(1) “During the whole of a dull， dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year， when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens， I had been passing alone， on horseback， through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself,as the shades of the evening drew on， within view of the melancholy House of Usher.” Thus Edgar Allan Poe opened his story of “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1839. In this beautifully crafted sentence he captured so much that is essential to the horror story—darkness,(ominous) solitude,foreboding calm,apprehension and uncertainty，and a deep feeling of melancholy that could soon turn to fear.

(2) Many kinds of fiction are self-explanatory: mysteries， westerns， love stories， spy thrillers， and science fiction define themselves by the terms used to name them. (The horror story is less easily defined, perhaps because other types of fiction so often use the trappings of terror to enhance their plots. )Charles Dickens used the vehicle of an old-fashioned ghost Story to tell “A Christmas Carol”， but that book is not a horror story. Nor does a Grimm brothers fairy tale such as “H?nsel and Gretel，” with its child-devouring witch， belong to the genre.

(3) The nature of the horror story is best indicated by the title of the 1990s television series Tales from the Dark Side. (Human beings have always acknowledged that there is evil in the world and a dark side to human nature that cannot be explained except perhaps in religious terms). This evil may be imagined as having an almost unlimited power to inspire anxiety， fear， dread， and terror in addition to doing actual physical and mental harm.

(4) In the tale of horror quite ordinary people are confronted by something unknown and fearful， which can be neither understood nor explained in reasonable terms. It is the emphasis on the unreasonable that lies at the heart of horror stories.

(5) This kind of literature arose in the 18th century at the start of a movement called Romanticism. The movement was a reaction against a rational， ordered world in which humanity was basically good and everything could be explained scientifically. The literary type that inspired the horror story is Gothic fiction， tales of evil， often set in sinister medieval surroundings. This original kind of horror fiction has persisted to the present. An early 20th-century master of the type was H.P. Lovecraft， most of whose stories appeared in the magazine Weird Tales. A more recent writer was Stephen King， author of Carrie (1974)， The Shining (1977)， Pet Sematary (1984)， Misery (1987)， and Rose Madder (1995).

(6) (Much horror literature is grounded in superstition,fear of demons,and the dread of death). No single tale brings all of these elements together so well as the vampire legend， an ancient folk superstition. The vampire is described as undead,an (entombed) individual who rises each night to feed on the blood of the living. In literature its best representation is Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker. The legend was retold in Interview with the Vampire (1976) by Anne Rice. The Dracula story was eagerly taken up by Hollywood in the 1931 film that starred Bela Lugosi， and numerous movies on the theme have been made since.

(7) (Similar to the vampire legend is the story of the wolfman,the human being under a curse who turns into a half man,half wolf presumably when the moon is full). This creature prowls around， devouring animals，people，or corpses，but he returns to human form by day. As with Dracula， the wolfman became a popular subject for movies，beginning with The Werewolf of London (1935) and the wolfman films of the 1940s. According to one superstition the werewolf， after being killed,turns into a vampire.

(8) (The belief that the dead can return to haunt and harm the living has long been an element of fiction). Ghost stories are at least as old as the Bible: in the Old Testament， King Saul calls up the ghost of Samuel to foretell the outcome of a battle. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet， the ghost of the (slain) king provides the information from which Hamlet plots revenge for his father’s murder. One of the masters of the modern ghost story was Ambrose Bierce， some of whose stories were collected in Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce (1964). A variation on the ghost theme is the haunted house， about which hundreds of stories have been written.

(9) Between the vampires and the ghosts are creatures called the living dead and zombies who return from the grave to devour the living. Hollywood celebrated this story in Night of the Living Dead (1968) and other films. In literature one of the best examples is the intriguing book The Beast with Five Fingers (1928; film version 1946) by W.F. Harvey. It is the story of a severed hand that goes on living after its owner dies. The movie Friday the 13th (1980) and its sequels also used the revived corpse as villain. In the 1986 film Trick or Treat， a dead rock music star is called back to life.

In the first paragraph, Edgar Allan Poe’ s story is quoted to show ( ).