Horror and Thriller, what's the difference?

[Addison]

It's probably a dumb question, I don't know. I'm tired, sun-burned to a crisp and covered in dirt thanks to the dog. I'm calling it an early night but I know this question will keep me awake. And I thought it would make an interesting forum/debate.

So horror, from what I understand, deals more with supernatural and gore and stuff. Thriller deals less with gore and stuff and not so much with supernatural elements. Which is why survival stories make great thrillers. But when I look up the horror movies I like I see that a horror comes up as a sub-genre while their main category is horror. What do you guys think?

 

[Terry Greer]

I always take the rule that Horror comes from without - something that is uncontrollable by the protagonists and all they can do is react to it. They never really 'beat it' and there is no real 'solution' (even if there seems to be).

A thriller on the other hand has a definite solution to be discovered (even if the protagonists fail to discover it) and its more an even match protagonist v antagonist (though the antagonist doesn't have to be human).

But as with all genres the boundaries are really blurred.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Somebody around here - and I'm drawing a blank, sorry - came up with the analogy that a thriller (or in this case, a dark fantasy) is when the villain has a super-powerful weapon and so does the hero. A horror is when the villain has a super-powerful weapon, and the hero has a pair of antlers.

Hope that helps!

 

[The Blue Lotus]

To me, A thriller is something psychological. A large part of the plot has to do with the mind and how it reacts to various stimuli.
A horror for me is blood and guts.
Stories about ghosts and the supernatural usually fall within the Thriller section, while zombies go to horror.
At least that is how I define them.

 

[Feo Takahari]

I think it's in the names.

Horror is about the feeling of horror, in the same sense that love songs are about the feeling of love. If your story is intended to scare your reader, it's a horror story.

Thrillers are about thrills. They're about tension, pounding pulse, worrying whether the main character will survive . . . but not horror, at least not exactly. I sometimes see gross-out violence in thrillers, but gross is all it is--you're not supposed to really be scared by it.

The analogy I'd draw is that if you get on a roller coaster, and it goes up and it goes down, it's a thriller. If you get on a roller coaster, and the track falls apart and people fall to their deaths, that's horror.

P.S. If this seems like an extreme interpretation of horror relative to a lot of the things that get called "horror," there's a simple explanation for that . . .

 

[Ghost]

Mwahaha! :bat:

Alright, I'll say up front, I'm very biased. Horror influences my writing more. Also, some of my thoughts here are unrefined.

Thrillers often have a time element, a ticking clock. The pacing matters a lot more, and readers/viewers experience a sort of headlong momentum–or in the case of psychological thrillers, a steady tightening of the emotional tension–until a culminating event. I agree with Terry Greer that thrillers usually have a solution. I think thrillers also tend to have stakes that are easier to define. You know the consequences of failure.

Horror is very broad. Movies like Psycho, Alien, The Stepford Wives, Cloverfield, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Halloween, The Others, and Black Swan could all be classified as horror. It's not all slasher flicks and zombies. Even the gore is optional. Horror is about the atmosphere. There's a sense of the uncanny and the possibility of being overwhelmed by it. Stories don't need supernatural elements to be horror stories (see Open Water, Misery, Funny Games, "The Lottery," etc). Things just need to go off-kilter in an ominous way. Horror isn't about the plot. You can obviously have plot-driven horror, but that's not a given. It's not a requirement of the genre.

I don't think that psychological emphasis is much of a distinction. A lot of your action-based thrillers aren't psychologically complex. Most horror has a psychological component–often poorly done, but they at least pay lip service to the idea. At the end of a horror movie or novel featuring a character who survives, she has had to endure and overcome trauma. For horror that revels in gore and violence, there's the gimmicky version that is little more than a blood spectacle and then there's the version with morbidly fascinating characters who lead you to explore the psyches of victim and perpetrator and to scrutinize their motives. Horror explores the nooks and crannies of the human mind and exposes them.

