Oldbather - that depends on what you want from a film.
I am someone more scared by an atmosphere than anything else.
But plenty of people like visceral gore scenes one after the other.
Obviously films are made for both sets of fans, and all the varieties in-between, but I don't think it's accurate to say that implication is scarier than visualisation - that depends on the person watching.
The scariest film I ever saw is an old one, made in the late 1970s I think, entitled “When a Stranger Calls”. No blood, no violence, but the very thought of it still makes my skin crawl. There has been a remake - but it's not a patch on the original.
The first horror film I saw was "House of Wax". They were just about to dip the body into the molten wax when some wag shouted "Frying Tonight". It completely wrecked the atmosphere.