Horror fiction is, broadly, fiction in any medium intended to scare, unsettle, or horrify the audience. Historically, the cause of the "horror" experience has often been the intrusion of a supernatural element into everyday human experience. Since the 1960s, any work of fiction with a morbid, gruesome, surreal, or exceptionally suspenseful or frightening theme has come to be called "horror". Horror fiction often overlaps science fiction or fantasy, all three of which categories are sometimes placed under the umbrella classification speculative fiction.
Early horror writings
Modern horror fiction found its roots in the gothic novelscitation needed that exploded into popularity in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, typified by Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) as a prototype, and refined by Ann Radcliffe's Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). A variation on the Gothic formula that remains one of the most enduring and imitated horror works is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's novel Frankenstein (1818, revised version 1831). Frankenstein has also been considered science fiction, a philosophical novel or a 'novel of purpose' by some literary historians. At the same time, John William Polidori devised the kind of vampire story that has since become familiar with his short story The Vampyre. This kind of supernatural character, combining evil with sinister charm, has since been much used and elaborated by horror writers.
Later gothic horror descendants included seminal late 19th century works such as Bram Stoker's Dracula and Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. Early horror works used mood and subtlety to deliver an eerie and otherworldly flavor, but usually eschewed extensive explicit violence.citation needed
Other early exponents of the horror form number such luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft who are widely considered to be masters of the art.citation needed Among the writers of classic English ghost stories, M. R. James is often cited as the finest.citation needed His stories avoid shock effects and often involve an Oxford antiquarian as their hero.citation needed Algernon Blackwood's "The Willows" and Oliver Onions's "The Beckoning Fair One" have been called the best horror stories.citation needed Lovecraft and Sheridan le Fanu called some of their writing weird fiction or weird stories.
Horror fiction reached a wider audience in the 1920s and 1930s with the rise of the American pulp magazine.citation needed The premier horror pulp was Weird Tales, which printed many of Lovecraft's stories as well as fiction by other writers such as Clark Ashton Smith, E. Hoffmann Price, Seabury Quinn, C. M. Eddy, Jr. and Robert Bloch. A different style was the weird menace or "shudder pulps" such as Dime Mystery and Horror Stories, which offered a more visceral form of horror.citation needed
Horror in early cinema
- See also: Horror film
As mentioned above, there have been "countless" horror films made. Many consider the Edison Studios version of Frankenstein, made in 1910, to be the first,citation needed though Georges Méliès' 1896 film Le Manoir du diable ("The House of the Devil" or "The Devil's Manor") is considered the first horror film by others.citation needed In the silent film era a great many films were made in the United States and Europe, particularly Germany, with such legendary directors as Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, and F.W. Murnau. They, and other members of the German Expressionism movement, produced such classic films as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and M. In Hollywood, Carl Laemmle's Universal Studios produced silent film classics with Lon Chaney, including The Phantom of the Opera. Universal, with such celebrated directors as James Whale and Tod Browning went into the "sound" era, making some of the most archetypal horror films of all time, including Frankenstein, Dracula, The Invisible Man and many others (see Universal Monsters). By the 1950s in the United States, horror or "monster" movies had become so popular, especially among teenagers, that most major studios were producing horror and/or science fiction films. Some small, new studios were apparently created solely to produce films of the genre.citation needed
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