Horror glossary

City people take a wrong turn. The countryside has been waiting.

The British Board of Film Classification. Industry-funded, and the reason a lot of horror looks shorter in Britain.

The threat is your own flesh. Canadian in origin, and largely one man's fault.

A short, indefensible Italian cycle with real animal killings in it. Crossover with Reel Scum.

The universe is indifferent and much larger than you. Lovecraft's, and mostly unfilmable.

Something large is coming and the army will be no help. Usually the fault of a scientist.

Why the running time on the back of the box does not match the one on the site.

The Director of Public Prosecutions, whose office made the list.

Nature has had enough. Ran on pesticides in the 1970s and on climate now.

Films made to be difficult. Some have an argument, some are an endurance test with a poster.

The survivor who takes up the weapon. Named in 1987, in use since 1974.

Isolated community, old belief, and an outsider who does not understand the calendar.

The camera is a character and it will be dropped. Cheap, exhausted, occasionally perfect.

Black gloves, a straight razor and a plot that will not survive scrutiny. Italian, and gorgeous.

Italian for yellow, after the paperback covers.

Castles, candelabra and inherited guilt. The oldest room in the house.

A building with an opinion. The purest test of whether a director can do restraint.

Long black hair, wet floors, and a ghost with a grievance. Reset the whole genre in 1998.

The child is the threat. Reliably effective and reliably difficult to cast.

Shockumentary. Real footage, staged footage, and a narrator who cannot tell you which is which.

How this site decides what counts as a deep cut.

The vengeful spirit of Japanese tradition. Female, wronged, and not open to negotiation.

Something else is using the body. Catholic in origin, now largely a genre of ritual.

Anything achieved in front of the camera. The argument for them is physics, not nostalgia.

The threat is a person, or it is nobody, and you are not sure which.

The genre's least defensible structure, and the one it argues about most. Crossover with Reel Scum.

The seizure power. No defendant, no jury, and the stock is destroyed anyway.

A masked man, a holiday, and a group of teenagers with one survivor. The genre's most abused formula.

No supernatural element, no killer with a motive. Just terrain, weather and time.

The most adaptable monster in the genre, and the only one that gets invited in.

A specific British legal category from 1983 onward, not a synonym for a gory film.

The law that ended the panic by giving the campaign what it wanted.

Body horror that arrives once a month. Ruined by CGI and never recovered.

Rural, female, and usually persecuted by exactly the people the film sides against.

Slow, numerous, and always about the survivors. Romero built the whole thing in 1968.