Horror fiction

Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the audience. Historically, the cause of the "horror" experience has often been the intrusion of a supernatural element into everyday human experience. Since the 1960s, any work of fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, or exceptionally suspenseful or frightening theme has come to be called "horror". Horror fiction often overlaps science fiction or fantasy, all three of which categories are sometimes placed under the umbrella classification speculative fiction.

Modern horror fiction found its roots in the gothic novelsFact|date=August 2008 that exploded into popularity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Later gothic horror descendants included seminal late 19th century works such as Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw". Early horror works used mood and subtlety to deliver an eerie and otherworldly flavor, but usually eschewed extensive explicit violence.Fact|date=August 2008

Other early exponents of the horror form number such luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft.Fact|date=August 2008 Edgar Allan Poe helped define both the science fiction and the horror genres.cite journal
url=http://www.tabula-rasa.info/DarkAges/Timeline1.html
title=The Horror Timeline, "Part I: Pre-20th Century"
author=David Carroll and Kyla Ward
journal=Burnt Toast
issue=#13
date=1993-05
accessdate=2001-01-16] Among the writers of classic English ghost stories, M. R. James is often cited as the finest.Fact|date=August 2008 Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" and Oliver Onions's "The Beckoning Fair One" have been called the best horror stories.Fact|date=August 2008 Lovecraft and Sheridan le Fanu called some of their writing weird fiction.

Horror fiction reached a wider audience in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of the American pulp magazine.Fact|date=August 2008 The premier horror pulp was "Weird Tales", which printed many of Lovecraft's stories as well as fiction by other writers such as Clark Ashton Smith. A different style was the weird menace or "shudder pulps" such as "Dime Mystery" and "Horror Stories", which offered a more visceral form of horror.Fact|date=August 2008

Today horror is one of the most popular categories of film.cite web
url=http://news.ncsu.edu/features/103106_HorrorFilms.htm
title=Horror Films Still Scaring – and Delighting – Audiences
author=Chad Austin
publisher=North Carolina State University News
accessdate=2006-01-16]

See also

* Bram Stoker Awards
* Fantastique
* Supernatural fiction.
* Ghost story
* Psychological horror
* Body horror
* Erotic horror

References

External links

* [http://www.horror.org Horror Writers Association]
*
* [http://www.awardannals.com/wiki/Honor_roll:Horror_books Horror books ranked by honors]