Part One: Horror through
History
Horror and the supernatural enter literature with one of the earliest extant literary documents, the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca. 1700 BCE), which was a product of ancient Mesopotamian culture. This fragmentary text already features such elements as the superhero, prophetic dreams, a descent into the underworld, and the quest for eternal life. But it was the writers of classical antiquity, especially the Greeks, who, with their prodigal creation of gods and monsters, definitively infused terror and strangeness into literature. The term “classical antiquity” itself refers to the fusion of ancient Greek and Roman culture, lasting from about the eighth century BCE to the fifth century CE, a period whose literature, art, and philosophy have exercised and continue to exercise an immense influence on Western civilization.
It is problematical to speak of “ancient Greece” as a unified entity, because the region was for centuries a series of largely autonomous and often warring city-states, chief of which were Athens, Sparta, and Corinth. The commencement of Greek civilization can be dated to around 1200 BCE (the approximate date of the Trojan War), although extant Greek literature does not emerge in abundance until the fifth century BCE. Alexander the Great did unify Greece politically and militarily in the later fourth century, but the Romans subjugated Greece two centuries later.
The Romans dated the founding of their city to 753 BCE, but did not emerge as a world power until the third century BCE. With the establishment and expansion of the Roman Empire in the course of the first and second centuries CE, the entire Mediterranean came under the sway of a single military power. The result was that both Greek and Latin literature flourished throughout the region, with leading writers emerging from Spain, North Africa, and elsewhere. The end of classical antiquity is canonically dated to 476 CE, when the Goths sacked Rome and overthrew the last Roman emperor.
The Greeks and the Romans initiated—and in many ways perfected—some of the major genres of literature, ranging from epic poetry (Homer, Virgil) to the drama, both tragic (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca the Younger) and comic (Aristophanes, Plautus), to lyric poetry (Pindar, Horace), to history (Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Tacitus), and even the novel (Lucian, Apuleius). Within these diverse genres there was abundant room for the expression of horrific themes, and both the Greeks and the Romans took occasional advantage of it.
In Homer’s Odyssey (codified around 700 BCE, but based on oral sources extending as far back as the twelfth century), Odysseus provides a first-person account of his travels throughout the known and unknown world that spans three books (books 9–12) and includes encounters with such curious entities as the Laestrygonians (a giant cannibal race who eat some of Odysseus’s men), the sorceress Circe (who can turn human beings into animals), the Sirens (hybrid creatures, half bird and half woman, whose songs are fatally alluring), and Scylla and Charybdis (the one a whirlpool, the other a sea creature with six heads and twelve feet). Perhaps most memorable is Odysseus’s battle with Polyphemus, a creature belonging to a race called the Cyclops (literally “round-eyed,” with the implication that the creature has only one eye in the center of his forehead). Some of these entities are only alluded to in the Odyssey, but they are described more exhaustively in Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BCE), an account of the origin of the gods that is as close as the Greeks ever came to having a sacred text.
Odysseus’s venture into the realm of the dead (book 11) has a number of curious features. First, this realm is not actually under the earth, as in the standard Greek view, but instead in a remote region far to the west. Homer does not name the region aside from calling it “the house of Hades,” referring to the god who rules the realm; but later sources sometimes use Hades to refer to the place itself. When he encounters the shades of the dead, Odysseus tries to embrace them, but they “fluttered out of my hands like a shadow / or a dream” (11.207–208). The suggestion is that the shades resemble the forms they had in life but are virtually immaterial.
Greek tragedy—flowering especially during the fifth century BCE in Athens, where annual contests were held among dramatists—contributed to the elaboration of Greek myth while at the same time probing human nature and social conflict with unprecedented subtlety and emotive power. Medea (whose name means “the cunning one”) was the focus of Euripides’s great play Medea (431 BCE). When her husband Jason, who brought her from Colchis (a remote city in Asia Minor) to be his wife, takes up with a younger woman, Medea appeals to Hecate (the goddess of magic and witchcraft) and prepares a dress and a golden diadem laced with poison. A Messenger’s speech telling of the grisly deaths of both Creon (Jason’s father-in-law) and Creon’s daughter (Medea, lines 1121–1230) is one of the most vivid passages of physical horror in classical antiquity. Somewhat similar, albeit nonsupernatural, is Euripides’s Bacchae (The Bacchantes; 405 BCE), in which women inflamed by the god Dionysus dismember King Pentheus of Thebes. (This event is also described by a Messenger rather than presented on stage.)
In Euripides’s Trachiniae (The Women of Trachis; ca. 425 BCE), Deianira gives Herakles a robe that has been poisoned by the blood of Nessus, a centaur who had attacked her. Herakles suffers horrible agony when he puts the robe on. The Herakles (Hercules in Latin) cycle, embodied in the twelve “labors” that he was forced to undertake, is largely separate from the Homeric cycle, but features such distinctive creatures as the snake-headed Hydra and the three-headed dog Cerberus, who guards the entrance to Hades.
Ghosts also make striking appearances in Greek literature. In Homer’s Iliad (ca. 750 BCE), the ghost of the slain soldier Patrocles berates his friend Achilles for not burying his corpse, thereby preventing him from crossing “the river” (i.e., the Styx, in Hades) and mingling with other shades in the underworld. Ghosts also appear in Greek tragedy, chiefly as baleful prognosticators of future woe. In Aeschylus’s Persae (The Persians; 472 BCE), a distinctive melding of contemporary history and supernaturalism, the Persian queen Atossa summons the ghost of King Darius, who is unaware that his forces have been decisively defeated by the Greeks in the battle of Salamis (480 BCE). In Aeschylus’s Eumenides (458 BCE—the middle play in the trilogy Oresteia), the ghost of Clytemnestra upbraids Orestes for murdering her and urges the Furies to plague him. The prologue to Euripides’s Hecuba (ca. 425 BCE) is spoken by Polydorus, the son of Hecuba and Priam of Troy, who now “hovers as a wraith over my mother’s head” (line 29).
With Athens’s defeat by Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War (404 BCE), Greek literature entered a phase referred to as Hellenistic, when highly sophisticated writers used mythic figures to display their own erudition and exhibit a bland cynicism about life and society. Many of the leading writers of the period flourished in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, although at this point it was thoroughly Greek in culture. Apollonius Rhodius’s epic Argonautica (third century BCE) recounts the quest for the Golden Fleece, as Jason gathers an illustrious band of cohorts for his voyage on the Argo. Along the way he encounters the bronze giant Talos; meets the prophet Phineus, who, having offended Zeus, is plagued by the Harpies (birdlike creatures; their name means “the snatchers”) who pluck his food away just as he is about to eat it; and braves the Clashing Rocks, immense cliffs that, at the Bosporus, clash together, crushing any ships that attempt to make their way through them. But a substantial portion of the Argonautica deals with Medea, who helps Jason obtain the Golden Fleece. At the very outset Medea is described as “something of a witch” (3.89); one of her most distinctive potions is a magic ointment made from the ichor of Prometheus, the demigod whom Zeus punished for giving the secret of fire to human beings.
The defeat of the Greeks at the battle of Corinth in 146 BCE spelled the definitive subordination of the Greek city-states to the increasing power of Rome. The sturdy, practical Romans developed a reputation in antiquity of scorning the fine arts, including literature, for the more “manly” arts of warfare and governance; and while it is true that many Latin authors—including the greatest of them, Horace and Virgil—were heavily reliant upon Greek models, Latin literature does include many imperishable works of poetry, drama, and history; and the supernatural plays a significant part in this array of writing.
Latin drama began in earnest with the comic playwright Plautus (T. Maccius Plautus). One play in particular is of interest in tracing the course of horror literature in the ancient world: Mostellaria (The Haunted House; ca. 200 BCE). Here no ghost actually appears; instead, the play deals with a clever slave, Tranio, who fabricates a ghost as a way of distracting Theopropides, father of the wastrel Philolaches. Tranio tries to maintain that the house in question has become haunted because its former owner had killed his guest (an appalling crime in Greco-Roman civilization), but the ruse collapses very quickly. The play is really a send-up of the superstitiousness and credulity that may have afflicted even wealthy and educated Romans.
In his memorable fifth Epode (ca. 38 BCE), Horace (Q. Horatius Flaccus) speaks of the witch Canidia, who has “locks and disheveled head entwined with short vipers” and who utters a mad incantation intended to prevent a hapless youth from falling in love with any other woman but her. Then there is the utterly bizarre Poem 63 (ca. 55 BCE) of Catullus (C. Valerius Catullus), written in a highly unusual meter and telling of the hideous self-castration of Attis (spelled Atys by later writers), the son and lover of Cybele, the Great Mother of the gods. While nothing strictly supernatural occurs here, the vivid first-person depiction of religious frenzy and madness makes it virtually unique in ancient literature.
Also unique, but in a very different way, is the Satyricon (ca. 65 CE) of Petronius (T. Petronius Arbiter). What survives of this sprawling novel—if it can be called that—is probably less than one-fifth, and perhaps less than one-tenth, of the complete work. Its centerpiece is the Cena Trimalchionis (Trimalchio’s Dinner), where different speakers tell amusing or fantastic tales for the enjoyment of the guests. It is here that we find the first extant account of a werewolf in ancient literature. This blandly told story depicts a soldier who takes his clothes off, urinates on them, and turns into a wolf. He proceeds to howl and run off into the woods; the clothes, meanwhile, have turned to stone. Later the teller of the tale learns that a wolf has killed many of the sheep on a nearby farm.
Of the Metamorphoses (ca. 10 CE) of Ovid (P. Ovidius Naso) it is difficult to speak in small compass, for its very premise is supernatural: the transformation of human beings into all manner of animals, and even into plants. Along the way we have many gripping set-pieces, among them Perseus’s slaying of a sea monster and his rescue of Andromeda (4.663–764), a lengthy account of the witcheries of Medea (7.1–424), a rendering of the transformation of the maiden Scylla into a birdlike monster (8.1–151), and perhaps the most poignant surviving account (although many others must once have existed) of the failed attempt of Orpheus to rescue his dead wife Eurydice from the underworld (10.1–85). Ovid’s purpose is rarely to induce terror; instead, he seeks to evoke wonder at the very process of shape-shifting.
The most celebrated Roman account of the underworld is, of course, the Aeneid (ca. 20 BCE) of Virgil (P. Vergilius Maro), but here we are even farther from terror. The moving passage (book 6) describing Aeneas’s descent into the underworld to seek the shade of his father Anchises, and also that of his dead lover Dido of Carthage, whom he abandoned, is notable for Anchises’s magnificent prophecy of future Roman greatness. A later epic, the Bellum Civile or Pharsalia (ca. 65 CE) of Lucan (M. Annaeus Lucanus), treating of the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey, is notable for the entire absence of the standard pantheon of gods, but features a striking passage (6.419–830) in which Pompey’s son seeks the counsel of the witch Erictho, who uses a “lunar poison” to reanimate a corpse and make him utter a prophecy.
The plays of Seneca the Younger (L. Annaeus Seneca, ca. 4 BCE–65 CE) are full of blood and thunder, among them Hercules Oetaeus, about the Hercules/Deianira story, and Medea. The Metamorphoses (ca. 180 CE) of Lucius Apuleius, usually translated as The Golden Ass, is a deliberate echo of Ovid, but focuses on a single metamorphosis: that of a man named Lucius into an ass. Lucius had seen a reputed witch named Pamphile turn herself into an owl and wished to become one himself; but the slave girl Fotis gives him the wrong potion, and he becomes an ass. The rest of the novel is an adventure story in which Lucius seeks to eat roses that will (for some unexplained reason) turn him back into a human being.
Terror and the supernatural are not absent from the work of otherwise sober historians. The Greek biographer Plutarch (46–120 CE) mentions ghosts with some frequency, as in Brutus (where Brutus confronts his “evil spirit”), Cimon (where the ghost of a murderer is seen haunting the public bath where he was killed), and elsewhere. Pliny the Younger’s famous letter to Licinius Sura (7.27; ca. 100 CE) speaks with apparent belief of a haunted house in Athens. The curious Peri thaumasion (On Wonderful Events; second century CE) by the Greek writer Phlegon of Tralles recounts the tale of Philinnion, a young woman who returned from the dead six months after her funeral because of her love for Machates, spending several nights with him before dying again.
