THE horror novel, as a distinct genre, began in the 18th century with the Gothic romance, arguably with Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764). It didn't remain distinct for long — appropriately, for a genre delighting in the indistinct and the polymorphous for its effects — but Ann Radcliffe's best-selling and much-imitated slices of suspense, perversion and apparent supernatural happenings — The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797) — offered a blueprint for a formula.
So much so, indeed, that Coleridge was able to write wryly to Wordsworth that: "I amused myself a day or two ago and reading a romance in Mrs Radcliffe's style with making out a scheme, which was to serve for all romances a priori — only varying the proportions — A Baron or Baroness ignorant of their Birth, and in some dependent situation — Castle — on a Rock — a Sepulchre — at some distance from the Rock — Deserted Rooms — Underground Passage — Pictures — A Ghost, so believed — or — a written record — blood on it! — a wonderful Cut throat — &c &c &c."
Few genres offer predictability to such a delightful extent, and yet horror fiction depends very much on suspense and the unpredictable: as with modern cookery, you stick to simple ingredients and make them fresh and exciting. This is still truer of the horror movie, which has become so knowing about its own routines and audience responses that its cannibalistic self-parody has recently culminated in the ne plus ultra of Wes Craven's Scream, in which a knowledge of the rules of such a narrative is vital for the survival of the teens who inhabit it. The genre defines itself as much on effect as content — it promises to horrify. In that, it must now be differentiated from sibling suspenseful or monstrous genres — the spy or crime thriller, the sci-fi adventure — which also, in the reviewers' favoured phrases, make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, set spines tingling and hearts thumping, and are unputdownable.
Various criteria differentiate horror novels from related genres. The threat must be supernatural or a perversion of the natural: though Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, whose monster became a staple of the Hammer Studios' horror flicks, borders on science fiction in its protagonist's meddling with forces he does not understand. The animal horrors — Jaws, James Herbert's The Rats — are not science fiction (though scientific meddling might be involved) nor tales of the supernatural, but base their shudders on urban man encountering a nature he is no longer equipped to deal with. Beowulf's encounter with monsters such as Grendel, Grendel's mum and a dragon are not horror stories: they are legends, partly by virtue of respectable age and historical value, partly because they are meant to elicit admiration for the hero, not the fear that another expendable character might be sliced and diced by a nastie. Horror is defined more by foe than hero, and more by the terms of the conflict; but above all, it is defined by our revulsion.
So Ann Radcliffe's spicy little numbers — incest darkly hinted at, castles and candelabra, threats of execution — might now themselves verge on that capacious genre, fantasy, since they were swiftly outstripped in terms of brute effect by Matthew Lewis with The Monk (1796). Lewis's books were graphic, almost pornographic tales of darkness and evil. Radcliffe herself, taking a cue from Edmund Burke, argued for a differentiation between terror and horror, asserting that: "Terror and Horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a higher degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them."
Horror — and this is also true of the film genre — can be, and often is, visceral; it offers terror first, but rather than leave the object of that terror suspended or merely suggested, it delivers it vividly, in order to prompt disgust. Catharsis comes less from escape than from the satisfaction of a reader's queasily balanced sadism and masochism. Yet for all its baseness — and this is a genre which in any medium, from novel through comic to film and video, has prompted critical response and sometimes legislation — the horror tale can be a profoundly moral form.
The genre springs up in the wake of the Enlightenment. In an age where hyper-rational philosophy dominate, the darker edges of human imagination and sensibility required an outlet. Furthermore, the bloodier excesses of the French revolution have excited and alarmed England: it is perhaps no coincidence that so many Gothic novels culminate in an uncontrollable mob storming the grim architecture — castles, nunneries, dungeons — which have contained the text's dark secrets. Anarchic, irrational behaviour threatens any order, and horror fiction of more recent times has not abandoned this particular trope. James Herbert's The Fog (1975) has a town go mad under the influence of a malign meteorological phenomenon.
From the Gothic novel, through the short stories of writers such as Poe, rational explanation is sought for phenomena which, more often than not, defy such explanation. Poe's narrator in "MS. Found in a Bottle" writes: "no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignis fatui of superstition", afraid that the tale might rather be considered "the raving of a crude imagination than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fantasy have been a dead letter and a nullity". The concerned scientist who abandons faith in science too late is a stock figure in the horror landscape (and even has a counterpart in the X-Files heroine Dana Scully).
Castles, dungeons and cells are symbols of human desire and evil thoughts, repressed by social convention and rational thought; they are a mental architecture for an age which lacked a Freudian psychological vocabulary. Interestingly, their use seems to have been sufficiently successful for them to be employed even in a post-Freudian horror literature — partly because the audience is trained enough to respond instinctively to the triggers of the old symbols, partly because institutions and enclosures still imply a frightening powerlessness for inmates. To be locked in a room or building while a malign presence stalks the corridors is scary; and that helplessness is assumed also by the reader, trapped within the asylum of the book and unable to move in any direction other than forward.