A character doesn’t have to be scare, the environment it is in will determine if the character is scary or not.
Take a clown for example, you can make it happy by placing it in a pleasant environment such as a party. But when you take that same clown and put it in an abandoned hospital which you’re stuck in, then it will have a whole different context. Not because the clown is scary, but because you made the player believe that it is scary.
Find out what things scare people and attach that to the image of your character. Give people a reason to be scared of it, instead of making the character visually scary. Look up level-design principles, how certain groups of people are being raised to give the proper scare to the right audience, what is embedded as scary in a certain culture? And why would you be scared of something if you don’t know it?
In a nutshell: Find a theme, search for the thrill or horror in that theme and design everything so that it complements your design, level design wise and game design wise.
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