That scene where the dogs came crashing through the mansion window in Resident Evil was arguably a seminal moment in ’90s gaming – a jump-scare that emblazoned itself on the minds of a generation of gamers. So too the haunting sounds of the sirens wailing in Silent Hill, the surreal warning before the world around you literally went to hell.

Cinema’s greater age means it has a long gallery of horror icons: Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger. But gaming has its icons, too – the Regenerator from Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill‘s terrifying Pyramid Head being among them.

It’s arguable, in fact, that horror games have long since overtaken movies in their ability to inspire fear. We could list plenty of horror films that have made our spines tingle in recent years, but none that have enveloped us with quite the same inescapable sense of dread as Amnesia: The Dark Descent or last year’s Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.

There’s the lasting impression in these games of a medium beginning to find its own identity – feeding off the grand lineage of horror literature and cinema, but also finding its own language and conventions. We’ve all seen characters wandering around a gothic locale with a lantern in their hands in horror films before, but A Machine For Pigs is a different experience altogether: when you suddenly become the person padding around an old gothic building, lantern clutched in trembling hand, the horror takes on a more immediate and dreadful dimension. A few minutes in, a piano starts playing by itself and the entire building begins to quake, as though it’s being rattled around in the palm of some angry, eldritch god. It’s utterly terrifying.

Compared to games like these, most horror films are little more than a ghost train ride – almost quaint with their plastic skeletons and predictable means of making us jump. After all, how can a past-tense experience like a book or film compete with the present-tense sensation of a well-made horror game? With the processing power of modern computers and consoles, it feels as though the genre’s beginning to really come into its own, both in terms of storytelling and creating frightening environments that are every bit as vital as those in books and films.