what is psychological horror?

2.13K views

what is psychological horror?

In: Technology

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Horror includes many categories. Some major categories are viscerally revulsive, e.g. gore/mutilation; momentary panic, e.g. jump scares; and mounting dread, e.g. the feeling of exploring an abandoned hospital.

Psychological horror would fall into the third category. It’s not necessarily immediately scary, but the more you immerse yourself in it, and the more you think about it, the more unsettled and distraught you feel. The feeling can last for days, weeks, or even longer after you’re done seeing, reading, hearing, or playing the horror story. Nothing scary even has to have happened, necessarily, although often times it does.

Tl;dr: Psychological horror gets worse the more you *think about* it, instead of the more you *see* it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If horror primarily deals with threats to the body (being murdered, tortured, disfigured,
etc.), psychological horror deals with threats to the mind (hallucinating, going insane, being possessed or controlled, etc.)

There’s obviously plenty of room for overlap in substance, but psychological horror also has a particular _style_. Authors have direct access to their audience’s minds in a way they don’t for their bodies, so they can do more than just depict violence and gore. They can actually give the audience something of the experience that their characters are having.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Psychological Horror is where a story tries to scare the reader/viewer/player with events and descriptions that dont always relate to common horror tropes. Often found in films using background sounds, music and plot twists, without showing anything necessarily scary. It builds up the horror lightly, and can be used to hype up a jumpscare or reveal something scary, and often uses more abstract subjects to scare the viewer, like the use of shadows or the creaking of a floor panel, to make the view think and scare themselves doing it