Nonsense, Pathfinder and D&D (not 5e) do horror fine. I mean, obviously, if you just dump the monster in front of them and tell them it's a scary fight you're not going to get anywhere, but other games don't do that either. The horror comes in the build up, the discoveries they make along the way, and the feelings of helplessness they induce.
You can't fight a small town tradition that's just a little bit off, or a room full of humanoid bones that are unusually small. Combat has already finished when the party realises the monster they just defeated was only a pawn of something even more sinister. There's nothing to roll initiative against when the party is discussing what they've discovered so far and can't quite get the pieces to fit together.
Overwhelming personal danger from the monster itself is an incredibly small part of horror, and 5e couldn't balance a fight to save its life, but 4e and PF2e are extremely built for it. From a skill challenge as "combat" against an enemy that can't be beaten, to a PL+3 statblock and some hazards for a challenging fight with a high likelihood of killing players without causing a TPK, you can very much tune the difficulty of combat. Even PF1 and 3.x can do a good job at lower levels.
I'm a big proponent of using the right system for the job, but horror is such a broad, circumstances dependent genre that it's a lot more about using the right horror for the system. There's plenty of classic horror tropes that Ellen Ripley would shrug off, which is why she faces xenomorphs instead. A warhammer space marine wouldn't find a zombie apocalypse particularly inconvenient, but trudging through a chaos and xenos infested hulk is still pretty terrifying for them. All horror has to be customised to fit the context.
Nonsense, Pathfinder and D&D (not 5e) do horror fine. I mean, obviously, if you just dump the monster in front of them and tell them it's a scary fight you're not going to get anywhere, but other games don't do that either. The horror comes in the build up, the discoveries they make along the way, and the feelings of helplessness they induce.
You can't fight a small town tradition that's just a little bit off, or a room full of humanoid bones that are unusually small. Combat has already finished when the party realises the monster they just defeated was only a pawn of something even more sinister. There's nothing to roll initiative against when the party is discussing what they've discovered so far and can't quite get the pieces to fit together.
Overwhelming personal danger from the monster itself is an incredibly small part of horror, and 5e couldn't balance a fight to save its life, but 4e and PF2e are extremely built for it. From a skill challenge as "combat" against an enemy that can't be beaten, to a PL+3 statblock and some hazards for a challenging fight with a high likelihood of killing players without causing a TPK, you can very much tune the difficulty of combat. Even PF1 and 3.x can do a good job at lower levels.
I'm a big proponent of using the right system for the job, but horror is such a broad, circumstances dependent genre that it's a lot more about using the right horror for the system. There's plenty of classic horror tropes that Ellen Ripley would shrug off, which is why she faces xenomorphs instead. A warhammer space marine wouldn't find a zombie apocalypse particularly inconvenient, but trudging through a chaos and xenos infested hulk is still pretty terrifying for them. All horror has to be customised to fit the context.