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Curious what people are doing in their games to inspire horror or terror, not influenced by Lovecraft. What are you doing effectively that doesn't involve slimy, stinking otherness, horrifying orifices, etc? It can feel at times as if everything meant to be scary is derivative of HPL/CoC. His influence is so pervasive and, uh, tentacular.
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If you can get the original translations from the Brothers Grimm, you will find out that the fae can be truly terrifying.
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Umm, theres a lot more Gothic horror (which is Poe) than there is Cosmic horror (Lovecraft) in RPGs, even Pathfinder. Zombies, vampires, flesh golems, ghosts, gargoyles, etc are pretty numerous, and there are more regions/settings that have a Gothic horror theme.
It's just that recently Pathfinder has deviated from the norm in doing a bit more Lovecraftian horror than is normal, but still overall there's more Gothic horror.
The problem with Gothic horror is it isn't really that scary anymore, so we don't always recognise the horror when we see it (The Simpson's famously joke about this when they read Poe's The Raven). Gothic horror is so saturated in the media and is very reliant on fears and psychology that aren't as relevant anymore - everyone knows that ghosts don't exist, and there aren't as many physical threats lurking in the darkness of night as there where.
Zombies have become something that people fantasize about existing because as a concept they have become fun wish fulfillment for people who want licence to shoot and murder people without consequences or any moral problems, and vampires have mostly stuck around in media because they can be used to explore social issues (notably thimgs like the AIDs crisis, or more recently racism in the case of the True Blood HBO series).
Cosmic horror is different because it relies on fears that remain relevant - darkness has become less scary, but the unknown (which is one of the underlying things that made darkness scary) will always be scary because we will never conquer all of the unknown. Body horror and mutation are still things that are threatening, as are secret cults (which are arguably more real in the modern age than they where in Lovecraft's time).
That's not to say that Gothic horror can't be scary, you just have to do a lot more work to make it scary. Zombies can be made scary if you really play up how human they once where (something most media fails to do except in the occasional "oh no my friend just turned into a zombie" scene) - bonus points if you make them be zombies of NPCs the players are really invested in (I had a GM who had us return to the town that was our main base of operations to find that half the town's population had been killed and turned into zombies). You also need to make fighting zombies exhausting and feel futile. There has to be enough and they just keep coming - an individual zombie just isn't a threat to an adventurer - the adventurer should be faced with numberless hordes that wear them down until their sword arm becomes weary and they run out of spells (which is hard to pull of).
Curse of Strahd is probably the best use of a vampire (and Gothic horror in general) I have seen in an RPG - they make Strahd compelling by making him a very complicated and tragic figure who frequently interacts with the party, and by making the campaign setting be a place heavily influenced by and connected to him that has a ton of atmosphere - vampires aren't really scary just because of what powers they have, rather it's that they are immortal 1000 year old psychopaths presenting a twisted veneer of culture over their monstrousness. They are intelligent schemers with obsessions that they have been pursuing for hundreds of years who behind all of the courtesy and culture are utterly amoral.
Anyway, this is getting long - the TLDR is you have to work pretty hard to make Gothic horror (the main alternative to Lovecraft's cosmic horror) actually scary, and to do it you have to work really hard on the atmosphere and look at what actually makes the various Gothic horror monsters work rather than just throwing them into an encounter and call it a day.
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I regularly run horror RPGs, and only rarely go with Lovecraftian/cosmic horror.
One big caveat is the game system: Heroic RPGs where the PCs have a lot of power are not particularly suited to tell horror tales. So that means Pathfinder or D&D are not good system choices to run a horror game.
I'm fond of supernatural horror, where the terrors are strange and spooky. Do things where the characters can't fully trust their own senses. Introduce weird dream-logic, opponents that are insubstantial, and supernatural effects that the characters cannot control.
The best horror RPGs incorporate game mechanics that heighten the sense of danger, despair, or dread.
Some excellent RPGs that really get horror right include...
Dread (Epidiah Rovochol). This game uses a Jenga tower as its risk resolution system: If you pull from the tower and it falls, your character dies. This mechanic really ratchets up the tension as the game progresses.
Ten Candles (Stephen Dewey). This is a tragic horror game where the characters are fighting against darkness, and the game mechanics enforce that literally. You play this game in a dark room by the light of ten actual candles. As play progresses, failure on the dice means you snuff out one of the candles, which reduces the number of dice in your pool, leading to a greater chance of failure. This is one of those games where the players know going into it that their character will not survive... but the characters don't know that they're doomed.
