We examine what makes the Fatal Frame games so terrifying, why they’re so important to the survival horror genre, and the series’ best scares. 

Zombies. Aliens. Hideous Pyramid-Headed Beasts. There are plenty of frightening monsters that fuel the survival horror games that give us so much joy. As much fun as it can be to mow down these threats, the Fatal Frame series (or Project Zero, as it’s known in Japan and Europe) chisels out a very unique place for itself in the genre due to how it approaches its horror. In Fatal Frame, a camera is your only weapon and you have to allow the attacking ghosts to get right up in your face. In fact, Fatal Frame actually encourages you to let your enemies get as close as possible before you snap the flash because you’ll get a higher score and deal more damage that way, yet it also helps intensify this terror to its breaking point. The games also inherently force tension in the way that you explore the rooms and slowly navigate with your camera, shifting over to the first-person perspective. It’s a brilliant game design that finds a way to increase the fear while it also doesn’t compromise gameplay.

The tone of Makoto Shibata and Keisuke Kikuchi’s Fatal Frame series is also more representative of Asian horror cinema than any other survival horror video game series that’s out there (it’s pretty fitting that the director of the Japanese live-action Fatal Frame film also directed a Ju-on sequel). So if that’s your jam, then these atmospheric titles are absolutely for you. The original game also loosely pulls from real events for the inspiration of its haunted story. The environments that fill the games are usually something like an abandoned village or gothic, dilapidated Japanese housing, which is arguably creepier than something ornate like Resident Evil’s Spencer Mansion. It feels more residential and homegrown, like this horror hits at a personal level. It’s the kind of experience where something like surround sound and a proper audio setup really go a long way and were priorities during development.

The Fatal Frame titles requires you to take pictures of lost spirits with your Camera Obscura in order to capture their past pain and help them move on in the process. These ghosts are scary, but the Fatal Frame games always feature an extremely disturbing backstory for these plagued spirits. They often involve sinister cults or other dark territory, which finds a way to make these scary visuals more upsetting and even feel grounded. This isn’t just an outbreak that infects without discrimination. These are people who have been targeted and murdered for terrible purposes. It shines a light on the darkness of humanity in a way that many other survival horror titles don’t experiment with to such great detail. This gives every encounter so much more impact and you almost feel for the vengeful spirits that try to kill you. A random enemy in Silent Hill or Resident Evil is just acting out their impulses and has no agenda, but the ghosts in Fatal Frame have clear vendettas. These are usually accompanied by cut scenes that play out with a certain abrupt harshness. They almost feel like snuff films in nature. They’re quick, effective, and feel like they exist to creep you out just as much as they’re there to convey story beats.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the Fatal Frame games is how their controls continue to refine themselves with each new release and generation of gaming. The Wii’s Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse ups the formula with the Wiimote, and there were even Wii ports of Fatal Frame II, which further intensified its gameplay, but it was still clunky in some respects. The WiiU’s use of its Gamepad for the camera in Fatal Frame: Maiden of the Black Water is also very brilliant and the best and more immersive application of the concept yet. It’s almost like what Takashi Shimizu intended with the Wii’s maligned Ju-on: The Grudge – Haunted House Simulator. Funnily enough, this camera/gamepad concept makes so much sense, it’s why people demanded a Pokemon Snap title on the console so much, but instead they got killer ghost photography instead.

There’s even a 3DS spinoff, Spirit Camera, that goes one step further and implements ARG aspects with the handheld’s camera and gyroscope to place you even further into the fear. A mobile game called Real Zero was also out for a few years, exclusively in Japan, that incorporated real-life environments and ARG effects where ghosts would be superimposed over the pictures that you take with your phone and clues to new ghost locations (or just creepy teases) would be texted to the player’s phone. It’s hard to think of any other survival horror titles that have been able to so effectively and appropriately evolve like that in a way where controls and fear increase together. Fatal Frame has tried to push the survival horror genre forward in many ways, but now let’s take a look at some of the series’ scariest moments.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly – The Falling Woman

Fatal Frame II’s Falling Woman spirit is upsetting for a number of reasons. Apparently, this woman took her life by leaping off the top floor, yet her spirit is now trapped in a loop where she perpetually re-lives her suicide. This results in a very startling moment where you encounter the spirit fall (and scream) down the stairs. Accordingly, the fight that follows is also rather disturbing because it appears that this fall has broken her legs and possibly her arms. This means that the Falling Woman just has to drag her contorted body and crawl towards you to attack.

Fatal Fame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse – Face-Cutting Ritual

Fatal Frame IV gets its share of criticism, but it takes place in a freaking Japanese mental institution and hospital! Five girls were kidnapped and used to perform a ritual and years later the surviving three return to figure out what exactly they were a part of. It’s a very disturbing premise, albeit kind of wonky in execution. The game sees the large threat of many people on Rougetsu Island who will “bloom” into monsters after their deaths. The face-cutting ceremony is done to prevent this unseemly fate. When signs of “budding” take place, these bodies are closely observed until they’ve completely passed. Then a shrine guard will remove the corpse’s face with a blade because without a face there can be no blooming. It’s one of the more disturbing rituals from out of the Fatal Frame series, even if it does get performed posthumously.

