Whether it is Frankenstein’s monster realising he will forever be unloved, Shaun killing zombies with the Winchester rifle, or Daniel having a Monday morning that is suspiciously out of this world, the horror genre is as diverse and old as hardly any other genre. Our fear of the unknown is the perfect fuel for stories that make little children check under the bed before going to sleep, has teenagers scream in cinemas and creeps out adults alike. Often it is based on our religious and cultural understanding of burial rites and the afterlife: as self-aware beings we can find the thought of death and non-existence incredibly terrifying, so we fill that void with fantastical creatures, monsters and ghosts.
Even though you’d be forgiven for thinking that the horror genre largely originated with Gothic fiction in the 1800s, it is actually one of the oldest genres in storytelling. The Odyssey, Homer’s epic poem, may be considered an archetypal horror story, with the hero lost at sea for a decade and fighting all kinds of evils from giant cannibals to the six-headed monster Scylla – and, just as many horror movies today, it even has a sequel by a different writer, Telegony, although it has sadly been lost. But even tropes such as the haunted house are very old and established conventions of the genre, with authors as far back as Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, also known in English as Pliny the Younger, already making use of this particularly well-recognisable staple in the first century CE. The genre has gone through several different twists since then, with everything from vampires to demons to werewolves taking turns and more often than not popular at the same time – such as in Charlaine Harris’ True Blood series, which is a huge collage of everything supernatural, mysterious and dangerous – and has sometimes scared children and adults alike with a twist on the same stories: what the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales are to children, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber is to adults.
“Cleanse them. Cleanse the world of their ignorance and sin. Bathe them in the crimson of… Am I on speakerphone?” – Mark Chatterley, The One in Charge*
With the inundation of Hollywood films and the influence of English-language and Scandinavian literature on the genre, it’d be easy to assume that horror isn’t a renowned and established genre in other cultures, too, but that would be a mistake. Russian author Nikolai Gogol penned stories such as the 1830 St John’s Eve which sees the protagonist behead a child in order to receive gold, while French author Jean-Christophe Grangé published L’Empire des Loups (‘The Empire of Wolves’) in 2004, a prime example of the grotesque side of horror in which a woman suffers from hallucinations, blackouts and eventually cannot even recognise the face of her own husband anymore. In Germany, authors such as Ivar Leon Menger have been making a name for themselves, with his 2006 audiobook anthology Der Prinzessin (‘The Male Princess’) including the most unsettling story about a man visiting the dentist that we have ever come across.
Interestingly, the genre isn’t limited to (audio)books, movies or TV either, with podcasts such as Welcome to Night Vale treating the more mysterious and fantastical side of the genre, and of course our very own free podcast Supermarket Matters which is a more bizarre, humorous take. However, with TV shows such as the popular The Walking Dead, a gorefest of zombie-killing, and many movies since The Blair Witch Project relying on first-person handheld camera – again not just a Hollywood phenomenon with non-English language examples being the Spanish [Rec] trilogy or the Norwegian Trollhunter – the question arises of what the future of horror will be. Stephen King has claimed that it is becoming increasingly harder to stay ahead of real-life horrors, noting he doesn’t think “that society has become any finer.” We don’t know what the answer will turn out to be, but we are secretly hoping that it’ll move back to more subtle creepiness such as our beloved Doctor Who episode ‘Blink’ (or indeed Blackfordian humour) and several less liters of bloodshed.
Do you love freaking your readers out with strange monsters or eerie atmospheres? If you are a (self-)published horror/fantasy writer who has been imagining worlds as haunting as Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher, as sick and twisted as Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In or as groundbreaking as Méliès’ film Le Manoir du Diable – we want to hear from you. Email us your story (up to 2,600 words) and one of our editors will get back to you as soon as possible. You may submit already published stories, but you must hold the audio rights.
And whether you write yourself or just love to listen to horror stories, keep an eye out for the upcoming volume one of our horror anthologies, Exquisite Death, to be released on August 13th.
* This may not be an actual quote by Mark Chatterley.
