Quite true (although the castle portion of 4 was a bit creepy), but I have to say that I've never found any of the games all that scary to begin with.  The closest moments come in REmake, because of the great use of lighting and the muted soundtrack, but that goes away rather quickly too.

RE4 beat the game 6x. The others I have beaten a few but not to the exent of 4. I did the GCN 2x, PS2 1x and Wii 3x did everything in the Wii

I think there was more to it than that,in the origional resident evils you there was much more tension, the ammo was low and you had to find it, walking into a room with the camera angle just showing you and the door , yet you can here shuffeling off feet and zombie groans, and in the orgional resident evils you had a map and an area to roam, you could go anywhere, where as with resi 4-5 you did it in chapters and it wasnt just free to roam.

also the monsters, they just comepletely change in 4-5 in resi5, the monsters where just ridiculous sized for stupid actions scenes ,and it wasnt scary at all because of the weapons given to you (massive machine guns on a ship) , where as in the orgional resident evils "big enemies" at least resembled humans  (tyrants, nemisis etc)  and the situations you were put in to fight them were scary, closed spaced corridors

The re-make of the Resident Evil game on the Gamecube was the best in my opinion, it was the most frightening game I've ever played.

I didn't actually think much of Resident Evil 4, I thought it was good but nowhere near as good as its predecessors.

Also Resident Evil 5 was too easy, so that wasn't my fave.

Oh and I also used to have the Jap version of Resi 1 (Biohazard in Japan) which made it all the more frightening as I didn't know what was going on :P