Chilla’s Art: Horror in the Mundane
When we think of the everyday, the last thing we’d usually experience is fear. There’s a lot of comfort in the routines and habits we carry out on a regular basis, as well as in the places we live and regularly visit. After all, what’s scary about a commute to and from work? Or a quiet, suburban neighbourhood? Even in the more unsettling dimensions of everyday life, like a closing shift or a night trip to the local shop, we wouldn’t necessarily be afraid. Millions of people do these things every single day and experience nothing untoward — they’re too commonplace, too normal, to be scary on their own.
But if you’ve ever played a Chilla’s Art game, you’ll know that even your own home isn’t immune to becoming a nightmare.
Chilla’s Art is an indie game studio created by two brothers, specialising in retro-style Japanese horror games. The studio has developed and published all of their own games since 2018 but have found the most success with their more recently released games, particularly The Convenience Store (2020) and The Closing Shift (2022). Many YouTubers of note have played through at least one Chilla’s Art game, including Markiplier, Jacksepticeye and Gab Smolders, and the majority of their releases have received very positive reviews on Steam, reviews which they’re more than deserving of.
Many of their games centre around unexceptional people living rather unexceptional lives. The protagonists are sometimes even left unnamed, presumably because they could be templates for anyone of a certain age or demographic — young, college-aged girls, as in The Convenience Store and The Closing Shift, working hospitality and customer service jobs to stay afloat and pay the rent on their cramped apartments. It’s a narrative that would likely be relatable the world over, a modern slice-of-life tale that the majority of people born around and after the millennium have had to experience. Though both the aforementioned games are indeed horror games, the first thing we feel for the protagonists is pity. We know the struggle of having to work these minimum-wage jobs, of scraping by and the monotony of it all.
Other notable games of theirs include The Caregiver (2021), Night Delivery (2021) and Night Security (2023). All of these also include regular people, working typical jobs that may not be as mainstream as customer service but are far from niche; carer, deliveryman and security guard, respectively. Before the horror begins, we follow the protagonist as they undertake their normal duties and have (mostly) normal conversations with colleagues or customers. The games are all perfectly fine representations of a normal working day for each of the main characters, so much so that we can even find we’ve been lulled by the false security of the routine, just as in real life.
While some of their instalments, like The Kidnap (2023) and Hanako (2020), feature more anomalous elements that fall further outside of the bounds of normality, such as rituals, spirits and child abduction, they’re still based firmly in reality. As an example, although Hanako features a ritual, the reality is that the story of the ritual is a simple, yet popular, Japanese urban legend known and retold by Japanese schoolchildren. It mirrors the kinds of stories we might have told as children to spook each other at sleepovers, stories like Humans Can Lick Too, or the theory that a particular house on a particular street in our neighbourhood is haunted. Urban legends have become such a typical part of the cultural zeitgeist for any country that they are quickly becoming familiar, commonplace.
The horror itself can also be fantastical, with spirits appearing in The Convenience Store and Night Security,and the everyday commute in Shinkansen 0 (2024) turning nightmarish as fellow commuters freeze in place, reflections turn to grin at you and entities materialise from nowhere. But the mundanity breeds relatability within these games. The idea of Shinkansen 0 is terrifying because the train itself is familiar, the layout and features almost universal, from the double and triple seats separated by an aisle right down to the lady pushing the snack trolley. All, if not most of us, can say we’ve been on a train, the dark of the night pushing in against the windows, and wondered what might happen if the train stopped, or if we were the only one aboard.
Similarly, The Convenience Store features a setting that we can all understand and relate to. When the dead body of the protagonist’s manager is found in a shed behind the store, that in itself is scary, but that the horror originates from the workplace is what magnifies it. The workplace is, of course, comparable to a Tesco Express in England, something so common it can be found on most street corners. The same goes for The Closing Shift. The stalker is terrifying in his own right but that his presence is in the café itself, a mirror image of any Costa or Starbucks shop, makes it a hostile environment, somewhere that no longer feels safe.
Even the notion of home, normally considered as sacred and untouchable for many people, is violated in Parasocial (2023) and The Bathhouse (2022). In Parasocial, the main setting is the protagonist’s apartment. At first things are normal, unremarkable, but strange things soon begin to happen. She starts receiving threatening notes slipped under her door, being watched while she bathes and ultimately, her apartment is broken into by her stalker. Home is featured less prominently in The Bathhouse but the horror from the eponymous bathhouse begins to encroach on the protagonist’s apartment, eventually attacking her there. Invariably, home is something we can all relate to, whether it’s a house, apartment or anything else. Not all of us have had those spaces sullied in such irreversible ways, but we all surely know the fear of that happening.
It’s the contrast of the horror with where we are, the mixing of something diabolical with something so very normal, that chills us so easily. There’s an idea that can be seen in a lot of horror that the scares are contained somewhere separate from the safety of our everyday lives — a haunted house, a far-off camp, a holiday spot — and we’re very comfortable with that. We like the thrill of that which scares us, but at a safe distance. To think that the monster can follow us home, watch us while we work and lurk behind us on the train is too much for most people, even the most hardcore of horror fans.
And much of the time, these worries wouldn’t even cross our minds. How many closing shifts have you done without blinking? How many evening trips have you made to the local shop without looking over your shoulder even once? And how many times have you gone about your days at home, cooking, sleeping, bathing, without even beginning to worry about what could force its way inside? The genius behind Chilla’s Art’s games is exactly that — the ignorance of comfort, the naïve faith that our routines are inviolable, confronted with the disturbing truth, that even the mundane can become a nightmare.
Check out Chilla’s Art’s work on their Patreon, where you can buy all of their games.
