Horror fiction

A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length ... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing".

The horror genre has ancient origins, with roots in folklore and religious traditions focusing on death, the afterlife, evil, the demonic, and the principle of the thing embodied in the person.

Dracula can be traced to the Prince of Wallachia Vlad III, whose alleged war crimes were published in German pamphlets.

[12] The motif of the vampiress is most notably derived from the real-life noblewoman and murderer, Elizabeth Bathory, and helped usher in the emergence of horror fiction in the 18th century, such as through László Turóczi's 1729 book Tragica Historia.

It drew on the written and material heritage of the Late Middle Ages, finding its form with Horace Walpole's seminal and controversial 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto.

[14] Otranto inspired Vathek (1786) by William Beckford, A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1796) by Ann Radcliffe, and The Monk (1797) by Matthew Lewis.

Influential works and characters that continue resonating in fiction and film today saw their genesis in the Brothers Grimm's "Hänsel und Gretel" (1812), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), John Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819), Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820), Jane C. Loudon's The Mummy!

: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827), Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), Thomas Peckett Prest's Varney the Vampire (1847), the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the works of Sheridan Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Lot No.

Later, specialist publications emerged to give horror writers an outlet, prominent among them was Weird Tales[19] and Unknown Worlds.

Yellow journalism and sensationalism of various murderers, such as Jack the Ripper, and lesser so, Carl Panzram, Fritz Haarman, and Albert Fish, all perpetuated this phenomenon.

[23][24] The modern zombie tale dealing with the motif of the living dead harks back to works including H. P. Lovecraft's stories "Cool Air" (1925), "In The Vault" (1926), and "The Outsider" (1926), and Dennis Wheatley's "Strange Conflict" (1941).

Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend (1954) influenced an entire genre of apocalyptic zombie fiction emblematized by the films of George A. Romero.

[25][26] One of the best-known late-20th century horror writers is Stephen King, known for Carrie, The Shining, It, Misery, and several dozen other novels and about 200 short stories.

[30] Other popular horror authors of the period included Anne Rice, Shaun Hutson, Brian Lumley, Graham Masterton, James Herbert, Dean Koontz, Richard Laymon, Clive Barker,[31] Ramsey Campbell,[32] and Peter Straub.

Horror also serves as one of the central genres in more complex modern works such as Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award.

[34] One defining trait of the horror genre is that it provokes an emotional, psychological, or physical response within readers that causes them to react with fear.

"[36] In her essay "Elements of Aversion", Elizabeth Barrette articulates the need by some for horror tales in a modern world: The old "fight or flight" reaction of our evolutionary heritage once played a major role in the life of every human.

War, crime, and other forms of social violence came with civilization and humans started preying on each other, but by and large daily life calmed down.

However, Barrette adds that horror fiction is one of the few mediums where readers seek out a form of art that forces themselves to confront ideas and images they "might rather ignore to challenge preconceptions of all kinds."

"[38] It is a now commonly accepted view that the horror elements of Dracula's portrayal of vampirism are metaphors for sexuality in a repressed Victorian era.

[40]Halberstram articulates a view of Dracula as manifesting the growing perception of the aristocracy as an evil and outdated notion to be defeated.

The depiction of a multinational band of protagonists using the latest technologies (such as a telegraph) to quickly share, collate, and act upon new information is what leads to the destruction of the vampire.

In their historical studies of the gothic novel, both Devendra Varma[44] and S. L. Varnado[45] make reference to the theologian Rudolf Otto, whose concept of the "numinous" was originally used to describe religious experience.