Ancient Greek and Roman civilization established a number of the major motifs that would be used in subsequent horror literature, including the ghost, the haunted house, the werewolf, the sorcerer/sorceress/witch, and monsters emerging from the depths of hell. While classical literature was largely the preserve of a small segment of the population during the Middle Ages, when literacy was restricted to a tiny intellectual elite, the horrific motifs in that literature were ripe for use whenever the heavy hand of Christian orthodoxy would be loosened to allow the appreciation of this “pagan” writing. While individual writers of the Middle Ages did find inspiration in classical writing, it took the radical scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic revolution of the Renaissance to restore this literature to a position of centrality in Western culture.
S. T. Joshi
See also: Horror in the Middle Ages; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Ghost Stories; Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Part Three, Reference Entries: The Haunted House or Castle; Monsters; Transformation and Metamorphosis; Werewolves.
Further Reading
Colavito, Jason. 2008. “Introduction: From Prometheus to Faust.” In Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre, 5–24. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Felton, D. 1999. Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Mark, Joshua J. 2014. “Ghosts in the Ancient World.” Ancient History Encyclopedia, October 30. http://www.ancient.eu/ghost.
Ogden, Daniel. 2009. Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman World: A Sourcebook. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
HORROR IN THE MIDDLE AGES
The Middle Ages (or medieval period) is the term used to designate the period of European history between the end of antiquity and the beginning of the early modern era. As neither of these transitions occurred on a fixed date, there are no definitive dates for the beginning and end of the medieval period. Broadly speaking, the Middle Ages begins with the fall of the Roman Empire, usually classed as occurring with the deposition of the last Western emperor in 476 CE. The end of the Middle Ages is harder to place, as there are substantial regional differences in political, religious, and social development. Some historians suggest that the Middle Ages ended with Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas (1492); others suggest that the endpoint comes with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press (ca. 1440), or with the Protestant Reformation (beginning in 1517). When attempting to characterize the entirety of the European medieval period, it is most common to use 1500 as an approximate endpoint—thus delineating a Middle Ages that lasted roughly 1,000 years.
In order to give more focus to the study of a millennium-long era, medievalists now frequently divide the Middle Ages into two or three subperiods. Some historians use the terms “high” and “low” to distinguish between the earlier and later parts of the era. English-speaking historians use “early,” “high,” and “late” to differentiate the periods of the Middle Ages, and this is the result of linguistic shifts across the era. Thus, the early Middle Ages refers to the period before 1066, when Old English (the Anglo-Saxon language) was the dominant spoken and written language in England. The High Middle Ages are the years following the Norman Conquest, when Anglo-Norman was the dominant language. An early form of Middle English began to develop toward the end of the High Middle Ages, leading to a decline in Anglo-Norman and the dominance of Middle English in the late Middle Ages (toward the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth).
It used to be common to find the term “Dark Ages” used to describe the medieval period. In fact, this term is still sometimes used to refer to the early Middle Ages. The phrase emerged as a way to differentiate the period from the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment that followed, and it was intended to conjure an image of a superstitious, ignorant, and barbaric period of European history. Developments in our understanding of the time have changed this perception, and more sensitive understandings of religious, intellectual, and social history have questioned this characterization. Although contemporary popular culture still often depicts the “darkness” of the period, scholarship has focused some attention on the cultural and intellectual achievements of the so-called Dark Ages. It is common nowadays to find medievalists challenging persistent misconceptions about the era, which include the myth of the “flat earth” belief, the idea that the Catholic Church suppressed scientific development, and the belief that diseases were universally misunderstood and mistreated.
The extent of time and space encompassed by a conception of the Middle Ages makes it difficult to summarize the significant shifts in religious, political, scientific, and literary culture during this time. However, there are some important developments that are worth noting for their impact on fiction writing. In 800 CE, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne emperor, the first time the title had been used in Western Europe since 476. Charlemagne’s coronation marked the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire (though it was not explicitly called this until the thirteenth century). The Holy Roman Empire claimed ascendancy through its descent from the Roman Empire, and Charlemagne used his title to expand the lands of the Carolingian kings and to further develop a close allegiance with the papacy. The Holy Roman Empire was a powerful—though not undisputed—complex of territories in the Middle Ages, which came to include the kingdoms of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy. Charlemagne himself is a key figure in both history and literature, as his legendary exploits were recounted in numerous narratives.
Along with the formation of the Holy Roman Empire and the coronation of Charlemagne, the Crusades would also play an important part in shaping European literature. The Crusades were a series of religious wars that were fought in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. While contemporary popular culture imagines these wars as a conflict between Christians and Muslims, taking place entirely in what is now the Middle East, there were, in fact, multiple conflicts involving Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Mongols—among others—and taking place in Asia, Africa, and Europe. While ostensibly a battle for the Holy Land, initiated in 1096, the Crusades had a huge impact on the political landscape of Europe. Not only did these wars lead to anti-Semitic violence across Europe, inflame tensions between Western and Eastern Christians, and enable the sacking of cities such as Antioch and Constantinople, the financial and military burden on Crusading territories was not insubstantial. Crusades in Northern Europe saw regions such as Livonia annexed and converted to Christianity, and the papacy was able to expand its control (and taxation) of the West through its success during the wars. Crusading nations were able to use seized and stolen property to fund local developments, and trading principalities (such as Genoa and Venice) were able to capitalize and prosper. In addition to this, the Crusades elevated the role of “knight” from that of a military horseman to a figure of elite aristocratic power. The Crusades added a religious dimension to the burgeoning code of chivalry first introduced by Charlemagne and his descendants.
This background is necessary for understanding some of the important changes in literature that occurred during the Middle Ages, which would have a big impact on the fiction that followed in later centuries. Some of the changes in literary trends as a result of events such as the Crusades are still clearly visible in contemporary literature.
There was no concept of “horror” as a genre in medieval writing. However, there are a number of tropes in contemporary horror fiction that have their ancestors or predecessors in medieval writing. Distinctions between “fiction” and “nonfiction” are also a more modern concept, so it is necessary to look at a broader range of types of writing in order to discern elements of horror in medieval narratives.
Literary storytelling in the Middle Ages took a number of different forms, including histories, chronicles, epics, and (later) romances. Medieval historiography worked differently than its modern counterpart, and so there is some crossover between these forms. A narrative that was designated as a “history” might, to modern audiences, seem like a work of fiction; the idea was that it revealed some “truth” about the world, even if it was not grounded in precise adherence to actual circumstances and events. In this way, some of the earliest stories of King Arthur were entitled histories, though the character later appeared in epic and romance narratives as well.
One of the best-known pieces of Old English literature is the epic poem Beowulf. Composed between 750 and 1000 CE (the exact date is unknown), this narrative describes the adventures of the eponymous Geatish king as he destroys the monsters besieging the Danish kingdom, ascends to the throne of Geatland, rules peacefully for fifty years, and then dies in a final battle with a dragon. The narrative makes a number of allusions to historical individuals, but also creates a fictional hero for whom there is no “real life” counterpart. The poem survives in only one manuscript, and there is little evidence of its being known in the later Middle Ages; however, it was rediscovered in the early modern era and successfully translated in the nineteenth century. At first, the poem was studied for its linguistic and historical implications, but in 1936 J. R. R. Tolkien gave a groundbreaking lecture in which he argued that the poem is, at its heart, about monsters. The monsters of Beowulf—Grendel, his mother, and the dragon—have been of abiding interest to scholars and creative writers ever since.
Despite its modern popularity, Beowulf is somewhat unusual as a piece of medieval epic poetry, though it does share some key concerns with later Norse poetry and Icelandic sagas, and there is little evidence of its influence on later narratives. The more influential forms of epic that circulated in Europe were tales of the military exploits of historical (and legendary) kings, and of the men who served them. In the late eleventh century, a form of Old French narrative poetry called chansons de geste (literally “songs of deeds”) began to emerge, telling stories about the exploits of Charlemagne (the “Matter of France”), King Arthur (the “Matter of England”), and the heroes of the Trojan War (the “Matter of Rome”). As the genre developed, the knights who served the legendary kings began to be the central focus of the chanson de geste (reflecting the growing power of the aristocratic knight in the wake of the Crusades). Fantastic and supernatural elements also began to be added, including monstrous enemies—particularly giants—and the use of magic. These elements were introduced as part of the hero’s development: monster-slaying was an important attribute of heroism, and the world of adventures began to incorporate exotic and preternatural realms.
However, the chansons de geste cannot really be characterized as “horror” fiction, as they lack a fully developed psychological component. There are numerous descriptions of fear in these texts, but this is most commonly presented as a straightforward and easily overcome response to a life-threatening situation. It was only with the development of a new type of fiction that emotions of dread and terror would start to be explored.
In the twelfth century, the first romance narratives started to circulate in Europe. The earliest examples of romance include the Arthurian stories of Chrétien de Troyes and the lais of Marie de France (short narrative poems that combined chivalric and supernatural themes). The rise of the knightly class in twelfth-century France, partly as a result of the Crusades and partly as a result of political power shifts, meant that this fiction, while often written by clerical and monastic writers, was commissioned and owned by royalty and the aristocracy. The figure of the knight (rather than the king) was central to this new fiction, and the stories abounded with fantastical elements, including monsters, ghosts, fairies, werewolves, magical weapons, supernatural transformations, and mysterious castles.
The increasing power of the aristocracy led to the development of “courtly” culture, including romanticized “codes of conduct” for knights, elaborate entertainments, and an increased desire for fiction that reflected this idealized self-image. Hand-in-hand with this, however, were shifts in theological thinking, particularly in terms of the conceptualization of the figure of Christ. Early medieval representations of Christ had focused on his divine strength and his role as the “King of Heaven” (and it is possible that Beowulf was intended to reflect this all-powerful masculine Messiah). By contrast, the twelfth century began to see a focus on Christ’s suffering as the “Man of Sorrows,” with iconography drawing attention to his wounds and his pain. As a figure of idealized masculinity, the romance knight also suffered—both physically and mentally. Later medieval narratives are often concerned with the interior life of the knight, and with the toll his adventures might take on his mind, body, and soul.
The first Middle English romances appeared in the late thirteenth century, but the genre really flourished in the fourteenth century. In the 1330s, a number of narratives appeared that told of fairy knights and kings who threatened and attacked the human realm, including Sir Orfeo and Sir Degaré, and of women seduced by demons, including Sir Gowther. Old French romances were adapted for English-speaking audiences, including William of Palerne, a werewolf story translated in the mid-fourteenth century. For modern audiences, one of the best-known Middle English romances is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century), which tells the story of a monstrous intruder at Arthur’s court at Camelot. The hero’s battle with the monster, the desolate and terrifying landscape through which he must travel, the constant indications of the man’s fear, and the final supernatural denouement are all features that connect this poem to contemporary horror fiction. Less well known—at least to modern audiences—is the later, shorter version of the same story, known as The Greene Knight, in which the inner thoughts and motivations of the supernatural intruder are presented, paving the way for many of horror fiction’s monstrous antiheroes.
When looking at medieval fiction, it is important to view it in relation to broader cultural concerns. These narratives did not occur in isolation, and various elements—for example, ideas about monsters, the physical body, and death—are reflected in all sorts of contemporaneous cultural productions, from religious sermons to medical writing, and from architectural decoration to maps of the world. It is possible to discern cultural patterns and trends, and to situate romance fiction, with its terrifying monsters, sadistic fairies, and traumatized werewolves, within this broader picture. Like a lot of horror fiction, these narratives reveal a profound concern with understanding the human condition, and with determining the limits to which a person can be pushed.
