Horror fiction

Horror is a category of speculative fiction designed to unsettle, frighten, or terrify its audience. It typically splits into two main sub-genres: psychological horror and supernatural horror. In 1984, literary historian J. A. Cuddon described the horror story as a prose work of varying length that shocks or frightens the reader, or even provokes feelings of disgust or loathing. The genre aims to build an eerie, frightening atmosphere, and the threats it presents often mirror larger cultural anxieties.

The genre’s origins stretch back before the year 1000, rooted in folklore and religious traditions concerned with death, the afterlife, evil, demons, and the concept of a personified thing. These traditions produced tales of demons, witches, vampires, werewolves, and ghosts. Early European horror fiction came from the Ancient Greeks and Romans. Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel *Frankenstein* was heavily influenced by the story of Hippolytus, whom Asclepius brought back from the dead—a tale Euripides turned into plays. In Plutarch’s *Parallel Lives*, the account of Cimon describes the ghost of a murderer named Damon, killed in a bathhouse in Chaeronea. Pliny the Younger (61–c. 113) recounts how Athenodorus Cananites bought a cheap haunted house in Athens. While writing a philosophy book, he was visited by a chained ghost that vanished in the courtyard; the next day, magistrates dug there and found an unmarked grave. Biblical texts, especially the Book of Revelation, also contain horror elements.

After 1000, William of Malmesbury’s *The Witch of Berkeley* is seen as an early horror story. Werewolf tales were common in medieval French literature. Marie de France wrote a werewolf lai called “Bisclavret.” The Countess Yolande commissioned “Guillaume de Palerme,” and anonymous authors wrote “Biclarel” and “Melion.” Much horror fiction draws from brutal 15th-century figures. The character Dracula is supposedly linked to Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, whose alleged war crimes appeared in German pamphlets, though Bram Stoker’s notes show no evidence for this. A 1499 pamphlet by Markus Ayrer is notable for its woodcut images. The serial-killer sprees of Gilles de Rais are thought to have inspired “Bluebeard.” The vampire motif, especially the female vampire, largely derives from the noblewoman and murderer Elizabeth Bathory, helping horror fiction emerge in the 18th century, as seen in László Turóczi’s 1729 book *Tragica Historia*.

The 18th century saw the gradual rise of Romanticism and the Gothic horror genre, which drew on late medieval written and material heritage. Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel *The Castle of Otranto* gave the genre its form. Its first edition was disguised as an actual medieval romance from Italy, supposedly discovered and republished by a fictional translator. When revealed as modern, many critics found it anachronistic, reactionary, or in poor taste, but it quickly became popular. *Otranto* inspired William Beckford’s *Vathek* (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s *A Sicilian Romance* (1790), *The Mysteries of Udolpho* (1794), and *The Italian* (1796), and Matthew Lewis’s *The Monk* (1797). Much horror fiction from this period was written by women and aimed at a female audience, often featuring a resourceful woman threatened in a gloomy castle.

The Gothic tradition evolved into what modern readers call horror literature in the 19th century. Influential works and characters that still resonate in fiction and film appeared during this time: the Brothers Grimm’s “Hänsel und Gretel” (1812), Mary Shelley’s *Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus* (1818), John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), Charles Maturin’s *Melmoth the Wanderer* (1820), Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), Jane C. Loudon’s *The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century* (1827), Victor Hugo’s *The Hunchback of Notre-Dame* (1831), Thomas Peckett Prest’s *Varney the Vampire* (1847), the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson’s *Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde* (1886), Oscar Wilde’s *The Picture of Dorian Gray* (1890), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lot No. 249” (1892), H. G. Wells’ *The Invisible Man* (1897), and Bram Stoker’s *Dracula* (1897). Each created an enduring horror icon later reimagined on the page, stage, and screen.

In the 20th century, cheap periodicals proliferated, sparking a boom in horror writing. Gaston Leroux serialized *Le Fantôme de l'Opéra* before it became a novel in 1910. Tod Robbins, a writer for mainstream pulps like *All-Story Magazine*, focused on madness and cruelty. In Russia, Alexander Belyaev popularized these themes in his serialized story *Professor Dowell's Head* (1925), about a mad doctor performing experimental head transplants and reanimations on stolen bodies, later published as a novel. Specialist publications like *Weird Tales* and *Unknown Worlds* later emerged to give horror writers an outlet. Influential early 20th-century horror writers made their mark in these mediums, most notably H. P. Lovecraft, whose enduring Cthulhu Mythos transformed and popularized the genre.