Horror’s long story is about mixing bloodlines, fuzzy edges, mistaken identities and schismatic reformers. This is the short one.
We’re here to define it. Genetically.
Why bother, if everyone’s having fun? When anything can be Ø, Ø means nothing. Mixing genres is fun, but if the writer doesn’t understand, respect, even know what they’re mixing, the middle falls out.
The Ancestors
Genres never die, they just turn retro. The (-dates) here aren’t when the genre stopped being executed, they’re when it stopped being innovated.
Fairytale (-1800s) bizarre, usually chainable supernatural oral tales told for pure entertainment, sometimes with a moral element. The end of this tradition comes with late-18th-19th Century attempts to catalogue them, as by the Brothers Grimm, Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, etc.
Romance (1300s-1700s) a literary immitation of Fairytale, often told as a first-person narrative–though not meant to be believed by the hip reader.
The Gothic (1600s-1800s) a highly moralized narrative of a virginal character thrust into a dark world. The tension is between the twin human desires to see the innocent preserved and ravaged.
The Grotesque (1840s-1880s) Poe’s groundbreaking step beyond the Gothic form, focusing on a sensation of revulsion, often as much spiritual (and psychological) as physical. Frequently the terminal experience documented.
Symbolist Fiction (1880s-1910s) the uncanny suspension of the world’s logic in pursuit of a felt–rather than enumerated–psychological understanding. Robert Aickman would later take up this thread and merge it with the traditional English Ghost Story.
The Decadent (1870s-1890s) a self-consciously giddy extrapolation of Poe’s Grotesque into an unburdened world of excess, decay and dissolution for their own sake.
Sensation Fiction (1860s-1930s) melodramatic Victorial pulp meant to unsettle the middle-class Victorian reader with taboo topics. The mantle was taken up onstage by the Grand Guignol’s (generally social realist) plays leading to tragic and violent endings; extravagently crafted, their climactic bursts of mayhem were a draw in and of themselves, in the manner of a Grotesque.
The English Ghost Story (1600s-1800s) focused heavily on the experience of the unknown, with a moralizing core. Wounded by the concretizing of formal Occult Fiction in the later 1800s, but revitalized near the emergence of the Weird by M.R. James.
Occult Fiction (1860s-1910s) a proto-science-fiction dressed up as Ghost Story, from a milieu in which literal communion with the dead was believed to be both possible and imminent. Often mixed with the (out-of-scope) Detective genre, also innovated by Poe.
The Weird (1910s-1930s) Lovecraft’s attempt to unify certain strains of contemporary supernatural fiction into a cohesive genre, from which his fixation on human insignificance birthed True Horror. (Science Fiction and Modern Fantasy, both out of scope here, also emerged from The Weird.)
Often Confused
Thriller (1910s-) modern Sensation Fiction, dealing with extraordinary but non-supernatural occurrences such as murder, pursuit, threat and disappearance.
Torture Porn (1970s-2010s) a melding of Thriller and Poe’s Grotesque.
Slasher (1970s-1980s) a blood-soaked form of Thriller, in which the focus is on the violent deaths of the characters by human hands.
Ero Guro (1960s-) Japan’s answer to Slasher, focusing more on sexuality and warped morality than pursuit and murder.
True Horror
True Horror (1920s-) the genre of fiction birthed by Lovecraft, featuring a focal supernatural element (real or perceived), and an indifferent universe in place of a moral one. The emotional effect moves between fear and horror. The True Horror story crystalizes in the moment of realizing one has been wrong.