Supernatural: can include ghosts, monsters, dark forces, zombies, or pretty much any creepy thing that can’t be found in the real world.
Dark Fantasy: contains fantasy elements with a horror twist, or horror with a distinctly fantastical setting, like Stephen King’s Dark Tower series.
Sci-fi Horror: mash-up of science fiction and horror, usually where the sci-fic aspects (aliens, robots, space travel) are used to precipitate the overriding horror. Like in the movieAlien.
Psychological Horror: driven by characters’ fears and focused more on psychological dread than on murder, mutilation, and gore. Could be supernatural, but is more often associated with those twists where the protagonist turns out to be insane.
Lovecraftian Horror: yeah, Lovecraft is so awesome he gets his own genre. Includes stories of a dinstinct aesthetic involving either Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythology or similar ideas and situations: i.e., ancient secrets, giant monsters/aliens in the bowels of the earth, and a profoundly unsympathetic universe. Could also be called cosmic or atheistic horror.
Gothic: involves psychological terror in historically romantic settings, usually including mysteries, ghosts, castles, decay, madness, hereditary curses, and death. Pretty much dominated by Edgar Allan Poe.
Splatterpunk/ Slasher: the horror extreme, with graphic and gory violence intended to gross you out. Includes cinema’s torture porn category, in movies like Hostel.
Satanic/Religious/Occult: horror derived from certain belief systems and the evil aspects that they fight against. Usually involves demonic possessions, exorcisms, or explorations of the darker side of pagan religions and the use of ”left hand” magic. The Exorcism is a stand-out example.
Erotic Horror/Paranormal Romance: for some reason that I can’t fathom, sex and horror seem to go hand in hand. There’s plenty of erotica involving horrifying situations/the supernatural, and (unfortunately) paranormal romance (which I’m not even going to consider a genre of horror, because it’s NOT) has gotten huge among the tweenieboppers with the unfortunate success of drivel like Twilight.
Suspense/Thriller: does not involve any supernatural or otherworldly aspects, instead relying on real-life situations to generate horror through serial killers, deadly situations, natural disasters, and psycopaths. Good film examples are Se7en and Jaws (even though it’s pretty unrealistic that a shark gets so hung up on eating people).
Weird Fiction: a primarily historical term for fiction of the 1930s, it predates genre fiction and blended the supernatural, mythical, and even scientific into stories that were ultimately strange, uncanny, or unreal in nature. The term is popularized by Weird Tales magazine.
Speculative Fiction: not a subgenre but an umbrella term encompassing science fiction, fantasy, horror, superhero fiction, utopian/dystopian fiction, apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history literature. For a story that doesn’t necessarily fit into one genre, or blends several (maybe a post-apocalyptic horror/sci-fi piece with elves?), you can always just call it speculative fiction, since these genres often overlap.
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