In a recent interview at RTX Sydney, Hideo Kojima spoke about horror games, and why he doesn't particularly want to return to that genre for the near future.
"I get scared very easily," he revealed. "Actually, this is true of Alfred Hitchcock as well as Steven Spielberg. Because they scare easily, because I scare easily, it's actually easy for us to make something that is scary, because we understand what is scary."
"But while in that process, we're constantly imagining, like, terrifying situations so it ends up giving me bad dreams. That's the reason why I don't want to make a horror game."
"I think the most effective way to scare someone is to show them something that's slightly out of the ordinary," said Kojima. "Slightly off, but at first glance, they don't know what it is about it that is unusual. When you do something like this, it confuses the mind, and that becomes unnerving for the person who sees it."
"Also, the unknown. When there's no information available for something, it's more frightening. An example would be a bungee jump. If you've done it more than one time, it's never as scary as the first time. Something that no one has any preconceptions about is the scariest thing."
"A good example of that is the original Alien. Everyone knows the design now, the famous design by H.R. Giger, but in the original movie, you don't see it for most of the movie. You just see, like, quick cuts and little pieces, so you don't know the shape. You don't know the exact size. Until you see it at the end, and it's like "oh, it's shaped like a person. Somebody is wearing, like, an outfit, like a mascot." So it's not scary at that point, but until that point, because it's this unknown entity. It's very scary."
Do you think this is the reason P.T. was so scary?