Granted, this isn't the most intuitive math around: the way we're used to thinking about it, horror tends to cater to the lowest common denominator. Fear is the rawest emotion we've got – meaning it's cheap to come by and cheap to exploit. That also puts horror next to comedy as one of the hardest genres to actually get right, as it's so fundamental that when you mess up there's nowhere to hide. Both these factors in turn make horror one of the all-time best starting places to hone your craft. Fear is such a fundamental force that, should you master its quirks, you will have developed an earthquake-proof foundation for any other genre, any "higher" emotional chemistry you wish to explore. It's like learning your Latin stems; take Spanish in high school, and any other Romance language will be a cinch.
You need only glance one medium to the left for some interesting examples. High-profile directors from the Coen Brothers to Sam Raimi to Peter Jackson began their crafts in gore and darkness. Alfred Hitchcock's entire career was based on suspense (which is practically the same thing) – and when he invented the slasher genre, in doing so he also just happened to forever fundamentally change the way that movies were made and perceived. Likewise, go all the way back and you'll notice that most of the truly significant films of the silent era (expressively speaking) are horror flicks: Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Phantom of the Opera.
To that end, and in light of the current season, here are ten pointers toward making your videogame scary as hell. Once you achieve that, you're already halfway to heaven.
TEN
"Fear" is actually a blanket term for a whole litany of related, though subtly different, forms of discomfiture. Decide right off what particular kind of fear (or mix of fears) you mean to explore. Focus is everything; do you want to evoke worry? Anxiety? Terror? Horror? Paranoia? Panic? Dread? They all cause different physiological responses, and are all triggered somewhat differently. My tip: if you want to truly affect the player, go after the deepest and most lingering, yet most abstract fears – anxiety, dread. Subtle things that nevertheless build up under a person's skin until he's too stiff to go on. It's hard to just brush off a generalized sense of malaise, as there's no specific target to defuse it.
NINE
Decide how you're going to evoke your fear of choice – through what associations. I'll tell you right here: don't rely on learned fears: personal phobias or established iconography. Once you start quoting verses from the Bible or throwing around Lovecraft references, or sticking in bats or snakes just because you're creeped out by them, you're losing yourself in abstraction. Consider this: not everyone cares about Christian mythology; a lot of people think Lovecraft is dull and overwrought. (Personally, I love his prose.) Unless you start thinking about them pretty deeply, Zombies aren't innately scary at all. Actually they're kind of funny, with the groaning and the stumbling. What you want to do is draft a scenario based on a specific universal fear – something deeply personal – and then thematically derive all further emotion from some aspect of that scenario.
A big reason why Silent Hill works so well is that nearly the entire game is based on a widower's loss of his young daughter. Notice the balance here: someone who feels weak and helpless (men don't have the social network that women do, so he will be essentially alone in the world), charged with protecting someone legitimately weak and helpless. More than an obligation, though, that awkward charge would be one of the few things keeping a single father going. If then the daughter vanishes... well, hell. There's a whole box of panic, waiting to blow up. You've just taken away the only thing holding an emotionally needy man together; you've already made his worst nightmare come true.
EIGHT
Which brings us to the next point: fear must have a purpose. It must be grounded in something real, something comprehensible, something mundane. As far as scale is concerned, it doesn't pay to be grand Nobody really cares if a whole town is razed, especially if they don't know anyone in it; that's just a statistic. As all emotional is personal and private, for fear to be strong its basis must be deeply personal. Explore normal people's most private weaknesses – those parts of their minds held up by bailing wire and twine, which they try so hard to hide – and snip the supports; then watch their worlds start caving in. If you want to load in some secondary emotions – guilt or sadness, say – this method is the key. It all depends on what cords you choose to snip. Who are your characters? What are their flaws? Once you've determined that, you can easily keep twisting the knife, triggering further associated emotions through the initial pain.
SEVEN
Create a sense of isolation. Again, emotions are a personal thing; they're the foundation for our personality. It's when that foundation is challenged – when someone kicks out our crutches and leaves us crawling, mentally – that fear takes us over. The best way to emphasize the personal nature of fear – to allow a person to dwell in his own weaknesses – is to make him feel all alone in his feelings. The player must feel helpless, both physically and emotionally; alone in a void, with only their scant wits to guide them. In this situation, the only purpose to the empathy or security of another character is to provide contrast; to give the player another temporary and partial crutch – such that when that empathy or security is removed, the loneliness becomes all the starker.
SIX
Similarly, you need to create a sense of anticipation – of dread. The longer you can stretch out the tension before releasing it, the better. The player needs at all times to just know that something awful is about to happen, that something terrible is just around the corner – and that he really, really doesn't want to continue. The moment something horrible or frightening actually occurs, that tension goes away – as fear itself is never nearly as strong as the fear of fear. Therefore once you reveal that the things the player is meant to be afraid of aren't really so bad – that they're something physical, that can be examined or fended off or destroyed – then however horrible they are, their power becomes defined. The player need no longer fear their potential – which removes the player's fear from the subjective, and shifts it to something objective. Something that can be dealt with. At that point, you've lost your grip on the player.