Think of your favourite ever horror game. Did it give you nightmares? Or at least make you want to keep the hall light on? No? Then it has failed as a piece of horror entertainment.

The term 'horror game' has become something of a misnomer, a generic term applied to any title that serves up lashings of viscera, or the odd ghost or monster. The latest example is Splatterhouse, Namco's furiously gory re-imagining of the old arcade and 16bit console series. This hack-n-slash fest is a cacophony of spraying blood and flying body parts and it makes lavish references to '70s exploitation cinema, '80s slasher films, and the works of HP Lovecraft. But it's about as scary as a Sunday afternoon costume drama re-enacted by Care Bears.

It is not alone. Horror should be a key facet in the video game armoury – the unique element of interaction is seemingly purpose-built to drag us into nightmarish experiences. But, mostly, horror games are merely blood-soaked adventures or shooters, which borrow the clothes of successful horror movies without ever occupying the body of terror within.

Why?



The first and most obvious explanation is that truly successful horror usually relies on the twisted vision of a single auteur. From James Whale to James Wan, the cinema of terror has been defined by mavericks and weirdos, often working with small crews and using movies to explore their own fears and neuroses. Only William Castle could have made The Tingler, only Wes Craven could have watched Bergman's The Virgin Spring and come up with the tonally bizarre Last House on the Left, and I'm hoping that only Tom Six could have imagined The Human Centipede. These aren't works that would come up through a boardroom discussion on USPs.

In video game development, it is very rare for this sort of singular creative input to make it through the rigorously structured and often painstakingly democratic production process. Within the average 150-person dev team there will be various strata of producers, creative directors, designers and marketers each jostling to impose their own conceptual foibles, while ironing out idiosyncratic design quirks. There are budgetary concerns, too – a mainstream publisher can't risk $30m on one man's nightmarish fancies (in this respect there are similarities with Hollywood, where horror flicks tend to involve specialist independent production companies and smaller budgets). Furthermore, as mainstream game development is still largely a technical rather than artistically-led endeavour, the sort of warped horrors imagined by the likes of Lucio Fulci or Ruggero Deodato are almost certain to be jettisoned in favour of another end-of-level boss, or never entertained at all.

Within these production constraints it's hardly surprising that horror games are mostly about cheap shocks and even cheaper gore: these are the systematic elements of horror most easily producible in a largely egalitarian, highly technical team environment. The ingredients required to make a gamer jump are fairly easily reproducible – you just need sudden unexpected movement and a loud noise. The most famous moment in the original Resident Evil is when the zombie hounds crash through a window as Jill Valentine makes her way gingerly through the Umbrella mansion. The moment takes place in a short corridor – a transitional space which doesn't look or feel like a set-piece location, so we're not expecting anything. It's a basic mechanic designed to exploit very recognisable human reflexes. The early Resident Evil games also made use of expressionistic camera angles to warp and obscure the player's view of their surroundings – and again, this is a well-known cinematic technique. All the designers had to do was sit down and watch the Cabinet of Doctor Caligari. Or any George A Romero movie.

Meanwhile, in the video game space, gore is cheap. In a film, an elaborate scene of bloody violence might well cost hundreds of thousands in CGI, prosthetics, stunt work and cinematography. In a game, it's no more or less expensive than any other scene, so it's easy for elements such as tension and subtly to be cast aside in favour of endless disembowelment – hence, games like Splatterhouse and Mad World, which display all the Hitchcockian suspense of a monday morning down at the abattoir. Also, from Mortal Kombat onwards, designers have known that pulling a character's arm off is a great way to entertain the traditional demographic of teenage boys – and pulling a character's arm off is, once again, a technical rather than artistic challenge. And then there's the fact that blood is a useful visual tool: it adds organic movement and matter to a static environment; it contrasts with the standard video game palettes dominated by blacks, greys and browns; and it can be used to break the fourth wall, oozing and spraying across the screen, bringing the player into the action. No wonder we see so much of it (unless we buy our games in Germany).

