Feeding the Cartoon Gators: Cult of the Lamb and Moral Disengagement

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #187. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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We are what we’re afraid of.

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In his essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” Stephen King closes his argument about horror serving important psychological stress relief functions with the following metaphor:

[I think of horror] as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love, and I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed.

While this feels (as most King does) a tad crude, the more time I spend in indie horror spheres, the more I find myself agreeing with this assessment of things. While there is undoubtedly always a bent toward “elevating” the experience of horror toward some grander political message – George Romero made movies about racial prejudice and consumerism, not zombies – when you talk to the fans, every justification of their love for horror boils down to the same basic answer. Everybody has some angry, sad, anxious and ultimately violent shit they want to work out.

I myself am no exception: my love of horror has its roots in the overwhelming sense of isolation and difference I felt as a child. I saw myself well-represented in the monsters and freaks in the King tomes I would check out from my local library, and some small, dark part of me reveled when the popular jerk or the snobby blonde would get their comeuppance at the hand of the monster of the week. I would never condone such violence in real life, no. But there, in the safety of the page, or the screen . . . there it was something close to sacred.

Now that you’re thoroughly convinced that I’m a psychopath (or secretly pleased that you now know that someone besides you is Like That), let us turn now to the actual subject of this column: the game Cult of the Lamb. I’ve been playing this game for the last few weeks, since it falls squarely into my dual interests in horror and cozy management sims, and it got me to thinking about how games can present us with a different relative distance to the horror in our media. In books or in movies, or hell, in most horror games, we exist as observers, those who watch the monsters commit the atrocious acts of violence that sate our mind-gators. We ourselves are entirely removed, or at best, plucky survivors combating the forces of evil. Only recently, and rarely, have games allowed us to inhabit the action space of the monsters themselves.

Cult of the Lamb works within similar kawaii/kowai aesthetic spaces as games from prior columns, but here the saccharine forest creatures are juxtaposed with scenes of cannibalism and human sacrifice. The combination is not entirely foreign to a Zillennial like myself (I watched many an hour of Happy Tree Friends on YT back in the day), but somehow, having to enact the horrors myself as the player pushing the buttons felt . . .  different, than passive observance. I tried to play the game at first as a benevolent cult leader who treated her subjects with respect and care, but the game forces you into selecting weak followers to sacrifice or feeding devotees meals of their own shit. There is no way, it seems, to wiggle out of the moral inevitability of being a cult leader. And after a while, I stopped noticing that the things the game was asking of me were, under normal circumstances, quite distressing.

Moral disengagement is a term coined by psychologist Albert Bandura, and is what often happens when humans engage in repeated harmful or unethical behavior. The worse the thing or the more often you do it, the more your brain is forced to rationalize or justify the behavior in some way (“I was just following orders” or “they’re not really people” or “that’s just how you get ahead in life”), so that you can still sleep at night thanks to a reduced sense of personal responsibility. It’s the same general idea that gets trotted out on the news cycle every time there’s new and notable gun violence – the idea that repeated violent action via the simulation of a game might erode barriers to real-life aggression. Videogames, through systematic desensitization, may make us violent.

While there is not a definitive claim to be made on either side of that debate (psychology studies and surveys have come to both conclusions in equal measure), I do wonder if the impact of a game like Cult of the Lamb might be somewhat more insidious. Maybe we don’t all go out and start our own cults after playing it, but maybe we do stop thinking quite as carefully about the impact of our daily actions on others, because our sense of personal moral responsibility has been sanded down. If pushing a button doesn’t make you complicit in the consequences of that push, maybe it becomes easier to ignore that Prime shipping comes at the cost of inhumane working conditions. Or maybe it is like Stephen King says up top, and it’s not that games destroy our better impulses – they keep our worst ones at bay, and without the pressure valve of games like Lamb, we’d be at each other’s throats.

Either way, may the congregation say amen.

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Emma Kostopolus loves all things that go bump in the night. When not playing scary games, you can find her in the kitchen, scientifically perfecting the recipe for fudge brownies. She has an Instagram where she logs the food and art she makes, along with her many cats.