Genre is a classification of texts based on the cathartic (emotional) response the author wants the audience to feel. There are three genres focused on offering its audience escapism (comedy, fantasy, and science fiction); three offering sentimental connection (tragedy, romance, and slice of life); three offering action-oriented thrills (war, western, and the quest for adventure); and three offering cerebral thrills of suspense (horror, mystery, and crime). These genres are defined by their use of tropes, which are consistently used literary devices like characters, plot events, settings, and motifs—these tropes become so integrated into their genre that they can often become cliché. Every genre can also blend with other genres (meaning the text has both sets of tropes) and has derivative subgenres with additional specific tropes. These twelve genres encompass both fictional and nonfictional texts as well as every kind of text structure.
HORROR: Feeling the Fear
Horror is a genre of artistic expression that revolves around the fear of becoming a victim of malevolent forces outside one's control. Horror appeals to an audience's fear, as it invites the audience to share in the fear of the characters as they face imminent death. The audience feels catharsis (the release of built-up emotions) at every scare and a final catharsis of relief once the characters are safe again. As dealing with fear is a universal human experience, horror stories are consistently one of the five most popular genres in the world.
Along with crime and mystery, horror is one of the three genres of suspense. Suspense is the feeling of excited anxiety that develops when one is uncertain about what will happen next. Stories of suspense (often called thrillers) have conflicts dependent on solving problems, as discovering the solution relieves the suspense. To increase the suspense of the conflict, these stories always involve significant risk to characters, who may lose their reputation, their freedom, or even their life if the problem remains unsolved.¹
To lead the characters and the reader toward the solution, stories of suspense use a lot of foreshadowing (hints at what will eventually happen) and have clear story logic. Ultimately, stories of suspense help audiences develop their own reasoning skills and their own moral conclusions, as suspense stories always revolve around ideas of justice and what people deserve.
Horrors are defined by eight tropes. There are the FORTUNATE VICTIMS that have atypical good luck or good lives that suddenly find that they are under THREAT OF DEATH by the UNNATURAL WICKEDNESS. The victims are ISOLATED from help in some version of a HAUNTED HOUSE, and because of their privilege, they make terrible and often deadly MISTAKES in trying to escape the wicked antagonist. Ultimately, the victims have to be brave enough to face their FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN in order to survive the horror, with the story ending in swift and just RETRIBUTION—the truly good are rewarded and evil is punished.
Along with crime and mystery, horror is one of the three genres of suspense. Suspense is the feeling of excited anxiety that develops when one is uncertain about what will happen next. Stories of suspense (often called thrillers) have conflicts dependent on solving problems, as discovering the solution relieves the suspense. To increase the suspense of the conflict, these stories always involve significant risk to characters, who may lose their reputation, their freedom, or even their life if the problem remains unsolved.¹
To lead the characters and the reader toward the solution, stories of suspense use a lot of foreshadowing (hints at what will eventually happen) and have clear story logic. Ultimately, stories of suspense help audiences develop their own reasoning skills and their own moral conclusions, as suspense stories always revolve around ideas of justice and what people deserve.
Horrors are defined by eight tropes. There are the FORTUNATE VICTIMS that have atypical good luck or good lives that suddenly find that they are under THREAT OF DEATH by the UNNATURAL WICKEDNESS. The victims are ISOLATED from help in some version of a HAUNTED HOUSE, and because of their privilege, they make terrible and often deadly MISTAKES in trying to escape the wicked antagonist. Ultimately, the victims have to be brave enough to face their FEAR OF THE UNKNOWN in order to survive the horror, with the story ending in swift and just RETRIBUTION—the truly good are rewarded and evil is punished.
THE UNNATURAL MONSTER
Scream 4
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While most genres are best known by their protagonists, horror puts its antagonists into the spotlight. Classic horror novels are named after the big baddie of the book: Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, The Call of Cthulhu. Horror film franchises are almost totally built on the continuing return of antagonists like Freddy Kruger, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface, Michael Myers, Chucky, Lubdan, and Candyman—but the inclusion of the last film's protagonist isn't requisite.
What do these antagonists all have in common? They are unnatural monsters. From the Latin monstrum, a monster is a powerful yet malformed being that engages in wicked acts.² Often, monsters are supernatural: Freddy Kruger is an unkillable dream demon with burned skin and razor fingers. Jason Voorhees is a zombie swamp boy who has survived going to space, Hell, and Manhattan. Leatherface is... Well, Leatherface is just a guy with a chainsaw. While there is nothing supernatural about Leatherface, he still takes on the form of a monster by wearing a horrific mask made from the skin of his victims... which is not natural human behavior. Beyond masks, monsters that are regular people may not look like monsters at first glance but are always given behavioral quirks or perspectives that make them unnatural in a way that makes them feel like they are too outrageous to actually be real. For example, Ghostface from Scream can seemingly be in two places at once, while Michael Myers from Halloween is unfeeling, mute, and can survive more damage than the average person. By being unnatural and threatening the protagonist with death, the antagonists of horror stories tend to be abominable, meaning they are so evil and irredeemable that they are meant to be hated. Ironically, most fans of horror love the antagonists as much as their victims, yet this doesn't change the fact that, to the characters in the film, they are and will always be monsters. Even villains who started as undeserving victims like Candyman or Cropsy cannot gain redemption due to the wickedness of their previous acts. |
Types of Monsters
Pairing the right monster to the right story in horror is important to establish the theme of the story. Different monsters play upon specific fears and insecurities of the audience. For example, vampires play upon fears of sexual intimacy, werewolves play upon fears of one's body image and self-control, and zombies play upon fears of losing one's identity and becoming part of a faceless crowd. Literary theorist Noel Carroll created what he called a taxonomy of monsters: five categories of unnatural creatures that all horror antagonists fit into. Understanding where a monster falls in the taxonomy helps determine the type of fear that monster represents.
THE CHIMERA
Chimeras, which are what Carroll calls fusion monsters, are a mix of the ordinary (usually an ordinary human) with some sort of impurity. Chimeras first appeared in ancient Greek literature in the form of centaurs, the snake-headed Gorgons, and other animal-person or animal-animal hybrids. These monsters originated as a punishment from a god or goddess for their wicked behavior.
Chimeras stand in for the fear of corruption—that an illness or other power beyond one's control could take over. The same fear audiences have in real life for cancer and Alzheimer's diagnoses is expressed through the screen by a wide variety of fusion monsters.
Stories that revolve around fusion monsters have conflict where characters seek to free the monster from their host through some type of exorcism. This comes from the magic elements of those Greek myths—if a god can turn a man into a half-chicken, they would have the power to undo it. However, these exorcisms don't always work, and both the monster and its host have to be destroyed.
Popular modern fusion monsters include voodoo zombies (humans not in control of themselves), mutants (humans that have extra features), and the demonically possessed (humans tainted by a demon). Frankenstein's monster is a literal fusion of dead flesh into a new being, and so is the genetically altered Seth Brundle in The Fly. Haunted houses are also fusion monsters, and the house itself is the host of a poltergeist that must be exercised. Another type of fusion monster is the parasite, where a separate being is hosted inside another being—like the facehuggers in Alien, these fusion monsters often represent fear of assault and pregnancy.
Chimeras stand in for the fear of corruption—that an illness or other power beyond one's control could take over. The same fear audiences have in real life for cancer and Alzheimer's diagnoses is expressed through the screen by a wide variety of fusion monsters.
Stories that revolve around fusion monsters have conflict where characters seek to free the monster from their host through some type of exorcism. This comes from the magic elements of those Greek myths—if a god can turn a man into a half-chicken, they would have the power to undo it. However, these exorcisms don't always work, and both the monster and its host have to be destroyed.
