Sure, there’s nothing scary about a jacket draped over a chair, apart from potentially your fashion sense, but when your brain is drowning in darkness and deprived of visual information, that chair is a threat. We’ve all been there, seemingly safe within the confines of our bed before opening our eyes to a weird entity in the corner of the room. While many might simply interpret Dead Space’s gaggle of grotesque hostiles to be mere alien zombies, the true nature of the Necromorph is obscured by its disconcerting disposition, comprising of incomprehensible body horror and a fear of the unknown. The 2008 survival horror game Dead Space may draw influence from various other space-fueled fright-fests, but it also gave birth to one of the most horrifying creatures to inhabit the stars above, in the form of the Necromorph.

There is, however, one guaranteed method of unnerving even the most hardened terror enthusiasts – by presenting them with a threat that they can’t quite figure out. From the guts and gore of splatter cinema to eerie tellings of the paranormal, there’s plenty of ways to harvest the screams of fear-loving fans. Horror comes in many guises and forms, with many takes on the genre feeding off of our own personal fears and aversions.

Dead space brethren moon music