Quietus (Oli Jeffrey) This is a no-prep one-shot melancholy horror game intended to emulate stories like The Strangers, The Babadook or the series The Haunting of Hill House. It uses a stripped-down version of the "Forged in the Dark" dice pool mechanic.
Bluebeard's Bride (Whitney "Strix" Beltrán, Sarah Doom, and Marissa Kelly) In this RPG, the players all control a single character, "The Bride," with each player running one aspect of her personality. The game re-tells the folktale of Bluebeard from the perspective of his latest bride, as she explores her new husband's haunted mansion and encounters the ghosts of her predecessors. I have found this game to be legitimately frightening.
Trophy Dark (Jesse Ross) This game is a deconstruction of a traditional fantasy RPG wilderness adventure, in which a group of treasure-hunters seek to claim fortunes from an enchanted forest that does not want them there. It uses a fantastic press-your-luck dice mechanic that offers great rewards... at greater risk. Will the forest claim a trophy of you? (Almost certainly.)
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I'll also note that I've done some game design for Trophy Dark, and I am very close to publishing a scenario for the game. It's called "Isle of Water and Blood."
A caveat of that scenario vis-a-vis the subject of this thread... This scenario does involve cosmic horror, sort of. It's an adaptation of an unpublished scenario I wrote for Call of Cthulhu back in the '90s.
The scenario is about a small group of early 20th-century dilettante occultists who travel to a tiny island in the North Atlantic to perform a mystical ritual that they don't truly understand. While the entity they're going to contact could be Lovecraftian, you could also play it as demonic. The real horror of the game comes from the sense of isolation and the desperation and hubris of player characters that lead them to make terrible choices.
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There is a lot of Science Fiction horror.
Both the displacer beast and beholder are based on short stories.
Hasbro owes some people some money.
To be fair to Lovecraft, not all of his horror stories involve tentacled monstrosities. His earlier works in particular are much more conventional horror: witches, ghouls, vampires, Gothic atavism, prophetic nightmares, etc.
I once ran a Cthulhu game using GURPS, about half of which took place in the Dreamlands and half in the waking world (modern-day Boston, where our group all lived at the time). The most memorable and frightening scenes I managed to pull off used small details to build up the horror, such as in this session:
Two PCs were waiting for a subway train downtown, when they saw some rats (normally a banally mundane sight in the T) working together to pull an old book along the tracks. As the PCs continued watching the rats, they were unnerved by the rodents' single-mindedness about moving this book, and the almost human gestures of the one that seemed to be directing them. One of them got up the courage to jump down and grab the book, which turned out to be an old tome of magical lore.
The better linguist of the two read enough of the book to translate a spell, which was to supposed to summon a ghoul. Being far too curious for her own good, she made preparations to cast the spell in a local graveyard. She had just enough sense to bring along her friend and a video camera. The ritual was surprisingly taxing, and she fell unconscious just as she completed it. Her friend carried her away, terrified that something would come hunting them before they got home.
After the caster PC recovered, they went back in the light of morning to check out their ritual site, and found the ground disturbed by claw marks, and the camera mauled by the same. They were able to recover some grainy video of a shadowy, hunched form that arrived at the site not long after they left, then sniffed around until it found and attacked the camera.
No tentacles, no oozing ichor, not even any of the gates to other worlds that showed up in other parts of that campaign. Just small bits of weirdness building up to more and more disturbing implications.
In fact, I did such a good job at portraying the rats' uncanniness in that opening bit that the players (my wife, and a friend who also worked downtown) actually started avoiding that T station as much as possible IRL. They will occasionally still bring up that session, which always earns an smug grin and evil chuckle from me!
I like pre lovecraftian horror ( so William hope Hodgson & M R James). There is the odd tentacle but isnt Alien horrors.
Plus Victorian settings where the 'horror' is the squalor, despair and misery.
So The Jack Hack RPG for example
That is one thing that is so great about the Horror Adventures book. It covers a lot of different topics and goes into detail about how to achieve that.
For me, my favorite thing is surreal and abstract horror. Things strange, off-putting, and unpredictable that keep the players off balance. While there is definitely some Lovecraft there, I think the stronger influences would be Junji Ito and David Lynch.