Popular modern fusion monsters include voodoo zombies (humans not in control of themselves), mutants (humans that have extra features), and the demonically possessed (humans tainted by a demon). Frankenstein's monster is a literal fusion of dead flesh into a new being, and so is the genetically altered Seth Brundle in The Fly. Haunted houses are also fusion monsters, and the house itself is the host of a poltergeist that must be exercised. Another type of fusion monster is the parasite, where a separate being is hosted inside another being—like the facehuggers in Alien, these fusion monsters often represent fear of assault and pregnancy.
THE DOPPELGANGER
But what about werewolves? They are humans with an impurity too—a literal mix of man and animal—so they're also chimeras, right?
No. There's a critical difference between a chimeric monster like a possessed person or the Brundlefly and a werewolf: the chimera is always a mix of man and monster, but a werewolf switches between the two identities. Larry Talbot is a fully human, mild-mannered telescope engineer most of the time, but when the moon is full, Talbot is gone, and he's the ferocious Wolf Man. Werewolves are either-or, not both at once.
These types of monsters are doppelgangers, or what Carroll calls fission monsters. Doppelgängers get their name from German fairy tales, though similar creatures can be found in the mythologies of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Scandinavia. According to the tales, a doppelganger (meaning "he who walks twice") is a supernatural duplicate of a person, and if a person sees their own doppelganger, it is an omen that their own death is imminent. Doppelgangers can also be called a split personality, a shadow self, or an evil twin.
Besides werewolves, popular doppelgangers include Mr. Edward Hyde (the dark half of Dr. Henry Jekyll), the Invisible Man, and the alien pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The "dark passenger" of Dexter Morgan and other psychopathic serial killers like Patrick Bateman and Norman Bates is also a kind of doppelganger because they have distinct regular personas and separate murderous personas. This is different from monsters like Jason Voorhees who are just the same psychopath all the time. While more traditional doppelgangers like werewolves undergo a physical transformation into their monstrous form, the psychopath shifts into their doppelganger by wearing a mask of disguise that becomes the face of that personality. This is the case of Michael Myers, who is normally mute and docile, but once he's given his bleached Shatner mask, he becomes The Shape.
Doppelgangers stand in for the fear of their own dark side—either giving into it or having it exposed. Like in the legend, true doppelgangers are completely separate selves and cannot be controlled by the normal personality. Individuals will often lose time and have no memory of what they've done as their other self, and this reflects the fear of being blamed or shamed for something that one believes they did not do. Additionally, every person has an inner dark impulse—one that wants to hit when angry instead of talk and that wants to hurt those that have hurt them rather than be the bigger person—that they tamp down because its impulses aren't productive or socially acceptable. Sigmund Freud called this the id. The doppelganger is the fear of giving complete control to our id or having the secret feelings of our id shared with the world.
No. There's a critical difference between a chimeric monster like a possessed person or the Brundlefly and a werewolf: the chimera is always a mix of man and monster, but a werewolf switches between the two identities. Larry Talbot is a fully human, mild-mannered telescope engineer most of the time, but when the moon is full, Talbot is gone, and he's the ferocious Wolf Man. Werewolves are either-or, not both at once.
These types of monsters are doppelgangers, or what Carroll calls fission monsters. Doppelgängers get their name from German fairy tales, though similar creatures can be found in the mythologies of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Scandinavia. According to the tales, a doppelganger (meaning "he who walks twice") is a supernatural duplicate of a person, and if a person sees their own doppelganger, it is an omen that their own death is imminent. Doppelgangers can also be called a split personality, a shadow self, or an evil twin.
Besides werewolves, popular doppelgangers include Mr. Edward Hyde (the dark half of Dr. Henry Jekyll), the Invisible Man, and the alien pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The "dark passenger" of Dexter Morgan and other psychopathic serial killers like Patrick Bateman and Norman Bates is also a kind of doppelganger because they have distinct regular personas and separate murderous personas. This is different from monsters like Jason Voorhees who are just the same psychopath all the time. While more traditional doppelgangers like werewolves undergo a physical transformation into their monstrous form, the psychopath shifts into their doppelganger by wearing a mask of disguise that becomes the face of that personality. This is the case of Michael Myers, who is normally mute and docile, but once he's given his bleached Shatner mask, he becomes The Shape.
Doppelgangers stand in for the fear of their own dark side—either giving into it or having it exposed. Like in the legend, true doppelgangers are completely separate selves and cannot be controlled by the normal personality. Individuals will often lose time and have no memory of what they've done as their other self, and this reflects the fear of being blamed or shamed for something that one believes they did not do. Additionally, every person has an inner dark impulse—one that wants to hit when angry instead of talk and that wants to hurt those that have hurt them rather than be the bigger person—that they tamp down because its impulses aren't productive or socially acceptable. Sigmund Freud called this the id. The doppelganger is the fear of giving complete control to our id or having the secret feelings of our id shared with the world.
THE GIANT
Some monsters are a big problem... literally. The idea of a giant (or magnification monster) is very simple: take ordinary people or creatures and, by making them abnormally large, make them monstrous.
Giants tended to be staples of 1950s B-movie horrors: giant ants, giant spiders, giant rats, a 50-foot woman, and even a giant blob. While not as popular as they once were, impossibly giant creatures still pop up in horror films like Host, Sting, Attack on Titan, and Cloverfield. The more modern use of the giant in horror involves actual creatures that are larger than humans: sharks, bears, killer whales, large apes, and dinosaurs. Notice that all these creatures are carnivorous or omnivorous—despite their size, no one is making horror films about humpback whales or elephants.
If it isn't obvious already, Giants stand in for the fear of our powerlessness against the environment and the natural world. While humans have become the dominant species on Earth due to our size, intelligence, and use of tools, it's not lost on humanity that something bigger, more intelligent, and more adept could knock us off our pedestal. There is no BFG or gentle giant in horror—Greek, Slavic, and Nordic myths all cast giants as man-eaters that would swallow a person whole. When pitted against a frenzied shark or a T-rex, a person loses the fight 99 times out of 100.
Coupled with this is a fear of how science and progress could destroy humanity. Nowhere is this clearer than with the daddy of all modern horror giants: Godzilla.³ Godzilla isn't just a giant lizard that can knock over buildings and shoot lasers from its eyes but is a giant lizard because of atomic radiation. Japan saw the environmental disaster due to radiation firsthand after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and Godzilla—a nuclear monster that cannot be controlled—is the manifestation of the fears. Many (though not all) giants in horror become gigantic, become murderous, or are brought into the present by reckless science.
Giants tended to be staples of 1950s B-movie horrors: giant ants, giant spiders, giant rats, a 50-foot woman, and even a giant blob. While not as popular as they once were, impossibly giant creatures still pop up in horror films like Host, Sting, Attack on Titan, and Cloverfield. The more modern use of the giant in horror involves actual creatures that are larger than humans: sharks, bears, killer whales, large apes, and dinosaurs. Notice that all these creatures are carnivorous or omnivorous—despite their size, no one is making horror films about humpback whales or elephants.
If it isn't obvious already, Giants stand in for the fear of our powerlessness against the environment and the natural world. While humans have become the dominant species on Earth due to our size, intelligence, and use of tools, it's not lost on humanity that something bigger, more intelligent, and more adept could knock us off our pedestal. There is no BFG or gentle giant in horror—Greek, Slavic, and Nordic myths all cast giants as man-eaters that would swallow a person whole. When pitted against a frenzied shark or a T-rex, a person loses the fight 99 times out of 100.
Coupled with this is a fear of how science and progress could destroy humanity. Nowhere is this clearer than with the daddy of all modern horror giants: Godzilla.³ Godzilla isn't just a giant lizard that can knock over buildings and shoot lasers from its eyes but is a giant lizard because of atomic radiation. Japan saw the environmental disaster due to radiation firsthand after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and Godzilla—a nuclear monster that cannot be controlled—is the manifestation of the fears. Many (though not all) giants in horror become gigantic, become murderous, or are brought into the present by reckless science.
