It’s late into the night when you hear a noise. Maybe it’s coming from just outside your bedroom door, or maybe it’s outside. It’s enough to stop you reading, and so you sit frozen. Listening. But the house is silent. So you tell yourself it was nothing. You convince yourself it was the wind kicking around branches. You’re certain that it’s nothing worth getting out of bed to investigate. And so you keep on reading. After all, you’ve spent the last 50 pages wondering how its characters could be so foolish as to ignore one warning after another. Suddenly, their excuses don’t seem quite so ridiculous.
And sure, many a horror novel relies on tropes. There’s the dead that refuse to stay buried, and a familiar house becomes a place of terror. But there are those that bury remarkably ordinary fears beneath all the supernatural goings-on: losing someone you love, being alone, and discovering you don’t know yourself quite as well as you thought. That’s what makes the best horror so difficult to shake. The ghosts and monsters might remain safely within the pages, but the things that frighten their victims tend to follow you long after you’ve closed the book.
‘The Monk’ (1796)
Ambrosio has spent his entire life being told he’s the holiest man in Madrid, and he believes it. Worshipers crowd into church to hear him preach, his reputation for virtue is impeccable, and he has rather strong opinions about other people’s sins. Plenty of them. But he’s spent so long cloistered away from temptation that nobody’s had much opportunity to test his resolve. That is, until a young novice reveals herself to be a woman named Matilda, who makes breaking vows a little easier than Ambrosio had imagined.
Ambrosio’s downfall is disturbing enough, but Matthew Gregory Lewis has much worse in store. There’s a bloodied ghost haunting a castle, witchcraft, and demonic rituals. There’s a particularly nasty secret buried beneath a convent: a young nun left to rot among corpses for breaking her vows. The way Lewis frames it is perhaps the most frightening part of all; that a broken vow is unforgivable, but leaving a woman to die in a crypt is perfectly acceptable if you call it God’s will. But Lewis wasn’t just taking aim at the Church, rather critiquing society writ large for its habit of becoming so preoccupied with condemning other people’s sins that it turns a blind eye to cruelty committed in the name of virtue. It’s no coincidence it caused such an uproar in 1796 — and it’s why it still reads like a modern horror.
‘The Exorcist’ (1971)
Chris MacNeil’s daughter, Regan, has made a peculiar new friend — someone named Captain Howdy, whom she talks to through a Ouija board. But when her bed begins bucking, and she develops an alarmingly foul mouth, that imaginary friend morphs from childhood peculiarity to something along the lines of spiritually corrupting. Doctors run tests, and they offer diagnoses and they prescribe treatments. None seem to help. Chris isn’t religious, but she’s running out of people to ask. She turns to Father Damien Karras, a priest who’s having enough trouble believing in God himself.
For a book about demonic possession, William Peter Blatty spends an awful lot of time in doctors’ offices. Doctors continue to explain away Regan’s behavior, but none of them can perfectly account for the increasingly bizarre things happening to her. Karras himself doesn’t exactly rush to blame the Devil. Chris continues to drag her daughter from one examination to another, only to return home to something worse than she left. The tests themselves start to inject just as much horror into the book as Regan’s possession. And for all its blasphemy, bodily horrors, and flying furniture, The Exorcist finds its greatest source of terror in an awfully ordinary predicament: A mother surrounded by experts, none of whom can tell her what the hell is happening to her child.
‘The Elementals’ (1981)
The McCrays and Savages decide to recover from a family funeral by heading to Beldame, an isolated stretch of Alabama coastline where three old Victorian houses sit along the beach. Two belong to families who’ve been vacationing there for generations. The third stands empty, with a great dune of white sand slowly swallowing it. Nobody goes inside. Nobody seems particularly interested in explaining why, either. But India McCray, a teenager visiting Beldame for the first time, doesn’t understand what could be so frightening about an abandoned house — and does what any nosy teen would and pokes around.
Michael McDowell gives the haunted-house novel a makeover. There’s no fog rolling over the moors or perpetual thunderstorms. No, it’s more the setting of a summer romance with the sun beating down and the families sitting around drinking and gossiping. The horror slowly builds: India sees faces in the windows, or figures in pictures she swore weren’t there when she snapped them. But the adults are more concerned with their accumulated grudges and weird traditions, and about suppressing the secrets they’d prefer remain buried in history. McDowell has a good ear for their squabbling, which has the effect of injecting an eeriness into ordinary conversation that’s just as unsettling as whatever’s lurking next door. That’s what makes The Elementals such a good piece of southern Gothic horror: It all unfolds in broad daylight, among people who’ve spent years convincing themselves there’s nothing to be afraid of.
‘The Twenty Days of Turin’ (1977)
Turin has spent a decade trying to forget its worst summer: a 20-night stretch during which residents couldn’t sleep, screams pierced the midnight air, and mutilated bodies littered the streets. Then the violence stopped as abruptly as it began. An unnamed office worker decides to investigate, but the few people willing to talk offer some downright bizarre accounts. His inquiries keep leading back to a strange library where residents once deposited their private diaries and confessions for strangers to read.
