Horror genres explained

What is Liminal Spaces Horror?

Liminal spaces horror is a genre built on the uncanny dread of transitional environments — empty corridors, deserted shopping malls, abandoned hotels, parking structures at midnight. These are spaces designed for moving through, not lingering in, and the wrongness of occupying them alone is the genre's primary mechanism. No monster required.

What is Sleep Paralysis Horror?

Sleep paralysis horror is a genre that uses a documented neurological phenomenon — waking fully conscious but physically immobile, often accompanied by vivid hallucinations of a presence in the room — as the foundation for supernatural fiction. It works because the experience is real, common (roughly 8% of people have it), and produces hallucinations that are phenomenologically indistinguishable from genuine perception.

What is Found Footage Horror?

Found footage horror is a genre that presents its narrative as recovered material — video recordings, audio diaries, forum threads, scanned documents — left behind by people who encountered something they didn't survive. The fictional frame is designed to collapse: by presenting horror as documentation rather than story, the genre bypasses the cognitive skepticism that normally keeps fiction at a distance.

What is Haunted Technology Horror?

Haunted technology horror is a genre that displaces traditional possession and haunting tropes into digital and electronic contexts — cursed game cartridges, phones that receive messages from dead contacts, AI systems that know things they shouldn't, software modified by something malevolent. It works because technology is supposed to be fully understood by its engineers, and when it isn't, the violation of expectation is more absolute than a haunted house.

What is Deep Woods Horror?

Deep woods horror is a genre rooted in the fear of wilderness — dense forest, lost trails, total isolation from help — and the things that inhabit it. Unlike urban horror, which features human constructions gone wrong, deep woods horror is about environments that never belonged to humans, that operate by older rules, and that contain things with no reason to accommodate our presence.

What is Cosmic Horror?

Cosmic horror — also called Lovecraftian horror — is a genre defined by the premise that the universe is vast, ancient, and populated by entities so alien that human minds cannot perceive them without breaking. The horror is not that something wants to harm you. It's that the scale of existence makes human life so marginal that the harm is incidental — if it registers at all.

What is Sci-Fi Horror?

Sci-fi horror is a genre that uses the frameworks of science fiction — technology, space exploration, artificial intelligence, biology — as vectors for dread rather than optimism. Where conventional sci-fi asks what we might discover, sci-fi horror asks what happens when we discover something we weren't designed to encounter, something that knowledge of can't be lived with normally.

What is Zombie Outbreak Horror?

Zombie outbreak horror is a genre that uses the undead as a forcing function for examining social collapse — how quickly civilisation fractures under existential pressure, what people do to each other when survival displaces every other operating principle, and who reveals themselves to be the real threat. The zombies are the premise. The horror is what they expose.

What is Vampire Horror?

Vampire horror is one of humanity's oldest and most geographically widespread monster traditions — appearing independently across dozens of cultures before Bram Stoker systematised it in 1897. At its core, vampire fiction explores predation, immortality, and what a person becomes when they trade mortality for the need to feed on those they once knew.

What is Stalker Horror?

Stalker and home invasion horror is a genre that targets the assumption that your home is secure — that you know who is in it, that the locks work, that the boundary between inside and outside is solid. These stories work by violating that assumption retrospectively: the intruder has been there longer than you knew, and everything you experienced as privacy was observed.

What is Doll and Mannequin Horror?

Doll and mannequin horror is a genre built on the uncanny valley — the measurable zone of discomfort where humanoid objects are similar enough to humans to trigger recognition but wrong enough to flag as threat. These objects were designed to look like us. They don't quite succeed. And in that gap between resemblance and reality lives one of horror's most reliable mechanisms.

What is Wrong Childhood Memory Horror?

Wrong childhood memory horror — also called lost media horror — is a genre that uses nostalgia as a weapon. It takes the warm, half-lit archive of childhood media and inserts something that was always slightly wrong, that nobody else seems to remember. The horror is not the content of the false memory. It's the gap between what you remember and what everyone else does, and what that gap implies.

What is Ritual Horror?

Ritual horror is a genre built around supernatural procedures — summoning ceremonies, occult experiments, folk rites — that go wrong or open something that should stay closed. What makes it distinct from other supernatural horror is agency: the protagonists did this deliberately, following steps, and are now accountable for what arrived.

What is Analog Horror?

Analog horror is a genre that uses pre-digital media aesthetics — VHS tape degradation, emergency broadcast systems, public access television, corrupted audio — as the delivery mechanism for horror. The wrongness appears in the format before it appears in the content: a transmission that looks almost normal, until it doesn't.

What is Paranormal Investigation Horror?

Paranormal investigation horror follows ghost hunters using real methodology — EMF meters, EVP recorders, thermal cameras, spirit boxes — as they document anomalies in allegedly haunted locations. The horror comes not from jump scares but from the evidence: what the instruments capture, what the recordings contain on playback, and what conclusions can no longer be avoided.

What is Abandoned Places Horror?

Abandoned places horror is set in derelict locations — hospitals, asylums, factories, hotels — that show evidence of more recent occupation than their official status suggests. The horror is not a discrete entity but a residual presence: processes that continued after the people left, files dated this year in a building sealed for a decade, equipment still running on a disconnected grid.

What is Body Horror?

Body horror is the genre of unwanted physical transformation — infection, contamination, the body becoming something other than what it was without the owner's consent or understanding. It works by removing the distance that other horror genres maintain between protagonist and threat. This isn't something happening near you. It's happening to you, from inside.

What is Cryptid Encounter Horror?

Cryptid encounter horror features creatures whose existence is disputed rather than disproven — animals that don't match any catalogued species, presences in wilderness and water that exceed known biology. Unlike supernatural horror, a cryptid could in principle have a taxonomy, a habitat, a diet. It's unknown, not impossible. That distinction is what makes the genre work.