Fatal Frame III: The Tormented – The Crawling Woman/Fatal Frame V: Maiden of the Black Water – The Tall Woman

Fatal Frame III’s Kiriko Asanuma, more popularly known as the Crawling Woman spirit is definitely one of the more effective jump scares from the title. This is a ghost that capitalizes on what makes so many of the creepy girls from “J-horror” stand out so much. She just crawls at you at an alarming rate and looks extremely angry as she does this. Fatal Frame V’s Tall Woman (also known as “Eight Feet Tall”) spirit resonates in the same way. This spirit is just supremely upsetting with her body proportions, odd appearances, and disturbing demeanor. Hell, the visual of this ghost is so alarming that it’s even spurred its own creepypasta and become it’s own Japanese Slenderman. Both of these spirits are strong examples where less is more. These ghosts’ iconic features get to speak for themselves and then they don’t overstay their welcomes.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly – Woman in Box

So the developers have the game have fully admitted that the Woman in Box spirit is inspired by Sadako from the Ringu films, but even without that confirmation it’s pretty obvious. This long-haired spirit pries herself out of a small box and slowly moves towards you in exaggerated motions. It’s the ghost’s frightening appearance that’s the most effective thing about this enemy, but the fact that this woman perished with her newborn child and that there’s also a ghost baby in that box with her is extremely grim.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly – The Cutting Ritual

Kusabi suffers a particularly gruesome fate due to a sacrificial ritual in Fatal Frame II. The stipulations of the Cutting Ritual require the sacrifice to be tied up and restrained by a number of ropes, then repeatedly slashed and mutilated. The more damage that the sacrifice takes, the more significance this offering has to the Hellish Abyss. It’s a lot. Beyond the horrific ritual itself, its victim also becomes quite the intimidating spirit. Kusabi, the Folklorist, can kill players in a single attack and is ostensibly invincible. He’s a major pain.

Fatal Frame – The Blinding Ritual

The original Fatal Frame features some of the most disturbing cult rituals from the whole series and it doesn’t hold back in the slightest. These rituals involve a number of different masks, all of which look scary in their own right, but it’s the Blinding Mask that’s the darkest of the lot. The Blinding Ritual shows that a child gets selected to become the next Blind Maiden, a process that helps once a decade. This “honor” involves wearing a mask that’s fitted with spikes that’s meant to blind the wearer. It’s a traumatic sight and the way in which the Blind Maiden screams for her eyes is an extra upsetting touch.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly – The Broken Neck Woman

That’s’ right, the Fatal Frame franchise was playing around with a creepy Broken Neck Woman years before The Haunting of Hill House made this kind of thing such an infamous ghost scare. Fatal Frame II’s Broken Neck Woman is easily one of the most unsettling sights in the game and you only encounter her twice. Much like the Falling Woman, this is a woman who jumped to her death, but happened to land on her neck. This gives the spirit her haunting off-kilter aesthetic and it really sticks with you (as does the original Fatal Frame’s Broken Neck spirit).

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly –Akane and Azami Twin Doll

The Fatal Frame series as a whole gets a lot of mileage out of twins and dolls, but the Kiryu twins from Crimson Butterfly are one of the more depressing combinations of these ideas. The story behind these spirits involves Yoshitatsu Kiryu, an esteemed dollmaker, builds his daughter Akane all sorts of dolls to make her feel better over the loss of her sister, Azami, included a life-sized replica of her passed sister. Akane forms an unhealthy attachment with the Azami doll and then it doesn’t take long for this doll to get possessed by an evil spirit and operate on its own. The possessed doll makes Akane kill her father and then proceeds to take Akane’s soul, which is just devastating all around. They’re just a supremely alarming and terrifying duo to go up against.

Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly – Sae’s Introduction In The Great Hall

Fatal Frame II contains an extremely unsettling cut scene where you stumble upon a room full of mangled corpses and introduces one of the game’s most deranged villains, Sae Kurosawa, the very worst kind of clingy partner who just can’t take no for an answer. Sae makes an incredibly memorable first impression, a lot of which has to do with her psychotic laugh, which has since become iconic in the Fatal Frame community. The character’s dangerous, unstable nature makes her highly unpredictable. It feels like maybe she doesn’t even fully understand what she’s doing.

Fatal Frame III: The Tormented – Rei Kurosawa’s House

Fatal Frame III messes with its formula and introduces the concept of the survival horror segments taking place in a dreamscape of sorts. This beautifully leads to the game’s best and most frightening moment that manages to be so effective because it’s such a deviation in form. During this seemingly safe sequence set in Rei’s home you don’t have your Camera Obscura to defend yourself and you’re so used to only encountering ghosts in the dream world up until this point. You slowly feel this sanctuary get invaded and become dangerous and it comes as such a shock. This throws all the rules out the window and keeps you guessing as to when spirits might strike. Just the concept of dreams alone makes this game feel like more of a prison. You can’t exit the dangerous areas until the game lets you, whereas in the other titles you could at least leave the tense areas if they became too much.

Fatal Frame knows how to make its scares count and where the real trauma lies. It absolutely deserves an HD Trilogy on current consoles more than a lot of other stuff that’s seen re-releases. It’s a rare series where many people don’t actually finish the games because they’re such a stressful, tense experience. They deserve another shot. With Fatal Frame games coming out as recently as 2014, it’s very possible that new games could still be on the horizon, perhaps even making use of the Switch’s capabilities or VR tech. There will hopefully be plenty more opportunities for this disturbing series to traumatize gamers in the future.