Everything was scarier on the PS1. That's just a fact. The undulating textures, the motionless patchwork faces, the audio that sounded like it was coming through three layers of tin foil, all of it combined to create something truly dread-inducing in games like Alone in the Dark and Silent Hill. As games get closer to photorealism, they get closer to real life, and real life is tedious, not scary. You need something really uncanny to get the goosebumps going, and back in the late '90s, the PS1 did uncanny like nothing else.
The fact I was five years old at the time probably also had something to do with it.
