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[1] Apart from being about murder,
suicide, torture, fear and madness, horror
stories are also concerned with ghosts,
vampires, succubi, incubi, poltergeists,
[5] demonic pacts, diabolic possession and
exorcism, witchcraft, spiritualism, voodoo,
lycanthropy and the macabre, plus such
occult or quasi occult practices as
telekinesis and hylomancy. Some horror
[10] stories are serio-comic or comic-
grotesque, but none the less alarming or
frightening for that.
From late in the 18th c. until the
present day – in short, for some two
[15] hundred years – the horror story (which is
perhaps a mode rather than an identifiable
genre) in its many and various forms has
been a diachronic feature of British and
American literature and is of considerable
[20] importance in literary history, especially in
the evolution of the short story. It is also
important because of its connections with
the Gothic novel and with a multitude of
fiction associated with tales of mystery,
[25] suspense, terror and the supernatural,
with the ghost story and the thriller and
with numerous stories in the 19th and
20th c. in which crime is a central theme.
The horror story is part of a long
[30] process by which people have tried to
come to terms with and find adequate
descriptions and symbols for deeply
rooted, primitive and powerful forces,
energies and fears which are related to
[35] death, afterlife, punishment, darkness,
evil, violence and destruction.
Writers have long been aware of the
magnetic attraction of the horrific and
have seen how to exploit or appeal to
[40] particular inclinations and appetites. It
was the poets and artists of the late
medieval period who figured out and
expressed some of the innermost fears
and some of the ultimate horrors (real and
[45] imaginary) of human consciousness. Fear
created horrors enough and the
eschatological order was never far from
people‟s minds. Poets dwelt on and
amplified the ubi sunt motif and artists
[50] depicted the spectre of death in paint,
through sculpture and by means of
woodcut. The most potent and frightening
image of all was that of hell: the abode of
eternal loss, pain and damnation. There
[55] were numerous "visions" of hell in
literature.
Gradually, imperceptibly, during the
16th c. hell was "moved‟ from its
traditional site in the center of the earth.
[60] It came to be located in the mind; it was a
part of a state of consciousness. This was
the beginning of the growth of the idea of
a subjective, inner hell, a psychological
hell; a personal and individual source of
[65] horror and terror, such as the chaos of a
disturbed and tormented mind, the
pandaemonium of psychopathic
conditions, rather than the abode of lux
atra and everlasting pain with its definite
[70] location in a measurable cosmological
system.
The horror stories of the late 16th
and early 17th c. (like the ghost stories)
are provided for us by the playwrights.
[75] The Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedians
were deeply interested in evil, crime,
murder, suicide and violence. They were
also very interested in states of extreme
suffering: pain, fear and madness. They
[80] found new modes, new metaphors and
images, for presenting the horrific and in
doing so they created simulacra of hell.
One might cite perhaps a thousand or
more instances from plays in the period c.
[85] 1580 to c. 1642 in which hell is an all-
purpose, variable and diachronic image of
horror whether as a place of punishment
or as a state of mind and spirit. Horrific
action on stage was commonplace in the
[90] tragedy and revenge tragedy of the
period. The satiety which Macbeth claimed
to have experienced when he said: “I have
supp‟d full of horrors;/ Direness, familiar
to my slaughterous thoughts, /Cannot
[95] once start me…” was representative of it.
During the 18th c. (as during the
19th ), in orthodox doctrine taught by
various „churches‟ and sects, hell remained
a place of eternal fire and punishment and
[100] the abode of the Devil. For the most part
writers of the Romantic period and
thereafter did not re-create it as a
visitable place. However, artists were
drawn to “illustrate” earlier conceptions of
[105] hell. William Blake did 102 engravings for
Dante‟s Inferno. John Martin illustrated
Paradise Lost and Gustave Doré applied
himself to Dante and Milton. The actual
hells of the 18th and 19th c. were the
[110] gaols, the madhouses, the slums and
bedlams and those lanes and alleys where
vice, squalor, depravity and unspeakable
misery created a social and moral chaos:
terrestrial counterparts to the horrors of
[115] Dante‟s Circles.
Gothic influence traveled to America
and affected writers such as Edgar Allan
Poe, whose tales are short, intense,
sensational and have the power to inspire
[120] horror and terror. He depicts extremes of
fear and insanity and, through the
operations of evil, gives us glimpses of
hell.
Poe‟s long-term influence was
[125] immeasurable (and in the case of some
writers not altogether for their good), and
one can detect it persisting through the
19th c.; in, for example the French
symbolistes (Baudelaire published
[130] translations of his tales in 1856 and
1857), in such British writers as Rossetti,
Swinburne, Dowson and R. L. Stevenson,
and in such Americans as Ambrose Bierce,
Hart Crane and H.P. Lovecraft.
[135] Towards the end of the 19th c. a
number of British and American writers
were experimenting with different modes
of horror story, and this was at a time
when there had been a steadily growing
[140] interest in the occult, in supernatural
agencies, in psychic phenomena, in
psychotherapy, in extreme psychological
states and also in spiritualism.
The enormous increase in science
[145] fiction since the 1950s has diversified
horror fiction even more than might at
first be supposed. New maps of hell have
been drawn and are being drawn; new
dimensions of the horrific exposed and
[150] explored; new simulacra and exempla
created. Fear, pain, suffering, guilt and
madness (what has already been touched
on in miscellaneous „hells‟) remain
powerful and emotive elements in horror
[155] stories. In a chaotic world, which many
see to be on a disaster course, through
the cracks, „the faults in reality‟, we and
our writers catch other vertiginous
glimpses of „chaos and old night‟,
[160] fissiparating images of death and
destruction.
From: CUDDON, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1999.
A fragment of a speech from Macbeth is mentioned in the text as an instance of the