Hannah Priest
See also: Horror in the Ancient World; Horror in the Early Modern Era; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Part Three, Reference Entries: Devils and Demons; Incubi and Succubi; Monsters; Transformation and Metamorphosis; Werewolves; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Bildhauer, Bettina, and Robert Mills, eds. 2003. The Monstrous Middle Ages. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.
Database of Middle English Romance. 2012. University of York. http://www.middleenglishromance.org.uk.
Heng, Geraldine. 2004. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press.
Pernoud, Régine. 2000. Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths. Translated by Anne Englund Nash. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Priest, Hannah. 2014. “Christ’s Wounds and the Birth of Romance.” In Wounds in the Middle Ages, edited by Anne Kirkham and Cordelia Warr, 131–150. Farnham: Ashgate.
Steinberg, Theodore L. 2003. Reading the Middle Ages: An Introduction to Medieval Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Tolkien, J. R. R. 2006. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Edited by Christopher Tolkien. London: HarperCollins.
HORROR IN THE EARLY MODERN ERA
The early modern era is generally defined as between 1500 and 1800, although many disciplines consider the eighteenth century the period of the Enlightenment. As a literary period, the early modern era is renowned for the output of what used to be called the Renaissance (a term that has fallen out of fashion because what is understood by “Renaissance” took place at different times in different parts of Europe) and is dominated by major canonical figures such as Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton. Traditionally horror is considered to begin after this time, with many studies citing Edgar Allan Poe as the first writer of true horror. More recently, however, critics have begun to highlight the rich veins of horror texts to be found in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The period as a whole is characterized by upheaval—both social and religious. Although encompassing the artistic achievements of the Renaissance, the early modern era also contained persecution, torture, and colonization on a massive scale. The uncertainties created by radical shifts in religion, science, and exploration created a space in which writers of various literary modes could utilize the embryonic motifs and tropes of horror to comment on and interrogate the issues of their time.
The main forms of literature in the early modern era all utilize early notions of horror. Drama and poetry have been the focus of most critical attention over the centuries, but prose writing and ballads are becoming more important in understanding the concerns and ideas of the time. The increased visibility of these popular forms enables the recognition of the more sensationalist aspects of early modern horror. As can be seen in later periods, horror literature took a range of forms and approaches, each of which can be linked to particular anxieties in the wider culture of the time.
One of the key sources of horror in the early modern era was the religious domain. Conflicts between the worldviews of traditional Catholicism and the newer reformed Protestant theologies led to fault lines that were explored in literary works (and that have continued to be explored even today). Religion was a fundamental part of early modern society and identity, and therefore the ruptures of the Reformation were powerful and long lasting. This can be seen in the popularity of supernatural and demonic figures such as ghosts, demons, and witches throughout the period.
A series of important prose works set out the parameters of early modern supernatural belief and therefore its implementation in horror. The demand for such writing can be seen by the translation into English of several prominent European examples, although surprisingly not the most infamous, Malleus Maleficarum (1487). Perhaps the two most influential of these translated works are Of ghostes and spirites walking by nyght, and of strange noyses, crackes, and sundry forewarnynges, which commonly happen before the death of menne, great slaughters & alterations of kyngdomes (1572) by the Swiss theologian Ludwig Lavatar, and French scholar Pierre le Loyer’s A treatise of spectres or straunge sights, visions and apparitions appearing sensibly unto men (1605). Important vernacular works include Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), in which the skeptical author reveals the misconceptions and artifices that lie behind many superstitious ideas, and King James I’s Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, Divided into three Books (1597). Although these texts are not traditionally considered to be horror, the lurid details and fascination with the darker aspects of human behavior contained within speak to a similar desire on the part of the reader. In fact, these “nonfiction” texts work in the same way as modern-day true-crime narratives in which information and sensationalism sit side-by-side. The potential for such texts to be intended as entertainment can be seen by the popularity of Thomas Nashe’s satirical Terrors of the Night (1594), a convincing parody of the kind of beliefs described in the other works.
Accounts of hauntings and suspected witchcraft were not restricted to large published tracts, however. Scores of cheap, popular ballads and chapbooks (small, cheap, paper-covered books of mass popular appeal) recounted supernatural happenings of every imaginable kind, clearly illustrating the demand for horror as entertainment. This demand can also be seen by the popularity of supernatural horror in the dramatic works of the time. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is probably the most famous example, but there were also hugely popular plays by other playwrights, such as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (1594), featuring a cast of demons that infamously caused contemporary audiences to believe they were real, and Thomas Middleton’s The Witch (1612), a play largely overshadowed by its textual links to Macbeth. Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton (1621) and Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) were both dramatic versions of “real” accounts of witchcraft. This “true-horror” subgenre shows the closeness between literature and other cultural uses of horror in the period. Alongside these plays centered on aspects of haunting or demonology, the tropes and devices of supernatural horror became widely used on stage, with ghosts in particular being a defining characteristic of the hugely successful genre of revenge tragedy.
Revenge tragedies are perhaps the clearest horror texts of the time, featuring as they do lurid representations of blood, death, and mutilation. Even William Shakespeare was not immune to the savage delights of the form, as can be seen in his blood-drenched Titus Andronicus. The origins of the revenge tragedy can be traced to a particularly English combination of the ghosts and described atrocities of classical drama and the highly visual and physical staging of the medieval mystery plays. The result was a style of drama that pushed the limits of taste and decency much as horror continues to do today. Although all revenge tragedies contain some element of supernatural or physical horror, particular exemplars illustrate the extremes to which playwrights took the horror. Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (ca. 1587) is the most famous early revenge tragedy and is often considered alongside Titus. Detailing the mental disintegration and torment of the Knight Marshal of Spain, Hieronimo, the play contains a litany of mutilations and murders, including an onstage glossectomy (removal of a tongue) and the Saw-like (2004) display of Hieronimo’s murdered son’s corpse. The play also popularized the metatheatrical ideas of plays-within-plays and a supernatural observer on stage—here both in the personification of Revenge and a Ghost. The inevitable bloodbath at the conclusion of the play brings to mind the tagline to the classic horror movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974): “Who will survive, and what will be left of them?” Indeed, this question can be applied to the entire genre of revenge tragedy.
The development of revenge tragedy can be compared to that of horror cinema, as writers competed to include ever more bloodthirsty and horrific content. Antonio’s Revenge (1599) by John Marston repeats the cannibalistic banquet utilized earlier by Shakespeare in Titus (and taken from the classical tragedian Seneca’s Thyestes, ca. 62) but furthers the horror by the meal being made from a young child—a choice made even more horrific by the fact that the play was written for one of the boy’s companies. Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (ca. 1607), a play often considered to be a commentary on the entire genre, features a poisoned and disguised skull used to murder a corrupt duke, and the line that perhaps best sums up the particular blend of sensationalism and moralizing that defined the revenge tragedy: “When the bad bleeds, then is the tragedy good” (Middleton 1988, Act 3, Scene 5, line 200).
Despite their surprisingly modern approach to violent representation, early modern revenge tragedies are clearly steeped in the conventions of the period. Revengers generally receive fatal punishment for taking matters into their own hands rather than leaving justice to the state or God (an approach often rendered impossible due to the villain being in a position of power), and the final words are invariably spoken by the highest ranked character left alive. The fate of almost all female characters in revenge tragedies also predicts their treatment in horror cinema as figures of desire but with little chance of survival.
Following from these hugely successful plays, the mantle of horror passes to John Webster, a writer so infamous for his macabre approach that he features as a child cameo in the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998), declaring: “Plenty of blood. That’s the only writing.” Alongside the obligatory mutilations, stabbings, and poisonings of revenge tragedy, Webster further adds to the horror in his masterpiece, The Duchess of Malfi (1623), through use of contemporary ideas of lycanthropy as an extreme form of mental disorder. The villainous Ferdinand, brother to the titular Duchess, conspires to have her killed out of a mixture of jealousy and family pride when she takes a lover he does not approve of. Following her death, he rapidly descends into madness, a madness that finally manifests itself in wolf-like behavior: “Said he was a wolf, only the difference / Was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside” (Webster 1996, Act 5, Scene 2, lines 16–17). Such use of creature horror was in part influenced by the popularity of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (ca. 8 CE) as a school text and also in part by anxieties and uncertainties about the barriers between human and animal brought about through accounts of strange beasts in travel narratives.
Horror’s existence on the boundaries can also be seen in early modern literature’s treatment of the closeness of horror and laughter. Modern expectations of comedy as funny and tragedy as sad do not apply to early drama, in which moments of extreme bloodshed and atrocities were punctuated with dark humor and a plethora of puns. This clear literary awareness of the proximity of horror and laughter is a defining characteristic of many forms of horror literature from revenge tragedies onward. The laughter, whether genuine or the result of discomfort at what is being witnessed, becomes a key part of audience response, and the high moral purposes of tragedy described by early modern theorists such as Sir Philip Sidney are subsumed into sensationalism and spectacle.
The influence of early modern horror literature can be seen across many aspects of later writing, as the period continues to be a popular setting for films and books that set out to exploit the superstitious pretechnological world. In fact, the rural European settings of later classics of Gothic horror such as Frankenstein and Dracula enable an atmosphere that has far more in common with the sixteenth century than the increasingly urbanized and industrialized England. Modern films such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Van Helsing (2004) emphasize this difference through costume and setting. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) plays on these cinematic conventions, depicting a primitive community that shares beliefs and traditions that set them aside from the modern setting of the film. More specifically, horror texts set in the early modern era continue to be popular, particularly within the subgenre of folk horror. Notable examples include the novels Deliver Us from Evil (1997) by Tom Holland and The Tale of Raw Head and Bloody Bones (2013) by Jack Wolf, and films ranging from the early classics Hexen (1922) and Day of Wrath (1943) to later standouts such as Witchfinder General (1968) and Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and, more recently, A Field in England (2013). The success, critically and commercially, of writer/director Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) demonstrates that the popularity and influence of horror in the early modern era is still strong.
Stephen Curtis
See also: Horror in the Ancient World; Horror in the Middle Ages; Horror in the Eighteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Religion, Horror, and the Supernatural; Shakespearean Horrors; Part Three, Reference Entries: Devils and Demons; Witches and Witchcraft.
Further Reading
Clark, Stuart. 1999. Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Middleton, Thomas. [ca. 1606] 1988. The Revenger’s Tragedy. In Five Plays, edited by Bryan Loughrey and Neil Taylor, 71–160. Houndsworth: Penguin.
Sage, Victor. 1988. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. London: Macmillan.
Shakespeare in Love. 1998. Directed by John Madden. Universal Studios.
Simkin, Stevie. 2006. Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Walter, Brenda S. Gardenour. 2015. Our Old Monsters: Witches, Werewolves and Vampires from Medieval Theology to Horror Cinema. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Webster, John. [ca. 1614] 1996. The Duchess of Malfi. In The Duchess of Malfi and Other Plays, edited by René Weis, 103–200. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
HORROR IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
The roots of horror literature run back through the Middle Ages, the classical age of the ancient world, and beyond, to the fireside stories and cave paintings of our Paleolithic ancestors. And while “horror fiction” would not be used as a generic label until the mid-twentieth century, there is nevertheless ample justification for stating that it was in the eighteenth century that horror as a popular fictional genre emerged. During the last decade of this century—roughly contemporaneously with the French Revolution—that crucial precursor to modern horror, the Gothic novel, became among the most widely consumed literary forms.
A wide variety of literary developments earlier in the century fed into the Gothic and the development of horror as a genre. Indeed, most early eighteenth-century writings that focused on the supernatural as a source of fear and excitement were not conceived as fiction at all. In reaction to the loss of religious faith occasioned by the rise of skeptical philosophy, empirical science, and materialism, the closing decades of the seventeenth century saw the publication of a variety of books and pamphlets dedicated to persuading their readers of the reality of supernatural beings, including ghosts, revenants, and demons. Later termed “apparition narratives,” such texts sought to combat growing skepticism toward religious, and specifically Christian, teachings, using supposedly empirical accounts of supernatural beings and occurrences to defend the reality revealed by scripture against the encroachments of Enlightenment science and philosophy.
