A Desperate Hunger for Snow
Hmmmm...see, I definitely perked at the VVitch description, but even slightly pulpy action sounds a bit too cartoon for what I'm after - I badly want to feel like I'm in a wood and can smell the snow and hear the wolves outside some warm place I've scraped for myself and am about as likely to die of horrible European diseases/dysentry as to go mad, eat my brother/friend/child and turn wendigo.
I don't know how/that freeform horror would work exactly, either: as far as I can picture it, it'd end up as just a flavour to the action-heroism - sort of like a different hat and plastic fangs on the Bad Guys that the latter genre tends to have. In that vein, treating cosmic horror as squid suits for boss fights, or Lovecraftian entities as actually evil (rather than just incompatable with human sanity/safe existence like bleach is incompatible with the human digestive system) makes me very sad, so I'd rather have something more folklore-grounded like "idiot colonists brought an Old Country vampire over somehow and now they have an exponential Problem and the locals have no idea what's going on, cue dire-straits teamup" than...non-cosmic horror goofy spooks (bless 'em) painted up like tentacles, if you see what I mean. I'd definitely want something deep enough not to be lazily offensive the way dear Indy is when it comes to non-European cultures.
I think actual horror does need a system - even one as utterly pass/fail basic as Dread - because there truly needs to be an element of pure luck. If a character lives for a predictable set of reasons that're the same every time, or dies because the player wasn't up to writing a clear enough narrative argument for survival that day, the tension would press higher OOC than IC, and that wouldn't let me immerse/unwind enough to fully play.
In short: listening, but dubious as to whether we want near enough the same things to fit in one game to mutual satisfaction. Either way, thanks for the response, at any rate.