It depends on the story, and sadly the horror genre is disproportionately filled with lackluster storytelling across all media. It's no coincidence for example that most young and inexperienced filmmakers make a horror short film when they decide to make their first short film. Likewise, the indie game scene is overrepresented by horror games and most are pretty bad. Literature is a bit different since it's more difficult to get published, but if you look at famous writers such as Stephen King they are more than capable of writing excellent horror novellas of long length. "It" is his longest horror novella and is often considered some of his best work. And in his short story compliation "The Skeleton Crew" which consists of over 20 stories, the longest one "The Mist" is considered the best.
The Evil Within 2 might be better paced (i.o.w. more linear) than it's predecessor, but by doing so it sacrificed almost everything that made the first game stand out as a psychological horror masterpiece. The best part about the first one was that you never knew what was going to happen, what was real and what was a dream, or when the nightmare was going to end. The game is absolutely bonkers and has some of the craziest varieties in levels, bosses, and gameplay that I've ever seen. The second game is a quicker and less complicated experience that kept you stranded in the same fixed location. And oh boy do I even need to mention how much the story sucks in TEW2.
Anyway, I never understand the need to rush through horror games unless you're doing a speedrun. You're talking about how it's impossible to go through this and that under 4 hours, so what? When I play a horror game I do it for the experience, and I like to completely immerse myself into its story, world and atmosphere. The best SH games are the ones where you can stay in a room longer than 4 seconds to pick up a key item, simply because you want to admire the atmosphere, sound design, etc just a biiit longer.
And lastly, RE4 is more of an action game than a horror game anyway, so.
I've read most of King's novel and I personally thought "It" was far from his best work, especially if you're looking for a horror novel. "Pet Sematary" is probably one of his finest, and it's one of his shortest. Also, King ain't the best example of a horror author in my book: he's the one who got the best PRs, but there are more interesting writers. Brian Keene is the first one I can think of: in his novella "Castaways" (which is 200 pages long, but it uses a very large font and lots of empty spaces - it could probably be shrunk to 50 pages), he managed to do what Brian Laymon failed to achieve with his four "Beast House" novels. King's real strength is that he writes very well, as demonstrated by his short story "It Grow On You" which is just the story of an old house that makes you believe is going to take a scary turn but it never does (you could probably read King's groceries list and it would still be a good read). Anyway, as a long-time reader of horror novels, I am not afraid to say most of them (if not all of them) have the same problem: they lack intensity, as the actual amount of horror content is usually diluted in hundreds of pages about the characters' own businesses. As for the short movies, the problem is that a lot of filmmakers (or aspiring ones) think that horror is easy. Hell, I've seen my share of short horror movies made by people who didn't even like horror (and it showed), they just did them because it's a genre that lends itself very well to stuff like final twists, which is what most short movies aim to have in order to appear smart.
Quite frankly, I was never under the impression The Evil Within was "psychological horror" in the true sense - it was just weird at first because you kept hopping from location to location, but, save for a few parts (like the beginning, where you have to sneak past the chainsaw guy), it was more or less a darker version of RE4 (and I can only wish RE4 had been like The Evil Within - at least it would've been a horror game). In all honesty, I don't think I have ever really played a psychological horror game: "psychological horror" per se is a rare currency even in movies. I can only think of a few who can really claim to be like that: "Jacob's Ladder" is the first one that springs to mind. But that's a movie that really wants to mess up with you. Most of the so-called "psychological horror movies" are just a string of jump scares or try to build up the tension by racking up the subwoofer channel.
I hate speedruns. My point about a good SH game being beatable in 4 hours relates to the fact that they are all essentially short games, it just takes you quite some time to figure everything out: but, once you do (after several playthroughs), you can go through them quite fast. It's quality over quantity: the classic RE games just had the right amount of content. While I love Code: Veronica (favorite entry along with RE2), a lot of people to this day complain about its length, which I think was intentionally increased over the previous games because a lot of critics kept pointing out that they were short: I have no problem with C:V, but I think that it sort of demonstrates that survival horror mechanics are hardly applicable on something that doesn't take a few hours to finish in theory.
As an addendum, I had a few encounters with game developers: to them, a game like RE3 is a 1 hour and 1\2 game, because that's the minimum amount of time it takes to finish it and, if you're going to try and make a game like that, in the presentation papers you have to indicate that kind of running time, not the amount of time you hope the average player is going to take to get to the end.
