Fatal Frame 3: The Tormented launches today on PSN, director discusses horror

Fatal Frame 3: The Tormented, the third title in Tecmo's survival horror franchise, is now available on PlayStation Network as a PlayStation 2 Classic, with series director Makoto Shibata discussing the game's origins on the PlayStation Blog.

According to Shibata, the first Fatal Frame used the Japanese horror technique leveraging the players own imagination to create a sense of fear, while second achieved this through storytelling. The third, Shibata wrote, used "fear lurking within the everyday" as the theme, noting that the scary scenes in horror movies are often in the bedroom or bathroom.

"Yet, leaving it at 'scary things in realistic places' would lack beauty, which is essential for any horror game. We needed more," he wrote. "What I came up with was this: an old Japanese house within a dream, a house in the real world, and a player that travels between the two.

"In the Japanese house surrounded by thickly falling snow are the remnants of a mysterious ceremony, and the spirit of a girl covered with painful-looking tattoos can be found wandering around," he continued. "Interacting with her causes the dream world to corrupt the real world."

Shibata said that he looked at his own dreams, nightmares and supernatural experiences for inspiration. For example, he shared experiences of recurring nightmares about a Japanese-style house, dreaming about attending his own funeral and scary antics he used to get up to as a child.

Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly launched on the PlayStation Network on May 7. Shibata also shared the origins of Fatal Frame 2 on the PlayStation Blog ahead of the game's release on the platform.