Horror

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For information about the fandom, see Horror Fandom.
Synonyms: Analog Horror‎, Body Horror, Gothic Horror, Hillbilly Horror, Survival Horror
See also: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Thriller, Mythology
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Horror is a media genre intended to frighten or scare the audience for entertainment. Horror often overlaps with other genres and includes a wide range of tropes and elements.

History

Horror is as old as fiction itself. Beginning with folklore and superstition, horror elements appeared in religious texts (such as Revelations in the Christian Bible), mythology (the various monsters and heinous acts in Greek, Roman, and Eastern stories) and moved to stories of vampires, werewolves and serial killers in medieval Europe (the war crimes of Prince of Wallachia Vlad III which lead to the story of Dracula; Gilles des Rais as the inspiration for Bluebeard, Elizabeth Bathory). In the 18th century, Gothic Horror emerged, with a few exceptions written by women and marketed towards a female audience. This then became what modern readers accept as horror fiction, with books such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Horror is now a multi-media genre, used in any creative media you could name.

Tropes, Subgenres, and Themes

Supernatural Horror

A subgenre of horror fiction, which provokes fear and unsettles the audience through the use of supernatural elements, such as monsters, demons, etc.

Prevalent elements include:

Psychological Horror

Another subgenre of horror fiction, which focuses on mental, emotional, and psychological states to frighten, disturb, or unsettle the audience. It overlaps with the thriller and mystery genres and "uses mystery elements and characters with unstable, unreliable, or disturbed psychological states to enhance the suspense, horror, drama, tension, and paranoia of the setting and plot and to provide an overall creepy, unpleasant, unsettling, or distressing atmosphere."[1] Unlike supernatural horror, psychological horror tends to use more "natural" themes that play off "normal" human fears, such as death, pain and isolation.

Horror in Fanworks

In fanworks, an emphasis on horror is usually associated with gen. (See the Horror tag at Archive of Our Own. Note that of 3660 fanworks, 45% are labeled gen and only 34% are slash; this is an unusual distribution for an archive with a slight majority of works in the slash category.)[2]

However, some popular fanwork tropes are associated with the horror genre:

Example Fanworks

Fanfiction

Fanart

Fansites

Fanvids

Zines

Challenges

Further Reading

External Links

References

  1. ^ "Psychological horror" at Wikipedia
  2. ^ Of the 3660 fanworks in the horror tag, 1656 are gen, 1227 are m/m, 783 are het, and 183 are f/f. In contrast, 483404 of 958456 or 50% of the total works on the archive are in the m/m category. Statistics taken from the AO3 on January 12, 2014.
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