The main types of horror include supernatural, psychological, Gothic, folk, cosmic, body, slasher, and creature horror. These labels describe different sources or treatments of fear, and they often overlap. Found footage and analog horror add another distinction: they describe how a frightening story is presented as well as what it contains.
There is no official final number of horror subgenres. A useful genre map helps you describe a work and find related experiences; it should not force every story into one exclusive box.
Which labels describe the source of danger?
Supernatural horror places ghosts, curses, possession, or other forces outside ordinary natural explanation at the center of its threat. A story can leave the supernatural uncertain, but the possibility shapes the experience.
Creature horror concentrates on a threatening being: an animal, invented monster, alien, or transformed person. The creature may be explainable within the story’s science or entirely fantastic. Slasher horror usually follows a killer stalking and attacking a sequence of people; suspense often depends on pursuit, vulnerability, and the survivors’ knowledge.
Body horror makes bodily transformation, invasion, damage, or loss of bodily control central. It is not simply a synonym for visible blood. John Carpenter’s The Thing, with its shape-shifting alien, demonstrates how creature, science-fiction, and body-horror elements can occupy the same film.
Which labels describe the kind of fear?
Psychological horror emphasizes uncertainty, perception, identity, memory, or manipulation. The reader’s difficulty knowing what to trust can be as important as the external threat. It need not exclude supernatural events.
Cosmic horror unsettles assumptions about humanity’s place in reality. Discovering the truth may reveal that familiar categories, values, or expectations offer little protection. A large monster alone does not establish cosmic horror; the change in understanding matters.
Gothic horror brings the past into the present through inheritance, secrecy, confinement, powerful households, or charged places. Folk horror often connects fear to landscape, communal beliefs, rituals, and the uneasy position of outsiders. These are interpretive traditions with porous boundaries.
Are found footage and analog horror separate genres?
They can function as recognizable horror categories, but their labels also concern form. Found footage presents material as recordings made within the fictional world. Analog horror borrows the textures and conventions of older broadcast or recording media.
A found-footage film might be a ghost story, a creature story, or psychological horror. The Blair Witch Project makes its fictional recordings part of the premise: the BFI’s film listing describes footage left behind by student filmmakers. The format does not specify every kind of fear those recordings contain.
Where do horror comedy and science-fiction horror fit?
These labels describe combinations. Horror comedy can make danger funny without removing it. Science-fiction horror uses speculative settings, technologies, or organisms to produce fear. Neither label tells you how graphic, fast-paced, or emotionally heavy the work will be.
How should you choose a horror subgenre?
Start with the experience you want: investigation, pursuit, disorientation, transformation, or a slowly developing atmosphere. Then add practical preferences such as pace, explicit violence, and supernatural content. Those choices are more useful than asking which subgenre is objectively the scariest. A genre name opens a door; it does not tell you everything waiting behind it.