The Campaign Builder's Guild

I'm curious - what's your favourite horror genre and why?

Breakdown of categories:

Gothic Horror – I like my horror to be resemble the classic tales of terror, full of romance and suspense and creeping dread.  Examples: Dracula, The Monk, most of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles.

Body Horror/Splatterpunk – I like my horror to be intense, grotesque, graphic, and visceral, to fixate on terrifying or disgusting scenes of intense violence or of hideous transformation and degeneration.  Examples: Cronenberg's films, Clive Barker's horror stories and novels, Alien.

Psychological Horror – I like my horror to be ambiguous and unsettling, to dwell on the personal psyche of the characters – their fears, neuroses, phobias, anxieties, and traumas.  Examples: The Shining, The Silence of the Lambs, most of Hitchcock's films, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper."

Cosmic Horror/Weird Horror – I like my horror to involve eldritch forces that utterly dwarf humanity, terrifying in their sheer overwhelming sublime indifference, their alienage and alterity.  Examples: the stories and novellas of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and William Hope Hodgson, John Carpenter's "Apocalypse Trilogy," Event Horizon.

Religious Horror – I like my horror to draw on real-world religions and mythologies, to harness a feeling of sacred dread; bring on the Satanic babies, possessed teens, and killer demons!  Examples: The Omen, The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby, many of the horror tales of Arthur Machen.

Survival Horror/Apocalyptic Horror – I like my horror to pit the protagonists against the natural world or against seemingly unstoppable odds, forcing them to the extremes of human ability to survive a harrowing situation.  Examples: The Walking Dead, The Descent, 28 Days Later, Deliverance.

Surreal Horror – I like my horror Freudian and non-sensical, nightmarishly illogical and anarchic and unsettling in creative and unexpected and bizarre ways; however it horrifies, it always does so strangely.  Examples: the films of David Lynch, House of Leaves, Alice in Wonderland, some of Kafka's stories.

Horror-Comedy – I like my horror to be mixed liberally with humour, to be both ridiculous and unsettling all at once; the humour can be black, but it's still always present to some degree, and the horror can be intense, but it's always shot through with the absurd.  Examples: Shaun of the Dead, The Cabin in the Woods, Gremlins, Beetlejuice.

Obviously, the above are almost never discrete categories or neat genres, and this list is incomplete: we might add an ever-narrowing series of subgenres like action-horror, science-fiction-horror, backwoods horror, torture porn, etc, but I think the above work fairly well as umbrella terms.  The Shadow Over Innsmouth is Cosmic Horror but also Body Horror and Psychological Horror, The Great God Pan would be Religious Horror and Cosmic Horror and perhaps a bit of Body Horror thrown in at the beginning, The Turn of the Screw would be both Gothic and Psychological Horror, etc.

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My two top choices are Body Horror and Cosmic Horror, which I think is interesting since they sum up two extremes of scale.  Body Horror is all about personal transformation and infection, about the feeling that something is inside you (and, of course, it's about guts).  When you stop and realize that we are all made of meat and let the implications of that sink in, that's the essence of Body Horror.  It's a "zoomed in" genre, in-your-face and intimate and highly corporeal.

Conversely Cosmic Horror is all about how all-inspiringly gigantic the universe is, and how little it cares about us; it's an existential genre that draws its horror from a sense of monstrous scale and about how utterly other the universe is.    It's a "zoomed out" genre about gulfs of time and space and things that are too big or too inhuman or too abstract to be fathomed.

Those two things, weirdly, are both just kind of everyday facts about the universe that are pretty startlingly obvious but which we don't care to think about much, and both genres rely on exposing those facts and exploiting the subsequent anxieties.

Now, why I like to be reminded of these two somewhat depressing realities is a harder question to answer...

I like fiction that teases out the nastiness in natural human conduct, or in conduct we won't accept as natural even though it happens all the time. I'm talking Elephant or Wasteland or The Act of Killing. It's about the way we treat the things in ourselves and in others that we choose to confront but refuse to examine. When I put "horror" in my games it's usually this.

That fits with your unique sensibilities!  I'd say that broadly speaking the closest subgenre your description resembles is Psychological Horror, although it sounds very social and amorphous, more about politics and the way we build a society.  Still, Psychological Horror, at its best, is about holding up a mirror to aspects of ourselves with which we're uncomfortable, and that sounds kinda like what you're talking about.

My question, too, isn't just about gaming per se; maybe this topic should've been in the Dragon's Den, actually...

Sociological Horror, perhaps.

Yeah, interesting... a big overlap with Dystopian fiction.  Horror is always bleeding into other genres anyway: science fiction, fantasy, mystery, comedy, tragedy, satire.

"Sociological Horror" is a tricky thing to categorize since a lot of documentaries and real-world representations of events fit in.  The kind of horror evoked by something like genocide or slavery seems, to me, of a fundamentally different type than the aestheticized form of horror you usually find in horror fiction; we react to it in a pretty dramatically different way.  There tends to be less delight or pleasure in experiencing horrors of that ilk, I think, in part because they're so mingled with affects like guilt, shame, and pity.

