I think it's just part of the game brief, the camera is treated almost as an obstacle from the outset.
There's a couple of benefits of locking the camera down like in SH, especially considering that it was running on quite cruddy hardware (PS1), and all it was competing with was a pre-rendered engine in the form of RE. So you had RE with it's strict, fixed cameras, then SH in full 3D, albeit with restricted camera angles. I mentioned before somewhere about how third person cameras can cover a multitude of sins. For instance, if your camera is locked at one position, then you don't have to show what that camera can't see. If the camera is locked behind the player, even just when they are doing something, then you can get away with blue murder
.
It was Dr.Who that was being mentioned and I used the example of the Doctor typing frantically. Well if you imagine a character typing frantically, that's a very difficult thing in full 3D, as the fingers would actually need to type something quite accurately to get the effect. But in 3rd person mode, you could lock the camera behind the player, so when they type, it might just be typing thin air, maybe just the elbows go. Now the effect is probably quite similar, the character is typing, but with a free camera the effect would take much longer to get right, but with a fixed camera hiding the actual hands doing the work, well it could be thrown together in minutes.
I think that the fixed camera in SH made it a better, tenser game - it actually looked like a movie in some places, dramatic angles, claustrophobic interiors forcing the player forward. I don't think that survival horror games that let you go anywhere are scary at all. You can spend half the day peeking around corners, camping, which is fine. But if you want to make a game scary, then having good camera angles, even if that means your limiting it, well you'd end up with a much scarier game I think.
I guess one good example of how effective a fixed camera can be is RE4. Some parts of that are button-bashers, like you'd have to tap the button quickly to run faster and get away from a monster or rolling boulder or something. But the camera angle always stays fixed, facing the player a little ahead of them, so whatever is giving chase is shown too. Actually watching something chase you is a lot more tense than turning round and running for it - there is no fear unless the fear is tangible, when you face away and can just run for it, well what's scary about that!. Having an idea of where the enemy is at all times is important, how close are they, are they attacking, what other threats am I dealing with right now (falling platforms, jumps). In FPS games people tend to just run away and hide, and it's a case of mindlessly running far enough away, and that's about as scary as it gets - and in these cases the enemy is always waddling behind, then the player has to check where they are all the time.
I think that chases etc are only ever scary when you can see who is chasing you, and when you can see yourself being chased. That way it's much more tangible, in FPS games it hard to get the impression that your anything more than a collision object, an ellipsoid with a gun, a horrific war trophy of someones arms and a rifle. If SH was first person, and much more free with where you can go - it would be a good game still, but it wouldn't be very scary at all.
One other small factor worth mentioning is detail, if the camera only looks at 2 walls, then that's much less detail to draw, but also, it means that you can spend more detail on those visible walls. That's not because they have the time, it's more that the player won't be able to see the walls from a undesired angle. So details can be drawn right onto surfaces, and because the views of that surface are limited they can cheat a lot, fake 3D parts, lighting, that sort of thing. If the game is fully 3D then all that hand drawn detail would need to be full 3D, which would probably push that out of the realm of possibility.
