What is a horror story about?
Before we start, let’s take a poll: What defines a horror story?
A common answer to “what is horror about?” is that horror aims to horrify (produce a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay in) its audience. Whereas other genres like romance or science fiction can be defined by their content, many argue that horror is defined by the feelings of the audience.
I’m not sure this is quite right. Horror certainly tends to make its audience feel a certain way—afraid, anxious, disgusted. And I suspect most horror authors and filmmakers aim to elicit those feelings. But this doesn’t make it the core of the genre because it isn’t a sufficient condition for horror.
Many war dramas also make audiences feel fear, dread, and dismay. We even describe war as horrific and associate it with feelings of fear, anxiety, dread, and dismay. In describing his experience shooting Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks had this to say (emphasis my own):
“The first day of shooting the D-Day sequences, I was in the back of the landing craft, and that ramp went down and I saw the first 1-2-3-4 rows of guys just getting blown to bits… The air literally went pink and the noise was deafening and there’s bits and pieces of stuff falling all on top of you and it was horrifying.”
Despite the dread and disgust it might make you and Tom Hanks feel, nobody would call Saving Private Ryan a horror film.
Another common definition of horror relies on the atmosphere of the story. For Stephen King, the height of a horror author comes when the author can create an atmosphere of dread, what King calls “the terror.” In his characteristically evocative tone, King gives readers a few examples of the terror:
“…when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”
Here again, many horror stories do create an atmosphere of dread. The Blair Witch, It Follows, Alien, and many others have mastered this part of spooky storytelling. However, many horror stories have little-to-no terror. Most notably the slasher genre is low on terror. Films like Evil Dead II, Jason X, and The Devil’s Rejects feature very little slow-burn, atmospheric dread. And of course there are some great suspense thrillers that don’t seem to fit within the horror genre (e.g., Zodiac, Se7en).
Defining horror based on the intention of the filmmaker or author is another common argument. But this one falls short for more a basic reason. Namely, my intent in creating something doesn’t matter for almost any other creative output. Fear and humor in particular are two areas where a creator’s intent can be missed entirely by the audience.
I was once in a screening of Hereditary with director Ari Aster in attendance. Following the film, Ari had a discussion with a humanities professor on stage. The professor launched into a deep, philosophical examination of that scene. You know the one, the pole scene. When he asked Ari if he was on the right track, Ari simply said (paraphrasing here since this was years ago):
“Not really. That’s just my sense of humor; I thought it was funny.”
The villain is a key component of horror, but perhaps not quite in the way some think it is. The classic academic definition of horror does rely on a specific kind of character. In his book, The Philosophy of Horror: Or Paradoxes of the Heart. Noël Carroll argues that central to the horror story is an entity that defies scientific and/or moral categories. That entity, Carroll says, is an extraordinary monster that exists in an ordinary world.
I’ve discussed Carroll’s definition before and where I think it succeeds and falls short. What I do like about his definition is that it focuses on structural elements of the story rather than emotions external to the story. And while I think it would miscategorize some slashers as not horror and some action films as horror, it does a better job than most definitions.
Still, I don’t think it’s the monster per se that defines horror. Instead, it’s the victim of the monster that makes a story horrifying.
A horror story is about a vulnerable character(s) being threatened by a powerful antagonist(s).
Being vulnerable often leads to fear, which is “fear == horror” is a common answer to what defines the genre. In fact, expressions of fear like a scream or the “fear face” might be best understood as signals of vulnerability.
Vulnerability implies a relationship with someone or something that outmatches you, wherein you know you are outmatched. If this is something that has yet to happen, but is anticipated, it creates dread (a la King’s terror). If you are faced with the thing that outmatches you, you feel fear and respond by fleeing, which is the adaptive response to exposure to a much more formidable adversary.
This is why horror features lots of running and hiding while action and thrillers feature tit-for-tat and fighting. Horror is unique in that the protagonists are very weak/vulnerable and the antagonists are very powerful (leading to the final girl trope that is so common in horror).
In my research, I’ve shown this empirically across hundreds of films. I’ve also formalized what I call the Horror Formula, which quantifies how “horror-centric” a story’s structure is. The vulnerability of the protagonist is a strong predictor of whether a film is classified as horror and whether “fear” appears among its IMDb keywords.
It also predicts heart rate of the audience when they’re watching the film — a physiological proxy for fear.
I’m sure there are still some edge cases with this definition (feel free to comment them below). But a definition built around structural vulnerability is more theoretically grounded and empirically supported than any emotion-based or monster-based definition. And it opens up a huge space for new experimental work.