Let’s take a deep dive into the scariest children’s book series of all time.

1. “Harold” Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, CBS Films.
2. “The Red Spot” There are spiders living in a girl’s face in this story.
3. “The Haunted House”
4. “The Bride”
5. “The Thing”
6. “The Drum”
7. “Just Delicious”
8. “The Babysitter”

The 12 Scariest Things That Actually Exist in Real Life

• The Bolton Strid. via: Shutterstock.
• Invisible Fire. No, it’s not just a silly plot point from Talladega Nights.
• Asian Giant Hornets. via: Twitter.
• The Sun. Stick with me, here.
• Locked-in Syndrome.
• Sleep Paralysis.
• Fatal Familial Insomnia.
• Alien Hand Syndrome.

Without further ado, we present our choices for the best horror novels of all time.

1. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)
2. It by Stephen King (1986)
3. Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (2004)
4. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty (1971)
5. Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (1818)

In Western literature the literary cultivation of fear and curiosity for its own sake began to emerge in the 18th-century pre-Romantic era with the Gothic novel. The genre was invented by Horace Walpole, whose Castle of Otranto (1765) may be said to have founded the horror story as a legitimate literary form.

The early 20th century brought more milestones for the horror genre including the first monster to appear in a full-length horror film, Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame who had appeared in Victor Hugo’s novel, “Notre-Dame de Paris” (published in 1831).

Try working with these 5 key elements.

• Characters. First off, you need to write characters worth caring about.
• Fear of the unknown. Fear of the unknown is a common psychological issue.
• Emotions. You can’t have a horror story without tapping into different emotions.
• Storyline.
• Killer ending.
• In summation.

As odd as it may sound, the fact that people were more anxious in 2020 may be one reason why horror films were so popular. They found that fans of horror movies were more likely to be high in neuroticism—a personality trait characterized by high anxiety.

Horror films are designed to elicit certain emotions such as tension, fear, stress, and shock. These can cause the release of the hormones in the body such as norepinephrine, cortisol, and adrenaline from the autonomic nervous system.

Psychological horror focuses on the inner conflict of your main character, rather than on an external monster or creature. You can create your own psychological horror story by coming up with a compelling story idea, and by focusing on creating a mood of terror and foreboding in the story.

This is a psychological horror film distilled down to its essence. Only a human being could fracture in this way. Hitchcock portrayed radically deviant physiological sickness as a classic horror film. The amount of literature on the psychoanalytical significance of Psycho is well-worth checking out.

Psychological Horror is a very popular sub-genre of horror among horror fans. This sub-genre focuses on mental, psychological, and emotional states that the characters go through, using them as a way to relate and scare the audience simultaneously.

Answer: A typical horror story emphasizes external conflict, with a monster or paranormal entity as the antagonist attacking a normal world full of nice, normal people. A psychological horror focuses on the main character’s inner conflict and the fear comes from an attack on the ego.

While horror tends to rely on thrilling people with bodily terror, the thriller opts instead to explore the depths of human psychology. In fact, it’s precisely because such characters are so charismatic and compelling that thriller is very often scarier, and more real, than horror.

Psychological horror usually aims to create discomfort or dread by exposing common or universal psychological and emotional vulnerabilities/fears and revealing the darker parts of the human psyche that most people may repress or deny. Thus, elements of psychological horror focus on mental conflicts.

Midsommar is Ari Aster’s most recent masterpiece of a thriller. For a psychological thriller along the same lines as Midsommar, look no further than these riveting and mind-bending movies.

The 15 Best Psychological Thriller Movies That Will Make You Question Everything

• The Silence of the Lambs (1991) Orion.
• The Girl on the Train (2016) UniversalUniversal.
• Get Out (2017) UniversalUniversal.
• The Sixth Sense (1999) Buena Vista.
• Black Swan (2010) FoxFox.
• American Psycho (2000)
• Gone Girl (2014)
• Us (2019)

Psychological Thrillers

• The Game.
• Haseen Dillruba.
• The Woman in the Window.
• Domestic Disturbance.
• The Manchurian Candidate.
• The Stepfather.
• Mystic River.
• Bird Box.

Jump Scare Rating: Midsommar has barely any jump scares worth mentioning although there is no shortage of disturbing imagery and gore (mainly in the second half).

While Midsommar was a psychedelic, disturbing experience, it’s pretty much a general consensus among fans of Aster’s work, that Hereditary was the scarier film. This means that Midsommar was disturbing in its own very unique way, but Hereditary utilized the eeriness that comes with darkness to its advantage.