Horror Films: A Subgenre Guide

by Team Tyneside

Theme & Genre

If you have ever wondered why one horror grabs you while another leaves you cold, the answer is often subgenre. As a celebration of one of the most diverse genres in cinema, here's our guide to films that delight in frights.

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Horror covers a lot of ground. A quiet ghost story and a chaotic slasher both fit the label, as do a sinister gothic costume drama and a found-footage trip into the woods.

This guide sets out the main types of horror films, with the horror subgenres explained by where they came from and which films to start with. If one of them catches your interest, check out our horror at the tyneside screenings to see what is currently scaring up the big screen.

Slasher films

A masked or hidden killer picks off a group of people one at a time. The form took shape in the 1970s and gave horror some of its most recognisable “rules”. The slasher film is the most imitated of the horror subgenres, which is why a knowing film like Scream (1996) works so well by deconstructing these tropes.

Scream (1996) – Wes Craven

Halloween (1978) did much to set the template, so start there and follow it with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), which added a supernatural twist. Later contributions like Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) toyed with meta-narratives before Scream cemented the self-aware era, while modern entries like Ti West’s X (2022) and Damien Leone’s relentless Terrifier series prove that audiences still crave practical gore and unstoppable stalkers.

Recommended Slashers

Halloween (1978): John Carpenter’s foundational suburban stalking blueprint.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974): Tobe Hooper’s blistering, sun-baked nightmare of rural terror.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): Wes Craven’s supernatural spin on the formula using dream invasion.
Scream (1996): The ultimate self-aware deconstruction of slasher rules.
Black Christmas (1974): Bob Clark’s chilling holiday-set precursor that laid early groundwork for the subgenre.

Giallo

Giallo blends murder mystery with stylised horror, usually featuring a black-gloved killer and plenty of saturated colour. The word is Italian for yellow, after the cheap yellow-jacketed paperback thrillers that inspired the films.

Mario Bava and Dario Argento turned it into a cinematic style from the 1960s onwards, alongside other notable directors like Sergio Martino, Lucio Fulci, and Umberto Lenzi, and the American slasher owes it a good deal.

Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964), set in a fashion house, is often named as a blueprint for the genre, and Argento’s Deep Red (1975) is one of its high points. Rich colours like this provide a good reason to see giallo on a film print, which is where our 35mm screenings can’t be topped.

Recommended Giallo

Blood and Black Lace (1964): Mario Bava’s saturated, high-fashion murder puzzle.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970): Dario Argento’s breakthrough mystery set in Rome.
Deep Red (1975): Argento’s peak giallo achievement paired with a legendary Goblin score.
Torso (1973): Sergio Martino’s tense thriller bridging stylish mysteries with early slasher mechanics.
Don’t Torture a Duckling (1972): Lucio Fulci’s grim, superstitious take on rural Italian paranoia.

Folk horror

Folk horror finds its fear in the countryside, where an isolated community follows old beliefs and an outsider realises too late that the locals play by different rules.

Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) stands as the touchstone of British folk horror, alongside Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) and Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971).

The Wicker Man (1973) – Robin Hardy

Robert Eggers’s The VVitch (2015) carried those ancient anxieties into 1630s New England, whilst Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) proved dread can flourish in broad daylight under a sun that never sets. More recently, films like Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022) and Goran Stolevski’s You Won’t Be Alone (2022) have pushed the subgenre into deeply poetic, textural territory.

Recommended Folk Horror

The Wicker Man (1973): Robin Hardy’s untouchable clash of Christian rigidity and pagan ritual.
Witchfinder General (1968): Michael Reeves’s historical portrait of cruelty across English soil.
The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971): A dark fable of rural youth corruption and ancient bone discovery.
The VVitch (2015): Robert Eggers’s atmospheric exploration of Puritan paranoia in colonial New England.
Midsommar (2019): Ari Aster’s sunlit, daylight-drenched descent into Swedish communal cult terror.

Body horror

Here the body itself is the source of fear: mutation, transformation, infection, things growing where they should not.

