In the opening moments of Dario Argento‘s Phenomena, a young traveler stumbles through the woods, abandoned by her tour bus. She finds a house and enters, looking for help. That’s a mistake. A serial killer stabs the teenager repeatedly with a pair of scissors, then shoves her through a second-story window.

It’s a brutal and strange beginning to an even stranger movie, and it’s a perfect jumping off point for one of Argento’s best films. It’s also the inspiration for Scissorman, one of the most memorable villains in video game history and the star of 1995’s unsettling survival horror point-and-click adventure Clock Tower.

Clock Tower may not be a massive franchise like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, but it’s just as terrifying as either of those games. In hindsight, Clock Tower is also uncannily prophetic about survival horror’s future. Recent Resident Evil games turned into schlocky action titles, not horror games, before Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil 2 reverted the franchise back to its roots. Silent Hill is all but dead following the collapse of Guillermo Del Toro and Hideo Kojima’s reboot, Silent Hills. And yet, in the past half-decade or so, more and more games are playing with the ideas that Clock Tower first explored over twenty years ago.

While historians consider the Japanese role-playing game Sweet Home the first real survival horror game, it’s really Infogrames’ Alone in the Dark that set the standard for future games of the genre. Like many of the survival horror games that followed, Alone in the Dark uses fixed camera angles with pre-rendered backgrounds and 3D models to create a spooky, cinematic atmosphere—an impressive technical feat back in the early 1990s.