Dungeon Master Basics - The best way to Run a Horror Game
Few forms of RP are as fun and rewarding just as one excellently run horror game. You may be taking your players through a zombie-ridden post-apocalyptic wasteland or plumbing the depths of the Gothic nightmare, striving for atmospheric chills and creeping out your players is as worthy an effort as it can be hard to achieve. There is little electrify your players being a truly terrifying session, and absolutely nothing is more memorable than scaring their pants off. However, running this kind of game can be incredibly challenging: so what can you need to do in order to succeed?
Bloodborne
First, you have to distinguish between two fundamentally basic varieties of play. When it comes to a horror game, you'll be able to opt to either focus on terror or horror. Don't see the difference? It's simple: terror is what occurs when you achieve a heightened state of psychological fear, while horror emanates from revulsion and disgust. Wading by having a room that's hip deep in moving body parts would elicit horror: it's gross, it's unnatural, it's full of blood and flesh and very physical. Being haunted night after night by an unknown spirit would elicit terror: driving a car is that of the unknown.
There isn't any right or wrong when it comes to choosing your lifestyle, and you can switch with shod and non-shod if you are careful of the way you do it. Just remember how the basis of horror comes from realizing that we are mortal, which our bodies are just bags of flesh and blood that can be torn apart, knowning that there are monsters in this world that would delight in doing that. Think of movies including Hostel or Saw; these 'torture porn' movies are about how each character will die, and how gruesomely, not about whether will all survive.
First Impressions
The premise of a terror game comes from mankind's oldest fear, that is fear of the unknown. This game is infinitely harder to perform than a horror game, because the DM you must make an effort to build up the terror with mind games, descriptions and atmosphere, rather than by simply throwing blood at your players. The goal is to apply the player's imagination against them, to offer them enough gruesome clues so they can conjure up the worst possible scenario, and after that reel them within a sense of inevitability to the terrifying climax.
As you should pick a basic style to follow along with overall, there is no reason you simply can't switch from one to the other occasionally to further your requirements. A long, drawn out sport of psychological terror can descend into horror from the final scene as everything becomes physical, just like a game of physical horror can be made all the more terrifying by inserting long moments of dread and suspense. Everything you can't do is mix them up randomly; finely time consuming moments of terror is going to be undone by shambling corpses, just like hour's worth of hack and zombie slash could make it very difficult to transition in a moment of fine tuned terror. So pick your general mood, and then use each scene and scenario to help that very theme. Being clear sighted about your objective will help you immeasurably in accomplishing it!