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Published Oct 29, 2026, 6:01 AM EDT
Paulo Kawanishi is a Brazilian freelance writer and contributor on Polygon. He's been writings guides, features, and reviews since 2022 for publications like Eurogamer, Game Informer, Nintendo Life, PCGamesN, and Into the Spine. He's part of the guides team at Polygon, working on projects that cover from long explaners to quick tips on how to complete specific tasks in games. In addition, he also writes features, analysis, and reviews especially about JRPGs and games like Path of Exile 2. He holds a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics.
Makoto Shibata changed what photography is capable of
Image: Koei Tecmo via PolygonSign in to your Polygon.com account
Fatal Frame creator and director Makoto Shibata once said that the most frightening thing is people's imaginations, which are populated by monsters that we can't see. When designing the first installment of one of the 2000s' most iconic horror series, his desire was to create a game that would make players feel terrified by the mere idea of even grabbing the controller. But the way he got there was unconventional: by making players take photos of ghosts.
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As a kid who grew up with Resident Evil 3 Nemesis and Silent Hill as the epitome of horror games, I became fascinated and terrified by Fatal Frame. Released by Tecmo in 2001 in Japan for the PlayStation 2, the game was created by Shibata and Keisuki Kikuchi, who had worked together before on the Deception series. In Fatal Frame, we play as Miku Hinasaki, a young woman looking for her brother, who has disappeared in the haunted Himoru Mansion. To protect herself, she has only an old camera called Camera Obscura, which is capable of damaging and capturing spirits. While characters and settings change between titles, all games in the series follow a similar structure.
Image: Koei TecmoShibata's relationship with ghosts goes beyond simply creative curiosity. He claims to have had supernatural experiences since he was a kid. In a March 2023 interview with Xbox Wire, he explains that "to me, zombies and monsters aren’t scary because they’re not real, but spirits have been a frightening presence in my life since I was young. I wanted to bring some of my scariest sightings to the games I created, helping capture some of the moments that have kept me up at night, hoping to do the same to gamers around the world."
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Whether Shibata's experiences are true or not, his design philosophy is based on the assumption that if we fear what we can't see, he is going to force us to confront the source of our terror. The camera as a gameplay element does exactly that. When you activate it, the perspective shifts to first-person, and you're forced to aim the camera at the spine-chilling spirits. The damage dealt to an enemy depends on how long they remain within the camera frame as you charge the photo, which means that the game encourages you to stand there looking at the ghosts as long as possible in order to "kill" them faster.
Before Fatal Frame, I would never have considered that I could be afraid of taking pictures. After all, we only take photos of things we consider beautiful — or turn into something beautiful through photography. In the first paragraph of Susan Sontag's essay "The Heroism of Vision," she says: "Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty. Except for those situations in which the camera is used to document, or to mark social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something beautiful."
Although I think that the broader perspective of her statement is debatable, I agree that taking a pic of anything will inevitably constitute it as something beautiful, or imbued with some kind of beauty. After all, there are infinite varieties of beauty. Take the work of the famous photographer Sebastião Salgado's work as an example. While his pictures of Amazon's flora and fauna in his Genesis collection depict a natural kind of beauty, his pictures of the gold miners in Serra Pelada, a mining site in the Brazilian state of Pará, are beautifully sad portraits of the precarious conditions under which many Brazilians worked.
In the Fatal Frame games, photography works very differently: we discover fear through it. Every time you raise the camera to take a photo, it protects you from danger while simultaneously unveiling a terrible reality, one where actual ghosts exist. As we play the game and hear the sounds of the dead walking nearby, we use the camera's lens to give shape to the frightening presence that begins to occupy our minds — our imagination.
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