Defining horror is very difficult. To me, it's the intrusion of the alien and malevolent upon the familiar and safe.
Example setup: You're walking through your house at night, maybe to get a drink of water from the kitchen, when you notice something out of the corner of your eye. You look, and there's nothing there, but you're sure there was something, and you're sure it saw you, and most of all you're sure it did not
belong there.
That opinion sometimes made playing CoC difficult. Some of the adventures would truly creep me out. The ones that wisked my character off to the Dreamlands, however, just bored me. In a place where everything was alien and strange, there was no horror.
The fact that my character (who I believe may have been the longest-lived Cthulhu character in the history of the game) suffered from Panzaism (was unable to believe in the supernatural) and thus required me to come up with a rational explanation for everything he saw was another reason I hated the Dreamlands so. Writing off a shantak seen at night as a big bat is one thing, writing off a menagerie of Dreamlands critters is something else entirely.
