Holly Green crams a decade of GDC talks and developer interviews into ten tightly packed horror design lessons that share a surprising throughline: the most effective horror technique is restraint. Mason Smith (FAITH) argues you must earn the player’s trust before you can betray it – calibrating safe spaces so their violation lands with maximum force. Frictional Games insists cutscenes are kryptonite for immersion; Ken Levine says scripting every reaction is futile and the scariest things are glimpsed, not shown. Wright Bagwell of Dead Space 2 notes that players’ imaginations are always more powerful than whatever you can render, meaning a smaller budget can actually be an advantage. The Chinese Room’s postmortem of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs champions environmental storytelling – a single potent image carries more weight than paragraphs of dialogue. And in a final twist that resists the listicle format itself, Dead Secret director Chris Pruett warns that horror game design lessons cannot be easily extracted and recombined: great games are holistic systems where mechanics, controls, and level design intertwine so tightly that separating strands risks losing what made them work.