What Makes Good Horror?

What Makes Good Horror? —Photo by Edilson Borges on Unsplash

I used to think horror was like art or porn – you knew it when you saw it. Helping to judge the Australian Shadow Awards this year changed that. While the other panel members and I were provided with some existing criteria to judge by, we nevertheless found ourselves debating whether some entries were ‘horror enough’ to be considered for the award. Were some simply fantasy fiction with dark elements, or YA with a little bit of bite? This was even before we’d discussed whether the books were actually any good or not. I’m confident we got the short list and eventual winner right in the end, since Kaaron Warren’s Tide of Stone also won the Aurealis award for best horror novel. However, since then, the same nagging question has been festering in my grey matter. What makes good horror? To silence those devils, I decided to dig into the crypts and actually research a proper answer. This article is a distillation of what I’ve found, with some additional thoughts of my own. First, I tackle what ‘horror’ is in the first place and then discuss what makes it ‘good’.

Obviously, horror is something that scares you. However, there has to be something more to it than that. We might be tempted to add that horror is anything with a monster in it. Dracula, Frankenstein, The Wolfman. Yet, there are plenty of stories out there with monsters that you’d hardly class as horror – Twilight to name just one. On the flip side of that, there are plenty of scary stories that exist without the need for a monster at all. Most body horror lacks a defined external threat, opting for the metaphorical terror of our own vessels as enemy instead. Does horror need to have a supernatural element in it then? The Shining. The Haunting of Hill House. The Exorcist. They’re all horror. But, what about Wolf Creek? That doesn’t have a ghost or ghoul in sight. Maybe instead of supernatural elements, you need blood and gore? Hello Saw. Yet, plenty of cosmic horror avoids gore and is all the scarier for it. It seems any additional element beyond ‘horror is scary’ just throws up counter examples that disprove the rule.

Some might say simply then, that horror is any piece of writing or film intended to frighten you. However, many advertisements these days are intended to scare and, despite their toe-curling awfulness, can’t be classified as horror. Documentaries like Before The Flood also fall into this ‘scary but not horror’ bucket.

Literary historian J. A. Cuddon 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 first key part in that definition is ‘fiction’. It takes out the ads and documentaries that are meant to scare, but certainly aren’t horror. The words ‘repulsion’ and ‘loathing’ are getting to the heart of how horror makes us feel as well. While adding subjective feelings to an objective definition seems to be problematic, I think this does have a lot of merit. We’ll get back to this later. First, it’s worth exploring how horror does make us feel, and what kinds of fear you might experience during something true to the genre of Horror.

Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe published an essay way back in 1826 defining two elements of horror fiction as ‘terror’ and ‘horror’. She said terror is that sense of building dread you feel before something happens. Horror is the disgust you feel after the deed is done. Orson Scott Card expands on this definition in his essay Maps on a Mirror. He explains:

“Dread is the first and strongest of the three kinds of fear. It is that tension, that waiting that comes when you know there is something to fear but you have not yet identified what it is.”

“Terror only comes when you see the thing you're afraid of.”

“Horror is the weakest of all. After the fearful thing has happened, you see its remainder, its relics.”

Card does have a point on the first two. However, I think he is dead wrong in saying horror is the weakest form of fear (I think he’s dead wrong about many other things too, but that’s another essay). A true sense of horror lingers long after a traumatic event. It’s something that sticks with us, both in our minds and hearts. Horror is something that can circle back into dread, then terror again. The best horror mimics this loop, sending us through the spin cycle again and again, until we emerge out the other side exhausted yet strangely satisfied.

Another element that needs to be added to dread, terror and fear is the sense of revulsion we often feel in horror. Stephen King refers to this as the ‘gross-out’ in his book on horror, Danse Macabre:

“…when Regan vomits in the priest's face or masturbates with a crucifix in The Exorcist, or when the raw looking, terribly inside-out monster in John Frankenheimer's Prophecy crunches off the helicopter pilot's head like a Tootsie-Pop. The gross-out can be done with varying degrees of artistic finesse, but it's always there.”

