The Horrors of Chance: Exploring Luck and Randomness in Horror Films and Fiction

The Horrors of Chance: Exploring Luck and Randomness in Horror Films and Fiction

In online gaming platforms, the presence of all new titles frequently adds to the excitement of punters beyond wagering. Likewise, in the dimly lit corridors of horror, what usually terrifies people most is not the monster, killer, or supernatural force. Usually, it is the unexplainable randomness that governs who lives and who dies. Horror flourishes on disrupting order, and few elements are as destabilizing as luck.

While most henges celebrate structure, skill, or cause-and-effect logic, horror usually abandons rationality in favor of the unpredictable. In doing so, it taps into an ancient human one. It is a fact that our fates are not in our hands but are determined by cruel and indifferent chances. Hereon, we’ll unveil how the random nature of fate becomes the true enemy in many of this genre’s most haunting tales.

The Fear of Randomness

In the realm of the world, we seek meaning in events, especially the traumatic ones. Horror turns that desire in its head, suggesting that sometimes, bad things just happen. A car crashes. A stranger chooses a random house to infiltrate. A disease spread. This intrusion of pure chance into daily life is horrifying because it invalidates the comforting mirage of control.

Take Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, where villagers engage in an annual ritual of human sacrifice selected by drawing lots. There is no rhyme or reason involved here, just tradition and chance. This story’s power lies in the random nature of the violence rather than the gore.

Likewise, in Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds, the inexplicable attacks by avian hordes are never explained. 

The arbitrary nature becomes a force beyond understanding, making the characters’ struggles not just futile but cosmically insignificant. These stories don’t just scare us with monsters. They equally confront us with the idea that the universe may be senseless and unresponsive to our cries for justice or order.

Dice Rolls & Death

In horror films, randomness usually manifests through the “kill roster” trope, where characters die in unpredictable sequences, seemingly independent of moral worth or surgical skill. This is particularly evident in slasher films like Scream, Friday the 13th, or Final Destination. Unlike action or drama genres, which reward intelligence or heroism, horror usually punishes characters without explanation. Whoever survived is usually not about merit but fortune.

The Final Destination series is perhaps the most overt exploration of this concept. Death becomes a sentient force, correcting the mistakes of survivors escaping a catastrophe. The characters scramble to disrupt the sequences of their deaths, but the order seems random. Efforts to outwit death may be delayed, but they rarely escape it. Here, randomness is given a structure that mocks human agency, such as playing chess against an unseen opponent who changes the rules mid-game.

Cosmic Horror & Indifferent Realms

Randomness funds its most terrifying form in cosmic horror. Here, the universe itself is hostile or, worse, indifferent. H.P. Lovecraft’s works concentrate on the notion that reality is governed by alien and unknowable forces, not by human logic or divine morality. In these stories, chance encounters like stumbling upon a forbidden book or taking a wrong turn during an expedition led to revelations that shatter sanity.

The terror in cosmic horror does not lie in immediate death but in the existential realization that humanity is insignificant in the face of a massive, uncaring cosmos. Contemporary worlds like The Endless and Annihilation carry on this legacy, depicting strange phenomena governed by rules that defy comprehension. In such worlds, even survival can feel random, determined less by action and more by an unknown, inhuman logic.

Game of Chance

Some horror stories literalize arbitrary through games. The 2019 film, Ready or Not depicts a deadly game of hide-and-seek dictated by a randomly drawn card. The main character’s fate depends entirely on the luck of the draw. The gamification of horror, also seen in films like Saw or The Belko Experiment, emphasizes the role of luck in life-and-death decisions. 

By framing horror around games of chance, these stories critique real-world structures that discuss randomness as a meritocracy. In this sense, horror becomes not just frightening but satirical, highlighting a dark commentary on life’s inherently unfairness.

What Truly Keeps Us Awake at Night

Horror’s reliance on luck and randomness taps into primal fears, like the fear of the unknown, the fear of powerlessness, and the fear that the universe is chaotic rather than ordered. It challenges the narrative that we construct to make sense of our lives. 

In some way, horror becomes a reflection of reality, not because life is always horrific but because it is usually just as random. That randomness, more than any masked killer or haunted house, is what truly keeps us up at night.