The Difference Between Terror and Horror in Film and Literature

A quick Google search is enough to plant the seed of doubt. Type in “the best horror movies of 2024” and dozens of results appear—but with a subtle difference: most of them are listed under another heading, “the best terror movies of 2024.” The reader may not even have noticed: in almost all of them, it says terror instead of horror. Is this simplification correct? As we will see, not exactly, although the two can sometimes be combined. What they share is fear, which, interestingly, is rarely used as a genre label, either in literature or in film.

The Royal Spanish Academy offers two definitions for the word fear: the first, “anguish caused by a real or imaginary danger or harm”; the second, “suspicion or apprehension that something contrary to one’s wishes will happen.” When fear becomes very intense—rational thought is no longer possible—it turns into terror, and if it becomes extreme, collective, and contagious, it becomes panic. The term fright adds an element of astonishment and/or dismay, as does dread, while apprehension is defined as a “passion of the soul that makes one avoid or flee from what is considered harmful, risky, or dangerous” (that is, it involves a component of suspicion).

Among all these related feelings, perhaps the deepest is horror, as it goes beyond mere immediacy. Caused by that “terrible and horrifying something” that, according to university professor David Simpson, triggers an intense somatic response (shaking, hair standing on end…), the concept extends to additional meanings such as a “deep aversion to someone or something” and references to monstrosity, deformity, or enormity. Beyond definitions, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, compared it to the uncanny, while anthropologist Georges Bataille saw in it something akin to ecstasy, as it transcends the everyday and surpasses rational social consciousness.

terror horror differences — Poster of the movie “The Exorcist”.

In fact, there are more authors who have theorized on the topic. The semiotician and philosopher Julia Kristeva links horror to primitive, infantile, and demonic aspects of unmediated femininity in her work Powers of Horror. Indian literature professor Devendra Varma was one of the first to argue with some depth for the distinction between terror and horror; he did so in 1957, in his book The Gothic Flame: Being a History of the Gothic Novel in England, in which he states that “it is the difference between a terrible apprehension and a morbid understanding: between the smell of death and stumbling upon a corpse.”

In his work The Gothic, writer and professor of English literature Fred Botting gets more specific, linking terror to the emotional energy released in contrast to the paralysis—in all its forms (confusion, physical helplessness, overall loss of faculties)—that horror induces. In other words, the former generates a response because it stems from something presented in real terms, while the latter produces the opposite effect, arising from the intangible or supernatural.

An expert on the subject such as Ann Radcliffe, the famous writer known for her Gothic novels, is considered a pioneer in distinguishing the two concepts as opposites. In her book On the Supernatural in Poetry, she explains that terror is characterized by the darkness and indeterminacy that “accompany it in relation to the most dreadful evil” and, consequently, “expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of vitality.” In contrast, horror “contracts them, freezes them, and almost annihilates [the faculties].” Of course, this is just a starting point that would need to be qualified.

Radcliffe is referring to literature, and perhaps that framework applies to art—films, novels—rather than to life, where one can be horrified by very mundane causes, and the sources of one or the other can overlap, with context perhaps being the deciding factor. Moreover, even within a single work, there can be a combination of terror and horror, depending not only on the theme but also on the tone or simply the moment. Even the format can be adapted; the quintessential literary territory of horror would be pulp fiction.

Examples are often ambiguous. The horror genre tends to adapt better to film due to the medium’s idiosyncrasies—the need to shake the viewer within a couple of hours—and many films fit perfectly within that framework, although the best ones include moments with a horrific tone, as seen in Psycho, The Exorcist, or Alien. In literature, where the immediacy of a scare is no longer a requirement to maintain tension (curiously, another print medium, comics, is closer to cinema because of its sequential structure), the second concept is more prevalent; very clear cases are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or The Cthulhu Mythos by the Lovecraftian writers (a paradigm of the aforementioned pulp publications).

Stephen King, a recognized master of the genre, published an essay in 1981 titled Danse Macabre in which he considers terror as “the most subtle element” of the three that make up a story in the genre, followed by horror (the third would be revulsion—gore, blood and guts—which he admits to resorting to, somewhat reluctantly, when he cannot terrify or horrify). For him, the difference lies in timing: terror would be the moment of suspense before the monster appears, and horror its contemplation.

What happens, we insist, is that these are not watertight compartments, and there is almost always a mix of situations that shift the tone of the story from one concept to another. This is what we mentioned earlier about context, something King fully embraces by combining them—along with that third element he contributes. His best-known novels, such as The Shining, Cujo, or It, follow this pattern, as do those of other authors, although there are always more specific references, like the not-so-subtle Richard Laymon, for example.

King is an avowed enthusiast of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who also theorized on the subject in Supernatural Horror in Literature, published in 1927, although, as the title suggests, it focuses mainly on that supernatural or cosmic horror—the being from another world or even an extradimensional one instead of the classic ghost—which fascinated him and characterized most, if not all, of his work and that of his circle. The writer from Providence is one of the best representatives of what literary horror entails, although he does not refer to terror and speaks a bit more generally, saying that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”

And fear is what horror must necessarily provoke in the viewer, according to art philosopher Noël Carroll in his study The Philosophy of Horror, adding that terror is the result of combining the other two elements King identified: horror and revulsion. For Carroll, terror and horror are distinguished by their ability to interrelate the story with the audience. The former does not need to resort to the supernatural to frighten—just a human being, such as a serial killer, for example—while the latter usually relies on the appearance of a creature that “violates the normal order of nature” (the classic monster) and the ensuing reaction of the characters to it.

If we apply this in practice, we’ll see that it is rare to find a story, whether visual or written, that fits entirely within those definitions. In the end, what matters is the story’s ability and how it is handled—regardless of the chosen modality or a convergence of them—to move us. Let us allow master Lovecraft to add the final—though not definitive—note to all this:

But those who are sensitive are always on our side, and sometimes a strange flash of fantasy illumines some obscure corner in the most rigorous head; therefore, no rationalization, reform, or Freudian psychoanalysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on April 25, 2025: La diferencia entre terror y horror en el cine y la literatura