In a post on CrimeReads, Matthew Lyons says that nearly any story can be considered a horror story in the right lift. “I’ve written before about horror’s profound genre inclusivity, and let me tell you: once you start looking at your favorite stories through that lens, you can’t really unsee it ever again,” he writes. “But that’s only because horror has always been there, lurking in the shadows of every story, hiding in the attics and the sewers, just waiting to be uncovered.”
While mixed genre or hybrid horror stories have been trending in popularity, Lyons says there’s really no such thing. “Almost the very beginning of what we might consider ‘modern horror,’ people have been blending it with other genres to create something new—and, most of the time, to great success,” he writes. “There’s no such thing as ‘hybrid horror’ because horror’s always been synthesized into something else.”
Lyons engages in a lengthy examination of The Sopranos as a horror-inflected series. Many of the characters are haunted by the ghosts of their past – some of them the literal ghosts of people they murdered – and deceased characters make brief appearances long after their deaths. “To live as a human is to live in fear, because life is absolutely fucking terrifying,” he says. “That’s part of what makes horror so compelling: when it’s done right, we empathize with people through their fear, no matter how terrible they may be.”
Those fears can be traditional horror fare – ghost, vampires, monsters – or dramatic themes, such as trauma, mental health crises, or aging. “Sure, we might call it ‘narrative stakes,’ but at the end of the day, we’re really just talking about things that characters have a reason to be scared of,” Lyons says. “Just because the ghosts look different doesn’t mean you’re not haunted.”
