Horror has a special place in my life. It’s one of those rare things that I both love and hate. I love it because I get those indescribable rushes of adrenaline while watching, but I hate it because I feel like i’m having a heart attack. Now, I interact with horror usually in 2 ways: movies and games. However, it often seems (to me at least) that horror games are often magnitudes scarier than horror movies. The question is, why?
I believe the answer can be derived from a simple albeit in-depth analysis of both horror games and horror movies. Lets start with the movies.
Movies are scary for a number of reasons, regardless of the horror sub genre. In 99% of horror movies, you are scared because you are not in control of anything. Now, this can take many forms. In some horror movies, you’re scared because you know exactly what the threat is and the main character is on an unchangeable path to collide with that threat. In other horror movies, you have no idea what the threat is, but you know there is a threat and that the main character cannot avoid it. These both make your brain try to fill in the blanks of what is happening in the movie’s environment, which of course is trying to scare you. This leaves you with fear, making you scared. End of story.
However, horror games are scary because you have control, but you only have control over your character, and the things happening to your character are uncontrollable and unavoidable, or you think you have control, but you actually don’t. In other words, horror games are scary because you have either limited control or some semblance of control. Our brains aren’t used to this. We, as humans, want to have full control over a situation. When we don’t, we experience fear, i.e. being scared.
That’s my opinion, anyway.
Programming, Ascended 