I like Psychological Horror quite a bit, but when it came down to it I'm just more interested in Cosmic and Surreal Horror. The former because I like how it mocks our human need to understand and quantify, and admire how it operates outside those parameters - it leaves me asking why and wanting more even though I understand that knowing those answers would ruin it. It's a terrible temptation that keeps me thinking of it for days on end and makes it linger. I like the latter for similar reasons, but also because where Cosmic Horror can have a certain grandiosity to it, Surreal Horror can be very down-to-earth (no pun intended) and "close." I think it can stem from psychological horror and yet creatively expand upon it with vivid manifestations and strange occurrences. Psychological horror can be subtler, I think, but I like my strangeness to be large and in-your-face and unsettling.

I was tempted to put Body Horror, but that's a genre I "enjoy" in the same manner people might gather around a gruesome traffic accident - horrifying and grotesque, but difficult to look away from. It's a genre I find most unsettling and horrifying in the worst ways, and I have to respect it for that... but whereas Cosmic and Surreal horror I can usually walk away from with my interest piqued, Body horror leaves me wishing I had walked away much earlier.

Psychological and survival. I'm a huge fan of the horror that comes with isolation in my games.

My games tend towards gothic horror more than anything, lots of dreams and undead strangeness, though the large use of sensitives to undead also means there is a psychological element.

My combats often end up something out of SPlatterpunk.

I had no idea there were so many kinds of horror.  This may be partly because I don't have much experience with it - I've read/seen only a tiny handful of the listed works.

I tend to not enjoy horror very much.  "Body horror" in all its types just grosses me out, and isn't enjoyable.  "Cosmic horror" seems to just be an evocation of existential dread, and I can get that just by staring at the night sky or watching Cosmos.  I enjoy some Hitchcock films, but in general "psychological horror" tends to bore me.  I may just not have a terribly refined sense for the genre.

I suppose the variety of horror that appeals to me most is the strange and the unknowable, forces and creatures that are "out of synch" with the world.  I like weirdness, though I think I tend to prefer "weird and wonderful" to "weird and unsettling," or for them to at least coexist, which I suppose is why I like strange fantasy but I don't much like horror.  The horror genre focuses on the dreadful, scary, or otherwise negative implications of weirdness, and I prefer my weirdness to be more positive, or at least more ambiguous than that.

Quote from: PolycarpThe horror genre focuses on the dreadful, scary, or otherwise negative implications of weirdness, and I prefer my weirdness to be more positive, or at least more ambiguous than that.

This is actually why I GM Cadaverous Earth. I was never sold on the "horror" of the setting (sorry, Steerpike!) but it was easy enough to shift from weird and unsettling to weird and wonderful with a simple perspective tweak.

That's OK, SA; Cadaverous Earth may be horrific, but it's not just a horror setting.  More of a weird dark fantasy/science fantasy post-apocalyptic setting with horror elements...

Quote from: Polycarp"Cosmic horror" seems to just be an evocation of existential dread, and I can get that just by staring at the night sky or watching Cosmos.

I think that in a sense this is absolutely right - cosmic horror is just a particularly evocative version of regular-old existential dread.  As usually understood it's about unfathomable, alien entities; sometimes they have contact with humanity, viewing them as vermin or slaves or food or playthings, but they're rarely malevolent in the classic Good vs. Evil sense.  In the words of Lovecraft:

"The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the dæmons of unplumbed space...  The one test of the really weird is simply this -- whether of not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere the better it is as a work of art in the given medium."

Quote from: PolcyarpI suppose the variety of horror that appeals to me most is the strange and the unknowable, forces and creatures that are "out of synch" with the world.  I like weirdness, though I think I tend to prefer "weird and wonderful" to "weird and unsettling," or for them to at least coexist, which I suppose is why I like strange fantasy but I don't much like horror.  The horror genre focuses on the dreadful, scary, or otherwise negative implications of weirdness, and I prefer my weirdness to be more positive, or at least more ambiguous than that.

You might like some of Algernon Blackwood's stuff.  Try the much-renowned story The Willows if you're interested in reading more stuff of that type; it's kind of a horror story, but not really.  Blackwood is essentially an optimist, and is as-or-more interested in wonder and awe as he in horror per se.  He's also just an all-around fascinating guy: a British Evangelical who become a quasi-Buddhist mystic, occultist, and amateur paranormal investigator, traveled extensively in the Canadian backwoods, climbed mountains (and often skiied down them afterwards), and eventually segued into radio broadcasting and early television, all on top of being one of the most prolific weird fiction authors of the early twentieth-century.

You know, I had prepared myself to read the opening post, shake my head, and say "I guess horror just isn't my genre", but I guess I like a lot more of this than I realized I did.

