Psychological horror
A horror genre that creates fear through mental distress, unstable perception, psychological conflict, or threats to identity and sanity.
Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account of events cannot be fully trusted. Unreliable narration makes a story’s apparent threats difficult to separate from distorted perception.
The Turn of the Screw: Henry James’s 1898 novella about a governess who believes children in her care are haunted. Its unresolved ambiguity leaves open whether the apparitions are real or products of the governess’s mind.
Dissociation: A disruption in the usual integration of consciousness, memory, identity, emotion, or perception. Dissociation offers stories a way to fracture a character’s experience of self and events.
Supernatural horror: A horror genre in which threats arise from forces or beings beyond ordinary natural explanation. Psychological horror may leave supernatural causes uncertain or make perception itself the threat.
Gaslight (1944 film): George Cukor’s 1944 film about a husband who manipulates his wife into doubting her sanity. The film made psychological manipulation itself the engine of a suspenseful horror-adjacent story.
Gaslighting: A form of psychological manipulation that makes someone doubt their memory, perception, or judgment. Gaslighting turns uncertainty about reality into a source of fear and vulnerability.
The Yellow Wallpaper: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story about a woman whose confinement intensifies her psychological distress. Its first-person account ties domestic confinement to a deteriorating grasp of reality.
Memory: The mental capacity to encode, retain, and retrieve information and experiences. Threats to memory let past events return in distorted, incomplete, or frightening forms.
Slasher film: A horror-film subgenre centered on a killer who stalks and murders victims, often one by one. Slashers foreground a pursuer and bodily danger, while psychological horror foregrounds mental uncertainty.
Shutter Island: Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel about a U.S. marshal investigating a disappearance at a psychiatric hospital. Its investigation makes the reliability of the protagonist’s perceptions central to the mystery.