THE SWARM
Of course, nature doesn't have to be big to be scary. One of the most prevalent fears humans have had across centuries is a fear of spiders. Spiders are small and squishable, so to go from phobia to horror, we have to make a giant spider, right?
You could... or maybe just have a lot of spiders. Hundreds. Thousands. A swarm.
Swarms (i.e., massification monsters) are almost always ordinary creatures that become horrific by being abundant in numbers. Swarms of flies, ants, spiders, rats, birds, and pirahnas are examples of massification threats frequently used in horror.
Like with giants, swarms stand in for environmental fears and being replaced as Earth's apex predator, but swarms work differently than giants. The threat of a giant is obvious: it's big and can squish you. But compare that to a spider: it's small and you can squish it. What makes the spider dangerous and a source of fear is that it could actually be venomous or is so small that you may not notice its attack if it, say, crawled into your ear canal and laid its eggs in your brain. Swarms stand in for the fear of our underestimation and naivety regarding threats created by the environment and the natural world. There are real-world analogues for this fear too, as people have seen how a swarm of ants can take down a larger predator or how a swarm of scarabs can turn a corpse to bones in hours.
Of course, the swarm gets more threatening when science gets involved. Who needs a giant gundan to destroy the world when a gray cloud of thousands of nanobots could work just as well? Like with giants, scientific experiments and accidents create the terrifying swarm. The piranha swarm in Piranha wasn't terrifying because they eat flesh (in nature, they rarely attack people) but because they were mutated to be extra ravenous by an experiment and then released in New York, far away from their native Amazon.
Another type of science-bred swarm took over horror for a while: zombies. One brain-eating George Romero zombie isn't that scary—they move slow and aren't very bright—but hundreds of them suddenly becomes a no-win situation. Whether they be aliens, killer robots, or the resurrected undead, swarms of inhuman beings represent the threat of invasion by a foreign enemy. If the invaders were just regular people, that'd be a War story, so the invaders replacing humanity must be some kind of monster.
Zombies and invasion also bring up another terrifying feature of the swarm: it spreads. One can just go to the cemetery and count the number of headstones because zombies beget more zombies when they infect humans. Thus, swarms can also represent the fear of viral disease. Zombies aren't scary because they are dead but because they used to be people you knew and because you could become one. In modern society, it isn't just germs that can go viral either but ideas. Zombies, with their blank stares and shuffling movements, specifically represent the fear of losing one's individuality to corporate consumerism or addiction to online screens, as established by the father of the modern zombie George Romero in his film Dawn of the Dead.
You could... or maybe just have a lot of spiders. Hundreds. Thousands. A swarm.
Swarms (i.e., massification monsters) are almost always ordinary creatures that become horrific by being abundant in numbers. Swarms of flies, ants, spiders, rats, birds, and pirahnas are examples of massification threats frequently used in horror.
Like with giants, swarms stand in for environmental fears and being replaced as Earth's apex predator, but swarms work differently than giants. The threat of a giant is obvious: it's big and can squish you. But compare that to a spider: it's small and you can squish it. What makes the spider dangerous and a source of fear is that it could actually be venomous or is so small that you may not notice its attack if it, say, crawled into your ear canal and laid its eggs in your brain. Swarms stand in for the fear of our underestimation and naivety regarding threats created by the environment and the natural world. There are real-world analogues for this fear too, as people have seen how a swarm of ants can take down a larger predator or how a swarm of scarabs can turn a corpse to bones in hours.
Of course, the swarm gets more threatening when science gets involved. Who needs a giant gundan to destroy the world when a gray cloud of thousands of nanobots could work just as well? Like with giants, scientific experiments and accidents create the terrifying swarm. The piranha swarm in Piranha wasn't terrifying because they eat flesh (in nature, they rarely attack people) but because they were mutated to be extra ravenous by an experiment and then released in New York, far away from their native Amazon.
Another type of science-bred swarm took over horror for a while: zombies. One brain-eating George Romero zombie isn't that scary—they move slow and aren't very bright—but hundreds of them suddenly becomes a no-win situation. Whether they be aliens, killer robots, or the resurrected undead, swarms of inhuman beings represent the threat of invasion by a foreign enemy. If the invaders were just regular people, that'd be a War story, so the invaders replacing humanity must be some kind of monster.
Zombies and invasion also bring up another terrifying feature of the swarm: it spreads. One can just go to the cemetery and count the number of headstones because zombies beget more zombies when they infect humans. Thus, swarms can also represent the fear of viral disease. Zombies aren't scary because they are dead but because they used to be people you knew and because you could become one. In modern society, it isn't just germs that can go viral either but ideas. Zombies, with their blank stares and shuffling movements, specifically represent the fear of losing one's individuality to corporate consumerism or addiction to online screens, as established by the father of the modern zombie George Romero in his film Dawn of the Dead.
THE UNCANNY
Finally, it's time to talk about clowns.
Coulrophobia—the irrational fear of clowns—now affects around half of the adult population.⁴ Why? Clowns are just people in funny outfits and makeup, right? That's the thing, though—the pancake makeup that clowns wear makes it hard to see who's under the cosmetics, and it makes it harder to pick up facial cues to indicate how the clown is feeling. Clowns also wear bright, garish colors and have clothes that are out of proportion, like baggy pants and oversized shoes. Lots of them also have oversized round noses. And they're always laughing even when things aren't funny. And way too many of them fit into that little car—it shouldn't be possible.
Clowns are a type of uncanny monster, a person or thing that isn't outwardly monstrous but still sets one ill at ease because it isn't quite normal either. Carroll calls these monsters horror metonyms because they represent a larger evil or danger that isn't outwardly obvious. If one sees Freddy Krueger, a Yautja, or a werewolf walking down the street, it's obvious that one ought to turn around and walk in the other direction. But that charming pale dude that seems to move really quick, hates garlic, and has to ask your permission to come in... maybe they're just a weird dude, or maybe they're a vampire.
Uncanny monsters fall into the uncanny valley, a psychological phenomenon where things that appear almost but not quite natural cause the viewer discomfort. The human mind, which is very good at subconsciously picking up on small details, senses that something about what they are seeing isn't right. The uncanny valley was first described when gauging audience reactions to different CGI characters in the late '90s and early '00s, and while it is still used today for AI-generated images with six fingers or eyebrows that are just a little too high, it's been expanded to include things that are not human, like an AI generated image of a landscape where the reflection of the clouds in a lake doesn't match the clouds in the sky.
Uncanny monsters represent the fear of a secret and undetected threat, a fear that is written into our biology. Early humans didn't understand what illness was or why sickness spread, but they figured out if someone looked pale and sweaty, it meant that they should stay away. The threat of the uncanny isn't something concocted by the rational mind but is a subconscious feeling. Something isn't quite right about Dr. Lecter and the way he says he wants to have me for dinner... I could swear that Good Guy doll I bought wasn't sitting there earlier... All these people living on Summerisle are overly nice to me... That orphan girl we brought home seems really mature for her age...
What separates uncanny monsters from chimeras is that chimeras are obviously a threat (vampire creatures in 30 Days of Night) while an uncanny monster isn't obviously threatening (Dracula is known to be an excellent host to his guests). What separates uncanny monsters from doppelgangers is that doppelgangers have two distinct personalities (I'm awkward taxidermist Norman Bates, and now I'm Mother!) while uncanny monsters are the same person the entire time (I'm the depressed member of my family who is bullied for his ugliness, so whenever I get the chance, I take a chainsaw to strangers and make a pretty new face out of their skin). Chimeras realize but can't control their violent behavior, and doppelgangers have no knowledge or control of the monster when it emerges, but uncanny monsters are always in control and could stop being a monster if they wanted (which is how we got the sparkly nice vampires of Twilight).
