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If only vanilla minecraft had a lanky creature who screams loud and attacks you when you stare at it.

I think one issue is that Minecraft is inherently less scary these days. The world just isn't as empty and unsettling. It's no longer this oppressive fog hanging over an eerie, barren landscape. You can see for miles and the world is far more diverse and explorable. Going underground, the caves are far too open to ever get snuck up on, you won't feel that cramped, claustrophobic sense of the classic twisting tunnels full of dark corners and dead ends. It's not an environment conducive to horror like the earlier versions.

The original cave dweller worked because it was avoidable. It appeared, walked away, and didn't overstay its welcome. The mods based on it, however, overstayed their welcome and never walked away.

How to make a good dweller mod:
1. Don’t throw everything at the player too early. Instead, build up the introduction to your creature.
2. Build suspense.
3. Don’t have the monster become a nuisance.
4. Be subtle.
5. Don’t have the monster become unavoidable.
6. Add details to your world that gradually indicate to you that something is wrong.
7. Play unfimilar audio cues every once in a while to catch the player off guard.
8. Be a bit deceitful about the features of your mod on the page. Just don’t spoil the mod!
9. Be creative.

The Cave Dweller being able to be killed pretty easily somehow makes it make more sense. It's an ambush predator, relying on taking targets by surprise instead of by raw endurance. If you wanted to "enhance" it, you'd probably want to play into that. Have it retreat after a certain time or if its' opening attack doesn't do much damage, because it realizes you're not easy prey. Then it comes back with a friend, or starts deliberately setting off sculk shriekers to summon a warden: something it knows can kill a well-armored player. It'd still die easily, but it would feel like a more dangerous presence the entire time it's around as opposed to only during combat.

Minecraft's horror excelled when it took advantage of the fear of the unknown. The ambient cave sounds can put anyone off guard, and a surprise hostile mob attack is equally unnerving. Horror mods are very hit or miss, as sometimes they take advantage of that fear of the unknown and other times it just throws horror tropes into places where they don't belong.

I think the simpler the Minecraft “horror” mod is, the scarier it is.. as goofy as the og model is, the more and more these mods look like they don’t belong in minecraft the more the atmosphere is completely broken and no longer scary.

this gave me a monster idea :
a "living world" monster, a monster that is the world itself
the world is normal at first, but in rare occasions you will sometimes hear rumbling and see tentacles on the distance that quickly retract once you look at it, and once you start mining you will find gaping wounds on the bedrock layer where the bedrock is broken, instead of the void its just a mass of flesh blocks, the more you dig down, the more weird and dangerous it gets.
if you dig long enough, you will find a giant bone sphere where the creature's brain is located, you can either kill it, or spare it.
if you spare it, nothing happens, but if you kill it..
your world starts to rot.
once you come back to the surface, animals turned into blobs of flesh, the grass turns into a darkish green color that makes gooey noises when you walk on it, the trees become soft and break easily making anything crafted with it have very low durability.
the only way to restore the world, is to make a "artificial brain" and put back in the creature
i feel like it would be more scary than those "in-the face" cave dweller mods, just imagine just mining and realizing that your world is a living being and you were living on its shell the entire time.
edit : added more to the concept

I think the main problem with it is that they tend to base these new mods too heavily on the Cave Dweller. The Cave Dweller was a genius concept for the time, but once it came out, everyone had to throw their hats into the ring. Dweller this, dweller that, night dweller, day dweller, skinwalker dweller, it's practically transformed into a parody

Cave Dweller actually has such a clever sound design! The footsteps are only heard whlie you're mining, as soon as you stop it stops too. Like it's sneaking up on you while you're less likely to hear it

The original dweller seemed the best to me. Being initially pretty tall, but then being able to crouch down into 2 block tall spaces, and drag itself through 1 block holes to get to the player seems the most frightening.

The second one going entirely prone to try to go through 2 block tall spaces really just made it seem janky.

I feel bad for Gargin, he literally just made something based off an interesting idea and then it went WAAAAY further than it was supposed to.

Me when the butt sniffer dweller starts making loud af noises and kills me with 2 hits:

It's very hard to make minecraft scary, because while playing you know you play horror mod. Hearing cave noises in vanilla minecraft feels supernatural, that's why they are terrifying.

I honestly quite like the first iteration of the cave dweller, because it seems to be the one that understands the most about what makes minecraft creepy.

It’s not just adding a le spooki tall monster to run at you screaming in a random location, it’s playing off of the already existing feature of the cave noises. I think it’s the one that gets the closest to what works with minecraft horror.

I think the thing that could really elevate the cave dweller is making it way more subtle. What if it wandered around breaking light sources or even quietly hunting and killing other mobs around its cave system, only leaving the loot behind as a sign that it’s there. Isolating you from everying, including the other hostile mobs in the game. Plunging the cave system into complete silence and darkness. By the time you notice just how close by it actually is, it would already be too late as it has trapped you entirely alone with it, in the dark, in it's territory.

I think the pay off needs some work and the model could be improved, but I don’t think the ‘better cave dweller’ approach of making it bigger really works, mainly due to it just making the problem regarding the clunky animations all the more noticeable.

I hate how everything spooky in Minecraft has to be a “dweller” like goddamn it’s not that hard to name something

Why Minecraft was scary sometimes was simply just the fear of the unknown combined with the endless isolation of the player so hearing or seeing something unusual for must a second like seeing a Herobrine screenshot would usually be enough to be terrifying, not knowing what’s going on but feeling like something is off
Daggz’s conclusion said it all
Subtly is key

classic minecraft was a horror game, literally went back and i was genuinely afraid of mining, and immediately remembered why herobrine was such a popular thing

I think the main problem is that it’s a lot easier for our minds to imagine something that we think is super scary with smaller hints to tell us what could be lurking around the corner.

And creating a defined version of that scary thing risks killing any built suspense  or imagined threat.