Hideo Kojima Explains Why He's Done Making Horror Games

Silent Hills, the game Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima worked on with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro before its cancellation, looked pretty scary. His current project is Death Stranding, which is not a horror game. But would Kojima ever consider making another horror game someday?

It doesn't sound like it. He told IGN that there is a very practical reason for why he doesn't want to. "I get scared very easily," he explained. "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," he added. "That's the reason why I don't want to make a horror game."

P.T./Silent Hills surely proved that Kojima has the chops to scare us. He even joked before the game's cancellation that a version of the game would come with a new set of pants because the game was going to be so scary it would make you "sh** your pants."

In the IGN interview, Kojima said he thinks the most effective way to scare people is to show them something that is "slightly out of the ordinary."

"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," Kojima said, adding that the element of the "unknown" can also be very scary.

Kojima spoke about his new game, Death Stranding, during a presentation recently. He confirmed the game is coming to PS4, not PS5; he also discussed the possibility of a sequel and a lot more.