The New Southern Gothic: Gothic Tropes in Resident Evil 7

By Taylor Ward

The Resident Evil franchise has gained lots of notoriety in the past two decades, as a horror game franchise (and films, tv shows, novels, and comics) that deals with mutation and human testing experiments gone wrong, resulting in zombie and monster-like enemies to face. While the storylines of the games are hard to explain or understand to those with no prior knowledge of them, having played many of the games or watched other people’s playthroughs of them, the games seem to draw you in more and more as you play them. The last two in particular have always reminded me of Gothic aesthetics and tropes, with the seventh game submersing me in the swampy gothic horrors of the south and the eighth game absolutely immersive me in the European gothic tropes of werewolves, castles, and vampires. They were especially immersive as the player sees everything through Ethan’s eyes, in the last two games, making it feel as if it is actually you being forced to face everything alone.

Though the first 6 games have a relatively similar and connected storyline, Resident Evil 7 introduces new protagonists and characters in a very different space. Most of the other games, not counting RE 7 and Resident Evil 8 Village, have taken place in bigger cities and in laboratories/Umbrella Corporation bases. However, in Resident Evil 7 the player is instead thrown into a horrific maze of a house in the swamps of Louisiana.

From the start of the game, it can be fairly easy to tell that they are really playing up the aesthetics and tropes of the southern gothic. From an isolated house framed by the eerie Spanish moss-covered swamp that surrounds it to the uncivilized (cannibalistic) “hicks” that they use as enemies against a “city boy,” it is easy to see the ways that they played up gothic and horror tropes of southern-based media. The real gothic framing comes out once the main character Ethan finds himself trapped in a run-down swamp shack, as he seeks out his missing wife, and must fight to find a way out against the pursuit of the crazy, mold-infected Baker family.

Similar to Shirley Jackson’s, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the house in Resident Evil 7 becomes a sort of personified character itself. Just like in Jackson’s novel, the house becomes a sort of prison for Ethan, even though it also occasionally helps to protect him from the family’s attacks, just as the house did for Merricat and her sister. Parallel to this, is the fact that the Baker Family views the house as a protective barrier from the outside world and the corrupt people that live there, considering they ironically believe that they are pure and “perfected” unlike the people outside of their household and family. This ends up playing on the tropes of “us versus them”, just like the mob’s mentality in the novel, which is the main conflict within the video game.

The Baker family uses the setting of the house to their advantage, considering it is their own house, as they chase Ethan throughout his chances to escape his “simple” prison, toying with him in the process. They push him through the areas they wish, even allowing him to “kill” them (they cannot die and essentially regrow), all to add in their sadistic toying with him. However, the house also seems to be one of the main reasons that Ethan is able to survive and get away from the family’s attacks on him. The house offers him ample places to hide away from the family’s advances, as well as supplies him with all of the tools and weapons he needs to fight against the family and escape the nightmare he has unfortunately found himself within.

There is even a specific line in the game at one point where Ethan, after finishing a “puzzle” and opening a secret door that revealed a hidden hall for his escape, quite literally says “Who builds this shit?” This is most likely what the player is thinking as this maze of a house was shown in the beginning to be a simple swamp shack. Not only do the actual lives, or deaths, of the Baker family make the player think, but also the fact that the house comes across as a mystical sort of unexplainable entity in itself.

The fact that it is not only the horrors of the mold-infected, crazy cannibals of people in the house that both the player/Ethan are faced with, but also the psychological gothic horrors of the house playing tricks on you and giving you puzzles to complete, makes this game in particular especially gothic in my eyes. The tropes of Southern Gothic aesthetics and ideas have and continue to show unsettling settings and messages in all forms of media, literature or not.