whats up with these? I dont search for them nor have any interest in them. Even with my search-history on itch the main page when i enter itch is filled with horror games.
As far as I know, itch.io doesn't take into account what you search for and look at when displaying results, it's the same for everyone - and I applaud them for this. If they did otherwise, I'd just ignore my account here, and only ever use the site while logged out.
So it's not you, it's just a matter of... lots of people are making small horror games and putting them on twitch. No idea why, it's kinda been an ongoing thing on the site for a while now. It seems to mostly come in waves at least? Same with twine engine text games and visual novels, though at least there the reason is obvious: they are relatively easy to make compared to other sorts of games. Horror game or visual novel or whatever else, nothing wrong with making and posting these, depending on my mood maybe I'll even check them out at some point. The real question is: Why the hell are we STILL unable to filter these out!? We have been asking constantly for YEARS, it's like the single most requested thing for the site and yet nothing is ever done with it...
I wish Itchio would add better filtering systems, or improve the existing ones...
I'm also not fond of finding horror projects when looking for entirely unrelated contents. Simply being able to hide/block content creators' projects (or the content creators overall) from appearing in search results, like Steam does for ignored titles, should suffice in this case, I think.
Latest games, sort by popular? Well, I would assume it is exactly what it says on the tin. When there are many horror games, it just means that they are popular and numerous. There is the recommendation part for more personalized games to your taste and the most recent tab along with the global news feed for more random view of games.