tThe sound came first. In a San Francisco Bart train tunnel, Don Veca took his tape recorder and captured the metallic roar of a train: “like demons in agony, wonderfully ugly,” he remembers. That recording became one of the most chilling sounds from 2008’s Dead Space.
“We dropped that loud industrial screech right after the silence of the void, creating one of the most jarring sonic contrasts in the game,” recalls Veca, who made horror history as audio director of the Dead Space games. “Our game designer hated it, but the boss loved it. Over time, it’s become iconic.”
Now, nearly two decades after Dead Space terrified gamers into grabbing their controllers, 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 pushing horror?
The sound of fear
Ask anyone who’s worked on a great horror game and they’ll probably tell you the same thing: real fear begins with what you hear.
Veca says it begins in the mind. “It all starts with psychology: not the fear of what is, but what could be,” he says. “True horror is not an assailant with a gun. It is the shadow behind the door, the silence that lasts too long, the certainty that something is coming… but you don’t know when or what.”
That unpredictability became the theme of Dead Space’s sound design. “We create tension like a slow tide,” Veca says. “Something could happen… something could happen… and then nothing, just a kitten in the kitchen. You laugh, the adrenaline wears off, and three seconds later: claws, blood, screams!”
Jason Gravesthe Bafta-winning composer behind the music for Dead Space and 2015’s Until Dawn, agrees. “The sound and music prepare the player for the fear; it’s about the build-up, the tension and then the release when something jumps out at you.”
Graves even treated the score 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, tapping instruments, no clefs or chords, just groups and tension.” When the musician thinks it is silent, it can be 60 strings, each of which plays the note it wants, very softly. It becomes a lively and dissonant room tone, always changing, unpredictable.”
If you doubt how much sound matters, Graves offers proof. “My daughter tried Until Dawn and she kept freaking out,” he laughs, “I told her to mute it, and then she got over it fine. If the picture is off but you still hear something, that’s what our brains are designed to do. The monster under the bed, the fin in the water—your imagination fills in the gaps, and that’s 10 times scarier than anything we can show.”
The human element
For cult game developer Swery, whose real name is Hidetaka Suehiro, fear has never been about cheap shocks: it’s about the human condition. He began to question what really scares gamers when his mentor, Resident Evil creator Tokuro Fujiwara, once asked him, “What is fear in a game?”
“I was in my mid-20s and naively responded, ‘Game over,’” Swery recalls. “He replied, ‘So, games without a ‘game over’ aren’t scary? Isn’t a haunted house where you can’t take damage scary?’ I was lost. Since then, I have been continually searching for the answer.”
That curiosity became the basis for 2010’s Deadly Premonition, a surreal small-town horror that combines absurdist humor with existential dread. “Before creating fear, we set a clear goal: to build the city and its people,” he says, “I even wrote the story after the city existed.”
“At the center of the horror is a human being,” adds Swery. “That human being, who carries with him an inner diversity and suffering, is fragile and can be defeated by evil… that’s all.”
Although monsters are where our fears are visualized, for Thomas Grip, 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 fear,” he says. “There are no big twists or constant shocks. The 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 blood and surprises in the dark: Soma is more about using silence and philosophy to get under your skin. “The key to any horror story, regardless of the medium, is for the audience to fill in the blanks themselves,” Grip says. “If your story is just, ‘There’s something scary here, be afraid,’ it’s not that interesting. The best horror makes you think about something deeper.”
The unknown and twists on the familiar
Another thing to play with is fear of the unknown, and uneasiness often arises from what is not shown. “You shouldn’t explain everything,” says Grip. “The player only glimpses, and his imagination fills in the rest: his own fears, anxieties and all that. That’s where the real fear comes from.” Even Soma’s monsters reflect that idea. “The key is familiarity,” he says. “The best monsters are the ones where you think, ‘Something’s wrong here…’ and the more you look, the worse it gets. People react strongly to things that seem infectious or unhealthy. It triggers a primal fear.”
In 2021, the viral indie horror has arrived at Poppy Playtime, with its factory of cute and killer toys, fear takes a brighter form. “With nostalgia comes vulnerability. When we think about childhood, we think about safety, and when you change those things, the reaction is visceral,” says Zach Belanger, CEO of Poppy Playtime’s Mob Entertainment studio.
“That’s what makes Huggy Wuggy so effective. We asked ourselves, ‘How can something seem adorable and wrong at the same time?’” he adds, referring to the game’s furry villain.
In the psychological horror of 2025 Loop//Errorthe images themselves are made creepy by suggestion, leaving the details to the imagination in the form of a blocky black and white pixelated art style. “The use of pixelated images and the deliberate absence of color creates unknowing: your mind projects things that don’t actually exist,” says solo developer Koro. “It’s like remembering a nightmare: blurry, incomplete, but emotionally sharp.”
“The fear in Loop//Error isn’t based on horror clichés,” adds Koro, “it comes from human depth. From watching a mind collapse under its own weight and realizing that the scariest place to get trapped is yourself.”
The interactive factor
Finally, there’s another element that makes horror in video games so impactful: you have to participate 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, a cyberpsychology specialist at Arden University.
Daniel Knight, creator of the 2020 multiplayer game Phasmophobia, agrees. “Games immerse you in fear,” he says, about the horror game that took Twitch by storm upon its release. “When you decide to open a door or enter a dark room, the fear is yours. You are responsible for what happens next.”
Grip also believes the genre endures for this reason. “In games, you make the decision to face danger,” he says. “That makes it personal. The fear comes from you being the idiot walking into the dark tunnel.”
After all, horror movies ask what you would do in the dark. Video games make you discover it.
