Zombies, gore and creepy kids - why we can't stop playing horror games

Horror games are having a moment. Resident Evil 9 has sold 14 million copies. The Silent Hill revival has been both a critical and commercial success. Independent horror titles are finding audiences that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. And the question that cultural critics keep asking is: why do we keep volunteering to be terrified?

The answer, according to psychologists who study the appeal of horror, is that games offer something that films and books cannot: agency. In a horror film, you watch the character open the door. In a horror game, you are the one who has to press the button. That difference transforms fear from a passive experience into an active one, and the satisfaction of surviving a game's horrors is proportionate to the terror that preceded it.

The current wave of horror games is also notable for its thematic ambition. The genre has moved beyond the simple jump-scare mechanics of its early years to explore grief, trauma, mental illness and the horror of systems rather than monsters. Games like Signalis, which uses the visual language of early PlayStation horror to tell a story about identity and memory, and Soma, which poses genuinely unsettling questions about consciousness, have expanded the definition of what horror games can be.

The accessibility of game development tools has also democratised the genre. Independent developers can now create horror experiences that are visually and technically sophisticated on modest budgets, and the result has been an explosion of creativity that has produced some of the most interesting games of the past decade.

The fundamental appeal, however, remains what it has always been. Horror games offer a controlled encounter with fear, a safe way to experience the adrenaline and the relief of survival. In a world that often feels genuinely frightening, the contained fear of a horror game is, paradoxically, a comfort.