We should also add ‘the creeps’ to this discussion (further mentioned in Danse Macabre). It is separate to revulsion in that it has an anticipatory element to it. The creeps are to dread as repulsion is to terror. We get the creeps when we sense something gross is about to happen, we feel revulsion when it does. There is also the aftermath of shock that is the cousin to the lingering effects of horror too. So, each stage of fear has its accompanying feeling to further signal the phase we’re in: Dread (the creeps), Terror (revulsion), Horror (shock). These feelings all give us an added clue when we’re experiencing good horror, and give writers a bullseye to aim for when they’re trying to create it.

Now that we have an idea of what horror is and what it isn’t, it’s time to consider what makes something in the genre ‘good’. There have to be the standard things like solid writing, interesting plot, and characters you’re invested in before they get the axe to the throat. Throw these foundations of any good fiction out and you’re bound to have something that lands flat.

Good horror also plays on our fears in an impactful way. It dials them up to ten and then dials it up some more. Because fear is subjective, good horror has to dig deep into our primal phobias to frighten a broad audience. It needs to delve into our universal fears of pain, loss, seeing loved ones suffer, feeling trapped, being hunted, being forced to do something we don’t want to do. Pick one and present it in a convincing way we haven’t seen before, and you’ll likely have people hiding under the edges of their seats. Combine a few together and you create a massive beast of terror we can’t escape from. Bad horror does this in heavy-handed or cliché ways. It relies on ‘jump scares’ when you’re shocked for a second, but come down quickly when you realise it was just a black cat popping out from behind a tree. Because we’ve been exposed to so much horror these days, we need a sense of newness to achieve proper terror. A regular show of needles going into eyeballs doesn’t pierce the psyche of devout fans any more. Rather, we want to pick our way through a carnival ride of bloody syringes. In that way, good horror is somewhat of a moving target. Just think, if Dracula came out today, it would be classified as gothic romance rather than horror. It wouldn’t strike fear into our hearts, because we’ve already had that stake rammed through it too many times. Creators don’t need to fully reinvent the wheel every time. A unique take on an age-old story can be just as great as something completely different at its core. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski is one example of a haunted house tale that feels fresh and gut-wrenchingly scary.

A big part of keeping horror on the sharp edge of fear is exploring our sense of the unknown too. This trump card can be pulled out to make our own imaginations do the heavy lifting in the story. Set up a scenario where we need to fill in the dark spaces, and we often come up with something truly frightening. Of course, this works well for the ‘dread’ phase of fear, but at some point we have to move on from that to terror. When you show the monster, it had better also be part of the unknown – something we’re yet to encounter and find hard to fathom in its awfulness. If you do that, you deliver a paralysing, uncomprehending terror through the height of the scare, then keep a lingering sense of horror going as we try to compute what we just witnessed. It’s this element of the unknown that is the hardest to pull off. In a world where we’ve been exposed to thousands of stories, finding a way to innovate them is difficult. That, I think, is the special sauce in good horror. Finding a way to push the boundaries of the unknown, while grounding fear in a sense of realism. There has to be a balance. Too fanciful and it just doesn’t have the personal impact it needs to. Too familiar and it also lacks punch. Good horror sits at that intersection, taking us through unchartered byways that still feel like they could exist in our own universe.

So, horror is fiction that takes us through the three main stages of fear – dread, terror and horror. In each of these phases we experience other primal, physical reactions. Creepy tingles on our skin, gut-sickening revulsion, muscle-paralysing fright, and mind-numbing shock. Good horror draws on our deep-seated fears to achieve this. It then exploits our phobia of the unknown to tip us into the abyss. Good horror also feels real. Possible. It lets us put ourselves in the driver’s seat and makes it seem like these horrible things could happen to us – somewhere, somehow. Rounded characters, thoughtful details, and great prose all go a long way to achieve this sense of realism. However, it’s more in finding a balance between keeping one foot in the world we understand and plunging the rest of our souls into a place we do not. In finding that balance we find good horror. It is something that will always be morphing in how it presents, but will always have these fundamental elements to it. Good horror is a feeling within. Fear that goes beyond subjective and into the universal, wherever people dare to look into the darkness. I hope you find yourself inside that entertaining nightmare sometime soon.

This article first appeared in Aurealis Magazine (issue #128, March 4, 2020) and was a finalist for the Best Non-Fiction Category in the 2020 Shadow Awards.