Recently, the literary genre known as horror has undergone some modifications, and for those of you who hold fast to the past customs, these changes are not promising. It is best to first provide a quick description of the horror genre before delving into that subject, though. Fundamentally, the goal of the genre was to frighten people by using any tactics deemed appropriate. However, more contemporary horror works (to be referred to as Hollywood Horror from this point on) focus on more overt attempts to frighten the audience. Horror masters of the past were often inspired in their work as they employ subtlety and psychology to maximum effect.
Older horror masterpieces used a knowledge of psychology and human nature to arouse terror. The consequences of the vampire's bite made Bram Stoker's Dracula less horrifying. By posing the risk of a bite and the potential for transformation into the monster he has become, Dracula inspired terror in his audience. He didn't incite fear due to who he was, but rather by portraying himself as what the heroes may become if they gave into the same basic urges that he did. The bite only serves as the ignition, the allegoric key to the lock that Victorian society members used to restrain their darker inclinations. In reality, to frighten their readers, authors of early horror fiction frequently tapped upon audiences' fears and anxieties about humanity's darkest parts.
However, as people's tolerance for violence grew, it became more difficult to generate dread and anxiety through textual communication. Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and Mr. Hyde all became less terrifying as the media expanded and more people became aware of the depths and atrocities their fellow humans were capable of. This was the situation when the general British population learned about the murders committed by Jack the Ripper, since the unidentified perpetrator had committed acts that were despicable even by the standards of Shelley's or Stoker's masterpieces.
The terror of the unknown and what was beyond that horizon was more of a focus for two later masters of horror, Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. Poe was the more deft master of the two. As the father of American horror, he is renowned for utilizing psychological elements that only his Victorian forebears had explored. He skillfully mixed the very real fear of death with the implications of being a victim of events beyond one's control. Lovecraft, on the other hand, made use of the negative effects of humanity's quest for knowledge to explore subjects he shouldn't have. A minor but effective subgenre of horror known as "love-craftian" employs the idea of having too much knowledge as a means of dread while also attempting to demonstrate the futility of human endeavor. Lovecraft had the same impact by showing people the results of tampering with things man was not supposed to know, in contrast to Poe who frightened by reminding them of how little they knew.
As time went on, the creators of horror films rapidly stopped focusing on terror and anxiety. This is especially true now that movies have taken over, relying more on blood and gore to provide audiences cheap thrills. Hollywood horror has evolved in two separate paths in the contemporary era—one for the literary world and the other for the film business.
The first volumes of Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles" are the clearest example of how modern horror novels tend to focus more on personal terror and aim to evoke the reader's concerns of becoming into the monster within the books. However, because personal terror almost exclusively focused on the monster within the individual, it also rendered the alleged "monsters" too easily sympathetic. On the other hand, other movies have adopted a more brutal approach, employing as much gore, blood, and overt violence as they can. Sadly, this isn't much of a replacement for genuine fear because cheap thrills and screams only go so far.
There is optimism on the horizon as Hollywood horror, whether in literature or cinema, progressively pushes the genre into a downward cycle of degradation. Even if there are many aspects of Asian horror that set it apart from the well-known Western horror genres, they are nevertheless successful in evoking fear and anxiety.
Asian horror frequently combines aspects from several different horror subgenres. Asian horror fiction is substantially more subtly and psychologically complex than Hollywood horror, nevertheless. For instance, the main horror in the movie "Battle Royale" is not in the murdering and the brutality, but rather in the fact that the individuals who are killing one another called each other friends just hours before. Personal horror and gore are also employed in a more artistic way, restricting both how much blood is shown onscreen and how much the viewer is made aware of an antagonist's suffering. The graphic book "Tomie" and the "Ring" series of novels are the greatest examples of how Asian horror often makes strong use of the supernatural and the unknown, successfully leveraging the lack of information and minimum quantities of it to great effect.
Fear is a concept that everyone can understand. However, it would seem that while Western authors and filmmakers have chosen to go for simplicity and inexpensive shocks, writers and filmmakers in the East have chosen to take the greatest aspects of previous horror genres and add their own cultural twists to it.
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