Typology of Horror

Last updated: Fri Jul 19 2024

I was recently trying to explain to someone why I feel the horror novel House of Leaves is particularly unique. It’s not just because of its metafictional structure — which is similar to for instance Pale Fire — but also because of the precise structure of its horror. To express this I came up with a little typology of horror.

• Paranoia: You and your best friend are walking in the dark woods. It’s just woods, right? There’s no bears here… right?
• Suspense: You hear a twig crack. Is something there with you?
• Shock: Suddenly, a bear lunges out of the darkness!
• Disgust: You see the bear mauling and eating your best friend while you run away. Poor guy.
• Ambiguity / incomprehensibility / anomalousness: Wait, there shouldn’t even be bears in these woods. Why was a bear there? Was the bear even real?

Some scholars make a distinction between “terror” and “horror”, where terror is anticipation and horror is the reveal, with Stephen King adding “revulsion.” Terror roughly corresponds to suspense and somewhat paranoia, horror to shock and somewhat disgust, and revulsion to disgust.

So, in this typology, House of Leaves is interesting because it mostly operates at the level of paranoia and incomprehensibility. The house has a labyrinth of mysterious origin which may or may not contain a monster — it’s all left carefully ambiguous. This is a structure shared with many SCPs, where the horror is due to, say, the sheer anomalousness of a giant indestructible underwater serpent rather than anything traditionally terrifying or horrifying.

I suspect I’m missing some types in my typology. Some others that might be relevant:

• Social: Horror from watching a group of people do something terrible, a la Midsommar or The Lottery, which typically involves suspense, shock, or disgust but adds an extra social dimension.
• Psychological: Horror derived from a character’s psychological state — often derived partly from ambiguity — like Mima’s spiraling sense of reality in Perfect Blue or the focus on Eleanor’s anxiety in The Haunting of Hill House.
• Existential: Anything to do with considering mortality, nonexistence, and vast, inhuman periods of time. This again often comes from incomprehensibility or surreality, but layers additional emotion on top. Here we might think of cosmic horror a la Lovecraft or the more philosophical horror of a Woman in the Dunes.