David Cronenberg built an entire career on it, and his 1986 remake of The Fly is among the most affecting examples, because the horror comes from watching a brilliant man come apart in slow, agonizing stages. Alongside Cronenberg, directors like John Carpenter in The Thing (1982), Shinya Tsukamoto in Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), and Brian Yuzna in Society (1989) pushed physical transformation into new, uncanny, and socially critical territory.

An example of this subgenre getting its recent flowers was Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), which weaponised body horror as a vehicle for a dark, hyper-stylised satire on fame and ageing.

Recommended Body Horror

The Fly (1986): David Cronenberg’s heartbreaking, practical-FX-laden tragedy of biological decay.
The Thing (1982): John Carpenter’s cosmic masterclass in shape-shifting cellular terror.
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989): Shinya Tsukamoto’s kinetic, industrial-cyberpunk fever dream of metal mutation.
Society (1989): Brian Yuzna’s grotesque, socially satirical plunge into upper-class conformity.
The Substance (2024): Coralie Fargeat’s audacious, hyper-stylised weaponisation of youth obsession.

Supernatural and ghost stories

Ghost stories and possession films tend to build dread more than they spill blood.

Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963) gets its scares from sound and suggestion, while William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) set the standard for harrowing possession narratives. Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961) and Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) similarly prove that quiet halls and creaking floorboards can yield more terror than explicit violence.

The Others (2001) – Alejandro Amenábar

The turn-of-the-millennium J-horror movement perfected this atmospheric dread. Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) introduced Sadako, whose waterlogged form crawling from a television became a global icon of ghostly terror, while Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge (2002) weaponised unnatural croaks and contorted body language. Modern indie hits like Talk to Me (2022) and Hereditary (2018) prove the supernatural still has plenty of fresh nerves to pluck.

Gothic horror

Gothic horror pairs crumbling castles with aristocratic monsters, and it is one of the oldest strands of the genre.

Bram Stoker wrote vampirism’s defining gothic text, and film has kept returning to it, from F. W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu (1922) to Hammer’s Dracula (1958), where Christopher Lee established a magnetic, predatory archetype alongside Peter Cushing’s relentless Van Helsing. Beyond bloodsuckers, James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) set the standard for tragic, stitched-together monstrosity, whilst Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) brought decay and haunted lineage into modern visual focus.

Many of these gothic classics now reach cinemas as pristine 4K restorations, allowing them to reach new audiences and making a rewatch essential.

Recommended Gothic Horror

Dracula (1958): Terence Fisher’s Technicolor Hammer classic starring Christopher Lee as a magnetic, predatory count.
The Innocents (1961): Jack Clayton’s exquisitely atmospheric adaptation of The Turn of the Screw.
Frankenstein (1931): James Whale’s universal monster landmark establishing tragic, stitched-together monstrosity.
Crimson Peak (2015): Guillermo del Toro’s visually sumptuous romance set inside a sinking, bleeding mansion.
The Fall of the House of Usher (1960): Roger Corman’s vibrant Edgar Allan Poe adaptation led by Vincent Price.

Psychological horror

The threat here is as likely to sit inside a character’s head as outside it, and the film often leaves you unsure what is real.

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) follows a woman whose isolation turns her flat into a nightmare, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) makes an isolated snowbound hotel feel like a human mind coming apart at the seams.

Mulholland Drive (2002) – David Lynch

David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) fractures reality into a waking nightmare of identity loss, whilst Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010) turns the pursuit of artistic perfection into a paranoid descent. More recently, psychological masterclasses like Rose Glass’s Saint Maud (2019) have kept the subgenre sharply focused on internal zealotry and isolation.

Recommended Psychological Horror

The Shining (1980): Stanley Kubrick’s masterclass tracking a mind unravelling inside an isolated hotel.
Repulsion (1965): Roman Polanski’s claustrophobic portrait of a woman’s fracturing reality in a London flat.
Black Swan (2010): Darren Aronofsky’s intense descent into perfectionism, paranoia, and identity loss.
Saint Maud (2019): Rose Glass’s haunting British debut focused on religious zeal and terminal isolation.
Jacob’s Ladder (1990): Adrian Lyne’s hallucinatory journey through grief, war trauma, and fractured perception.

