Subgenres — in Horror Fiction
Horror is a family of genres, not one. Gothic horror frightens through place and inheritance, cosmic horror through scale, splatterpunk through the body, folk horror through the ground underfoot. Each entry here explains one kind and points at the shelf that stocks it.
33 terms · click any to explore
Apocalyptic Fiction
Horror narratives where global catastrophe serves as the backdrop for psychological unraveling and societal collapse rat…
Banshee
A wailing spirit that warns of imminent death in Irish and Scottish tales, now adapted as a terrifying supernatural omen…
Body Horror
Body horror focuses on the visceral, grotesque transformation or violation of the physical form, triggering deep revulsi…
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 …
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 …
Necronomicon
A fictional grimoire containing forbidden cosmic knowledge that drives readers to madness when they attempt to read its …
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…
Possession
A narrative framework where an external entity, usually demonic or spiritual, takes control of a character's body and mi…
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…
Slasher Fiction
A thriller subgenre focusing on a masked killer hunting teenagers, defined by suspenseful chases and graphic violence ra…
Southern Gothic
A literary mode blending Gothic dread with the specific decay, racism, and poverty of the American South.
Splatterpunk
A hyper-violent horror subgenre that prioritizes graphic bodily destruction and shock value over traditional narrative s…
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…
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