I feel like depth of field and motion blur have their place, yeah. I worked on a horror game one time, and we used a dynamic depth of field- anything you were looking at was in focus, but things nearer/farther than that were slightly blurred out, and when you moved where you were looking, it would take a moment (less than half a second) to ‘refocus’ if it was a different distance from the previous thing. Combined with light motion blur, it created a very subtle effect that ratcheted up anxiety when poking around. When combined with objects in the game being capable of casting non-euclidean shadows for things you aren’t looking at, it created a very pervasive unsettling feeling.