I think the B-Horror movie aesthetics were already dropped after CVI-III. Bloodlines may have the film reel opening, but it became more gothic atmospherically. Similarly, SCIV feels more like the stage of a gothic vampire novel instead of bad cinema slock. The GB titles never adhered to that concept in the first place.
I didn't strictly mean B-Horror, but horror cinema(particularly classic, or in the case of the early CVs, up to that point[80s-90s]) as a whole. I thought Bloodlines felt more like something you'd see at that time in horror(particularly Charles Band's Subspecies). The opening scene for SotN(the view of the castle) reminds me of something very Roger Corman-esque. The CV64 games gave me somewhat of a Hammer-feeling. In the end, any one that references the Boris Karloff Frankenstein Monster really is channeling classic horror cinema. CV used that look up to OoE(in the Minera Prison lab). The classics always had staying power and were HIGHLY influential on horror as a whole.
^
They'll say that it's the werstern manuals that matters. I think that this bullcrap of "taking itself seriously" was debunked so many times already, but people will always says otherwise.
A Japanese game will always have anime influences somewhere. I don't remember a big japanese series that didn't have anime influences.
I've said this before, I don't think having anime influences is bad, as long as it's GOOD anime(RoB is an great example, as is Bloodlines, which both have an anime style modeled after 80s/early 90s anime that offers great structure, detailing and shading). When it's "garden variety" fluff(which DoS and PoR seems to be more modeled after), that's when I have a problem.