Titles of Horror Games

My blogs are mainly all trying to answer the question what specifically it is that makes a horror game-, which I will hope to summarize my findings in my final post. This guess is about the titles of horror games. Maybe a reason some games are put into the horror category is because of their title. While trying to find our blog, I ran across another, older blog called “OMG: Horror” which talked about all of the horror games this blogger was excited about coming out. Just reading through the titles, I was shocked at the level of violence portrayed right off the bat. Titles like “Sadness”, “Witches”, “Alone in the Dark”, “Zombie Massacre”, “Siren: Blood Curse”, “Dead Space”, “Operation Darkness”, “Dead Rising”, “Left 4 Dead”, etc.

So does the anticipation of a game being scary make it more frightening? Were game makers correct in putting gruesome images on the cover alongside a scary title? The amount of blood and gore has to contribute in some amount to whether or not a game is classified as “horror,” but how much? I mean, in every game there is killing. Even in Super Mario, Mario has to hop on the little mushroom looking things that shuffle by so that they don’t hurt Mario. But in horror games, you see every little last detail of the slaying. Blood flies everywhere, your victims scream in pain, you see it all. Is that an aspect that makes it horrifying?