Probably the most influential of these was Saducismus Triumphatus (1681). Written by English cleric Joseph Glanvill (1636–1680) and published shortly after his death, the book is a compendium of witchcraft and related subjects that is ultimately a defense of the truth of Christian scripture. As suggested by the title, which can be translated as “The Triumph over Sadducism”—with the latter term coming from the ancient Jewish sect of the Sadducees, which held a skeptical viewpoint about supernatural matters such as angels and the afterlife—Glanvill aligns skepticism toward supernatural menaces including witches and revenants with skepticism toward the Bible. Heavily influenced by Glanvill, American Puritan theologian and prolific writer Cotton Mather (1663–1728) published his Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) shortly after the conclusion of the Salem witch trials. A work of natural theology that catalogues a wide variety of supernatural phenomena in the New World, Wonders focuses particularly on the dangers of witchcraft and the need to punish and prevent its practice, drawing on the cases presented during the Salem trials and serving as a justification for the trials themselves. Tremendously influential at the time of their publication, in the succeeding two centuries both Glanvill’s and Mather’s works would continue to exert an influence quite unlike anything their authors had intended, as they would be drawn upon by many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers who would reweave these accounts into fictional fabrics.
Many eighteenth-century writers speculated about the attraction such supernatural terrors held, often tying them both to the important role folklore and superstition played in the development of national and cultural identities, and to the supposedly more universal concept of the sublime. An affective state combining awe and terror, the sublime became a major aesthetic category in Britain and throughout Western Europe following the rediscovery of the ancient Greek rhetorician Longinus’s Peri Hypsous and its translation into modern languages. (Nicholas Boileau’s 1674 French translation was probably the most influential, but the most widely read in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century was William Smith’s 1739 translation, titled On the Sublime.) Longinus saw the elicitation of great passion, ekstasis, as both the hallmark of genius in a writer and as a way of elevating the reader, and this concept of the sublime became widely discussed by critics and philosophers, and even more widely aspired to by writers and artists. English dramatist and critic John Dennis (1658–1734) explained the importance of sublime terror in poetry and theater in his 1704 essay “Grounds of Criticism in Poetry,” claiming that no passion is more “capable of giving a great spirit to poetry” than the “enthusiastic terror” of the sublime (Dennis 2000, 101). Dennis went on to iterate some sources of such terror in what amounts to an ingredients list for later Gothic writers: “gods, demons, hell, spirits and souls of men, miracles, prodigies, enchantments, witchcraft, thunder, tempests, raging seas, inundations, torrents, earthquakes, volcanoes, monsters, serpents, lions, tigers, fire, war, pestilence, famine, etc.” (102). Dennis concluded that such terrors are important both morally and theologically, as “of these ideas none are so terrible as those which show the wrath and vengeance of an angry god” (102). Building on Dennis’s ideas, Joseph Addison (1672–1719) provided a more psychological account of sublime terror in his journal The Spectator in 1712, claiming “it does not arise so properly from the description of what is terrible, as from the reflection we make on our selves at the time of reading it,” situating those things that terrify us at the center of our attempts to understand our own identity (Addison 2000, 105).
Following such critical statements, more writers would come to see the creation of a feeling of terror in readers as a worthy aspiration. One crucial example was prolific English writer Daniel Defoe (1660–1731). Best remembered for his protorealist novels Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), Defoe also wrote numerous tracts, pamphlets, and books about the reality of supernatural phenomena, and this work occupies a prominent position between the apparition narratives of the late seventeenth century and the Gothic fictions of the latter half of the eighteenth. His longer and more influential works in this vein include The Political History of the Devil, As Well Ancient as Modern (1726), A System of Magic, or the History of the Black Art (1726), and An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions (1727). Presenting itself initially as a compendium of apparition narratives in the tradition of Glanvill, the latter essay is particularly ingenious in its blending of encyclopedic and narrative elements, tied together by a narrating theologian who serves as a modest witness while creating an uncanny atmosphere through an eye for eerie details. Defoe brings to bear his verisimilar skills here just as he did with Robinson Crusoe, making the Essay important as much for its literary techniques as for its apparition accounts.
French Benedictine monk and researcher Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757) took an approach similar to Defoe’s in producing what is probably the most influential collection of eighteenth-century apparition narratives. Calmet undertook an exhaustive study of the apparitions of angels, demons, various other spirits, and related occult phenomena, including witchcraft and lycanthropy. The fruits of his labor, Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, et sur les revenants et vampires de Hongrie, de Bohême, de Moravie et de Silésie (Dissertations on the Apparitions of Spirits and on the Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, and Silesia) was published in 1746 and in an expanded revised edition in 1751, and was quickly translated into English and numerous other languages, reaching a wide audience. Calmet’s work, though it ultimately attempts to discount the reality of many of these phenomena on Catholic theological as well as on empirical grounds, was often read for the vivid and chilling details of its accounts. In particular, his description of the supposed vampires and revenants of Eastern Europe continued to fuel the popular fascination with such creatures for well over a century, serving as a major source for vampire narratives from Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer (1801) through John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897).
The middle decades of the eighteenth century also saw a number of British poets produce religious ruminations on mortality that relied heavily on images of death and decay, ostensibly to serve as memento mori (reminders of mortality) and aids to pious meditation. The earliest and most influential example was Anglo-Irish poet Thomas Parnell’s (1679–1718) “Night-Thoughts on Death” (posthumously published by his friend Alexander Pope in a 1722 collection of Parnell’s poetic works). The popular success and critical attention paid to Parnell’s work would inspire many later poets to work in a similar mode. Other important examples include Scottish poet Robert Blair’s (1699–1746) blank verse poem “The Grave” (1743), English poet Edward Young’s (1683–1765) The Complaint: Or Night-Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (serially published between 1743 and 1745), and English poet Thomas Gray’s (1716–1771) “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Critics of some of the later and more formulaic examples of what would come to be known as the “Graveyard” or “Boneyard” school of poetry, however, saw the gruesome images of such poems as ultimately exploitative, and their supposed moral and theological purpose as an excuse to revel in morbidity, an accusation that would also be frequently leveled against later Gothic and Dark Romantic writers who learned vital aesthetic lessons from the poets of the “Graveyard school.”
In 1757, the literary aesthetics of death, pain, power, and cosmic immensity that continue to play a vital role in modern horror were influentially articulated when Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797) published his treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Building extensively on the work of earlier writers including Addison as well as philosophers Lord Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, and exemplifying his ideas through the work of great writers including William Shakespeare and John Milton, Burke drew on empirical psychological principles to argue that terror was the most powerful emotion a human being was capable of experiencing, and thereby provided an aesthetic justification that would be seized upon by writers devoted to inspiring awe and terror in readers. Burke could not have anticipated the tremendous influence his Enquiry would have in shaping literary tastes for centuries to come. It would be read, referenced, and reacted to not only by early Gothic writers including Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, but also by later writers including Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, the latter of whom would paraphrase Burke in declaring fear to be “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind” (Lovecraft 2012, 25).
It was Horace Walpole (1717–1797) who invented the Gothic as a literary form. Inspired by the medieval revivalism of poets including James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton, Walpole combined his antiquarian enthusiasms with an interest in folkloric superstitions and a desire to explore his own dreams and nightmares, and the result was his pseudo-medieval romance The Castle of Otranto (1764). He presented the first edition of the book as a translation from a thirteenth-century Italian manuscript, and even as historians and philologists decried it as an obvious hoax, the book became a popular success. Walpole appended an apology to the book’s second edition (1765), coining the term “Gothic story” for this new literary form that combined history with fantasy in a manner meant to evoke both wonder and terror, one that would become a vital precursor to modern horror literature.
By the 1780s in Germany, another precursor emerged in the form of Schauer-romane (shudder-novels). An extension of the Sturm und Drang (“storm and stress”) aesthetic of early romanticism, these novels combined tragedy with mystery and supernaturalism, often focusing on conspiracies, secret societies, and black magic. Despite never being completed, one of the most influential was Friedrich von Schiller’s (1759–1805) Der Geisterseher (The Ghost-Seer, serially published between 1787 and 1789). Also seminal was Christian Heinrich Spiess’s Das Petermännchen (1793; translated as The Dwarf of Westerbourg). Like Walpole’s Otranto, this was a ghost story set in the thirteenth century. These and other Schauer-romane anticipated the British Gothic novels of the 1790s in both subject matter and style, and in some cases would be directly imitated by British writers including Matthew Lewis.
Lewis was a young English aristocrat whose first and only Gothic novel, The Monk (1796), has a strong claim to be considered the first novel of supernatural horror in English. Partly inspired by the Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), whose popular Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Lewis had devoured and sought to imitate, The Monk draws heavily on the Sturm und Drang writers Lewis avidly consumed as a student of German literature. With its frenetic style, florid descriptions of sexuality and violence, and its unapologetic portrayal of a world in which satanic supernatural powers conspire against humanity, The Monk rejected both Radcliffe’s decorum and the Enlightenment values that led her to explain the seemingly supernatural occurrences in her fictions according to rational, materialist principles. These excesses led a scandalized Radcliffe to distinguish between her own moralistic “terror” Gothic romances and Lewis’s “horror” Gothic in an essay titled “On the Supernatural in Poetry” (1826) that in many ways serves as the first critical attempt to distinguish “horror” as its own literary genre. Radcliffe’s distinction between terror and horror corresponds closely with how horror as a literary genre evolved in the two centuries to come, and would be echoed by later studies including Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) and by Stephen King’s Danse Macabre (1981).
Lewis’s novel became an international sensation, its scandalous success carrying it not only throughout Britain, but to France, Germany, and the New World. In Britain, it would inspire more transgressive and horror-focused Gothic fictions including Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1816), and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). In France, it spurred the popular appetite for the roman noir, inspiring writers including François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil and the Marquis de Sade, and later nineteenth-century writers of horrific fiction including Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Guy de Maupassant. In America, though Charles Brockden Brown’s early Gothic novels Wieland (1798) and Edgar Huntly (1799) took a psychological approach informed by William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1793), they would nevertheless echo The Monk’s use of a vicious and religiously deluded antihero, whereas Poe’s later forays into the Gothic would share Lewis’s emphasis on overt supernaturalism and the grotesque.
Sean Moreland
See also: Horror in the Middle Ages; Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Gothic Literary Tradition; Gothic Poetry; Part Three, Reference Entries: Brown, Charles Brockden; The Castle of Otranto; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; The Monk; The Mysteries of Udolpho; Psychological Horror; Radcliffe, Ann; Romanticism and Dark Romanticism; The Sublime; Terror versus Horror; Vampires; Walpole, Horace.
Further Reading
Addison, Joseph. [1712] 2000. “Joseph Addison (1672–1719), The Spectator, No. 419 (1712).” In Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, edited by E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, 104–107. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Bloom, Clive. 2007. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Crawford, Joseph. 2013. Gothic Fiction and the Invention of Terrorism: The Politics and Aesthetics of Fear in the Age of the Reign of Terror. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Dennis, John. [1704] 2000. “John Dennis (1657–1734), The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704).” In Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700–1820, edited by E. J. Clery and Robert Miles, 100–104. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.
Hogle, Jerrold E. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
HORROR IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
As the nineteenth century began, it seemed, at least in Europe, to mark a new beginning following the upheaval of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s empire, which occupied Europe until 1815. America was relatively unconcerned with such developments, which seemed distant in spite of their repercussions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The United States seemed relatively well settled after its own revolution, in spite of seething disputes between the North and South that would remain in uneasy balance for the first sixty years of the century, the continuing conquest and taming of the West providing a safety-valve of sorts.
