Horror and evil

Abstract

This paper deals with the relationship between the real and the unreal in horror literature. Its basic premise is that the concept of evil in horror stories stems from liminal content which is the product of the authors' subjective experiences of reality. The aim of the paper is to answer the question of whether such conceptualizations of evil can be put into a certain socio-cultural context, or are they arbitrary seeing as they are rooted in the imagination of individual writers. In order to understand this dilemma, this paper focuses on the analysis of instructions for writing horror stories in the form of books, essays and forewords formulated by leading contemporary horror authors, which, among other things, consider the thematization of evil in horror prose.