Horror subgenres, defined and measured
A guide to each major subgenre: what it actually is, where it came from, what it is not, and — the part nobody else can write — how it scores against the 105 horror works in this index on six measured axes of fear.
Why there are only 7
A subgenre gets a guide when we have scored at least 5 works in it and enough people are looking for it to justify the page. Several well-known labels fail one test or the other, and a few of our own tags turned out not to be subgenres at all — slow burn, bleak, surreal and analog are descriptions of a work’s position on an axis, not kinds of horror, and they are served properly by the ranked lists instead.
Guides appear here as the index deepens. The full tag index still lists every label we use, including the ones too small or too specific to deserve an essay.