Horror films aim to elicit negative and primal emotions in viewers by including frightening scenes involving the intrusion of evil forces, supernatural events, or threatening people into everyday life. Common elements in horror films include ghosts, monsters, demons, zombies, and serial killers. There are several subgenres of horror, including action horror which combines violence and supernatural threats, body horror focusing on graphic bodily destruction, comedy horror blending humor and scares, gothic horror featuring suspenseful romances in horror settings, and slasher films centered on a killer stalking and murdering victims with blades.

1. Horror is a film genre seeking to elicit a negative emotional reaction from viewers by
playing on the audience's primal fears. Inspired by literature from authors like Edgar
Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, horror films have for more than a century featured
scenes that startle the viewer. The macabre and the supernatural are frequent themes.
Thus they may overlap with the fantasy, supernatural, and thriller genres.
Horror films often deal with the viewer's nightmares, hidden fears, revulsions and terror
of the unknown. Plots within the horror genre often involve the intrusion of an evil
force, event, or personage, commonly of supernatural origin, into the everyday world.
Prevalent elements include ghosts, aliens, vampires, werewolves, demons, dragons,
gore, torture, vicious animals, evil witches, monsters, zombies, cannibals, and serial
killers. Conversely, movies about the supernatural are not necessarily always horrific.
There are many sub genres to horror and these are a few examples:
Action Horror - A subgenre combining the intrusion of an evil force, event, or
supernatural personage of horror movies with the gunfights and frenetic chases of the
action genre. Themes or elements often prevalent in typical action-horror films include
gore, demons, vicious animals, vampires and, most commonly, zombies. This category
also fuses the fantasy genre.
Body horror – In which the horror is principally derived from the graphic destruction or
degeneration of the body. Other types of body horror include unnatural movements, or
the anatomically incorrect placement of limbs to create 'monsters' out of human body
parts. David Cronenberg is one of the notable directors of the genre.
Comedy horror – Combines the elements of comedy and horror fiction. The comedy
horror genre almost always inevitably crosses over with the black comedy genre. The
short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving is cited as "the first
great comedy-horror story".
Gothic horror – Gothic horror is a type of story that contains elements of goth and
horror. At times it may have romance that unfolds in the setting of a horror tale, usually
suspenseful. Some of the earliest horror movies were of this subgenre.
Slasher film – Often revolves around a psychopathic killer stalking and killing a sequence
of victims in a graphically violent manner, mainly with a cutting tool such as a knife or
axe. Slasher films may at times overlap with the crime, mystery and thriller genre, and
they are not all of the horror genre.