Coulrophobia—the irrational fear of clowns—now affects around half of the adult population.⁴ Why? Clowns are just people in funny outfits and makeup, right? That's the thing, though—the pancake makeup that clowns wear makes it hard to see who's under the cosmetics, and it makes it harder to pick up facial cues to indicate how the clown is feeling. Clowns also wear bright, garish colors and have clothes that are out of proportion, like baggy pants and oversized shoes. Lots of them also have oversized round noses. And they're always laughing even when things aren't funny. And way too many of them fit into that little car—it shouldn't be possible.
Clowns are a type of uncanny monster, a person or thing that isn't outwardly monstrous but still sets one ill at ease because it isn't quite normal either. Carroll calls these monsters horror metonyms because they represent a larger evil or danger that isn't outwardly obvious. If one sees Freddy Krueger, a Yautja, or a werewolf walking down the street, it's obvious that one ought to turn around and walk in the other direction. But that charming pale dude that seems to move really quick, hates garlic, and has to ask your permission to come in... maybe they're just a weird dude, or maybe they're a vampire.
Uncanny monsters fall into the uncanny valley, a psychological phenomenon where things that appear almost but not quite natural cause the viewer discomfort. The human mind, which is very good at subconsciously picking up on small details, senses that something about what they are seeing isn't right. The uncanny valley was first described when gauging audience reactions to different CGI characters in the late '90s and early '00s, and while it is still used today for AI-generated images with six fingers or eyebrows that are just a little too high, it's been expanded to include things that are not human, like an AI generated image of a landscape where the reflection of the clouds in a lake doesn't match the clouds in the sky.
Uncanny monsters represent the fear of a secret and undetected threat, a fear that is written into our biology. Early humans didn't understand what illness was or why sickness spread, but they figured out if someone looked pale and sweaty, it meant that they should stay away. The threat of the uncanny isn't something concocted by the rational mind but is a subconscious feeling. Something isn't quite right about Dr. Lecter and the way he says he wants to have me for dinner... I could swear that Good Guy doll I bought wasn't sitting there earlier... All these people living on Summerisle are overly nice to me... That orphan girl we brought home seems really mature for her age...
What separates uncanny monsters from chimeras is that chimeras are obviously a threat (vampire creatures in 30 Days of Night) while an uncanny monster isn't obviously threatening (Dracula is known to be an excellent host to his guests). What separates uncanny monsters from doppelgangers is that doppelgangers have two distinct personalities (I'm awkward taxidermist Norman Bates, and now I'm Mother!) while uncanny monsters are the same person the entire time (I'm the depressed member of my family who is bullied for his ugliness, so whenever I get the chance, I take a chainsaw to strangers and make a pretty new face out of their skin). Chimeras realize but can't control their violent behavior, and doppelgangers have no knowledge or control of the monster when it emerges, but uncanny monsters are always in control and could stop being a monster if they wanted (which is how we got the sparkly nice vampires of Twilight).
LOOMING DEATH
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What does the monster have to antagonize the protagonist with? Horror stories keep things simple—the monster wants to kill. Why? Without a threat of final and irreversible death, the stakes are too low in the horror for the audience to feel true fear.⁵
Not only are the victims in a horror story being actively pursued by a deadly monster, but death looms all around them. Horror stories don't happen in the safest, most well-lit environments. As we'll see with another trope, there are dangers everywhere, and victims can easily succumb to an environmental threat just as easily as a boogeyman. However, death in horror isn't always a bloody affair. While horror stories rely on the threat of death, that death could be physical, mental, or emotional. Physical death is the one most commonly associated with horror and includes being stabbed, impaled, burned, drowned, suffocated, eaten, or dismembered. Physical threats can also be bodily additions or mutilations, such as a protagonist gaining monstrous attributes like claws or horns or becoming whatever Sue was at the end of The Substance. Mental death, however, is also fairly common in horror. Mental death includes being driven to insanity, like the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper." Mental death can also be losing control over one's mind or self through acts of mind control (like in The Stepford Wives), societal control (like in Midsommar), or otherworldly possession (like in The Babadook). Just as not every attempt at a physical murder ends in death, some attempts at mental death fail to kill, like the mind games that Hannibal Lecter tries on Clarice Starling. Similar to mental death is emotional death, where a character stops feeling and reacting to others. This numbness comes from extreme trauma and often comes after a monster has tortured their victim and has taken away their hope. This kind of death could come in the form of unbreakable Stolkholm syndrome (which befalls Cheryl Dempsey in The Poughkeepsie Tapes) or complete catatonia (the fate of the seventeen children in Weapons). |
THE FINAL GIRL AND OTHER FORTUNATE VICTIMS
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To contrast with the abominable attributes of the antagonist, the story usually involves a group of fortunate victims. They are not fortunate in that they are lucky that they are characters in a horror story—they instead come from a fortunate background, like a loving family, wealth, or fame. They are typically young, beautiful, and strong—what society says are ideal bodies.⁶ Due to their privilege, they have never dealt with horrors, and thus they are completely inept when it comes to being threatened by a menacing evil. This is why so many victims die in horror stories: it's the story's way of extolling those who have faced suffering head-on rather than ignoring it.
However, not every victim is as fortunate as the others. Often, there is a victim who has endured trauma in the past, which in turn makes them more capable of survival and more sympathetic to the audience. Since the victim is usually teenaged and female, this character is called the Final Girl, as she is the final one standing. This is Nancy Thompson, who endured her divorced, neglectful parents before Freddy Krueger went after her. This is Sidney Prescott, who endured the murder of her mother a year before becoming a target of the Ghostface killer herself. This is Laurie Strode, who was not as popular as her peers and was thought to be a nerdy bookworm before Michael Myers stalked her (hey, the trauma doesn't always have to be that extreme). While the Final Girl is often flawed due to neuroses involving her past trauma, she is good and "purehearted" overall, so she deserves to live. The other victims... not so much. Below is a list of a dozen victims commonly found in horror stories. Why so many characters? In order to establish a threat of death, characters need to die. Yet it is important that we live in a world where good wins and evil loses (most of the time), so we can't have anyone too good die. Thus, these privileged victims often do or say things because of their privileged position that justifies their death. For example, the tough guy is a bully, while the scholar is judgmental of her inferiors. These fortunate characters have moments where we see that they are not overall good, which brings about their unfortunate end. The most common "sin" these characters commit is underage and unwed sexual activity, which has long been seen as immoral in Western society. Sex and death also make for a good pair symbolically—according to the eros-thanatos principle in part created by Sigmund Freud, humans have two primal divergent urges: to create and love (eros) and to destroy and hate (thanatos). These two extremes are often depicted juxtaposed together in art to show how different these two forces are despite having matching physical effects (quickened heartbeat, sweating, shivering, and pupil dilation). This also explains the cliche of the Final Girl often being referred to as a virgin—it's shorthand for saying they are without a sin that will doom them later. |
Types of Horror Victims
THE TOUGH GUY
The tough guy has an inflated sense of ego because of their natural athletic skill and strength, which leads to them testing their brawn against the horror monster. This character is also often popular and judgmental of "weaker people" but isn't the greatest strategist--they usually go with their gut, not with the plan. They would thrive in the traditional hero story beating mythic monsters on a quest, but this isn't mythic fantasy. The horror monster cannot be overpowered by a mere human, and the tough guy finds that all their strength is no math for the monster.
THE DITZ
Often paired with the tough guy (and often depicted as a cheerleader), the Ditz is a beautiful, naive young woman that lacks common sense or self-awareness--this is what gets her killed. Her main focus is on romance and the well-being of her companions, though this unfortunately doesn't cover her own well-being. She is also easily distracted and doesn't see the obvious threats right in front of her.
