Monsters & Figures — in Horror Fiction

Banshee

A wailing spirit that warns of imminent death in Irish and Scottish tales, now adapted as a terrifying supernatural omen…

Changeling

A supernatural infant swapped with a human child, growing up with hidden motives that slowly reveal their true, often ma…

Cosmic Horror

A mode of fiction where characters confront an indifferent, incomprehensible universe that renders human existence meani…

Cthulhu Mythos

A shared fictional universe of ancient gods and forbidden knowledge, originally created by H.P. Lovecraft to evoke cosmi…

Dark Fantasy

A narrative blending supernatural magic with grim, atmospheric dread where heroes face moral decay and monstrous threats…

Doppelganger

A physical double of a living person that appears in literature to signal impending doom, madness, or the fracturing of …

Eco Horror

Eco horror uses terrifying natural forces to expose human hubris, showing how environmental neglect invites monstrous co…

Eldritch

Eldritch describes phenomena that are profoundly alien and unnatural, evoking deep dread through their violation of know…

Extreme Horror

Extreme horror pushes narrative boundaries by depicting graphic violence and taboo subjects with unflinching detail to p…

Folk Horror

A horror subgenre where ancient pagan rituals and rural isolation collide with modern sensibilities, creating dread thro…

Ghost Story

A narrative where spectral entities interact with the living, often blurring the line between psychological terror and g…

Gothic Horror

Gothic horror traps characters inside decaying, isolated settings where lingering ancestral secrets, psychological terro…

Gothic Novel

A literary genre blending intense emotion with supernatural terror, using decaying settings and psychological dread to e…

Grimdark

A narrative mode where moral ambiguity reigns, protagonists commit atrocities for survival, and hope is scarce or illuso…

Haunted House Story

A narrative where the setting itself actively resists or manipulates the inhabitants, blurring the line between psycholo…

Horror Comedy

A literary mode blending macabre terror with humor, where grotesque violence and supernatural dread are offset by witty …

Lovecraftian

A subgenre emphasizing human insignificance against vast, indifferent cosmic entities that defy comprehension and drive …

Penny Dreadful

Cheap, sensational serial novels from the Victorian era featuring lurid tales of crime and terror designed to thrill wor…

Poltergeist

A restless spirit that interacts with the physical world through violent, unexplained disturbances like flying objects a…

Psychological Horror

Psychological horror uses the instability of the human mind to generate dread, replacing external monsters with internal…

Quiet Horror

Quiet horror builds dread through subtle psychological tension and atmospheric unease rather than explicit gore or sudde…

Revenant

A revenant is a physically returned corpse that retains its consciousness and agency, driven by vengeance or duty to hau…

Southern Gothic

A literary mode blending Gothic dread with the specific decay, racism, and poverty of the American South.

Survival Horror

A narrative mode where characters face overwhelming, often supernatural threats with limited resources, emphasizing vuln…

The Uncanny

The uncanny describes the eerie discomfort when familiar things suddenly feel strange and threatening, blurring the line…

Unreliable Narrator

A storyteller whose credibility is compromised by bias, delusion, or deception, forcing you to question every fact prese…

Weird Fiction

Weird Fiction blends supernatural dread with cosmic indifference, focusing on psychological unease rather than tradition…

Wendigo

A starving spirit that possesses humans, turning them into gaunt cannibals driven by an insatiable hunger for human fles…