Horror Subgenres

How the subgenres relate and how to explore them

A subgenre is a set of habits. Films in the same subgenre tend to share a kind of threat, a typical setting and a way of building fear, and audiences learn those habits and start to expect them. The eight subgenres in the library are not sealed boxes. They overlap constantly, which is why a single film can appear under more than one of them and why a good deal of the fun lies in seeing how they borrow from each other.

It helps to sort them by where the fear comes from. In slasher films and creature features the danger is physical and visible: someone or something is hunting, and the question is who survives. In supernatural horror the danger comes from forces that break the rules of the real world, such as ghosts, curses and demons. In psychological horror the danger is inside the characters' perception, and the audience is never quite sure what to trust. Body horror makes the human body itself the source of dread. Folk horror draws its fear from landscape, tradition and isolated communities. Zombie and apocalyptic horror is about crowds and the collapse of society. Found footage is the odd one out, because it describes a method of presentation rather than a type of threat.

That last point matters. Most subgenres are defined by content, but found footage is defined by form: the story is presented as recovered recordings. Because of that, it can be combined with almost anything. The library's example, The Blair Witch Project, pairs it with supernatural horror, which is why it is listed under both. Thinking about form versus content is a useful habit for the whole page, since it explains why some films refuse to fit one label.

Some relationships are direct lines of descent. Psycho sits near the start of the slasher family tree, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Halloween developed the pattern that later films repeated. The library's slasher page also explains the survivor figure known as the final girl, a term introduced by Carol J. Clover in a 1987 essay and popularized by her 1992 book Men, Women and Chain Saws. Other links are looser. Alien is a creature feature that also borrows the structure of a slasher, with a small group picked off one by one in a closed space.

Several subgenres also share a deeper interest, which is the way fear tracks the worries of a given moment. Zombie films are often read as stories about social breakdown, body horror as stories about illness and technology, folk horror as stories about the countryside and the beliefs modern life has pushed aside. These readings are interpretations, not facts about the filmmakers' intentions, and the entries present them as ways of watching, not as the only correct view.

There are several good ways to explore. One is to read the subgenres chronologically, starting with the form that has the oldest roots and moving to the newest, so that you see how each reacts to what came before. Another is to pick one subgenre and read its entry in full, then use the hallmarks section as a checklist while watching, noticing which habits a film follows and which it breaks. A third is to choose a film you already love, read its subgenre page and look at the other titles listed there to find your next film.

One more way to use this page is to look for the films that sit at a crossing. The Fly is body horror, but it is also a tragic love story and a science fiction tale about an experiment. Ringu is a ghost story built around a piece of technology, which gives it a foot in the world of modern anxieties as well as folklore. The Wicker Man is folk horror that also works as a mystery. Films like these show why labels should be treated as handles for talking about a film, not as rules it has to obey, and why the best entries mention more than one subgenre.

If you want to cross subgenres with other qualities, switch to the Movie Explorer, where you can combine a subgenre with a decade or a country. For example, combining folk horror with the United Kingdom gives a very different list than combining it with a different country. Together, the subgenre pages and the explorer give you two views of the same material: one organized by idea, the other by whatever criteria you choose.