Giorgio De Maria wrote The Twenty Days of Turin in 1977, a time when political violence was the norm in Italy. He captures the paranoia of a society in which nobody quite trusts anybody else. De Maria makes the library especially nasty: a place supposedly intended to bring lonely people together, where anyone could rifle through a stranger’s most intimate thoughts. Sound familiar? But De Maria has much more on his mind than the dangers of surrendering one’s privacy. The deeper the narrator digs, the more threatening ordinary conversations become, and the more suspicious everyone’s silence seems. The worst thing about De Maria’s Turin isn’t necessarily what happened during those 20 nights. It’s that, a decade later, an entire city seems determined to pretend nothing happened at all.
‘Pet Sematary’ (1983)
When Louis Creed uproots his family to move to rural Maine, he hopes the new house can blunt the blow. After all, with its sprawling lawn and the woods out back — and a friendly neighbor who’s delighted to have some company — it has all the makings of an idyllic family home. Perhaps it would have been if those trucks didn’t come barreling down the road. The neighborhood pets haven’t fared especially well against them; there’s a little cemetery in the woods to prove it. But when the Creeds’ cat joins the casualties, neighbor Jud Crandall takes Louis to an older burial ground. The cat turns up again. It smells rotten and has developed an ugly disposition, but then, coming back from the dead probably doesn’t do wonders for the mood.
Stephen King — yes, the same guy who brought forth Carrie and The Shining — thought he went too far with this one, later calling it the most frightening book he’d ever written. It had nothing to do with the walking corpse of a cat. It’s what he does to Louis, a doctor who’s spent years dealing with death as a fact, not something up for debate. When the tragedy actually affects him, reason and logic are no comfort. Yeah, the cat came back wrong. But it came back. That little distinction was all Louis needed to start making a case for something he’d have considered madness a few weeks earlier. It’s that slow, painstaking slip into logical madness that makes Pet Sematary almost unbearable to read, yet impossible to shake off once you have.
‘Dracula’ (1897)
Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to help a wealthy count buy property in England. The villagers practically beg him to turn around, but the young solicitor has a job to do. And his host seems pleasant enough. Though he does have some quirks that cause Harker to suspect something’s amiss: he never eats dinner, casts no reflection, and has the tendency to crawl down castle walls. By the time he thinks of leaving, the castle doors are locked. And the Count’s plans for England have very little to do with real estate.
Bram Stoker didn’t invent the vampire. What Stoker did was bring the whole bloody business together: the coffins and the garlic, the missing reflections, and the ability to turn into a bat. He did it so well that The Count basically became shorthand for vampire for more than a century. But what makes Dracula so ground-breaking — and still a marvel to this day — is how Stoker made the monster feel like someone who actually existed. You’re reading through diaries and newspaper reports, even watching as a ship’s log grows more and more desperate by the page. It all seems so grounded in reality that you nearly forget it’s dredging through age-old folklore. And that’s why, nearly 130 years later, Dracula can still make you afraid of a monster you’ve spent your entire life recognizing.
‘The Haunting of Hill House’ (1959)
Eleanor Vance has spent much of her adult life looking after her demanding mother, and has precious little to show for it. So when a professor invites her to take part in a paranormal investigation at Hill House, she jumps at the opportunity. The house is beyond strange: doors have the tendency to swing shut on their own and there’s something that pounds its way through the halls at night. Then Eleanor’s name mysteriously appears scrawled across a wall. It’s a rather obvious hint to leave, you’d think. But Eleanor, who’s never felt particularly welcome anywhere, is beginning to feel right at home.
Shirley Jackson makes Eleanor almost painfully eager to be liked, so much so that even the hint of a little teasing can send her spiraling down a dark staircase of suspicion. It’s not always pleasant being inside Eleanor’s head. Jackson never quite lets on how much of the supernatural activity is real and how much might exist only in Eleanor’s increasingly fragile mind. The longer Eleanor stays, the more you realize that whatever’s haunting Hill House may be considerably less frightening to her than the prospect of returning to her old life. It’s quite a trick. Jackson takes the familiar haunted-house story and turns it on its head: The great tragedy of The Haunting of Hill House is that Eleanor may have finally found somewhere she belongs, even if it kills her.
‘Frankenstein’ (1818)
Victor Frankenstein has pulled off something scientists have dreamed of for centuries: He’s figured out how to bring the dead back to life. You’d think he’d be rather pleased with himself. Instead, he takes one look at the creature he’s cobbled together from human remains and runs for the hills. Doesn’t even give it a name. The poor creature is left to learn everything for himself, from how to read to why people become violent at the sight of him. He’d quite like a little companionship. But humanity seems to have other ideas, and eventually he develops some rather murderous feelings toward the man responsible for his existence.
Mary Shelley was only 18 when she began writing Frankenstein, and she gave her so-called monster considerably more brains than the man who created him. He can speak, read, reason, and make a pretty convincing case for why he’s so miserable. Victor, meanwhile, spends an awful lot of time lamenting his own misfortunes, apparently forgetting that he’s responsible for most of them. Shelley doesn’t excuse the creature’s increasingly terrible behavior, either. She lets both tell their sides of the story, and neither comes away looking particularly innocent. What made Frankenstein such a horror was that it was a mirror held up to humanity: Shelley didn’t need an ancient curse or some malevolent spirit to conjure her monster; all she needed was man.
