Fatal Frame director talks about all the ghosts he's seen: 'spirits have been a frightening presence in my life since I was young'

pcgamer.com:

Fatal Frame series creator Makoto Shibata has been working on the spooky horror games since 2001 and, to coincide with the re-release of Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse has written an extraordinary blogpost on Xbox Wire(opens in new tab). It's all about how the ghosts and spirits in the games, and specific examples from this one, are «actually inspired by spirits that I've seen (and even touched!) in real life.»

Oh we're barely getting started. «Zombies and monsters aren't scary because they're not real,» explains Shibata, «but spirits have been a frightening presence in my life since I was young.» Obviously believe what you want to believe and all that, but I do find it amusing Shibata dismisses certain kind of horror creatures as not real before talking about spirits like we bump into them on the regular.

Shibata talks about how, within the Japanese games industry, developers will often perform a purification ceremony when beginning work on a horror title. Well, developers who are scaredy-cats do. Shibata thought it «better to let the spirits emerge, so we usually don’t do the purification ceremony for games in this series.» He credits this decision with various phenomena the team has come across while developing the series, «like the time we were recording sound and a mysterious voice was actually recorded in the background. We tried to remove it from the recording, but eventually gave up because no matter what we did, the voice kept coming back onto the recording, so we actually left it in the game!»

You can almost feel the excitement. By the end of this blogpost I loved Shibata, and you will too. Writing specifically about Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, Shibata talks about how the game's concept was