France was not done with revolutions yet—it was to have two more in 1830 and 1848, and another, albeit brief and localized, in 1871—and other European nations, even when they kept the lid on ever-seething domestic social upheavals, were by no means done with international wars, the Crimean War providing a particularly bloody midcentury interlude, and the traumatic reverberations of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 extending beyond France, especially in their apparent implications as to the probable shape of wars to come. The imaginative significance of those two European wars and the American Civil War of 1861–1865 went far beyond the political questions they appeared to settle temporarily, by virtue of the innovative newspaper reportage that brought the horrors of war to the domestic hearth in an unprecedented fashion and complemented their dire reality with a new urgency that sowed fear for the future as well as horror.
The news in question revealed, all too clearly, that war was something that affected civilians as well as soldiers in devastating fashion, and that as weaponry became more powerful, civilians were being moved ever closer to the battle lines as increasingly easy cannon fodder. Writing about the horrors of war became much more intimate and immediate in the nineteenth century, not merely because the images of death and devastation became sharper but because they became much closer in time and space. For the first time, people began to produce fictional images of wars that were historically very recent, or even still in progress, sometimes even yet to come. Such fiction is not generally categorized as “horror fiction” because that genre tends to be defined primarily in terms of supernatural horror and the horror of psychological aberration, but no shift in the spectrum of horror, considered in its broadest sense, can occur without reverberations in other parts of the spectrum.
Supernatural horror fiction did not slide toward oblivion as the spectrum of real horrors began to take a much greater place in the popular imagination—after war, the most newsworthy topic by far was murder, the more gruesome the better, and murder involving passion and rape the best of all—but it did mutate, as it had to do, to adapt to the new imaginative ambience. To some extent it did so by absorption; as the news suffered from the effects of melodramatic inflation, having to pile on increasing amounts of agony to procure the same level of shock and awe, so horror fiction reached for new extremes of gruesomeness, passion, and violation, but it was hampered and shackled in so doing by standards of literary decency. Even the news was censored of actualities too nasty to be reported, but fiction, devoid of the justification of accurate reportage, was more severely constrained by prudishness.
Inevitably, therefore, the most prominent strategy of adaptation was not a matter of taking real horrors aboard, but a matter of seeking and discovering oblique approaches to stimulation that could achieve telling effects without too much crudity. Even in France, which did not suffer from English Victorianism or American prudishness, the Marquis de Sade’s reckless indulgence in the horrors of rape and cruelty remained banned throughout the century, and it required special circumstances for a catalogue of physical atrocities like the one featured in Louise Michel’s Les Microbes humains (1886; translated as The Human Microbes) to slip through the net. The supernatural was, in that regard, something of a literary refuge, offering abundant scope for the creation of horror by implication, but it did not take long for writers to begin to exploit the inevitable hesitation of any character confronted with apparently supernatural manifestations, as to whether they were to be construed as objective facts or as symptoms of madness—or, in the most sophisticated works of all, the hesitation over whether that supposed difference ultimately really matters.
Against the background of this overall pattern of evolution, the Gothic novel was already doomed by the time the nineteenth century began. One of the first reflections of the developments of the philosophical and literary movement of romanticism, it had already reached its peak in the 1790s and was entering a phase of decline by 1801. The precedents laid down by Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Gregory Lewis were still influential, but anyone intending to achieve something new in the genre was required at least to broaden it out somewhat, and in so doing begin its transformation.
Most of the nineteenth-century novels subsequently to be labeled Gothic and established retrospectively as landmark works, most notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), are considerably more sophisticated, psychologically and conceptually, than the eighteenth-century Gothic classics and helped mark a transition toward narrative that aspired both to more profundity and delicacy. Radcliffe, Lewis, and their imitators had given the imaginative lexicon of Gothic horror a new location on the literary map, from which the writers of the nineteenth century were to take selected items of that lexicon in several new directions, often refining its horrific element, both in the detail of its imagery and the imagined subtlety of its psychological effect.
By 1825 the Gothic vogue in Britain was well and truly past, although it lingered in the lowest strata of the marketplace, continuing to fuel “penny dreadfuls” like Varney the Vampire (1845–1847) for some time thereafter. When imported into America in the work of Charles Brockden Brown, it had already undergone a psychological adaptation that fitted it for the kinds of endeavors that Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe were to carry forward with such artistry, and a similar sophistication occurred, even more flamboyantly, in Germany, largely due to the endeavors of E. T. A. Hoffmann. It was Hoffmann who produced the most crucial exemplars of supernatural horror fiction in the first two decades of the century, not merely in his own country but in France, where his works were enormously popular. Hoffmann was the writer who first blurred the boundaries between manifestation and hallucination so completely that it became impossible to discern, and thus set the direction and the tempo for the development of modern horror fiction.
If there is one dominant theme in the post-Gothic weird fiction of the nineteenth century, it is the theme of the dead returning to pester the living, not necessarily literally, but insistently. Some authors stuck to the traditional motives of waiting to reveal the truth of hidden crime and to harry the guilty, but ghostly visitations were often more enigmatic than that, and the fright they caused more heavily impregnated with puzzlement and mystery.
Death had changed its social status in the nineteenth century; funerals, funereal monuments, and mourning became more ostentatious, to the extent that their extravagance could not help but be seen by many as gross hypocrisy. Thus, efforts made to soothe consciences by making more fuss of the dead often inflamed anxiety, and the angry psychological sores that resulted can be seen in the supernatural fiction of the period, as well as the remarkable growth of Spiritualism.
In America, the Fox sisters, who began to open new channels of communication between the forgiving dead and the reassurance-seeking living in 1848, were put on public display by P. T. Barnum. Their career as mediums served as the origin point for the Spiritualist movement, and as the century progressed it became increasingly difficult for people to let the dead rest in peace, especially as they seemed to be clamoring for attention with insistent rappings, levitating tables, and clouds of ectoplasm, while they waited their turn to use the overstrained vocal cords of entranced mediums, who responded as best they could to audiences’ demands to have their guilty anxieties soothed away. Their clients wanted to be told that their loved ones were safe in heaven, and that they—the living—had been forgiven for all their petty trespasses and sins of neglect. Horror fiction, which told a very different story, was the other side of the coin of conscience.
Skeptics fought to demonstrate that the apparitions of Spiritualism were merely products of fevered imagination. If they hoped by that means to drive out anxiety, however, they had mistaken their enemy; sufferers who were convinced that the cause was internal rather than external simply became haunted by demons within rather than demons without. In the nineteenth century the phenomena of madness were brought decisively into the context of medical research and medical explanation, and the idea of “mental illness” achieved its final victory, in order that the fear of the diseased psyche could take on its modern aspect. In stories of derangement written after 1825, therefore, an advancing clinicality was inevitable. The transformation that clinicality wrought sharpened rather than blunted the horrific aspect of tales of disturbing encounters with enigmatic apparitions. The medical association of madness with tertiary syphilis, under the euphemistic label of “general paralysis of the insane,” remained largely submerged in fiction by prudishness, but it lurks beneath the surface of nineteenth-century horror fiction, detectable to the psychoanalytic eye.
Because of its preoccupations with extraordinary extrapolations of guilt and medically defined madness, the history of the horror story throughout the nineteenth century is largely an account of growing introversion, as the moaning specters and deformed monsters of the Gothic were gradually relocated within the psyche, graphically depicted in such archetypes as Robert Louis Stevenson’s monstrous Mr. Hyde, lurking within the personality of the respectable Dr. Jekyll. Where ghosts and monsters retained independent existence, their connection with the people they haunted grew gradually more intimate and at least covertly sexual—a pattern particularly obvious in classic vampire stories from John Polidori, Théophile Gautier, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu to the full flowering of Dracula (1897).
There is nothing surprising in that growing intimacy, given the social dramatization of death and the clinicalization of madness. However the horrid specters of nineteenth-century supernatural fiction manifest themselves, there is something in the mind of their victim that summons them; the eye of the beholder is already prepared to catch sight of them. The Gothic villain, especially in his Byronic mode, was already an ambivalent figure, seductive as well as cruel; after 1825 his literary descendants evolved in two opposed directions, sometimes becoming more human and sometimes surreal, but they retained the power of the predisposition of their victims to be perversely fascinated by their symbolic status and force. There is a third line of development, in which the Gothic villain moves toward heroic status, foreshadowed in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rosicrucian romances, which served as an inspiration to many of the lifestyle fantasies of the occult revival that played such a prominent role in British and European (particularly French) culture during the Victorian period.
Brian Stableford
See also: Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: The Legacy of Frankenstein: From Gothic Novel to Cultural Myth; Part Three, Reference Entries: Baudelaire, Charles; Bierce, Ambrose; Brown, Charles Brockden; Bulwer-Lytton, Edward; Chambers, Robert W.; Dracula; “The Fall of the House of Usher”; Gautier, Théophile; Gothic Hero/Villain; Hawthorne, Nathaniel; Hoffmann, E. T. A.; The King in Yellow; Le Fanu, J. Sheridan; Lewis, Matthew Gregory; Maturin, Charles Robert; Melmoth the Wanderer; Penny Dreadful; The Picture of Dorian Gray; Poe, Edgar Allan; The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; Psychological Horror; Radcliffe, Ann; Shelley, Mary; Spiritualism; Stevenson, Robert Louis; The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; “The Vampyre”; Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood.
Further Reading
Frayling, Christopher. 1996. Nightmare: The Birth of Horror. London: BBC Books.
Hennessy, Brendan. 1979. “The Gothic Novel.” In British Writers, vol. 3, edited by Ian Scott-Kilvert, 324–346. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 1: From Gilgamesh to the End of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Sage, Victor. 1988. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. London: Macmillan.
Scarborough, Dorothy. 1917. The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction. New York: Putnam.
Wisker, Gina. 2005. Horror Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum.
HORROR FROM 1900 TO 1950
Culturally, socially, and artistically, the first decade or so of the twentieth century in America and Britain actually belonged to the nineteenth. It was effectively an extension of the Victorian Age, and this holds equally true for the significant horror literature of the period. In 1900, Bram Stoker’s (1847–1912) Dracula was three years old. Robert W. Chambers’s (1865–1933) groundbreaking The King in Yellow was five years old. As the new century was beginning, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), best known for his Sherlock Holmes stories of the late 1800s, wrote a variety of weird and ghostly stories. Indeed, his Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, published in 1901, is rich with a Gothic atmosphere and seems to promise the supernatural before its rationalized resolution.
The turn of the century saw the emergence of a number of significant new horror authors in Britain. One of the most important new writers of the age was M. R. James (1862–1936), who had been reading his ghost stories aloud to friends and groups of schoolboys (he was a British scholar and academic, later Provost of Eton) since about 1893. His first collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, appeared in 1904, and others followed, with all of them ultimately assembled as the still-standard Collected Ghost Stories (1931). James’s hallmark was a refined subtlety of technique, in which a series of clues and hints usually led to an explicit (and often distressingly physical) encounter with some menace from the past better left buried. His work represented the highest development of the classical English ghost story, and it has been enormously influential on a whole school of followers and on such moderns as Ramsey Campbell and Robert Aickman. A contemporary and similar figure was E. F. Benson (1867–1940), who is best known today for social comedies comparable to those of P. G. Wodehouse, but whose ghost stories, beginning with the collection The Room in the Tower (1912), form a significant and surprising appendage to his main career.
Another Englishman, Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), also did much of his best work about this time, producing the psychic-detective sequence John Silence: Physician Extraordinary (1908) and such collections as The Empty House (1906) and The Lost Valley (1910). Blackwood is notable for his nature mysticism and his use of outdoor settings, as is seen in his most famous stories, “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” H. P. Lovecraft rated the former as the finest weird story in the English language. The great Lord Dunsany (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth Baron Dunsany, 1878–1957) published his first book, The Gods of Pegana, in 1905. While most of his work would be classified as fantasy or even as comic, he could be eerie or horrifying when he chose, and his influence on subsequent writers, particularly Lovecraft and his school, is tremendously significant. Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) published a supernatural novel, The Return, in 1910 and became notable for such short stories as “Seaton’s Aunt” and “All Hallows,” which blended the ghostly and the psychological powerfully and subtly.
