Human Brain's reaction to Scary Stuff

[Froge]

I think depending on the person's personality, combined with human nature, leads to different fears. For me, I actually fear creatures with many legs like centipedes more than spiders. My personality is that many-legged insects are harmful, even though they usually aren't.

THIS. I don't fear spiders much at all; unless they're huge or very poisonous (lolAustralia) I actually find them kind of cute. But anything > 10 legs is just fucking disgusting. Centipedes move in such mesmerizing ways and twist and twirl around like fucked up bastards.

Darkness is a major contribution to horror media because of the simple fact that our retinal system cannot detect things as well in darkness. If Amnesia: The Dark Descent was never dark, it would not have the same effect that it did when we played it because we didn't know what was in the dark. We wanted to stay out of the darkness, so the lantern was used. This fear of the dark ties in perfectly with the sanity system. You can be terrified of the darkness and hear hallucinations or you can use the lantern constantly for light but be scared even more when the lights went out.

I would say that darkness actually created the greatest amount of immersion in Amnesia. Because there's no constant light source (unless you're a lamp oil whore) the player is constantly being forced to "see" through the darkness, thereby immersing themselves very deeply into the environment. It actually makes you scared of dying even though there's zero penalty for it.