Well to be fair if your not familiar with CoC it's hard to really "get it", sitting in an unoccupied throne is a typical way to proceed in many adventures, and frankly even when in CoC it uses a lot of pulpesque trappings. The game has such a crazy high body count because it can be very hard to know exactly what the right way to proceed is in some cases, and I've actually seen groups paralyzed with indesician because everyone was concerned about doing anything.
For example in CoC it can sometime be tricky to decide who is going to read a book to figure out how to proceed, because most books come with SAN losses, sometimes quite high, and sometimes can even screw with things like your POW rating, and it gets worse if you need to cast spells from inside one of those books.
It can be a hard game to run because people trying to keep their characters alive and sane can be indesicive, but ones who really start to "get into it" will oftentimes effectively be Kamikazes when they realize death is inevitable and try for the most awesome deaths possible while moving the plot along.
You can easily move from extremes where nobody does anything, to ones where everyone sort of does anything and a lot of the foreboding goes out of it because nobody cares anymore.
It's awesome when players are horrified when someone's eyes are turned into ever bleeding sockets from reading a book and getting some really mind blowingly bad roles. But then a couple of sessions later whenever someone reads a book you start getting suggestions from the players about how their PC should bite it, and actually kind of hoping they will fail the roll...
Of course my problem might be that I wind up GMing too many horror games, and so people wind up getting kind of jaded to my style.