The literary impact of the First World War (1914–1918) extended well beyond killing off such talented writers as William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918), who excelled at both cosmic and nautical horror stories (such as The House on the Borderland, 1908), and Saki (the pen name of H. H. Munro, 1870–1916), whose short, ironic horror stories are found scattered through his larger collections. Effectively, the twentieth century begins in 1919, in the wake of the war. One of the most important social changes of this transitional period was a blurring of class distinctions, and this is reflected in literature, both in Britain and in the United States. Thus the polite, elegant ghost story for upper-class audiences—and featuring upper-class characters—began to merge with something a bit earthier and less sophisticated. In Britain this meant the appearance of such lowbrow anthologies as Charles Birkin’s Creeps series (1932–1936), as well as novels of occult horror such as Dennis Wheatley’s (1897–1977) The Devil Rides Out (1934). In America, it meant pulp magazines.
“Pulp” is a technical term that refers to the quality of paper used, in which flecks of wood pulp are visible, but it became synonymous with cheaply printed and often luridly illustrated popular magazines. Pulps soon began to specialize in particular genres, with magazines featuring detective stories, Westerns, sea stories, and the like. The first weird fiction magazine was actually German, Der Orchideengarten (1919–1921), but the first in English, and the most important, is Weird Tales (1923–1954 plus several revivals, with the most recent issue published in 2014).
The earliest issues of Weird Tales may have seemed none too promising to readers at the time, since much of the contents were crude, material horror that was badly written by any standard. However, the magazine persisted and began to develop important writers, so that much of the story of English-language horror, particularly in the second quarter of the twentieth century, is the story of Weird Tales.
By far the most important Weird Tales writer was H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), whose popularity and influence made him the central figure in horror fiction for much of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Lovecraft’s first appearance in Weird Tales was with the short story “Dagon” in 1923. His “The Rats in the Walls” (1924) must have had a tremendous impact on the readership at the time, as it was so obviously superior to most of what appeared around it. The first editor of Weird Tales, Edwin Baird, accepted anything Lovecraft sent him, but Lovecraft’s relations with Baird’s successor, Farnsworth Wright, who edited the magazine from late 1924 to early 1940, were sometimes difficult. Wright was a brilliant editor who not only raised the magazine to greatness, but kept it going through the Great Depression, even when at one point the magazine’s assets were wiped out in a bank failure. However, Wright could be overcautious. For example, he first rejected Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu” because he was afraid his readers would not understand it, but then asked to see it again, and published it in 1928. He also published the majority of Lovecraft’s work, including such classics as “The Dunwich Horror” (1929), “Pickman’s Model” (1927), and “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), and singled out “The Outsider” (1926) for editorial praise in the highest possible terms. Wright rejected some of Lovecraft’s longer narratives, including At the Mountains of Madness and “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” which severely damaged Lovecraft’s self-confidence and slowed down his creativity in his last years. (At the Mountains of Madness was eventually published in another magazine in 1936, the same year that “The Shadow over Innsmouth” was published as a stand-alone book with a miniscule print run.) When Wright published Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark” and “The Thing on the Doorstep” in two successive issues (December 1936, January 1937), it must have seemed that all was suddenly well again, but by March of 1937, Lovecraft was dead.
In the meantime, Lovecraft had managed to gather a whole circle of colleagues around him, including such established contemporaries as Henry S. Whitehead (1882–1932), Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961) and Robert E. Howard (1906–1936), as well as a host of newcomers such as Robert Bloch (1917–1994) and Fritz Leiber (1910–1992), whom he encouraged and mentored with great generosity. His influence extended further through his revision clients. Stories in Weird Tales by Hazel Heald, Zealia Bishop, and others read a lot like Lovecraft and even mentioned his forbidden books and elder gods—because Lovecraft had, in fact, ghost-written those stories. Two of Lovecraft’s younger colleagues, August Derleth (1909–1971) and Donald Wandrei (1908–1987), not only wrote stories in the Lovecraftian tradition, with Derleth more or less taking over the “Cthulhu Mythos” in the 1940s and 1950s and putting his own quite un-Lovecraftian spin on it, but they changed the history of horror fiction profoundly by creating the publishing firm of Arkham House, first to preserve Lovecraft’s work in book form, and then to reprint other Weird Tales writers.
Of Lovecraft’s contemporaries and colleagues, Robert E. Howard is certainly the most popular and widely reprinted, though he is primarily an action-adventure writer, best known for his stories of Conan the Barbarian (who also made his debut in Weird Tales in 1932). Howard could evoke the supernatural and horrific powerfully in his fiction, but it was often tangential to his main interests. Clark Ashton Smith, on the other hand, was a strikingly original writer, obsessed with the grotesque and the cosmic. He often expressed a desire to reach “beyond the human aquarium” in his fiction and to depict alien worlds and beings on their own terms. This led him, as it did Lovecraft, to something approximating science fiction, but he also wrote of vampires, ghouls, and dire sorcery in such realms as Averoigne (medieval France), prehistoric Hyperborea, or Zothique, Earth’s last continent, which will arise sometime in the remote future.
By the early 1940s, Wright had died and his successor Dorothy McIlwraith did her best to keep the magazine going. It slowly declined, but continued to publish fine work, including many notable early stories by Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, Robert Bloch, and numerous others. Bradbury (1920–2012) became one of the dominant figures in twentieth-century science fiction, but he also made significant contributions to horror in his Weird Tales stories, some of which were later collected in the Arkham House book Dark Carnival (1947) and its later transformation into The October Country (1955). Where many of the Weird Tales writers tended to be a bit old-fashioned, even Victorian in their approaches, Bradbury was thoroughly modern and addressed emotions directly through a style derived more from Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe than from pulp fiction. He and other such writers helped give horror fiction a broader appeal, which made the tremendous horror boom of the 1980s and 1990s possible. Many of Bloch’s 1940s Weird Tales stories, including the famous “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943), were widely reprinted and adapted for television in later decades.
In the 1940s Weird Tales began to suffer serious competition from the magazine Unknown (later called Unknown Worlds), which ran thirty-nine issues between 1939 and 1943 and was edited by John W. Campbell Jr. (1910–1971), who is better remembered as one of the great science fiction editors for his work on Astounding and Analog. Campbell’s approach was radically different from Weird Tales: he wanted stories that were thoroughly modern in style and content. Except for a few with historical or imaginary settings, most Unknown fiction was firmly set in the contemporary world. Much was humorous, but Unknown did publish two particularly notable horror novels. Jack Williamson’s (1908–2006) Darker Than You Think (1940; expanded 1948) tells of werewolves, a distinct, shape-changing species that has always coexisted with humankind, but that has gained a terrible advantage now that people no longer believe in them. Similarly, in Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife (1943), set in a college, the faculty wives are all secretly witches who use their spells to advance their husbands’ careers and curse their rivals. Again, skepticism puts the hero in grave danger. Both of these novels, and a good deal of Unknown’s short fiction, are the immediate predecessors of what today is marketed as “urban fantasy.”
Outside of the pulp magazines, horror sank to a low ebb by the middle of the twentieth century, but some continued to appear. William Sloane (1906–1974) published two outstanding novels on the borderline of science fiction and horror. To Walk the Night (1937) concerns an alluring woman who seems to be an alien entity possessing the body of a human idiot, and The Edge of Running Water (1939) is about a scientific attempt to contact the dead. Robert Bloch and Fritz Leiber cited To Walk the Night as a particular favorite. Both novels are superbly atmospheric and written in a fully literate style, without any of the crudities typical of much pulp fiction. However, Sloane wrote no more, instead becoming a publisher. The mid-twentieth century also saw the birth of horror comics, most notably those published by EC comics (Tales from the Crypt, The Haunt of Fear, and The Vault of Horror), which went on to form their own important substream within the larger tradition of purely literary horror fiction.
Horror could still slip into the mainstream on occasion. Shirley Jackson’s (1919–1965) famous story “The Lottery,” about a rural town where one person is ritually stoned every year, caused a sensation in 1948 when it was published in The New Yorker. In 1950, Richard Matheson (1926–2013) published “Born of Man and Woman,” his first story, told from the point of view of a monster child kept chained under the basement stairs. Both of these stories are completely modern in style and approach, remaining subtle and understated, with great psychological depth, but told in deceptively plain prose.
The development of horror in the first half of the twentieth century can be defined as the evolution that went from M. R. James to Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson. Jackson went on to write The Haunting of Hill House (1959), one of the greatest ghost novels ever published. Matheson, for his part, defined horror for the generation of Stephen King and his contemporaries, and has been second only to Lovecraft in subsequent influence.
Darrell Schweitzer
See also: Horror in the Nineteenth Century; Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Anthologies; Horror Comics; Horror Literature and Science Fiction; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction; Part Three, Reference Entries: Arkham House; Benson, E. F.; Blackwood, Algernon; Bloch, Robert; Bradbury, Ray; Chambers, Robert W.; Cthulhu Mythos; de la Mare, Walter; Derleth, August; Hodgson, William Hope; Howard, Robert E.; Jackson, Shirley; James, M. R.; Leiber, Fritz; Lovecraft, H. P.; Lovecraftian Horror; Matheson, Richard; Pulp Horror; Saki; Smith, Clark Ashton; Wandrei, Donald; Weird Tales; Wheatley, Dennis; Whitehead, Henry S.
Further Reading
Colavito, Jason. 2008. Knowing Fear: Science, Knowledge, and the Development of the Horror Genre. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Everett, Justin, and Jeffrey H. Shanks. 2015. The Unique Legacy of Weird Tales: The Evolution of Modern Fantasy and Horror. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction, Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Lovecraft, H. P. [1927] 2012. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Weinberg, Robert. 1999. The Weird Tales Story. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Wildside Press.
HORROR FROM 1950 TO 2000
Between 1950 and 2000 horror literature underwent a major shift in focus and direction that contrasted with approaches to the tale of horror in the first half of the twentieth century. In the immediate postwar years horror fiction shed many of the crudities of style and content that had distinguished pulp horror in favor of more sophisticated storytelling. The second half of the twentieth century also saw the emergence of Stephen King, whose best-selling fiction had an incalculable impact on horror fiction written in the wake of his phenomenal success, including the popularization of the novel over the short story as the most important vehicle for horror fiction.
In the 1940s, wartime paper shortages killed off most pulp magazines that published short horror fiction. Weird Tales, the longest-lived of all pulp magazines that catered to tastes for weird fiction, struggled on into the 1950s and published its last issue in September 1954. By that time not only Weird Tales but the type of horror fare that it offered had fallen out of vogue. As Les Daniels observed in Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media, “The Second World War, climaxing with the explosion of nuclear weapons and capped by the hideous revelations unearthed in a beaten Germany, had temporarily exhausted the public’s appetite for horrors of any kind” (Daniels 1975, 156).
Horror fiction written by Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Joseph Payne Brennan, Manly Wade Wellman, Fritz Leiber, and other Weird Tales alumni continued to be published in science fiction magazines (then enjoying a postwar boost in popularity) and in mystery magazines, where it frequently absorbed influences from those very different genres. At the same time, horror stories from Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Ray Russell, and other writers whose careers were launched in the 1950s began appearing in the burgeoning men’s magazine market, whose publications demanded a higher level of literary sophistication and maturity than the pulps. Their work bore out the perception that, in the aftermath of World War II, the traditional monsters of horror fiction were now irrelevant to contemporary readers. “Sad, but true,” Beaumont wrote flippantly in his introduction to the anthology The Fiend in You, “after centuries of outstanding service to the human imagination, the classic terrors—the ghosts, the vampires, the werewolves, the witches, the goblins, all the things that go bump in the night—have suddenly found themselves unable to get work, except as comedians” (Beaumont 1962, vi). A world contending with the very real anxieties over the dawning nuclear age demanded horror stories that were more believable than fantastic.