THE MEAN GIRL
The opposite of the Ditz is the Mean Girl. Unlike the clueless ditz, she is aware of everyone and everything. Also unlike the Ditz and the Final Girl, she isn't nice. The Mean Girl constantly spits insults and criticism at others due to her own elevated sense of superiority. While she's as shrewd and savvy as the Final Girl, her attitude toward others and unwillness to go with the crowd results in her death.
THE SCHOLAR
This character acts as though they are an expert on everything and, to their credit, are very intelligent. The scholar recognizes the threat the monster presents early and can survive if they realize they need to leave before they become trapped. If they can't leave, the scholar will try to beat the monster analytically in the same way a science fiction protagonist would use their knowledge to invent a solution. Sadly, the unnatural qualities of the monster mean that they are beyond logic, thus the scholar fails. Some scholars even go so far as to investigate the monster in order to increase their knowledge, and like the proverbial cat, their curiosity gets them killed.
THE GOTH
This character is also an expert, but unlike the scholar, they are an expert on the one thing that matters: the dark and the macabre. The Goth's expertise in all things grim or supernatural is actually helpful in dealing with a monster because the Goth knows what genre they are in--and they love it. Yet most of the time, the Goth still dies. Sometimes, they are too overconfident in their knowledge of the horrifying that they can't help but make a fatal mistake. Other times, they end up embracing the darkness and ally themselves with the monsters--but monsters have no need for friends or fans, so the Goth is quickly dispatched. These characters make for good red herrings in horror mystery stories.
THE SKEPTIC
Another know-it-all character, the Skeptic isn't an expert in anything, but they feel that they know enough to know that there is no threat. The Skeptic doesn't believe there could be a monster because they are too grounded in real life and cannot conceive of something unnatural. Often, the Skeptic is someone older who's an authority that could help the others if they only took the situation seriously. The Skeptic's lack of belief leaves them vulnerable to the monster, as they do nothing to protect themselves.
THE FOOL
This character is a natural comedian--they bring joy to others and fill their lives with laughter. But horror is no laughing matter. While there are plenty of horror comedies, fools don't last long in horror, as a well-timed joke or positive attitude is no match for a sharpened machete. In comedy, the fool often sees what the far-too-serious people can't and thus survives, and this can happen in horror too, as fools are often the first person in the group to realize something isn't right. Yet the fool's power is using their natural affability to make friends with others, and their offers of cameradie fall on deaf ears when it comes to the antagonist.
THE OUTCAST
While the Final Girl typically fills the Outcast role, many horror movies will have another character that is culturally different from the rest of the group. This could be group culture (like the nerd in a group of pretty and popular girls) or ethnic culture--this is what to led to the cliche of the Black character in a horror movie always dying. The difference in culture causes this character to do things outside the group, leading to either their survival with the Final Girl or their death. These characters also make for good red herrings in horror mystery stories.
THE KILLJOY
This is a character that wants to put a stop to any merriment or risky behavior, but they do so because they want to be in complete control. Like the Skeptic, this includes authority members like principals and police officers, but unlike the Skeptic, the Killjoy understands the threat and the danger--they just insist everybody face the threat their way. This character almost always shows up in swarm stories (especially zombie horror) because their belligerent leadership leads others to turn on them. The Killjoy ultimately gets their comeuppance when they face a monster that cannot be controlled.
THE HUNTER
This character doesn't wait to be a victim but actively pursues the monster. Often, these characters have a background as a game hunter, a soldier, or in criminal activity (either causing it or stopping it). Hunters have different motivations: Dr. Loomis hunts Michael Myers because he wants to stop him; Creighton Duke hunts Jason Voorhees for the glory the kill will bring him; Roland Voight hunts the Cenobites in order to share in their power. The hunter occasionally survives (though is rare that they are the one to bring down the monster), but usually, their overconfidence leads them to their death.
THE HYSTERIC
The opposite of the Hunter, the Hysteric panics at the first sign of danger and cannot control their fear. Some hysterics are picked off quickly because screaming and running make one an easy target. However, there's also the Dissociative Hysteric who goes into shock and emotionally shuts down. These Hysterics typically lives longer than some victims, as their paranoia keeps them aware of danger, but they ultimately die because, when face to face with the monster, they freeze from fear and cannot fight back.
THE NICE GUY
Finally, there is the Nice Guy, who is often the primary companion to the Final Girl. Just like with the Final Girl, the gender of the Nice Guy isn't necessarily male but is usually male as they often serve as the love interest of the Final Girl. If not a love interest, the Nice Guy is the Final Girl's best friend and would do anything for her. This is why these characters don't always survive--they love the Final Girl so much that they sacrifice themselves so the Final Girl can live. While some Nice Guys do make to the end, those who don't are ultimately tragic figures.
RETRIBUTION
So far, we've seen that there is a monster that kills anyone that is sinful but can be defeated by a pure and righteous Final Girl. This idea that the good are spared and those that are sinful are slain is called just retribution. For example, look at the victims in the film Halloween: Annie does drugs and abandons Lindsey to fool around with her boyfriend, and she dies. Lynda and Bob use Annie's absence from the house to have sex, and they die. However, Laurie (who gets fun of earlier in the movie for not being promiscuous) survives, as well as the innocent kids under her care.
Even sinful characters who don't die get their comeuppance. For example, Mr. Teague in Poltergeist commissioned the Questa Verde development to be built on a cemetery only to go bankrupt when the ghosts from that cemetery wreck the whole neighborhood. This doesn't mean everything is perfectly just in horror stories—good people still suffer and have brushes with death, but like the Final Girl, they survive. Just retribution allows an audience to escape the horror at the end—sure, these threats are unstoppable, but if we're good people, we'll be fine.⁷
Except they aren't always fine. Sometimes, no matter how good and pure a character is, they still die. Sometimes, this is a choice by the character, like the sacrifice to save the Final Girl often made by the Nice Guy. But sometimes life isn't fair, and a perfectly innocent person (often a child) is slain by the monster. This isn't a violation of this trope because, when an innocent dies in horror, it's done to show just how evil and irredeemable the monster is. In James Whale's version of Frankenstein, the monster is a sympathetic character until he drowns the little girl—despite it being an accident, that becomes an irredemable act from which the monster cannot redeem themselves. Instead of the monster becoming the vehicle of justice, the monster is brought to justice in retribution for killing an innocent.
But note that it's really only in this case—after the monster kills a truly innocent person—that the monster itself is killed. How could a just world allow such a killer to live? As wicked and twisted as the monster is, if all their kills can be "justified" as retribution for the sins of their victims, the world is still just and good. After all, it's not like the monster goes without punishment: for trying to kill the virtuous Final Girl, the monster is punished with defeat.⁸
Even sinful characters who don't die get their comeuppance. For example, Mr. Teague in Poltergeist commissioned the Questa Verde development to be built on a cemetery only to go bankrupt when the ghosts from that cemetery wreck the whole neighborhood. This doesn't mean everything is perfectly just in horror stories—good people still suffer and have brushes with death, but like the Final Girl, they survive. Just retribution allows an audience to escape the horror at the end—sure, these threats are unstoppable, but if we're good people, we'll be fine.⁷
Except they aren't always fine. Sometimes, no matter how good and pure a character is, they still die. Sometimes, this is a choice by the character, like the sacrifice to save the Final Girl often made by the Nice Guy. But sometimes life isn't fair, and a perfectly innocent person (often a child) is slain by the monster. This isn't a violation of this trope because, when an innocent dies in horror, it's done to show just how evil and irredeemable the monster is. In James Whale's version of Frankenstein, the monster is a sympathetic character until he drowns the little girl—despite it being an accident, that becomes an irredemable act from which the monster cannot redeem themselves. Instead of the monster becoming the vehicle of justice, the monster is brought to justice in retribution for killing an innocent.
