Ancient Evil Sealed Away

A previous generation contained something at great cost, and the present cast breaks the containment through ignorance, greed, or renovation. The seal's makers are usually unavailable to explain it.

Body Horror

Terror is located in the violation, mutation, or betrayal of the body itself. The horror is not that something will kill you but that it is already inside and rearranging you.

Cosmic / Eldritch Horror

The threat is vast, ancient, and uninterested in humanity, and comprehension of it damages the comprehender. Scale, not malice, is the source of terror.

Creepy Children

A child behaves with a knowledge, calm, or malice that does not belong to their age. The unease comes from a category violation: the figure we are built to protect is the one to fear.

Cult Recruitment

A character is drawn into a group that offers belonging, meaning, and relief from an isolation the book has already established. The recruitment is gradual, reasonable at each step, and only monstrous in aggregate.

Cursed Object

A physical thing carries harm to whoever possesses it, and disposal proves harder than acquisition. The object's history is the book's backstory, delivered in fragments by previous owners.

Death Is Not the End

Something killed, buried, or resolved returns — often changed, often wrong. The return invalidates the survivors' sense that anything can be finished.

Descent into Madness

A character's grip on reality erodes across the book, with the prose itself often participating in the deterioration. Whether the cause is supernatural or internal may be left undecided.

Doppelganger/Evil Twin

A duplicate of a character appears, behaves better or worse than the original, and destabilises the question of which one has a right to the life. In horror the double is usually an argument about the self rather than a plot mechanism.

Final Girl

A single survivor, classically female, outlasts the threat and confronts it directly, having been established as more observant and less reckless than the rest of the cast. Carol Clover's term for a slasher convention that has outgrown the slasher.

Folk Horror

An isolated community maintains pre-modern beliefs and practices that a visiting outsider discovers too late. Landscape, agriculture, and calendar drive the dread.

Found Footage Narrative

The story is assembled from documents, recordings, transcripts, or reports presented as recovered evidence. The frame establishes that someone survived to compile it, or that nobody did.

Haunted House

A building is the antagonist, exerting influence over its occupants through architecture, history, and atmosphere. The house does not chase anyone; it waits and it changes them.

Home Invasion

Hostile people enter a dwelling and the occupants must survive inside their own space. The threat is entirely human and the geography is intimately known to the victims and not the attackers.

Ignored Warning

Someone with knowledge tells the characters not to proceed, and is dismissed for reasons of class, sanity, superstition, or convenience. The warning is usually accurate and incomplete.

Impostor Among Us

Something has replaced or is imitating a member of the group, and the survivors must identify it without a reliable test. Suspicion becomes more destructive than the entity.

Isolated/Cut Off From Help

Distance, weather, sabotage, or infrastructure failure removes the possibility of rescue, so the cast must solve the problem with what is in the building. The isolation must be established before it is needed.

Nature Turned Hostile

Landscape, weather, plants, or animals become actively threatening, either supernaturally or simply by being what they are at a scale humans cannot manage. The antagonist has no motive to negotiate with.

Possession

An external malevolence occupies and operates a person, so that the threat wears a face the other characters love. Rescue and destruction become the same action.

Sacrifice to Appease Evil

A community maintains safety by periodically offering a victim, and the arrangement is stable, administered, and widely accepted. The horror is bureaucratic as much as supernatural.

Summoning/Occult Ritual

Characters deliberately invoke a supernatural force, usually with incomplete knowledge and a good reason. The ritual's procedural detail is a promise that something specific will go wrong.

The Forbidden Room

A space is declared off-limits by someone with authority, and the prohibition guarantees the transgression. What is inside is usually less important than the fact of the rule.

The Threat Was Inside All Along

The danger the characters have been defending against turns out to originate from within the protected space — a member of the group, the house itself, the institution offering shelter.

Trauma Made Literal

A psychological wound manifests as a physical or supernatural entity that can be confronted, negotiated with, or fled. The dominant mode in contemporary literary horror.

Unreliable Survivor's Account

The single person who lived tells the story, and their account is compromised by trauma, guilt, or complicity. The reader must decide whether they are a witness or a suspect.

Unseen/Offscreen Monster

The antagonist is withheld from direct description, known through effects, sounds, absences, and the reactions of those who have seen it. Restraint is the technique.

Vampirism

A predatory immortal feeds on humans and is bound by rules — invitation, sunlight, running water — that make it defeatable in principle. The vampire is the most adaptable monster in the canon because it can be read as disease, aristocracy, addiction, or desire.