Inside the secret psychology of horror games – and why we can’t help playing | games

TThe sound came first. In the San Francisco BART train tunnel, Don Fica took out his tape recorder and captured the train’s metallic roar — “like demons in agony, beautifully ugly,” he recalls. This recording became one of the most chilling sounds of 2008’s Dead Space.

“We dropped that loud industrial noise at full volume right after the vacuum silence – creating one of the most controversial audio inconsistencies in the game,” recalls Vika, who made horror history as the sound director for the Dead Space games. “Our game designer hated it – but our boss loved it. Over time, it became something special.”

Now, nearly two decades after Dead Space first terrified players into grabbing their consoles, horror game designers around the world are still chasing that same feeling. So, how do they keep finding new ways to scare players – and what keeps us going with horror?

The sound of fear

Ask anyone who’s worked on a great horror game, and they’ll likely tell you the same thing: true fear starts with what you hear.

Vika says it starts in the mind. “It starts with psychology — not fear of what is, but of what might be,” he says. “The real horror is not a robber with a gun. It is the shadow behind the door, the silence that lingers for a long time, the certainty that something is coming…but you don’t know when or what.”

Unpredictability became the theme of Dead Space’s sound design. “We built tension like a slow tide,” Vika says. “Something might happen… something might happen… and then nothing – just a kitten in the kitchen. She laughs, the adrenaline wears off, and three seconds later: claws, blood, screams!”

Jason Greaves, the BAFTA-winning composer behind the music for 2015’s Dead Space and United Dawn, agrees. “The sound and music prepare the player for fear – it’s all about building up and building tension and then releasing when something jumps out at you.”

Greaves even treated the result itself as a kind of infected organism. “In Dead Space, something infected the crew and turned them into monsters, so I infected the orchestra,” he says. “Unusual techniques, percussion instruments, no keys or chords – just ensembles and strings.” When the player thinks it’s quiet, there might be 60 strings for each note and he plays whatever note he wants, very quietly. It becomes a lively, dissonant room tone – always changing, unpredictable.

If you doubt how important sound is, Graves offers you a test. “My daughter tried Until Dawn and she kept getting scared, so I asked her to mute it – and then she got through it fine,” he laughs. “If the image is deleted but you still hear something, that’s what our brains are preparing for. The monster under the bed, the flipper on the water – your imagination fills in the gaps, and that’s 10 times scarier than anything we can show.”

The human element

For famed game developer Soiri — real name Hidetaka Suehiro — fear has never been about cheap shocks: it’s about the human condition. He started wondering what really scares players when his mentor, Resident Evil creator Tokuro Fujiwara, once asked him: “What is fear in the game?”

“I was in my 20s and I naively said, ‘Game over,’” Swery recalls. “So, are games that don’t say ‘game over’ not scary? Are games where you can’t take damage not scary?” I was at a loss. Since then, I have been constantly searching for the answer.

This curiosity became the basis for 2010’s Deadly Premonition, a surreal small-town horror film that mixes absurdist humor with existential dread. He says: “Before we made Fear, we set a clear goal: to build the city and its people. I even wrote the story after I found the city.”

Al-Suwairi adds: “At the center of terror is a human being.” “This human being, who carries inner diversity and suffering, is fragile, and can be defeated by evil…that’s all.”

Although our fears are embodied in monsters, for Thomas Grebe, director of the critically acclaimed 2015 deep-sea horror game Soma, horror is also less about villains and more about what it says about being human.

“I think it’s a different kind of horror,” he says. “There’s no major development or constant scares. The whole idea is that it forces you to ask uncomfortable questions: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be conscious? What kind of life is worth living?”

Forget the gore and surprises in the dark – in Soma, it’s more about using silence and philosophy to delve deeper into yourself. “The key to any horror story, regardless of the medium, is that the audience fills in the blanks themselves,” Grebe says. “If your story just says, ‘This is something scary, be afraid,’ it’s not interesting. The best horror films make you think about something deeper.”

The unknown – and twists on the familiar

Another thing to play on is the fear of the unknown, and anxiety often comes from what does not appear. “You don’t have to spell everything out,” Greib says. “The player only gets glimpses, and their imagination fills in the rest – their fears, anxieties, etc. That’s where the real fear comes from.” Even the monsters in Soma reflect this idea. “The key is familiarity,” he says. “The best monsters are the ones where you think, ‘There’s something going on here…’, and the more you look, the worse it gets. People react strongly to things that seem contagious or unhealthy. They spark a primal fear.”

In 2021, indie horror has exploded in popularity and at Poppy Playtime, with its factory of cute and deadly games, the fear takes on a brighter form. “Nostalgia carries vulnerability,” says Zach Belanger, CEO of Poppy Playtime Mob Entertainment. “When we think about childhood, we think about safety — and we change those things, and the reaction is visceral.”

“This is what makes Huggy Wuggy so effective. We wonder: “How can something seem so adorable and so wrong at the same time?” He adds about the gentle evil character in the game.

In the 2025 psychological horror film Loop//Error, the images themselves are made frightening by suggestion, leaving details to the imagination in the form of a pixelated black-and-white art style. “The use of pixelated visuals and the intentional absence of color creates a state of unfamiliarity – where your mind is showing things that aren’t actually there,” says Kuro, the solo developer. “It’s like remembering a nightmare: hazy, incomplete, but emotionally intense.”

“The fear in Loop//Error doesn’t rely on horror clichés,” Kuro adds. “It comes from the human depth. From watching the mind collapse under its own weight, and realizing that the scariest place you can be trapped in is yourself.”

Interactive factor

Finally, there’s another element that makes horror in video games so effective: you have to be involved yourself.

“In a game, you’re not watching someone else run away — you’re in it, and that’s why you feel good: your heart is racing, but you’re still in control,” says psychologist Kieron Oakland, who specializes in cyberpsychology at Arden University.

Daniel Knight, creator of the 2020 multiplayer ghost-busting game Phasmophobia, agrees. “Games put you inside the fear,” he says of the horror game that took Twitch by storm upon its release. “When you decide to open a door or enter a dark room, fear is yours. You are responsible for what happens next.”

Grip also believes the genre persists for this reason. “In games, you make a decision to enter the danger zone,” he says. “It makes it personal. The fear comes from being the fool walking down the dark tunnel.”

After all, scary movies ask you what you’d do in the dark. Video games make you find out.