Creature features

Creature features put a monster at the centre and let it do the heavy lifting. The form runs from classic Universal monster myths to giant-scale blockbusters and modern B-movie fun.

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) is a classic of the form, and Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) showed how much a monster can do when the film hides it in plain sight. Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) trapped crewmates with an ultimate biomechanical predator, whilst John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) turned shape-shifting paranoia into a masterclass in practical FX.

Recommended Creature Features

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954): The classic Universal monster tale of prehistoric aquatic terror.
Jaws (1975): Steven Spielberg’s masterclass in tension, proving what an unseen shark can achieve.
Alien (1979): Ridley Scott’s claustrophobic blend of sci-fi terror and biomechanical predator hunting.
Dog Soldiers (2002): Neil Marshall’s gritty British classic follows soldiers trapped in a Scottish farmhouse by a pack of werewolves.
The Host (2006): Bong Joon-ho’s thrilling, emotionally grounded monster feature born from environmental neglect.

Found footage

Presented as recovered recordings, found footage uses handheld camerawork, simulated amateur framing, and small budgets to make extraordinary events feel horribly real.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) brought the style to a mass audience, following student filmmakers who head into the Maryland woods and do not come back, and Paranormal Activity (2007) later proved the formula could work inside an unassuming suburban house.

There’s no hard and fast rule on setting though; Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield (2008) expanded the conceit to giant-monster scale on city streets, whilst Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s [REC] (2007) trapped viewers in a claustrophobic apartment building under quarantine.

Recommended Found Footage

The Blair Witch Project (1999): The foundational student-film descent into Maryland forest panic.
Lake Mungo (2008): Joel Anderson’s haunting, grief-stricken Australian mockumentary about a family uncovering unsettling secrets after their daughter’s drowning.
Noroi: The Curse (2005): Koji Shiraishi’s deeply unsettling Japanese supernatural mystery compiled from chaotic investigator tapes and television footage.
[REC] (2007): Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza’s relentless, quarantined apartment-block nightmare.
Host (2020): Rob Savage’s hyper-relevant, tightly wound lockdown seance experiment.

Horror comedy

Some horror wants you to laugh and scream in tandem.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) is the ultimate example, a musical tribute to B-movie monsters that audiences have been answering back to for decades. Our first-timer’s guide to a Rocky Horror interactive screening explains how that works.

Evil Dead II (1987) – Sam Raimi

For more traditional scares alongside the dark comedy, Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) are the golden benchmarks. Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead (1985) injected punk rock energy and irreverent gore into zombie lore, whilst Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1992) pushed slapstick splatter to its absolute limit. Cult film screenings often celebrate horror comedies and midnight movies like these, which build fiercely devoted followings over decades.

Recommended Horror Comedy

An American Werewolf in London (1981): John Landis’s masterclass blending genuine lycanthropic terror with dark British-American wit.
Re-Animator (1985): Stuart Gordon’s wildly inventive, Grand Guignol adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft featuring mad science and manic energy.
Slither (2006): James Gunn’s gooey, affectionate throwback to B-movie alien parasite tropes with a strong streak of dark humour.
House (1977): Nobuhiko Obayashi’s psychedelic, avant-garde Japanese nightmare that turns surreal logic and slapstick into pure terror.
Ready or Not (2019): Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s razor-sharp satirical thriller about a high-stakes, lethal game of hide-and-seek.

Where to start

If you prefer atmosphere to gore, begin with a ghost story or a gothic classic, where dread builds through quiet suggestion and rich setting. Want a rowdy night out with a crowd? Slashers, creature features, and horror comedies are the place to start, offering shared jumps, practical effects, and collective laughs.

If you’re drawn to sleek style, mystery, and vibrant 35mm visuals, a giallo provides the perfect middle ground between a detective thriller and a gory slasher.

For those drawn to tension, psychological horror and found footage drop you straight into unravelling minds and claustrophobic realities. Folk horror and body horror provide uncomfortably visceral journeys into old rituals and physical transformation.

Whichever route you take, these horror film genres tend to work best with an audience, where every gasp, jump, and nervous chuckle is shared in the dark…

Browse the full programme of horror at The Tyneside screenings to see what is currently showing.