But note that it's really only in this case—after the monster kills a truly innocent person—that the monster itself is killed. How could a just world allow such a killer to live? As wicked and twisted as the monster is, if all their kills can be "justified" as retribution for the sins of their victims, the world is still just and good. After all, it's not like the monster goes without punishment: for trying to kill the virtuous Final Girl, the monster is punished with defeat.⁸
MISTAKES
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Mistakes—errors in the judgment of a situation—are vital to horror. Otherwise, the characters would easily escape danger, and the story would be over. This is why victims run up the stairs instead of running out the front door. Why they hide under the bed instead of jumping out the window. Why they stay in town after people they know start dying. Why they split up to look for the killer.
All these mistakes are obvious to the audience—one of the most familiar cries in the horror movie theater is "No! Don't go in there!" It's important that the victims make silly mistakes not to show that the characters are stupid but to ratchet up the tension using dramatic irony, or the fact that the audience knows what is coming while the characters don't. At least, they know something is coming because they are aware that they're experiencing a horror story, and equipped with that knowledge, they can easily identify character mistakes before they happen. But are these mistakes realistic? Perhaps—in real life, as people often make silly mistakes when panicking or overestimate their abilities in a stressful situation. However, the true function of mistakes is that they allow the audience to not feel so bad when characters die. Like how just retribution justifies sinful characters dying, mistakes justify the deaths of characters who are "too dumb to survive." It's easier to watch the sheriff get slaughtered after they said they didn't believe there was a killer on the loose. It's satisfying to watch characters who aren't aware of what's happening get punished for being in la-la land. One of the most common mistakes made is ignoring the harbinger, a clear warning of the danger before it occurs, but it is ignored. Often this harbinger is a character, like Dr. Loomis in Halloween, but could also be a metaphorical sign (like the bird flying into the window and dying at the start of The Birds) or even a literal sign (like the Keep Out signs at Camp Crystal Lake). A monster can even curse victims and become its own harbinger, like Fred Krueger's dying curse upon the parents of his victims in A Nightmare on Elm Street. |
THE HAUNTED HOUSE
One of the key elements that makes horror so popular is its aesthetic: abandoned building, scattered bones, gnarled trees, and spiderwebs everywhere. The tone and atmosphere make or break a horror story, as the audience won't be scared by something that doesn't "feel" scary. You need darkness. You need age and rot. You need dirt and grime. In short, you need a haunted house.
A haunted house doesn't literally need to be haunted, nor does it need to be an actual house. Just like The Green World in comedy and the Edge of the World in adventure, the Haunted House is a metaphor for a space where everyday life is gone and characters are trapped in a space where normal rules don't matter. In a haunted house, anyone can be a killer, even the final girl defending herself against a serial murderer. In a haunted house, escape is futile, as only the wicked forces can allow you to leave alive. In a haunted house, there are objects all around that can help the victims if they can only notice them, as well as hidden dangers that could spell their doom.
But why is the haunted house (or castle or cabin in the woods) the metaphor used for the spooky setting? Houses are domestic spaces that should be inviting and offer a sense of security. Almost everyone lives in a house, and our vulnerable moments (bathing and sleeping) mostly happen in a house, where there are doors with locks to keep danger out. A haunted house, then, is a corruption of the domestic and the familiar—the threat is already inside, the locks only serve to keep you in, and there is no place that's safe. This is also why abandoned hospitals, asylums, churches, and hotels are also favorites of the horror genre, as each should be a place of help and comfort but has been perverted into a place of pain and death.
As for the haunted part of the haunted house, it implies two things. First, that the danger and evil is tied to the location itself and that one can be saved if they escape. Usually this is true, sometimes it's not, but escaping the evil threat is the top priority of every potential victim in a horror story (at least, the top priority for anyone with a brain). Second, the literal definition of a haunting is "a visitation by a spirit," which means that a haunting is a temporary event that comes and goes. Often, horror stories mask their setting as an ordinary place that may need a little repair and TLC. The characters are comfortable... until the haunting begins. Most people wouldn't enter an obvious death trap, so the temporality of a haunting underpins the logic of the story. Haunting as visitation also implies that the visitor can be expelled from the house, and the focus of some horror movies isn't escaping the haunted house but curing it of its corruption.
A haunted house doesn't literally need to be haunted, nor does it need to be an actual house. Just like The Green World in comedy and the Edge of the World in adventure, the Haunted House is a metaphor for a space where everyday life is gone and characters are trapped in a space where normal rules don't matter. In a haunted house, anyone can be a killer, even the final girl defending herself against a serial murderer. In a haunted house, escape is futile, as only the wicked forces can allow you to leave alive. In a haunted house, there are objects all around that can help the victims if they can only notice them, as well as hidden dangers that could spell their doom.
But why is the haunted house (or castle or cabin in the woods) the metaphor used for the spooky setting? Houses are domestic spaces that should be inviting and offer a sense of security. Almost everyone lives in a house, and our vulnerable moments (bathing and sleeping) mostly happen in a house, where there are doors with locks to keep danger out. A haunted house, then, is a corruption of the domestic and the familiar—the threat is already inside, the locks only serve to keep you in, and there is no place that's safe. This is also why abandoned hospitals, asylums, churches, and hotels are also favorites of the horror genre, as each should be a place of help and comfort but has been perverted into a place of pain and death.
As for the haunted part of the haunted house, it implies two things. First, that the danger and evil is tied to the location itself and that one can be saved if they escape. Usually this is true, sometimes it's not, but escaping the evil threat is the top priority of every potential victim in a horror story (at least, the top priority for anyone with a brain). Second, the literal definition of a haunting is "a visitation by a spirit," which means that a haunting is a temporary event that comes and goes. Often, horror stories mask their setting as an ordinary place that may need a little repair and TLC. The characters are comfortable... until the haunting begins. Most people wouldn't enter an obvious death trap, so the temporality of a haunting underpins the logic of the story. Haunting as visitation also implies that the visitor can be expelled from the house, and the focus of some horror movies isn't escaping the haunted house but curing it of its corruption.
ISOLATION
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The haunted house serves another purpose: it isolates characters. Isolation, or separation from others, is foremost a logical requirement for a horror story—the tension will not be built if the serial killer is stabbing people in front of the police station in the middle of the afternoon. Phone lines must be cut so the police can't be reached. The closest neighbors must live a mile away or be out of town, so it's impossible to run next door for help. If by chance the authorities are contacted and arrive as potential rescuers, they don't believe the threat is real and leave (or are quickly killed by the monster). If help is readily available, the horror story just becomes a horror moment.
However, isolation does more than just fill in plot holes. Humans are social creatures that instinctually avoid isolation, as monsters and wild beasts come out in the dark and prey upon those who are alone. Isolation leaves a character to their own devices when it comes to defending themselves, which literally puts their life in their own hands. This not only reaffirms the idea that characters who die deserved to (because they couldn't figure it out on their own) but also hits on a major fear of the modern world: self-reliance. As life becomes easier and society becomes more reliant on technology, community services, and comforts, horror (and on occasion science fiction) pops up to remind the audience that it all can be taken away in an instant by one maniac with a chainsaw. Isolation doesn't just have to be physical in horror either—just like in real life, social and psychological isolation can keep characters far from safety even when they are surrounded by others. Joanna Eberhart is the only wife in Stepford not turned into a machine, which keeps her in a constant state of isolation. In It Follows, Jay is the only person in her group that actually can see It—It is invisible to everyone else. Claire Spencer isn't believed by either her husband or her friends when she says she's seeing the spirit of a dead girl in What Lies Beneath, and that isolation hits harder when it's revealed that her husband was intentionally gaslighting her about the dead girl the entire time. Isolation isn't just important for the fortunate victims—monsters are isolated too. In fact, isolation makes monsters. For example, Carrie White is isolated socially by her peers, and when they prank her on prom night, she has no compunction against slaughtering the entire town because none of them ever tried to connect with her.⁹ Victor Frankenstein refused to be a father to his creation, so his monster dedicated his life to make Victor pay for his neglect. In a twist on the trope, Dr. Rose Cotter of Smile isolates herself so she cannot spread the smiling entity within her to anyone else. |
THE UNKNOWN
All of these tropes build suspense and keep the reader interested, but none of them drive the suspense. The engine of a horror story—the glue that holds a horror story together—is the fear of the unknown.
