My hot take has been for a while that the term “psychological horror” as people use it doesn’t actually mean anything and people just use it to say “Horror I like/Horror I think is well done”. If you look on Steam, pretty much every horror title also has the “psychological horror” tag so while a clear definition might exist somewhere, the term is muddied to no end.

So I wanna ask what you think the term includes and what it doesn’t, maybe we can crowdsource it.

Out of this list of horror or horror-adjacent games/franchises/movies, which would you classify as “Psychological horror” and why? And just as importantly, which would you say aren’t psychological horror? If you can’t come up with good reasons, answering purely based on vibes is also valid. You don’t have to categorize all of them, only those you have an opinion about.

Games:

  • Ao Oni
  • Doki Doki Literature Club
  • Outlast
  • Lisa
  • Omori
  • Resident Evil
  • Five Nights At Freddy’s
  • Outer Wilds
  • Pathologic
  • BioShock
  • The Coffin of Andy and Leyley
  • Limbo
  • Sally Face
  • SOMA
  • The Binding of Isaac
  • Needy Streamer Overload
  • Ib
  • Silent Hill

Movies:

  • Saw
  • The Cabin in the Woods
  • It Follows
  • Martyrs
  • Coraline
  • Get Out
  • Midsommar
  • Blair Witch Project
  • All Quiet On The Western Front
  • It
  • Silence of the Lambs
  • A Quiet Place
  • The Shining

The list is very broad on purpose. If you have anything else you would confidently call psychological horror, feel free to mention it.

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    8 days ago

    Psychological horror focuses on the horror brought on by psychological abnormalities. e.g. the world shifts around the protagonist or follows dream logic, it’s revealed that they’ve been an unreliable narrator despite being the player avatar, heavy themes of guilt, shame, loneliness, trauma, etc.

    It’s usually a quieter and more subtle horror, and more inclined to use “fridge horror” – horrifying concepts that don’t quite hit until you think about it a bit. The appeal of it all is that the threat doesn’t just come from outside – it also comes from your own head.