How did Horror start?

Roots Of The Horror Genre

Horror:
• noun 1) an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust. 2) a thing causing such a feeling. 3) intense dismay. 4) informal; a bad or mischievous person, especially a child.

The modern horror genre as we know it is only around 200 years old (it begins to have form and conventions towards the end of the eighteenth century) but it has distinguished antecedents. Every culture has a set of stories dealing with the unknown and unexplained, tales that chill, provoke and keep the listener wondering "what if..?" Horror films are the present-day version of the epic poems and ballads told round the fires of our ancestors.

The Gothic Tradition.

The term 'horror' first comes into play with Horace Walpole's 1764 novel, The Castle of Otranto, full of supernatural shocks and mysterious melodrama. Although rather a stilted tale, it started a craze, spawning many imitators in what we today call the gothic mode of writing. For half a century, gothic novels reigned supreme. As the Age of Enlightenment gave way to the new thinking of the early 19th century, Romantic poets of the stature of Coleridge and Goethe reflected the strong emotions of the movement through a glass darkly, recognising that fear and awe aren't so very different sensations.

Nineteenth Century Masters.

Some of the greatest mid- nineteenth century novelists tried their hand at horror fiction, paying tribute to the dying traditions of the gothic. As the century advanced, many writers turned to the short story or novella form to spook their readers.

The End Of The Century.

As a Viennese academic called Sigmund Freud was beginning his explorations into the recesses of the human consciousness, literature too took on a more psychological bent, with many writers trading freely in madness (building on the work of Poe), and the horror that lies beyond the boundary we call sanity. These stories deal not with events, but with the slow unravelling of minds; the reader is left to decide whether the causes are supernatural or psychological.