House of Leaves, one thing could be that the structure of a building in which the players find themselves changes over the course of their adventure. This is, admittedly, hard to pull off (especially if playing with a physical map and miniatures - you know, post-pandemic of course).
Likewise, allow things that are plainly illusions to become all too real - maybe a whorl in a piece of wood that kind of looks like a face changes its "expression."
The appearance or disappearance of NPCs without comment can be disconcerting.
Another thing to play with is how well your players take notes. If, for instance, the party encounters some innkeeper and her family, maybe the next time the party goes there, there's an extra kid. Or better yet, there's a different inn. This can be a little tough - because the players might simply miss these details or think they've made an error. You'll thus probably want to call attention to it.
But this is important: some of these changes don't mean anything (at least nothing obvious or strictly relevant to the adventure.) The appearance of a new teenaged son for the innkeeper will likely get players thinking of doppelgangers and changelings and all sort of magical creatures that can be "solved" with a classic monster battle. But we want to try to keep things disorienting - so such changes should usually be uncommented on, and the new reality that replaced the old should simply be off-putting, with no obvious narrative to attach to it.
Overall, I think this is a tough genre to built an entire domain of dread around, at least in a way that will play well into D&D's problem-solving gameplay. But I do think it's a really good genre to look into for creating a sense of otherworldly dread. In Ravenloft, reality isn't really trustworthy because, well, it's not "real" in the strictest sense.
Some of my favorite works in the subgenre include, in no particular order:
Legion - the TV show based on the Marvel character, but unlike any other comic book superhero show you'll ever see. It's about a man with nearly omnipotent powers but who is also profoundly mentally ill, and the reality of the show is the world as seen by him.
Welcome to Night Vale - a podcast about a small American town in the Southwest where every conspiracy theory is true, and where the most horrifying, dystopian, nightmarish, and simply bizarre stuff is treated as the charming quirks of their lovely burgh, taking the form of a local radio show.
Twin Peaks - a TV show that is ostensibly a police procedural about a troubled prom queen who's found murdered, while also being a demi-parody of soap operas as well as a story of otherworldly entities spreading hate and corruption... I think.
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