While Ravenloft is a storied and beloved campaign setting for D&D, there's an inherent challenge with adapting D&D's typical fantasy to a horror setting.
As I've written about earlier, horror often comes from disempowerment. And even if the dangers are very real, the tone with which you approach a story can create a very different feeling.
Let's talk about Alien and its sequel, Aliens.
If we were to use the terms suggested by Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, I'd say that we're looking at Cosmic Horror and Body Horror as the two major horror elements in the story. I'm not calling it Cosmic simply because it takes place in space, but because the Xenomorph is meant to be disturbingly beyond our comprehension. I actually think the Body Horror elements are even stronger - while the xenomorph's life cycle is bizarre and its behavior is frighteningly predatory, the weirdest and creepiest thing about it is how oddly familiar it, or aspects of it, are. The phallic and yonic imagery dreamed up by concept artist H. R. Gieger is part of what made the xenomorph so iconic.
In the first movie, a working-class group of space travelers - basically a group of space truckers - go and investigate a weird signal coming from another planet, and they find an alien spacecraft, along with what seem to be some kind of eggs, one of which opens up, causing a strange parasite to attach itself to one of the crew members faces. However, he doesn't die, and the parasite falls off, seemingly dead. But later, we discover that the crew member who had been attacked has actually been gestating an alien within his abdomen, and the alien bursts out of him in a shocking, gory scene, killing him. The little alien quickly grows, and begins hunting the crew members, killing all but Ellen Ripley, the one reasonable person who wanted to follow the strict quarantine protocols, and who escapes from the lost ship, barely surviving by pushing the alien out into the vacuum of space.
The tagline was "In space, no one can hear you scream," and structurally, the xenomorph worked a lot like classic slasher villains in the vein of Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. (Alien actually predated Friday the 13th by a year.)
The second movie, Aliens, was made by director James Cameron, as opposed to Ridley Scott, who did the first one. Cameron's take was just as if not more popular, but it shifted things significantly. The movie begins 57 years after the events of the first one, in which Ripley has finally been recovered in cryo-sleep, explaining why she hasn't aged much in the intervening half-century. However, she discovers that the planet they found with the alien egg has now become a colony with plenty of human inhabitants. When the colony's communications have ceased, and Ripley goes with a group of space marines to investigate and find out what's going on. What they find is a colony utterly infested with xenomorphs. Ripley transforms from desperate survivor to action star, even returning to the alien queen's nest with an improvised machine-gun-taped-to-a-flamethrower in order to wipe out the colony for sure.
The xenomorphs in Aliens are no less lethal than the first one was in the original movie. And, much like the first movie, the movie's all about a dwindling group of people getting wiped out by the monsters.
But it feels totally different.
And I think a major reason for that is that the heroes of Aliens are badasses, soldiers who are equipped (even if under-equipped and surely unprepared) for a fight against the monsters, whereas the first movie was a bunch of civilians with no real ability to fight off a genuine terrifying monster.
And I think that's the thing with D&D - the player characters in a D&D party are all built to fight monsters. It's kind of the whole premise of the game. Yes, if you send a group of level 2 characters to fight a colony overrun by Red Slaadi (which I think is the best D&D equivalent to the Xenomorph, including the chest-bursting) they're probably going to get slaughtered, but it's much more likely they'll go down with a fight than be picked off screaming in terror.
I should note, though, that this is actually why I'm so into Ravenloft, at least in theory. I can appreciate good horror, even enjoying it on occasion, but the truth is that I really prefer a kind of fantasy in which you can beat the monsters.
To be fair, plenty of horror has the heroes prevail in the end, sometimes by killing or otherwise defeating the monsters directly. But I'm particularly drawn to the kind of narrative in which no matter how scary a monster is, a person who's smart and capable enough can protect others from the danger. I like the idea of a badass monster-hunter, and that's precisely what a D&D party in Ravenloft is positioned to become.
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