Was reading a CS Lewis essay and found something relevant to our interests:
Different kinds of danger strike different chords from the imagination. Even in real life different kinds of danger produce different kinds of fear. There may come a point at which fear is so great that such distinctions vanish, but that is another matter. There is a fear which is twin sister to awe, such as a man in war-time feels when he first comes within sound of the guns; there is a fear which is twin sister to disgust, such as a man feels on finding a snake or scorpion in his bedroom. There are taut, quivering fears (for one split second hardly distinguishable from a kind of pleasurable thrill) that a man may feel on a dangerous horse or a dangerous sea; and again, dead, squashed, flattened, numbing fears, as when we think we have cancer or cholera. There are also fears which are not of danger at all: like the fear of some large and hideous, though innocuous, insect or the fear of a ghost. All this, even in real life. But in imagination, where the fear does not rise to abject terror and is not discharged in action, the qualitative difference is much stronger.
* CS Lewis, "On Stories"
The essay gives giants and pirates as examples of types of danger whose fictional effect is qualitatively different from other sources of equally bad danger. He also talks about "the enormous difference between being shut out and being shut in", citing a scene in First Men in the Moon where a character is almost shut out on the Moon during the night.
'Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer was the Eternal...the infinite and final Night of space.' That is the idea which has kept you enthralled. But if we were concerned only with the question whether Mr Bedford will live or freeze, that idea is quite beside the purpose. You can die of cold between Russian Poland and new Poland, just as well as by going to the Moon, and the pain will be equal. For the purpose of killing Mr Bedford ' the infinite and final Night of space' is almost entirely otiose: what is by cosmic standards an infinitesimal change of temperature is sufficient to kill a man and absolute zero can do no more. That airless outer darkness is important not for what it can do to Bedford but for what it does to us: to trouble us with Pascal's old fear of those eternal silences which have gnawed at so much religious faith and shattered so many humanistic hopes: to evoke with them and thorough them all our racial and childish memories of exclusion and desolation: to present, in fact, as an intuition one permanent aspect of human experience.
I think both these quotes, especially the first one, would stand being read by Johnathan Simms with TMA sound design pretty well.