Horror fiction had already been moving in that direction via the stories of Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson. Throughout the 1940s Bradbury published horror stories in Weird Tales set in familiar small-town America, whose ordinary characters leading their mundane lives share more of a kinship with the everyday people of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, than they do with the creepy residents of H. P. Lovecraft’s legend-haunted Arkham, Massachusetts. More often than not the horrors in these stories grow out of ordinary human experience rather than some horrific incursion of the supernatural. In his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), a distillation of themes and ideas that he had addressed in his Weird Tales stories, Bradbury describes the people of Green Town, Illinois as “tired men and women whose faces were dirty with guilt, unwashed of sin, and smashed like windows by life that hit without warning, ran, hid, came back and hit again” (Bradbury 1998, 24). The unrelieved frustration and disillusionment with life expressed in this passage proves a magical incantation that summons Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a dark carnival that magically appears in town one October, on the cusp of Halloween, to mock the residents and their unfulfilled dreams with Faustian temptations.
The fiction of Shirley Jackson can be read as a complement to Bradbury’s weird tales. Jackson’s work appeared mostly in mainstream publications such as the New Yorker, Charm, and Good Housekeeping, and a very thin line separates her stories of amusing characters’ mishaps from those in which similar mishaps prove more ominous. At the core of much of Jackson’s writing is a vision of the individual perilously out of step with his or her society and the status quo, most evident in such stories as “The Lottery” (1948), about a small New England town where long-established traditions have deteriorated into menacing rituals, and “The Summer People” (1951), in which a vacationing family discovers the terrible fate that awaits any out-of-towners who overstay the summer season. Her best-known novels—The Sundial (1958), The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)—are modern Gothics in which characters who are usually more sensitive and self-conscious than others around them retreat to insular environments that bring their feelings of personal dislocation sharply into focus and concentrate what critic S. T. Joshi refers to as the “pervasive atmosphere of the odd” that pervades all of her work (Joshi 2001, 13).
The “banalization” of the macabre seen in the writing of Bradbury and Jackson became commonplace in much of the better horror fiction written in the 1950s and 1960s, notably in the work of Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont. The leitmotif in all of Matheson’s stories, as he described it in his introduction to The Collected Stories of Richard Matheson, is “the individual isolated in a threatening world, attempting to survive” (Matheson 2005, 252–253). In the paranoid world of Matheson’s fiction, even the most common situations and settings have the potential to threaten: household appliances turn murderous toward their owner in “Mad House” (1953), and every slight or unwanted encounter in the everyday world is proof of a sinister conspiracy again the individual in “Legion of Plotters” (1953). In his novel The Shrinking Man (1956), a character shrinking in size daily as the result of a toxic exposure suddenly finds the house he has lived in comfortably for years to be full of dangerous snares and pitfalls—among them the household cat and a spider in his basement—as his diminishing size renders him more vulnerable. In Charles Beaumont’s fiction, horror often grows out of the stultifying effects of social conformity. In his story “The New People” (1958), a couple newly moved into an upper-crust community are horrified to discover that all of their neighbors participate in a black magic coven to alleviate the boredom of their successful lives. “The Dark Music” (1956), “The Hunger” (1955), and “Miss Gentibelle” (1957) all are concerned with sexual repression and the strange forms that its expression can assume. Matheson and Beaumont became two of the most prolific screenwriters for Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959–1964), a television program that frequently focused on the dark side of ordinary human experience. The interplay between horror stories and representations of horror in extraliterary media such as television and film was another influence that shaped horror fiction in the postwar years in a way that it never had before.
The familiarizing of horror also extended to its most iconic tropes as writers sought to adapt and reconceive classic horrors to fit a postwar sensibility. Fritz Leiber, for instance, had begun doing this in the 1940s through short stories such as “Smoke Ghost” (1941), which conjured spectral presences out of the smoke and grime of industrial cities, and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (1949), in which an advertising model feeds vampirically off the sexual passions that she arouses in men. In his novel The Sinful Ones (1980), a man and woman awaken one day from their routine lives to discover that the world and all of its people are zombie-like automatons who go mechanically about their routines, oblivious to anything that deviates from the prescribed program. Another American writer, Jack Finney, reimagined the tale of supernatural possession in terms of extraterrestrial invasion in The Body Snatchers (1955), in which aliens from outer space appropriate the bodies of residents of a small California town, depriving them of their emotions and free will and forging a community through rigid social conformity. In his controversial novel Some of Your Blood (1961), Theodore Sturgeon expanded on the vampire theme, dispensing with traditional representations of the vampire as a creature of supernatural evil and presenting, instead, a case study of aberrant psychology in which a young man’s craving for menstrual blood provides him with the emotional fulfillment denied him by the norms of society. Norman Bates, the psychologically disturbed young man in Psycho (1959), who periodically assumes the persona of his overprotective dead mother to kill women who arouse his passions, was arguably Robert Bloch’s refurbishing of horror’s shape-shifter or werewolf theme for the tale of the modern serial killer. In Rosemary’s Baby (1967), Ira Levin reimagined the witch’s coven of gothic horror fiction as a clique of tenants in a modern Manhattan apartment building who worship Satan in order to reap advantages crucial to their social advancement.
Levin’s novel, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were all marketed as mainstream novels that gradually revealed undertones of horror in varying degrees. They epitomize the degree to which the horror tale embraced mainstream conventions through the familiarization of its themes, settings, and characters. These novels, all popular best-sellers, laid the foundations for the modern horror boom and set the stage for the meteoric ascent of Stephen King, whose phenomenal popularity is understandable in part in terms of the achievements of these novels. Like Levin, Tryon, and Blatty, King uses horror fiction effectively as a vehicle for exploring fundamental human dramas. Perhaps more than any other writer of contemporary horror fiction, King is the preeminent creator of fables that use fantasy to transform ordinary individuals into archetypes, and the personal, social, and political conflicts that shape their lives into struggles with mythic resonance. As a member of the baby boom generation, he became a mouthpiece through his tales of horror for the anxieties of his peers as they matured from rambunctious childhood to doubt-ridden adulthood. His novels Carrie (1974) and Christine (1983) are both powered by their insights into the cruelty of teenage peer groups. The Dead Zone (1979) presents its protagonist with a difficult moral choice that sums up the political dilemmas facing the counterculture of the 1960s. The Shining (1977) is concerned partly with the devastating effects that one individual’s personal demons can have on a family, and Pet Sematary (1983) with the devastating grief that comes with the death of a loved one. At the same time, King’s very contemporary tales of horror often nod to or reprise ideas and themes from classic horror fiction in a way that shows his keen understanding of the mechanics of the horror story and his appreciation of horror’s ideas and formulas as an endlessly interpretable set of myths that can be resurrected and reshaped to fit the anxieties of each new age.
Although King’s success was one of the main drivers of the horror boom of the 1980s, the movement was also catalyzed to some degree by the era’s social and political realities. King emerged as a popular writer in the years immediately following America’s withdrawal from the Vietnam War (1955–1975) and the political turmoil of the Watergate scandal, when distrust of authority and paranoia about once-sacred institutions were at their highest in the United States. Horror fiction spoke to the anxieties of the generation that had come of age in the 1960s and that was now wrestling with apprehensions about the state of the world that they were inheriting. Abetted by publishers who, rightly or not, interpreted King’s success as a sign of the reading public’s appetite for horror fiction, rather than for King’s inimitable style of storytelling, a new generation of writers began turning out works of horror, some of which specifically addressed the fears and concerns that readers felt as both individuals and members of their society, but much of which simply reworked the themes of classic horror, albeit with a contemporary spin. Several writers, including Peter Straub, Anne Rice, Dean R. Koontz, Clive Barker, and Robert R. McCammon, achieved best-seller status, a reality all but unthinkable before the phenomenon of Stephen King. The proliferation of horror fiction and the profusion of writers devising new approaches to horror themes helped to transform several of the fiction’s classic monsters in these years. Anne Rice, with her novel Interview with the Vampire (1976), aided by the scores of vampire novels by other writers that it inspired, helped to transform the vampire into a sympathetic individual marginalized by his society. And the zombie, once a relatively innocuous entity resurrected by voodoo, was reinterpreted by writers nurtured on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead films as a relentless, mindless, undead, flesh-eating predator.
The rise of the zombie in late twentieth-century horror fiction coincides with the emergence of “splatterpunk,” a horror literature distinguished by graphic and occasionally gratuitous revels in gore and violence. Splatterpunk found its impetus in the fiction of Clive Barker, whose six Books of Blood collections published in 1984 and 1985 were notable for their artful but explicit depictions of sex and violence. Splatterpunk was also a response to the dark fantasy movement—promulgated at the start of the horror boom and popularized by Charles L. Grant through his Shadows anthologies—which encouraged the crafting of subtle horror stories with mainstream literary appeal. Splatterpunk’s most talented contributors—David J. Schow, John Skipp, and Craig Spector—produced work of indisputable merit, but the vast amount of splatterpunk fiction’s violation of taboos, for no better reason than to shock or revolt, constituted a new decadence, not unlike that seen at the twilight of the Gothic novel era two centuries before. The controversies the fiction raised among readers and writers foreshadowed the implosion of horror markets in the 1990s, as publishers retrenched from a genre label and a glut of fiction most of which never achieved the same success as the work of horror’s standard bearers.
Two trends that developed in horror publishing in the final decades of the twentieth century have persisted into the new century. A vibrant and dedicated small press, which helps to nurture new writers and assist developing writers in honing their craft, has become an indispensable fixture in horror publishing, one with fewer aesthetic constraints or reservations than commercial publishing. And the horror periodical has been largely replaced by the original anthology, whose varying thematic and nonthematic orientation has resulted in a renaissance for the short horror story. The legacy of horror fiction in the second half of the twentieth century is best measured by the profusion of works published and the pervasive presence of horror fiction in Western popular culture (and also world popular culture) at large. Once a subliterature that catered to the tastes of a small audience of devoted readers, horror emerged during the postwar years as a vital fiction that reflected the anxieties of its age and became a part of that age’s culture. Any literature of the next century that would present an accurate portrait of its time would have to contend with horror fiction as a ubiquitous presence in the modern literary landscape and a regular part of the general cultural vocabulary.
Stefan R. Dziemianowicz
See also: Horror from 1900 to 1950; Horror in the Twenty-First Century; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Horror Anthologies; Horror Publishing, 1975–1995: The Boom Years; Page to Screen: The Influence of Literary Horror on Film and Television; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Part Three, Reference Entries: Barker, Clive; Beaumont, Charles; Bloch, Robert; Books of Blood; Bradbury, Ray; Brennan, Joseph Payne; Campbell, Ramsey; Dark Fantasy; Derleth, August; The Exorcist; “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”; Grant, Charles L; Harris, Thomas; Herbert, James; Interview with the Vampire; Jackson, Shirley; Ketchum, Jack; King, Stephen; Klein, T. E. D.; Koontz, Dean; Lansdale, Joe R.; Leiber, Fritz; Matheson, Richard; McCammon, Robert R.; Novels versus Short Fiction; The Other; Rice, Anne; Russell, Ray; The Shining; Something Wicked This Way Comes; Splatterpunk; Straub, Peter; Sturgeon, Theodore; Vampires; Weird Tales; Wellman, Manly Wade; Zombies.
Further Reading
Beaumont, Charles. 1962. The Fiend in You. New York: Ballantine.
Bradbury, Ray. [1962] 1998. Something Wicked This Way Comes. New York: Avon.
Daniels, Les. 1975. Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media. New York: Scribners.
Dziemianowicz, Stefan. 1999. “Contemporary Horror Fiction, 1950–1998.” In Fantasy and Horror, edited by Neil Barron, 199–343. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Joshi, S. T. 2001. “Shirley Jackson: Domestic Horror.” In The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction, 13–49. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
King, Stephen. 1981. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House.
Matheson, Richard. 2005. Collected Stories, Vol. 2. Colorado Springs: Edge Books.
Skal, David J. 1993. The Monster Show: A History of Horror. New York: Norton.
