And, of course, it is both personal and social, it operates within a system or systems, it has all kinds of functions and expressions, codes and conventions. Horror has its powers and pleasures, terms and its rhetoric, fictions and constructions. It is a way of defining what is within and what is outside society, what should be included and what should be expelled. It classifies things and people as unacceptable, abnormal, unthinkable: it names them as monstrous or evil. Not normal. Nature abhors a vacuum and a villain.

The word resonates throughout high and popular culture – a term, a site, a practice – to signify what we cannot comprehend but can’t stop thinking about. Kurtz’s last words in Heart of Darkness, borrowed and recycled by Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. The Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s, the collection of waxwork villains – distinguished murderers and criminals – more popular by far than the exemplary figures of goodness and respectability displayed elsewhere. The ‘House of Horrors’, the name bestowed by the media on the home of Frederick and Rosemary West, where the bodies of young women (including several members of their family) were buried, and whose excavation and demolition have not resolved the case or its mysteries. Above all, the term stands for a cinematic genre – varied, complex, popular, vilified – which stretches from the haunting silence of Nosferatu to the comic grossness and box-office grosses of Scary Movie.

One of the fears of and about ‘horror’ is that it can effortlessly reproduce itself, that it can engender, disseminate, infect. The massacres at Columbine and Port Arthur, for example, are seen as instances of extreme, incomprehensible horror. Contemporary media feels compelled to depict these events and hold them up as exemplars of evil. To insist on them. And to account for them principally in cause-and-effect terms. Horror as a genre, it is often suggested, contributed to their existence: violent videos and games helped establish the conditions for creating Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold and Martin Bryant and for generating their desires and their actions. Yet, the media that distances itself from these video and game representations also draws on their standard rhetoric, narrative devices, motifs. There’s a kind of Medusa effect when the media is faced with certain types of terrible events or actions: a freeze of the imagination, a monolithic recapitulation of words, images, postures, declarations. And a failure to acknowledge that this is taking place.

And why are some massacres so much more newsworthy than others? Why is Rwanda invisible and the Oklahoma City a four-page broadsheet wraparound? Why is the mind and modus operandi of the serial killer such an inescapable necessity of popular culture for the past couple of decades?

Mark Seltzer, in ‘The Serial Killer as a Type of Person’ (extracted in The Horror Reader from his book Serial Killers) considers the extraordinary relationship of dependency between the figure of the factual/fictional serial killer and his abhorring, adoring public (come on down, Dr Hannibal Lecter). Where does information end and fantasy begin in the dossiers about the serial killer ‘type’ that have become part of criminal law and criminal lore? ‘Interactions between the serial killer and public media (or, in some cases, circulation-boosting simulations of that interaction) have formed part of the profile of serial murder from the inaugural Jack the Ripper case on; for serial murder is bound up through and through with a drive to make sex and violence visible in public,’ Seltzer writes, in a contribution which proposes the contemporary infatuation with serial killing as part of what he calls wound culture: ‘the public fascination with torn and opened private bodies and torn and opened psyches, a public gathering around the wound and the trauma’.

Seltzer’s piece is one of twenty-nine essays and edited extracts that appear in the excellent collection The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder. In his introduction Gelder says he set out to assemble ‘the best academic essays on horror from over the last twenty-five years, with the aim both of giving “the field of horror” some definition and of affirming that this field is worth studying’.

Gelder has divided his field into themes and categories, with a general preface and helpful, suggestive introductions to each chapter. There is ample scope for reading across these categories: the divisions are not restrictive or exclusive. The field, as elaborated here, includes phantasmagoria and fanzines, Mary Shelley and The 50-Foot Woman, Lacan and low-budget horror.

Chronologically, the reader stretches from the Enlightenment to the present; geographically it focuses on the United States and England – as Gelder acknowledges, in a section entitled American Gothic, ‘the United States is the centre of modern horror production’ – but also includes chapters on Greek vampire tales, Caribbean ghost narratives, Italian horror movies and a couple of ‘preposterous’ Hong Kong movies, Rouge and A Chinese Ghost Story. (No extended treatment of Japanese cinema or animation, unfortunately.)

There has been plenty of work on the place of horror in exploring/repressing issues of gender and sexuality, and the Reader reflects this, with, among other things, Barbara Creed’s influential examination of the maternal, the abject and the modern horror film; Sue Ellen Case’s imaginative engagement with literary texts that seem to anticipate the subversive possibilities of the figure of the lesbian vampire; Vivian Sobchack’s exploration of the ‘the middle-aged woman who is both scared and scary’, the rarely seen, reprehensible figure who ‘evokes in herself and in others the horror and fear of an inappropriate and transgressive sexual desire’.

Sobchack uses several low-budget science-fiction horror movies from the late fifties and early sixties, most notably The Leech Woman. Looking at a later outbreak of low-budget, high intensity cinema, Philip Brophy coins a word – ‘horrality’ (horror, textuality, morality, hilarity) – and in a vivid, gleeful piece, explores this cinema’s textures, effects and reception. David Sanjek usefully reminds us of the importance of the fanzine in circulating ideas and information about horror movies, before they were a recognised subject of academic enquiry.

While cinema dominates the book, there are sections focusing on literary texts, above all the original, now-canonical Frankenstein and Dracula, which not only have given rise to countless versions, sequels, elaborations and imitations, both literary and cinematic, but which also offer the possibilities of rich and varied readings. The essays on Dracula remind us how many layers the novel contains, how many readings are simultaneously possible – accounts and interpretations which focus on sex, society, psychoanalysis, colonialism, feminism, new technology … Jennifer Wicke’s ‘Vampiric Typewriting’, for example, examines the media of Dracula rather than its mediaeval origins – the representation and incorporation into the narrative of typing and shorthand, the phonograph and the camera – and the role of Mina Murray/Harker, ‘the consumed woman whose consumption is a form of knowledge’ in employing and interpreting these devices.

Mina is, in intriguing ways, Dracula’s nemesis: as Wicke suggests, ‘she essentially becomes the detective of the final segment of the story’. It is typical of the way the Reader can usefully be read, that this point – Mina’s role in the concluding stages of the story ­–resonates with an essay on a very different theme, Carol J. Clover’s look at slasher movies, ‘Her Body Himself’. Here, she examines and challenges assumptions about the gendering of aggressor and victim, and the identifying position of the viewer, in an extract which explores the role of the character she memorably calls the ‘Final Girl’.

The Horror Reader is a stimulating and rewarding collection which covers a good deal of ground and has a sense of openness and engagement rather than textbook finality. Academic study, Gelder acknowledges, has left some significant (and surprising) gaps: it has tended to overlook audiences; it has its own restrictive canon; it focuses on cinema rather than fiction; it rarely pays attention to horror on television or in other media. (these latter omissions are surprising and disappointing.) But such omissions or constraints are evidence, clearly, that the field has not been exhausted – far from it. The Horror Reader is a fine collection of writings and readings, a substantial demonstration of the value of the field (if indeed its ‘worth’ should ever be in doubt) and a challenge to writers, researchers and academics to explore the uncharted territory outside its scope or address.