Horror series and games have a lot of the same tools as other kinds of horror story - monsters, risk of death, creaking doors, that kind of thing - but they generally can't do the total downer wipeout ending where the heroes' struggles are for nought and the evil wins outright. I could do a story about an evil mirror in my current World of Darkness series but I couldn't do Oculus. That's one scary thing you can't generally do if the characters have to come back next week.
TV shows often get around this by having sympathetic recurring characters killed off instead of the leads, but that can be overdone, and while it can give a feeling of "no-one is safe" it doesn't work if some of the characters obviously are. See The Walking Dead for lots and lots of examples. Or basically any female character in Supernatural. :P
One trick in gaming is to do a one-shot about an unbeatable horror, with one-shot PCs and maybe a system like Dread that encourages awful things happening to them... and then introduce it in the regular game. Mwahahahaaa...
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