Fiction designed to evoke fear, dread, or unease in the reader through supernatural, psychological, or visceral means.
Horror is the genre of fear. Its purpose is to make the reader feel something primal: dread, revulsion, unease, terror. It achieves this through supernatural threats, psychological manipulation, body-horror imagery, atmospheric tension, or the violation of things we take for granted (safety, bodily autonomy, sanity, the natural order). Horror is less about what happens and more about how it makes you feel.
Horror teaches you to control reader emotion more deliberately than any other genre. The skills you develop writing horror, pacing, atmosphere, dread, the withholding of information, transfer directly to thrillers, suspense, and even literary fiction. Understanding what scares readers helps you understand what moves them.
Considered the greatest haunted house novel ever written, generating terror through ambiguity and psychological deterioration.
Isolation, addiction, and a malevolent hotel converging on a family, showing how horror works through character as much as monsters.
A modern classic blending gothic horror with colonialism, fungi, and a crumbling English-style manor in 1950s Mexico.
Startling someone isn't scaring them. Sustained dread is harder to create and far more effective than sudden shocks.
The unknown is scarier than the known. The less you show, the more the reader's imagination fills in, and their imagination is worse.
Fear requires empathy. If readers don't care about your characters, they won't be scared when bad things happen to them.
Write a scene where nothing overtly threatening happens, but the reader feels deeply uneasy. Use setting details, character behavior, and pacing to create dread. The test: can you scare someone without any violence, monsters, or supernatural events?