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Horror fiction
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 an evil —- or, occasionally, misunderstood —- 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. See also supernatural fiction.
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Horrific situations are found in some of the earliest recorded tales. Many myths and legends feature scenarios and archetypes used by later horror writers. Tales of demons and vampires in ancient and more recent folklore were often quite horrific.
Modern horror fiction found its roots in the gothic novels that exploded into popularity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, typified by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) as a prototype, and refined by Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). A variation on the Gothic formula that remains one of the most enduring and imitated horror works is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818, revised version 1831). Frankenstein has also been considered science fiction, a philosophical novel or a 'novel of purpose' by some literary historians. At the same time, John William Polidori devised the kind of vampire story that has since become familiar with his short story The Vampyre. This kind of supernatural character, combining evil with sinister charm, has since been much used and elaborated by horror writers.
The first published American horror story was Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
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.
Other early exponents of the horror form number such luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft who are widely considered to be masters of the art. Among the writers of classic English ghost stories, M. R. James is often cited as the finest. His stories avoid shock effects and often involve an Oxford antiquarian as their hero. Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" and Oliver Onions's "The Beckoning Fair One" have been called the best horror stories. Lovecraft and Sheridan le Fanu called some of their writing weird fiction or weird stories.
Horror fiction reached a wider audience in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of the American pulp magazine. 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, E. Hoffmann Price, Seabury Quinn, C.M. Eddy, Jr. and Robert Bloch. At a lower intellectual level were the weird menace or "shudder pulps" such as Dime Mystery and Horror Stories, which offered a more visceral form of horror.
Some stories in highbrow "literary" fiction could arguably be regarded as horror narratives: examples include Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" (Die Verwandlung) and "In the Penal Colony" (In der Strafkolonie) and William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily.
Some modern practitioners of the genre use vivid depictions of extreme violence or shock to entertain their audiences, often recalling Grand Guignol theatre (see splatterpunk). This development has given horror fiction a stigma as base entertainment devoid of literary merit. Other writers, such as Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, are cited as rejecting the portrayal of violent acts in favor of more psychological writing.
Nevertheless, popular contemporary writers such as Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, and Stephen King will sometimes bring off the horror effect without the extreme violence that characterises much of the current mainstream of this genre.
Horror fiction does not confine itself to literature, however. Countless horror-themed movies have been released in the 20th century, notably Dracula, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday The 13th, and Night of the Living Dead. There have also been many horror television series, such as Dark Shadows, Kolchak: the Night Stalker, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural. Even video games have used horror elements in their plotlines or gameplay, such as Resident Evil, Silent Hill, VtM:Bloodlines and VtM:Redemption, Quake, the Ravenholm chapter of Half Life 2, F.E.A.R and the Doom series, especially Doom 3. Also there are some horror-based role-playing settings such as Ravenloft and World of Darkness.