What horror is as a genre

A term you'll meet in literary genre.

Horror is the genre whose primary aim is to frighten, unsettle, and disturb. It is defined less by its furniture — monsters, ghosts, killers — than by its target: the reader's fear, dread, and revulsion. Horror sets out to make you feel unsafe.

Terror vs. horror

The Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe drew a famous distinction. Terror is the dread of what might happen — suspense, anticipation, the creak on the stair. Horror is the recoil at what is revealed — the body, the wound, the thing finally seen. Terror expands the imagination; horror confronts it. Most great horror uses both, withholding then disclosing.

Fear of the unknown

H. P. Lovecraft argued that "the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." Much horror works by keeping its threat partly hidden or incomprehensible — what we can't fully see or explain frightens us more than what we can. This is why over-explaining a monster so often kills the fear.

The uncanny and the taboo

Horror frequently operates through the uncanny — the familiar made wrong — and by approaching cultural taboos around death, the body, and contamination. The best horror disturbs because it touches something we'd rather not look at: mortality, the loss of self, the monstrous inside the ordinary.

How to read it

Ask what a horror story is really afraid of. The surface monster is usually a mask for a deeper anxiety — about disease, sexuality, the outsider, death itself. Naming the fear beneath the fright is how horror rewards a serious reader.

Try Lexio

Look up any word like this — in any book, in any browser.

Lexio is a free Chrome extension and web app that reads a word's actual context and tells you what it means in this sentence, not from a generic dictionary.

Try Lexio — free →