I checked psychological horror on the poll, but I also really like the surreal stuff, and I suppose I'd probably be into a little bit of gothic horror if I ever got around to reading the classics. I do like the "creeping tension of the unexplained" aspect of things.

I have a hardcover complete works of Lovecraft on my bookshelf that I bought at Barnes and Noble because it was on sale for three dollars, and never got around to reading. Maybe I ought to?

I don't dig religious horror because there's always some kind of element in there that makes me roll my eyes. And I know I absolutely don't have the stomach for any sort of body horror, though I guess in a game format where we're talking and reading in prose rather than going to the  movies, I might have an easier time coping with those elements.

Quote from: Luminous CrayonI have a hardcover complete works of Lovecraft on my bookshelf that I bought at Barnes and Noble because it was on sale for three dollars, and never got around to reading. Maybe I ought to?

Lovecraft can be a joy to read.  I sincerely consider him one of the great prose stylists of the twentieth century, contrary to some who dismiss him as a hack or who denigrate his purple style as bad writing, as if minimalist writers were automatically superior.

That said, the big things that can be a turn-off when it comes to Lovecraft are (1) the almost complete absence of dialogue in all but a few of his stories, (2) the undeniably racist anxieties that underlie much of his horror writing (check out "The Horror at Red Hook" sometime and see if you can get through it without throwing the book across the room; Lovecraft wrote it during his miserable time in New York, when his racial neuroses reached their fever peak).

Since the collection is complete and there's no order to the tales I'd try At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, or "The Call of Cthulhu," as those are the highwater marks in my book.  The Dunwich Horror is pretty good, too, and The Whisperer in Darkness is creepy and fun in a kind of cheesy 1930s B movie sort of way.

EDIT: If Lovecraft doesn't work for you but you find the idea of cosmic horror intriguing, Ramsey Campbell is great, too, but more modern (and better at dialogue) than Lovecraft.  I actually like a lot of his entities more than Lovecraft's.  Although that might be because there's often an element of body horror in his stuff.  His later stories stray away from the cosmic a bit - I think he sort of exorcised Lovecraft as an influence in the 1970s...

I appreciate Lovecraft's imagination but I got burned out on him pretty quickly.  The stories always struck me as really repetitive; once I had read a few, I'd basically read them all.  I think part of this may have to do with the subgenre itself, because "cosmic horror" is almost by definition a plot-free zone - the "cosmic horror" has no personality, no discernible goals, no characterization.  It's not really good or evil, nor is it really a protagonist or antagonist; it's just there, which is sort of the point, but means it forms a more or less inert part of the backdrop.  The Lovecraft stories that are best known or stand out often evoke horror within the plot primarily through other means (e.g. the body horror in The Dunwich Horror), and existential dread is just a re-used set piece.  It doesn't seem like very fertile ground for more than a short piece of evocative writing (though fortunately for Lovecraft, that's exactly what he did with it), and it doesn't help that the writing itself can get repetitive.  Take a shot every time you see the words "cyclopean" or "nameless" and you won't just have a wild night, you'll end up in the hospital.

Quote from: Lmns CrnI don't dig religious horror because there's always some kind of element in there that makes me roll my eyes.

I feel sort of the same way about this.  Religious horror often takes the form of "sinister Catholicism" which seems faintly ridiculous; maybe it's more credible among those whose knowledge of Catholicism is limited to "weird dudes in robes speaking ominously in Latin."  I very seldom see examples of religious horror that are not either explicitly Catholic or Catholic-fantasy-equivalent, so maybe I'd enjoy it more if it was based on a tradition I was less familiar with.

Quote from: PolycarpTake a shot every time you see the words "cyclopean" or "nameless" and you won't just have a wild night, you'll end up in the hospital.

:D

A chapter of my dissertation actually focuses on the repetition of the word "nameless," and on what namelessness means for Lovecraft, how it operates in his fiction (specifically with regard to disgust and cosmicism).

It's true that too much Lovecraft in a short sitting can get repetitive, and that "pure" cosmic horror can be sort of empty-feeling unless it's mixed with something else.  This is why The Shadow Over Innsmouth is all kinds of awesome, in my opinion: it's a story that's not just about the vast, abysmal horror of the sea, it's got the creepy, possibly diseased, possibly degenerate villagers and a brilliant action-oriented set-piece and a long, rambling interlude from an old, crazy drunk, and all sorts of other stuff that makes the story work.  But you're quite right that plot isn't the important thing for cosmic horror, atmosphere is.

As for religious horror, there's just not much of it that's any good.  The Catholic thing is interesting; arguably it could be a hold-over from the strong anti-Catholic streak that was common in England in the 18th & 19th centuries, especially among some of the early Gothic writers, but a lot of religious horror these days (especially in film) sort of validates the Catholic cosmology.  My personal favorite for religious horror (at least on film) is Carpenter's Prince of Darkness, but it's kind of a deconstruction and isn't really pure religious horror, exactly; there's definitely a Lovecraftian element to it.  Although I must admit, the remake of The Omen was quite pretty to look at...