In both thrillers and horror, there is imminent disaster. The antagonist is usually better equipped–perhaps literally, perhaps in terms of knowledge or by way of a character trait. In a thriller, you know what is unfolding, what it means, what the cost is. A lot of the time, it's the logistics that are in question. ("Will he defuse the bomb in time?" or "Can she find the killer's house before he murders her son?") In horror, not knowing the meaning or the cost could be part of what inspires dread. You shouldn't know exactly what's coming in a horror story. That's the uncanny bit. Maybe you know Freddy Kreuger is after you, but you don't know under what rules he operates.

In both genres, one of the commoner stories is of a protagonist trying to reestablish the status quo by eliminating, diffusing, or escaping the big threat. It seems to me the thriller protagonist can go about business as usual once the threat is contained because all is well. Not always, though. A good thriller shows the toll the experience takes on its characters. Sometimes thrillers end by letting the protagonist (and the audience) know that the world will change now that the bad guys are defeated, but it's beyond the scope of most thrillers to deal with those repercussions. Thrillers generally feel more resolved to me.

With horror, you can get the "All is well" ending because horror doesn't have to end with the protagonist losing against the menacing force. They can win. It can end ambiguously. But sometimes Evil hasn't truly perished, and we're told outright or through one last event. Sometimes, it's about the realization that nothing can be done. Disaster is inevitable. We made it out of the cavern alive, but the Elder Gods or cave dwellers came out with us. Oh, the humanity!

I don't think it's stupid to ask what the difference is. Both thrillers and horror utilize suspense and tension in similar ways. They aren't always separate genres. Silence of the Lambs and Se7en–heck, a lot of the serial killer type movies–blend thriller with horror. The boundaries of psychological horror and psychological thrillers are blurred with suspense and good old-fashioned drama, too. The differences casual consumers take note of are often just the trappings (explosions and car chases vs. zombies and chainsaw-wielding madmen). Underneath, these genres try to accomplish similar things, like having a physiological effect on the audience, keeping the audience on edge by eliciting anxiety.

But when I look up the horror movies I like I see that a horror comes up as a sub-genre while their main category is horror.

I'm not sure what's meant by this sentence.

I'm dissatisfied by the conclusions I've come to about thrillers because most of my thriller knowledge comes from movies and Michael Jackson music videos. I'm posting this anyway since there's a possibility someone can glean something useful from it.

 

[wordwalker]

Great discussions here. Ghost, I really like your point that horror is a threat you can't quite understand well enough to fight, while thrillers do. --Although, a story often shifts from horror to thriller if characters get a handle on things, so an overall horror tale would have to be one that stuck to the proper horror sense.

(In fact, I'm the one A E Lowan quoted, that thrillers and dark fantasy are both sides squaring off with supernatural "guns," and horror is facing a super "gun" with a pair of antlers. My meaning is that horror isn't just a fight with the odds against you, you're supposed to feel like prey.)

But, the genres keep getting mixed up, and people use the names any way they want.

Part of it seems to be that authors have taken to using horror tools for other styles-- that is, using monsters with a sense that you're supposed to fight back. "If you fight aliens it's SF, if it's wizards it's fantasy, if it's demons (in our world) it's horror." It does give us an easy label for those, it gave us Buffy, and it's a healthy thing to take "unbeatable" enemies and build stories around how they actually can be beaten... at least if some are done well, and if true horror's still out there too.

But honestly, I think some authors, critics, and fans just like to call a story a thriller (or paranormal, or dark/contemporary fantasy), and others like to call the same thing horror. Some may be trying to point out whether the tone really is horror, and others think horror just isn't quite a respectable word; it's always had that odor, and maybe it needs to have it.

So these days a lot of stories flirt with horror concepts (yes, pun intended too, but it's not the whole point), but might call themselves horror when they aren't really trying to be-- but more likely they'll call themselves something else, sometimes even when they could have claimed to be full-on horror. And then some people will call the same story the opposite, because they can.

(Or because you can sell more on Amazon by finding a smaller category to make yourself look bigger...)

We aren't at the point SF reached, where it's all SF but everyone knows what "hard science fiction" and "space opera" mean. Maybe someday.