Requimortis
The horror element isn't gone, we're just desensitized to that particular genre.
That's actually a really good point. The thing about early resident evils is that they really defined the concept of survival horror... at the time. While not the first horror games, they were some of the first majorly successful entries along with other early series like silent hill.
But things get old. People get desensitized. Zombies stop being scary. And the flaws of the older games become glaring as the series gets dry and archaic.
Resident Evil 4 entered the scene to jump start Resident Evil (and the genre) and pretty much is one of the most (if not the most) well received Resident Evil games ever. Many other survival Horror games also went more along the action route and now the question "What is survival horror?" is something that gets a lot of gamers butthurt.
It's important that we voice our complaints and sing our praise, but lets not forget that we now have an extremely high standard of what's scary and also remember that a game being fun is what is most important... not the amount of zombies crashing through windows.