HORROR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The twenty-first century has seen an accentuation and continuation of events, trends, and inventions begun or created in the twentieth century that came to fruition in the 2000s. The widespread use and development of communication and digital technologies, the completion of the Human Genome Project, terrorist panic after the attacks of 9/11, and the culmination of neoliberal agendas and globalization have led to a consolidation of mistrust in governments and corporations. Horror has been affected by these events and shows a clear tendency toward apocalyptic scenarios, best captured by the zombie pandemic narrative, a form of dystopian fiction that focuses on the lives of survivors in a world of little hope and much suffering. But horror has also been positively affected, on a practical side, by the development of digital books. A significant number of out-of-print horror novels, especially from the 1980s’ “boom” period, have gradually become available as eBooks at low prices that make them easily accessible and affordable. At the same time, the possibility of self-publishing, via platforms like Amazon, means that horror novels have multiplied. In fact, it is safe to say that, although not as mainstream as it was in the 1980s, horror is undergoing a species of second golden age, with hundreds of horror novels having been published in the new millennium.
If horror literature is, indeed, experiencing a revival, this is partly because horror writers such as Stephen King, Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Tanith Lee, and Dean Koontz, all of whom began writing in the 1970s or 1980s, have acted as role models for a new generation. Their establishment as auteurs, regardless of their (in some cases) dwindling or niche readerships, have made horror writing an appealing venture. Stephen King, in particular, with his tireless championing and promotion of the genre, whether through book tours, encouraging reviews, or talks at universities, has become a spearhead figure for the indefatigable horror writer and has even received recognition from outside horror circles; he was awarded the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and, in 2015, the National Medal of Arts. King has also managed to produce a string of successful novels, novellas, and short stories, including Under the Dome (2009) and A Good Marriage (in Full Dark, No Stars, 2010), that have been or are being swiftly adapted to television or film.
Although some of these writers, such as Barker, have switched gears and now work in genres such as YA (young adult) fiction—or else, like Caitlín Kiernan, have never considered themselves to be horror writers—they have still managed to produce significant works of literary horror, such as Kiernan’s haunting novel The Red Tree (2009) and Barker’s The Scarlet Gospels (2015), which chronicles the return of the iconic Pinhead (best known from the Hellraiser movies). This exodus or evolution of some writers of genre horror has also helped “clear” horror’s image, so that more literary or mainstream writers, such as Bret Easton Ellis (Lunar Park, 2005), Chuck Palahniuk (Haunted, 2005), Mark Z. Danielewski, who actually began his career with the labyrinthine postmodernist horror novel House of Leaves (2000), and David Mitchell (Slade House, 2015), have successfully turned to horror at occasional points. The perennial return of the Gothic, in novels by the likes of Sarah Waters (The Little Stranger, 2009), Susan Hill (Dolly, 2011), Jeanette Winterson (The Daylight Gate, 2012), Lauren Owen (The Quick, 2014), and Kate Mosse (The Taxidermist’s Daughter, 2014), has also been important in keeping the flame of subtle horror burning bright.
While the twenty-first century has seen the death or retirement of more than one key figure—such as Richard Matheson, James Herbert, and Poppy Z. Brite, to name a few—these have been swiftly replaced with young blood. A remarkable example of this new generation is Joe Hill, who, despite beginning his career by hiding the fact that he is Stephen King’s son, has quickly built up a significant bibliography that tackles ghosts (Heart-Shaped Box, 2007), devils (Horns, 2010), vampires (NOS4A2, 2013), and world-changing plagues (The Fireman, 2016). Importantly, Hill has also worked in another medium that has seen a rise in horror-themed volumes: comics. His Locke and Key series (2008–2013) deserves particular praise for its innovative magical “keys” premise, which rethinks the haunted house narrative.
Adam Nevill is another writer on the rise who has consistently produced solid works and is developing an ever-growing readership. His brand of supernatural horror, high on suggestion and cinematic in style, features horrific creatures that range from evil presences such as the Brown Man (The Banquet of the Damned, 2004), to a pagan beast looking for sacrificial prey (The Ritual, 2011), to heretic ghosts awaiting remanifestation (Last Days, 2012), to an ancient fertility rite spirit (No One Gets Out Alive, 2014), to deadly portals (Apartment 16, 2010). The occult cult, a recurring trope in Nevill, is also present in House of Small Shadows (2013).
A few other noteworthy contemporary horror writers are Sarah Pinborough, Gillian Flynn, John Shirley, Alison Littlewood, Jonathan Maberry, David Moody, Glen Duncan, Conrad Williams, Joseph D’Lacey, Nicole Cushing, Graham Joyce, Joel Lane, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan, Sarah Langan, Brian Keene, Tom Fletcher, and Tim Lebbon.
Monsters continue to play a significant role in horror fiction, and none have been a more steady focus of attention than the vampire and the zombie. The vampire, despite largely having been co-opted by the romance genre and YA fiction, especially after Stephenie Meyer’s record-breaking Twilight series (2005–2008) established sparkling Edward Cullen as the vampire du jour, has also been at the heart of several notable twenty-first-century horror novels. John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In (2007), a work that aligns its child vampire, Eli, with another social outsider, twelve-year-old incontinent and bullied Oskar, develops pity for the monster, who in turn becomes a savior and, as we find out in Ajvide Lindqvist’s short story “Let the Old Dreams Die” (2009), even a lover.
But apart from exploring “human” bonds and the modern sympathetic monster, Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel is representative of the gradual change that monsters experienced in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when their monstrosity became linked to the idea of disease and infection, an idea first explored at length in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954). Vampires, for instance, became the result of viral infections and partially shed their religious connections to a Manichean notion of evil (that is, the idea that vampires are simply and purely evil, as absolutely opposed to good). Justin Cronin’s The Passage (2010) takes this trope to the extreme and merges it with the postapocalyptic narrative, itself particularly popular after Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007 for The Road. Market forces aside, it could be argued that vampires are becoming viral as a result of an increased awareness of pandemics and their spread, following recent international disease crises such as the various outbreaks of AIDS, mad cow disease, avian flu, and Ebola.
The contemporary fascination with infection has also traveled underground, deep into the graves of the restless undead. If late 1960s cinema saw the birth of the nuclear, meat-eating zombie in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, then the twenty-first century has fathered the viral zombie, the rabid subject that is human but shows all the signs of being a traditional flesh- and/or brain-craving zombie. Apart from the obvious filmic, comic, and television influences—the films Resident Evil (2002) and 28 Days Later (2002), and Robert Kirkman’s comic series The Walking Dead (debuted in 2003) and its corresponding AMC television series (debuted in 2010) have all been seminal—two novels have been key in the establishment of zombie fiction, which was never predominant in the twentieth century, as the postmillennial subgenre par excellence: Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006) and Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). The former followed scrupulously the template of the global pandemic and showed that horror could still be well written and politically committed, while the latter kick-started the mash-up parody subgenre, which splices together literary classics with pulp horror fiction. The zombie has, like the vampire, proved very versatile. Novels such as Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010) have given prominence to the zombie romance, and others, such as M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), have explored the possibilities of fungus-based plagues and of zombies retaining mental powers. Most likely, zombie fiction is popular not just because of the simple laws of supply and demand; the zombie resonates with the hyperconnected masses of the twenty-first century. Its alienation, horde-like qualities, and, ultimately, helplessness constitute a strong metaphor for the feelings of disenchantment brought about by late capitalism and the invigoration of multinational corporations.
The other main horror subgenre to develop strongly in the twenty-first century is the weird, particularly following the rehabilitation of its flagship writer, H. P. Lovecraft. Three volumes of his stories were published by Penguin Classics between 1999 and 2004. Then, in 2005, a selection of his tales appeared in a prestigious edition by the Library of America, effectively canonizing him as a major American author. The weird, “a rather breathless and generically slippery macabre fiction, a dark fantastic (‘horror’ plus ‘fantasy’) often featuring non-traditional alien monsters (thus plus ‘science fiction’)” (Miéville 2009, 510), may be seen to be thriving in the work of writers such as Simon Strantzas, Quentin S. Crisp, John Langan, Richard Gavin, Paul Tremblay, Livia Llewellyn, Mark Samuels, Matt Cardin, and Laird Barron. The latter’s fictional universe, largely constructed through intricately crafted short stories and in the novel The Croning (2013), has been gathering such attention that an homage anthology of stories by various writers, The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron, was published in 2014. Samuels received a similar treatment in 2016 with a tribute anthology titled Marked to Die: A Tribute to Mark Samuels.
Another writer of weird horror who rose to prominence in the early years of the century and who exerted a profound influence on the new crop of writers is Thomas Ligotti. Having established a cult reputation during the 1980s and 1990s with his extremely literary and philosophically pessimistic style of horror fiction, Ligotti was a key progenitor of the weird renaissance at the turn of the millennium, even as he continued to produce work of his own, including The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010), a nonfiction book of horror-centered philosophical and literary commentary. Ligotti’s significance was then amplified in 2014 when his name suddenly came to mainstream awareness as the first season of HBO’s True Detective drew on the tradition of weird supernatural horror fiction, and in particular the work of Ligotti (along with Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, 1895), as a chief inspiration.
The weird has also played a major role in the speculative turn in horror philosophy, especially in the work of media scholar Eugene Thacker, author of three books comprising a trilogy on the “horror of philosophy”: In the Dust of This Planet (2011), Starry Speculative Corpse (2015), and Tentacles Longer Than Night (2015). Another significant writer in this vein is philosopher Graham Harman, author of, among others, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012).
The extent to which the “new weird,” understood as a hybrid of the science fiction new wave of the 1960s and the new horror of the likes of Clive Barker—and practiced by, for example, China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer—is “new” (innovative) or simply a periodic marker (of the modern or contemporary) is still very much up for debate. In any case, the new weird shows how horror has, in some cases, hybridized to the point where its generic allegiance becomes less interesting than a specific writer’s own style and influences.
All in all, horror fiction in the twenty-first century is in good health, a situation that is surprising considering that written fiction now has to compete with other, similarly immersive horror products, such as comics and video games. Although the rise of the zombie and the interest in an impending apocalypse demonstrate a marked pessimism and skepticism about global capitalism and the neoliberal triumph of free trade—Žižek has astutely referred to the current period as “living in the end times” (in a 2010 book of that very title)—it would be unfair to say that all horror fiction shows signs of a social and political engagement with the zeitgeist. The continuations and further mutations of well-known myths, alongside the nurturing of subgenres such as the weird, as well as the arrival of a new generation of writers who are influenced by the horror “boom” of the 1980s—all of this makes twenty-first-century horror, still in its infancy, a fascinating and multiple-headed beast.
Xavier Aldana Reyes
See also: Horror from 1950 to 2000; Part Two, Themes, Topics, and Genres: Apocalyptic Horror; Horror Comics; Horror Literature as Social Criticism and Commentary; Horror Literature in the Internet Age; Small Press, Specialty, and Online Horror; Weird and Cosmic Horror Fiction; Part Three, Reference Entries: Ajvide Lindqvist, John; Barker, Clive; Barron, Laird; Campbell, Ramsey; Hill, Joe; House of Leaves; Keene, Brian; Kiernan, Caitlín R.; King, Stephen; Koontz, Dean; Lee, Tanith; Ligotti, Thomas; Lovecraft, H. P.; Miéville, China; New Weird; Palahniuk, Chuck; Rice, Anne; Samuels, Mark; Straub, Peter; Vampires; VanderMeer, Jeff; Zombies.
Further Reading
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. “Post-Millennial Horror, 2000–16.” In Horror: A Literary History, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, 189–214. London: British Library.
Joshi, S. T. 2014. Unutterable Horror: A History of Supernatural Fiction. Volume 2: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. New York: Hippocampus Press.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2015. Zombies: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion.
Miéville, China. 2009. “Weird Fiction.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherryl Vint, 510–515. London and New York: Routledge.
Nelson, Victoria. 2013. Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural. London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sederholm, Carl H., and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, eds. 2016. The Age of Lovecraft. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. 2008. The New Weird. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications.
VanderMeer, Jeff. 2008. “The New Weird: ‘It’s Alive?’” In The New Weird, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, ix–xviii. San Francisco, CA: Tachyon Publications.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.