The problem is, robbed of any kind of psychological depth, these horror mechanisms become empty sideshow tricks within games that are merely gruesome pantomimes. Splatterhouse fails as a horror game because it is not at all scary. But then neither – really – is Resident Evil. They go through the motions, they have monsters and body parts and a few dark ideas, but there's very little substance or meaning behind it all. In comparison, the most memorable horror movies and novels prey on deep-seated collective fears and psychosexual hang-ups. With Carrie, for example, Stephen King meant to explore the fear of female sexuality, rather than the fear of being impaled on falling gym equipment by a telekinetic murderer; and it was a similar fear and disgust that underpinned William Friedkin's masterful treatment of The Exorcist. Psycho and Alien gorge on facets of Freudian theory and the Kleinian concept of the archaic mother. Vampire movies can hint at everything from fears of contamination to the power of the id.

Games generally don't do this. There are titles that have delivered effective supernatural chills – the Project Zero series, Siren: Blood Curse, Alan Wake – which, by default, summon fears of death and the uncanny. Dead Space, meanwhile, made excellent use of darkness and scary audio effects to ramp up the tension. There may also sometimes be inadvertent moments of symbolic horror – with its vengeful ghost mother, F.E.A.R has an element of what cultural critic Barbara Creed referred to as the monstrous feminine. But there appear to be no established systems of exploring and conveying shared primal fears through games. Silent Hill is often labelled as psychological horror, because it deals more in surreal imagery than in straightforward shocks and monsters – but there's little sense of universality in the demons that stalk the series. In an article on survival horror for The Idler, Gavin Craig asserts that Silent Hill 2, in which the lead character is haunted by the death of his wife, seems to be built around Freudian notions of psychosexual guilt. Craig also sees the lead antagonist, Pyramid Head as a Jungian archetype – and there's certainly weight to that argument. But Pyramid Head is too obscure, too specific, to be generally scary in the same way as, say, HR Giger's Alien or Frankenstein's Monster, both of which are rife with metaphorical significance.

To me, it's not surprising that the most unsettling games haven't been horror games at all. Rockstar's Manhunt, with its utterly nihilistic premise and remorseless violence is a grimmer game than 100 Splatterhouses crammed into a tourture chamber together. Heavy Rain, meanwhile, is about neglect and remorse and parental duty, and manages to disturb through a series of psychologically challenging mini-games and motifs. And Bioshock, riddled with images of genetic horror and twisted folkloric tropes, is arguably more nightmarish than any Silent Hill title. Interestingly, both Heavy Rain and Bioshock were effectively overseen by auteurs – David Cage and Ken Levine respectively. The weird (though crucially meaningful and recognisable) concepts they were willing to explore may have been smoothed out in a less directorial development environment.

What Heavy Rain also proved was the effectiveness of setting a psychological thriller in a recognisable universe peopled by believable characters. Ethan and Madison are not demon slayers running around a mythological castle swirling gigantic swords at over-sized monsters, they're just regular people. Indeed, one of the singular creative crimes of the mainstream video game industry is its inability to engage with the real world. Of course, there's absolutely nothing wrong with escapist entertainment, but there should be an alternative, and the idea of horror is not being fully exploited until studios begin to consider the ample horrors our own world provides.

But then we probably shouldn't be looking toward mainstream developers for truly terrifying game experiences – just as we wouldn't look toward mainstream movies. The indie community, a place where small teams and lone coders are still free to explore singular horror visions, is making more interesting inroads. Check out the frequently disturbing works of Jonatan Soderstrom or surreal adventure game The Path by Belgian studio Tale of Tales. It could also be that the future of the true horror game is with digital download titles. The monochromatic Limbo by Playdead managed to conjure a true feeling of dread out of its sparse, shadowy landscapes.

These examples are diverse, and you'd have trouble effectively categorising some of them as 'horror'. But they have more to say about fear than games like Splatterhouse ever will.