Aaron: I hadn’t heard of that distinction before; fascinating! Sounds like an interesting teacher. You have good points about the movie & TV impact on things, too. I’d love to read an informed take on why TV & movies seem to focus more on gore than on chillers & thrillers. (Although that said, there are definitely some good thrillers & chillers out there.)

I love a wide variety of horror, but I do like a lot of the old stuff. It tends to be very atmospheric.

gautami: I do prefer psychological horror to gross-out horror. It just has more impact.

Horror is probably associated with blood and guts more because of the film industry’s long history of B-grade slashers and monster movies than because of the recent fascination with masochism. I love good horror flicks, but the crap-to-gold ratio seems worse for the horror genre than almost any other. The motion picture industry (films and TV) has a greater impact on our culture than literature, so how we define literature is determined largely by the other industry.

Personally, I like both Hitchcock-style suspense and open-action monster tales, but the best horror is usually found in older literature. I have a collection of Victorian and Eduardian ghost stories which has some good, creepy tales. They wrote better horror than modern writers partially because most modern writers (and some modern audiences) don’t believe evil is real in the way people used to. The Exorcist scares the hell out of Catholics because we believe possessions and exorcisms are real. But when a story tries to explain that the murderer was beaten and abandoned as a child, and there is no real hero (because modern writers hate heroes… anti-heroes are the style), then the appeal to fear becomes muddled in a pool of sympathetic affections. Complex, rounded characters can be great; but they’re not great automatically, and somemtimes they’re out-of-place.

I use labels for my own books as descriptors and for my own personal use in seeing reading patterns and such, but it is very loose. And the definitions sometimes can be very fluid–or at least which books they put in what category, anyway. The definitions themselves don’t really change so much, I suppose. Sometimes I come across a book and just don’t know what to label it. I usually end up going for the marketing label, but not always. I’ve thought about just denoting whether a book is fiction or nonfiction and leaving it at that.

Based on the definition of horror you have given above, that opens the field quite a bit, not to mention what it means to an individual reader. What constitutes horror to me, might not be the same for you. It makes for an interesting discussion!