The unknown is, obviously, something that neither the characters nor the audience can explain. However, that's also a main component of horror's sister genre Mystery. The key difference here is how the characters react to the unknown. In a mystery, characters and the audience endeavor to solve the unknown (the stories are literally called whodunits because we want to know who done... uh, did it). With horror, however, the unknown is something to fear, and not knowing is the fuel to a horror story's fire.
It's the secret behind the monster. It's the mysterious object in the locked chest. It's the dark... seriously, darkness is synonymous with horror because the darkness hides things from characters, leaving them exposed to dangers they don't know are there. Every other trope is tied to the unknown: no one knows what the monster is, where it comes from, or why it wants to kill; the victims don't know they are about to be slaughtered, and they make mistakes because they don't know what to do once they figure it out; the haunted house is full of dark corners so no one knows where the monster is lurking, and its isolation means no one who could help knows what's going on.
This doesn't mean the characters can't know anything, however. The opposite is actually true: the characters must face the unknown and confront it to survive, and confronting it means changing the unknown into the known. Here's an example: Nancy Thompson has no idea who the maniacal burn victim haunting her dreams is until she asks her mother who Fred Krueger is, and once she hears the story, she knows why she and her friends are being targeted. Then, instead of trying to never fall asleep again, Nancy uses the sleep study her mother forces upon her to confront Kruger in his boiler room. While she's injured and earns a whitlock for her troubles, she learns how to wake herself up while in a dream and that she can pull things out of a dream into the real world—and she uses these two pieces of knowledge to defeat Krueger.
For the audience, the suspense of horror only pays off when they learn something that gives them hope that a character might survive. In Orphan, why is Esther so strange? Unknown... but the answer is fascinating. In Saw, who put Adam and Dr. Gordon in the bathroom? Unknown... until we meet Zep, but (plot twist!) it's not actually him, and it's unknown again. Like in Saw's case, the unknown can sometimes lead to a full horror mystery that uses the tropes of both--Scream built a franchise out of this concept. Sometimes, it's only the characters that don't know something, and the audience feels suspense waiting for them to figure it out, like where Marion Crane has disappeared to in Psycho.
However, not everything is known at the end of a horror story, nor should it be. Where did the Blob in The Blob come from? How did Jason Voorhees go from a skinny dead swamp boy to a living hulking menace? Why did Michael Myers kill his sister Judith when he was six? Two films actually tried to answer that last question: Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (a cult had manipulated him since birth) and Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween (Michael was abused as a child, and Judith was mean to him). These answers didn't make fans of Michael Myers happy, and subsequent films retconed these facts out of existence. Why? Fear comes from not knowing, and while the Final Girls need to learn enough about the monster to survive, learning too much kills the suspense.
The unknown is, obviously, something that neither the characters nor the audience can explain. However, that's also a main component of horror's sister genre Mystery. The key difference here is how the characters react to the unknown. In a mystery, characters and the audience endeavor to solve the unknown (the stories are literally called whodunits because we want to know who done... uh, did it). With horror, however, the unknown is something to fear, and not knowing is the fuel to a horror story's fire.
It's the secret behind the monster. It's the mysterious object in the locked chest. It's the dark... seriously, darkness is synonymous with horror because the darkness hides things from characters, leaving them exposed to dangers they don't know are there. Every other trope is tied to the unknown: no one knows what the monster is, where it comes from, or why it wants to kill; the victims don't know they are about to be slaughtered, and they make mistakes because they don't know what to do once they figure it out; the haunted house is full of dark corners so no one knows where the monster is lurking, and its isolation means no one who could help knows what's going on.
This doesn't mean the characters can't know anything, however. The opposite is actually true: the characters must face the unknown and confront it to survive, and confronting it means changing the unknown into the known. Here's an example: Nancy Thompson has no idea who the maniacal burn victim haunting her dreams is until she asks her mother who Fred Krueger is, and once she hears the story, she knows why she and her friends are being targeted. Then, instead of trying to never fall asleep again, Nancy uses the sleep study her mother forces upon her to confront Kruger in his boiler room. While she's injured and earns a whitlock for her troubles, she learns how to wake herself up while in a dream and that she can pull things out of a dream into the real world—and she uses these two pieces of knowledge to defeat Krueger.
For the audience, the suspense of horror only pays off when they learn something that gives them hope that a character might survive. In Orphan, why is Esther so strange? Unknown... but the answer is fascinating. In Saw, who put Adam and Dr. Gordon in the bathroom? Unknown... until we meet Zep, but (plot twist!) it's not actually him, and it's unknown again. Like in Saw's case, the unknown can sometimes lead to a full horror mystery that uses the tropes of both--Scream built a franchise out of this concept. Sometimes, it's only the characters that don't know something, and the audience feels suspense waiting for them to figure it out, like where Marion Crane has disappeared to in Psycho.
However, not everything is known at the end of a horror story, nor should it be. Where did the Blob in The Blob come from? How did Jason Voorhees go from a skinny dead swamp boy to a living hulking menace? Why did Michael Myers kill his sister Judith when he was six? Two films actually tried to answer that last question: Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (a cult had manipulated him since birth) and Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween (Michael was abused as a child, and Judith was mean to him). These answers didn't make fans of Michael Myers happy, and subsequent films retconed these facts out of existence. Why? Fear comes from not knowing, and while the Final Girls need to learn enough about the monster to survive, learning too much kills the suspense.
Subgenres of Horror
GOTHIC HORROR
Gothic literature focuses on melodramatic plots, grotesque characters, decaying locations that once were places of wealth and success, the hypocrisy of religion, experimental narration, and an immoral society that allowed for sins in the past that now will bring a downfall for the characters. This subgenre actually consists of three different literary movements. The original Gothic movement in the nineteenth century focused on crumbling European castles, tyrannical male figures, damsels in distress, and supernatural beasts like devils and vampires. The Southern Gothic movement of the mid-twentieth century shifted its focus to the rural Southern US, a culture of violence, extreme poverty, and ghosts (both literal and figurative). The current New Gothic movement writes stories involving the decaying suburb, generational trauma, fears of gaslighting and doppelgangers, and liminal spaces like the Backrooms.
PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
Psychological horror focuses not on physical threats like death, mutilation, or imprisonment but on mental and emotional threats like loss of identity, madness, and self-imposed captivity. Psychological horror features unreliable narrators who are constantly questioning if what they are seeing, feeling, or experiencing is real. Their paranoia leads them to isolate themselves, engage in behaviors that put them at risk of injury, commit acts of self-sabotage and self-harm, and alienate anyone who tries to help. The unknown horror of this subgenre isn't what the monster is but the tension of if there's even a monster at all.
BODY HORROR
In body horror, the threat is not an outside monster but one's own body rebelling against the protagonist, which turns the person into a monster. The progenitor of body horror was Franz Kafka with his novella The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning as a giant cockroach. Modern body horror usually isn't as kind as "magic happened while sleeping:" instead, the body horror comes from involuntary mutation, contagious disease, unfortunate accidents, or parasitic infestation. Unlike stories of struggles with disfigurement like The Phantom of the Opera, body horror focuses not on the specific way the body is altered but the specific horror of slowly losing autonomy over one's own form.
