Horror in Sci-fi

One of the players at the larp I was at last weekend has said that if you're going to introduce horror elements into a non-horror game it needs to be signposted and possibly have content warnings.  And she's right.  You should do this in any larp, regardless of genre.  Even horror games.  Especially horror games.  (This incident doesn't seem to have been anything more than a case of inadequate signposting, but does demonstrate how easily things can go wrong, even with well-intentioned refs who care about their players.)

But I'm going to disagree with the person who described introducing horror elements into this game - a sci-fi larp that cites Star Trek, Mass Effect and Firefly as major influences - as a genre switcheroo.

Sci-fi horror is obviously a thing.  As far as I'm concerned, three of the greatest haunted house horror movies ever made are Alien, Event Horizon and The Thing.  The body horror genre is full of sci-fi, with films like The Fly and Slither immediately coming to mind, where either weird science or aliens provide the impetus for the horror.

Then there's things that aren't explicitly billed as horror, but are nonetheless scary and full of horror elements.  Films like Super 8 and Cloverfield, or the biggest sci-fi influence on my childhood, The X-Files, have no shortage of scares.

And then there's sci-fi that's not intended to be scary, yet still brings the scares from time to time.  Star Trek has the Borg.  Even Red Dwarf has the polymorph.  (Anyone who's encountered mimics in D&D probably has the same reaction as me to a monster that can look like anything, even before we get to the emotion-sucking aspect.)

Sci-fi and horror simply go together.  Themes of weird science going wrong, hostile aliens and technological breakdown in the harshness of space are genre staples.  Sci-fi doesn't have to include horror - I can't think of anything horror-related in Star Wars, for example - but they are close enough that horror themes showing up in a sci-fi shouldn't be a complete surprise.

Which brings me to Firefly.

Firefly isn't a horror setting.  Space western is the normal description, and when I run a Firefly game, I aim for that vibe because if I signed up for a Firefly game I'd be hoping for something that would fit in on the show.

That said...

    "If they take the ship, they'll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. And, if we're very, very lucky, they'll do it in that order."
    ―Zoë

My convention scenario starts with the PCs going to investigate an abandoned ship, and I'd like to think that people who sign up for a Firefly game are going to be genre savvy enough to realise ships don't get abandoned for no reason.  What happens after that depends quite heavily on the players, but horror themes, particularly those that come up in the show, are always a possibility.  (With the exception of reavers doing the thing Zoe describes, for obvious reasons.)

It's not surprising to me that a larp that cites Firefly as one of its primary influences might include elements of horror.  The same goes for tabletop RPGs like Coriolis, which claims both Firefly and Alien as influences.

I've never really thought of myself as a horror fan, but I love sci-fi horror.  I hope to see more of it in both larp and tabletop.