Horror fiction

Horror is a genre of speculative fiction intended to disturb, frighten or scare an audience. Intent is the defining word: the genre sets out to provoke an emotional, psychological or physical fear response, building an eerie and frightening atmosphere deliberately rather than by accident. Noël Carroll's much-cited anatomy of the monster requires two traits, threatening and impure: the menace endangers the characters and violates accepted cultural categories, which is why hybrids, transformations and the uncanny dominate the genre's bestiary. Horror's threats are also read as reflecting the broader cultural anxieties of their moment.

The prose lineage runs from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), the first Gothic novel, through Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897), to the publishing boom of 1967 to 1971 and Stephen King's run from the 1970s. Its named branches include gothic fiction, cosmic horror, folk horror, body horror and the slasher. For novelists and serial writers alike, horror is an information discipline: dread is managed through what the reader is told, hinted at and withheld, chapter by chapter, which makes it a natural serial genre. See how to write horror.