CREATURE FEATURES
Every type of humanoid monster (e.g., vampires, zombies, werewolves) has its own subgenre, as each monster has its own fans and rules for how they operate. Unintelligent monsters that kill out of animal instinct, however, live in the same subgenre: creature feature. Creature features either involve a group of people disturbing the creature's natural habitat or the creature suddenly appearing in the middle of a regular town. The creatures can be rare but naturally occurring (like giant sharks and alligators), the result of an unethical scientific experiment or accident (the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and giant tongue-eating lice in The Bay), or a creature that's been hibernating and is now awakened (The Creature from the Black Lagoon and the monster from Cloverfield). Monsters from space can fall into the creature feature subgenre if they act like monsters, not people--Predator and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are not creature features; Nope and The Thing are.¹⁰ Creature features can also overlap and include stories where humans turn into something that isn't human (e.g., The Human Centipede is not a creature feature; The Substance is).
SLASHERS AND META-SLASHERS
Mostly a film genre, this subgenre revolves around suburban teenagers and an unknown mystery killer picking them off one by one. By the end of the film, the killer's identity is revealed, and the killer "dies," is arrested, or escapes only to come back for the sequel (slashers are almost always serialized). Slashers are overt in their use of tropes to the point of cliché and have been around since the pulp novels about Sweeney Todd in late nineteenth-century London. However, the structure of slashers changed with the 1996 film Scream, the first meta-slashers. In a meta-slasher, the characters recognize that they are in a horror story and use their own knowledge of the clichéd tropes of the genre to survive. This fresh take on the subgenre has allowed the meta-slasher to interrogate the use and limits of horror as a genre while satirizing mainstream culture and their media literacy. While not the scariest or most cerebral, meta-slashers have the most to say about horror as a genre.
CREEPYPASTA
Creepypasta (a portmanteau of creepy and copypasta, a term for memetic transference of media through the internet) is the latest iteration of the horror legend. Traditionally, adults would tell horrifying tales to children to teach morality and behavior. However, the Victorian era saw the development of the Precious Childhood,¹¹ and the older horror tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were Disneyfied to match the more sanitized attitudes toward child-rearing. Creepypasta is a reclamation of those legends to scare teens and children and features fictional monsters like Slenderman, The Rake, and Jeff the Killer. Creepypasta uses integrated multimedia with purported images, source links, and transcripts of recordings embedded into the stories to give them the veneer of authenticity. Common tropes of this subgenre include cursed technology, lost media, hyperrealistic gore, unmotivated violence, and inescapable endless loops.
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FOOTNOTES:
1. What sets horror apart from mystery is the nature of the involvement of the characters: mysteries draw the characters further into danger, while horror characters do whatever they can to escape the horror. While plenty of horror stories do contain an element of mystery to them (Who is the killer? Why are they doing this? How do we stop the evil rampage?) Characters are driven to solve the mystery unless doing so will free them from the monsters that are threatening them. Mysteries also require a complete and satisfying resolution, while horror stories often leave questions unanswered to increase the reader's fear. Horror is also notably different from crime. While horror victims have awful crimes committed against them (murder, torture, captivity, and so much more), crime stories ask the reader to follow and sympathize with the villain, while horror rarely does this. Imagine someone saying, "That poor Freddy Krueger. If only he could just kill all those teens, then his soul could be at rest"—this sounds ridiculous. Still, crime horrors do exist: a great example is The Silence of the Lambs, where the horrifying cannibal Hannibal Lecter aids agent Clarice Starling in catching the equally horrifying serial killer Buffalo Bill. 2. According to literary theorist Noel Carroll, a monster is an unnatural creature, nonhuman or not entirely human, that constitutes a threat to the protagonist. Chewbacca, for example, is not a monster because he is not a threat to the protagonists. 3. No, I didn't forget about King Kong—he's the granddaddy of horror monsters. However, Kong is of a different era and represents the fear of undiscovered threats lurking in foreign lands. While relevant in the 1930s (only two-and-a-half decades after the invention of the airplane), this isn't a prevalent fear for modern audiences, which is why he's become a heroic character and defender of humanity in the 21st-century Monsterverse franchise. Meanwhile, Godzilla remains a monster who fights other monsters not to defend humanity but for self-preservation. 4. A 2022 survey published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction found that 53.5% of adults have some degree of fear of clowns. Interestingly, women are more likely than men to fear clowns, and fear of clowns starts to fade with age, which isn't true of other irrational fears. 5. Why? That can get complicated. Some monsters like Freddy Kruger and Candyman are out for revenge against a society that did them wrong and made them into a monster. Others, like the titular creatures in The Blob and Alien, kill to survive like any creature in the animal kingdom (though they kill so sadistically they still come off as evil). Slasher monsters have lots of different motivations: Norman Bates killed out of jealousy, Patrick Bateman killed out of boredom, and Jason killed because teenagers kept trespassing onto his land. Some monsters don't even need a reason to kill: Michael Myers kills babysitters because he likes to kill babysitters. 6. See the article on Affliction Theory 7. This is complicated by the idea that "sinful" behavior is a judgment by society, and societies change over time. For example, a common practice in '80s and '90s horror was "kill your gays:" if a horror movie had a character that was part of the LGBTQ+ community, they either die for their "sinful" sexual identity or are the monster (e.g., Angela in Sleepaway Camp is a monster because she's a boy that was forced to act like a girl by her crazy aunt). These decisions don't stand up to modern ethical scrutiny but, when put into the context of society when they were created, do properly follow the tropes of horror. 8. At least that's the story logic of why the monster doesn't always die at the end. The more practical answer is that there can't be any sequels if the monster is dead and gone forever. This also explains why death is very seldom permanent for horror villains. 9. Yes, there were Sue Snell, Tommy Ross, and Miss Desjardin, and Carrie doesn't hurt them. But at that point in the novel, Tommy is dead, Miss Desjardin just happened to survive after Carrie psychically threw her against a brick wall, and Carrie only spares Sue after she reads Sue's mind and is too weak to hurt Sue anyway. So my point stands. 10. This doesn't mean the monsters can't ever act like people in a creature feature: both The Thing and the queen alien from The Faculty masquerade as human (the Outpost 31 staff and Marybeth Louise Hutchinson, respectively) but shed their human forms and become horrifying creatures. 11. See this article on the Victorian literary movement |
FURTHER READING:
WORKS REFERENCED: Scream. Directed by Wes Craven. Dimension, 1996. The Faculty. Directed by Robert Rodriguez. Dimension, 1999. A Nightmare on Elm Street. Directed by Wes Craven. New Line Cinema, 1984. Friday the 13th. Directed by ____ The Silence of the Lambs. The Thing. The Blob. Halloween. Halloween. The Bay. Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers. King Kong. Frankenstein. The Wolf Man. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Weapons. Nope. It Follows. Child's Play. Candyman. Dracula. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Invisible Man. The Call of Cthulhu. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Leprechan. Frankenstein. Godzilla. Godzilla vs. Kong. Sleepaway Camp. The Burning. Carrie. Sweeney Todd. Cloverfield. Predator. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Bay. Jurassic Park. The Human Centipede. The Substance. Psycho. American Psycho. The Phantom of the Opera. The Metamorphosis. Twilight. The Backrooms. Slenderman. Jeff the Killer. The Rake. Orphan. Saw. What Lies Beneath. The Stepford Wives. The Wicker Man. The Birds. Pirhana. Poltergeist. Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. Hellraiser. Midsommar. The Babadook. The Poughkeepsie Tapes. |
Article was last updated on 22 March 2026.