While horror is an genre, it’s also a tactic used to examine or confront an aspect of reality by engaging the audience in extremes. As a child, I was scared of movies that were scary until I saw one and could not get enough. What really was striking out from the films and books that I liked most was that more often than not, the terrifying aspect was just a small part which made the tale unique. The best horror has that is more than simply scares. It actually is able to use the terror to discover what it is.
- Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
The Silence of the Lambs gets all the attention, however the greatest Hannibal Lecter novel is still the first book which demonstrates that the most horrific of crimes can emerge from a very human place in addition to the fact that all heroes can carry something unimaginably evil within their own. Each Lecter story at least includes some kind of Faustian bargain, and no one is worse than FBI profiler Will Graham’s conscious decision to give up his fragile security to stop a criminal which he is able to identify.
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
There are no true characters in Oscar Wilde’s very first and sole novel. The real danger in the novel is our own vanity and the way this can physically and metaphorically slash our lives, and how a desire for maintaining beauty will always result in its destruction. Even the main villain, Dorian himself, is the most tragic of a liar than a the conniving mastermind, a young dope obsessed by an uncontrollable conviction of the sole thing that is worth having is beauty, no matter what. The story could be comical if it weren’t so terrifyingly plausible.
- Horns by Joe Hill
Sometimes even when it’s when it’s most dark, is the window dressing for something sweeter. That’s what happens in the distinctive and thrilling Horns the novel that begins out as a dark revenge tale, but then evolves into an expansive, tangled but ultimately optimistic. Horns is by many an gothic romance as well as a murder mystery a supernatural thriller, and sharp satire of how easy our minds can be to make judgments despite the dark side we all carry.
- The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty
The most effective horror stories are those that trust, despite the jump scares, death and terror, in the fundamental triumph of the good. The fact that The Exorcist was long considered one of the most terrifying books ever written is in significant part is due to how much we are drawn to be concerned about the dire situation of its main characters, and how well elaborate each one of them is. The threat they confront is massive and unfathomable however, it is not, in the end, unsurmountable. A large part of the novel’s book (and film’s) impact is due to the ultimate victory, hard-earned, of a few people that sacrifices everything for the sake of a child who is innocent.
- Ring by Koji Suzuki Koji Suzuki, translated by Robert B Rohmer and Glynne Walley
Film adaptations of the horror film have not been able to capture the full impact of this surprisingly tame tale of a spooky videotape that is a terrifying and all too human tale of learning to accept the significance of your existence in the presence of forces that are that are beyond your understanding. Although Ring is an iconic film but it’s in its sequels that Suzuki showed the extent of his vision, naturally expanding his horror fable into something more powerful and transcendent than any film version of the story has ever been realized.
- Psycho by Robert Bloch
To be precise, as with Jaws which was a great film, Psycho is superior; Hitchcock having made a series of smart adjustments to come up with innovative ways to manipulate the viewers by engaging them in. However, everything that made Psycho into a enduring cultural lightning rod began in Bloch’s novel, including the shower scene as well as The house in the hills the twist ending, and the gothic dread that oozes from every scene. The playful subversion of conventions Hitchcock deserves all the credit for came from in the book film and horror could not be as effective.
- The Passage by Justin Cronin
Justin Cronin’s epic tale of the vampire is an expansive story of loss, love and societies that are destroyed that are rebuilt only to be destroyed once more and centered not just on characters we would love to be for, but also a increasing sense of a sinister darkness that is whispering in the dark, a threat which was so unresolved that it was bound to be a bit less terrifying after it was described. However, like all the great horror authors, Cronin uses that inevitability to illustrate his point – that a lot of the time, evil comes from an place that is somewhat more comprehendable than what we’d like to acknowledge. The entire trilogy is excellent, but due to its distinct sense of dread that grows, the first will always be the best.