Horror Fiction: What It Means and the Classics That Shaped It

Roots in the Gothic novel

Horror fiction tells stories whose core, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, is the creation of a sense of fear in the reader. In Western literature, this cultivation of fear as a literary purpose in its own right emerges in the pre-Romantic 18th century, with the Gothic novel. Britannica credits Horace Walpole, with “The Castle of Otranto” (1764), with founding horror fiction as a legitimate literary form. Before Walpole, fear often showed up in fiction, but rarely as the main point of the text.

The Gothic novel, then, is the historical ancestor of horror fiction, not a synonym for it: it has its own separate guide on our site, with the castles, settings and atmospheres that belong to it alone — see our guide to Gothic literature. The horror that grew out of that strand later expanded well past those settings.

The authors who defined the genre

Mary Shelley brings pseudoscience into the genre with “Frankenstein” (1818): the plot of a created monster that turns on its own maker, according to Britannica. By the end of the century, Bram Stoker published “Dracula” (1897), the genre’s defining vampire tale; Britannica credits it with a decisive role in shaping the vampire trope that later spread through Western popular culture, in both fiction and film, with a line of influence running all the way to Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot,” one of the titles covered in our guide to the best horror books.

Edgar Allan Poe deserves a section of his own. According to Britannica, he pushed the horror story well past simple entertainment, skillfully blending reason and madness within an unsettling everyday atmosphere; his first published story is itself a horror tale, “Metzengerstein,” which appeared in the Saturday Courier on January 14, 1832. Yet, according to the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, horror tales make up only a small part of his overall output, which also included poetry and literary criticism. The source itself notes that it is not Poe who is morbid for having written those tales, but readers who are morbid for remembering him chiefly for them.

In the 20th century, Britannica places H.P. Lovecraft among the masters of the gothic tale of terror, an author of novellas and short stories blending horror and macabre fantasy. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on August 20, 1890, and died there on March 15, 1937; drawn to science from childhood, he was kept out of university by lifelong frail health. His Cthulhu Mythos tells of ordinary New Englanders who encounter horrific beings of extraterrestrial origin, built on an intimate knowledge of the region’s geography and culture fused with an original mythology. The geometry Lovecraft imagines for those beings is nothing you would find in a classroom: a separate Recap covers it on its own. Per Britannica, Lovecraft’s fame as a writer grew mostly after his death.

Practical example: readers of “Dracula” follow vampires, sorcery and a castle in the Carpathians, within the genre’s supernatural strand. Readers of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” (1959) instead follow four people investigating increasingly disturbing phenomena in a mansion with a dark past, where the tension comes from the blurred line between the supernatural and the characters’ state of mind: the more realistic strand.

Two strands, not one

Britannica marks out two strands of the horror story. The first plays on explicit supernatural elements, such as ghosts and vampires. The second builds fear on psychological ground, closer to ordinary life. Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House,” a 1959 novel adapted in 1963 into a film often ranked among the best haunted-house movies, belongs, per Britannica, to this second strand: a horror story with Gothic roots that explores psychological suspense.

In some horror stories, Britannica notes, the tension comes precisely from the absence of a mysterious atmosphere, from the contrast with an everyday setting.

Horror, Gothic fiction and the map of literary genres

Horror fiction does not line up exactly with the Gothic novel: Gothic fiction is the historical strand that gave rise to it in the 18th century, while horror also includes works with no castles or Gothic settings at all, from the Cthulhu Mythos to the domestic suspense of Hill House. Britannica still groups Bierce, Machen, Blackwood, Lovecraft and Stephen King among the authors who shaped the horror story’s evolution in the 20th century, alongside the names from the century before.

To place horror within the wider system of narrative genres, novel, short story, poetry, drama, and their branches, our guide to literary genres lays out the full picture. Anyone deciding which genre to write in, horror included, can turn to our guide on choosing a literary genre. Readers curious about the subgenre blending horror and romance can turn to our guide on horror romance. Anyone ready to move from reading to writing can find the concrete techniques, atmosphere, pacing, point of view, in our guide on how to write a horror story.