D&D General Genres of Horror (per Ravenloft) Lets discuss

[Steampunkette]

Love After Hours. So pissed at Cracked for killing it.

I would like to point out that Slasher Horror, more than anything else, relies on a Closed Environment. It's not something we -really- consider when we're watching it, beyond recognizing that the protagonists are trapped somewhere. Usually in a House or something, a feature that's also really common in most Monster Movies in general. Especially when it comes to Camera Angles that try to enhance the claustrophobic nature of the situation.

To give your players the Slasher Movie or general Monster Movie experience: Lock 'em up.

Keep them in a boat with the killer(s). Or an Antarctic Research Station. Or a manor surrounded by the Forest that the monster (and it's kin) normally hunts. Make sure they don't have a ton of room to maneuver for their fights. That they lose access to parts of the environment as the story advances, forcing them into smaller and smaller locations until they've no choice but to run through Monster infested Forests or Shark infested Waters or whatever the external threats are in order to secure a new safe haven... for as long as they can hold it.

But yeah... the Blurb basically hit all the highlights of Horror styles. Everything in the other article is just greater specificity of an individual ideal of one of those types of horror.

Aliens? Totally just a Cosmic Horror story about our own insignificance as noted by Michael Swaim.

 

[Stormonu]

You can, of course, mix horror types.

My favorite horror movie of all time is Alien - it is a mix of body horror (the facehugger/chestburster), cosmic horror (the unfathomable alienness/wrongness of the alien) and a bit of slasher (the unbeatable monster). Throw in the likes of Ash, the android and you also get some psychological horror as well.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I would like to point out that Slasher Horror, more than anything else, relies on a Closed Environment. It's not something we -really- consider when we're watching it, beyond recognizing that the protagonists are trapped somewhere. Usually in a House or something, a feature that's also really common in most Monster Movies in general. Especially when it comes to Camera Angles that try to enhance the claustrophobic nature of the situation.

To give your players the Slasher Movie or general Monster Movie experience: Lock 'em up.

Keep them in a boat with the killer(s). Or an Antarctic Research Station. Or a manor surrounded by the Forest that the monster (and it's kin) normally hunts. Make sure they don't have a ton of room to maneuver for their fights. That they lose access to parts of the environment as the story advances, forcing them into smaller and smaller locations until they've no choice but to run through Monster infested Forests or Shark infested Waters or whatever the external threats are in order to secure a new safe haven... for as long as they can hold it.

Ravenloft makes having a closed environment very easy to do. The tricky bit to doing this kind of thing is staging inconclusive encounters between the PCs and the slasher before the big showdown.

Aliens? Totally just a Cosmic Horror story about our own insignificance as noted by Michael Swaim.

I maintain that cosmic horror was invented by H. G. Wells in War of the Worlds (1898).

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”

 

[Tonguez]

The Folk Horror episode of Torchwood "Countrycide" is unusual for not having anything supernatural or SF.

The Wicker Man doesn't really have anything supernatural either.

That does bring up one of the issues with D&D power levels when trying to do horror. Countryside and Wickerman work because they feature mundane humans facing mundane humans, but in D&D the humans arent so mundane.
In the Ravenloft WickerMan-like adventure (Circle of Darkness) the PCS make a choice between a powerful high priest and a Level 13 Pit Fiend. These are supernatual threats not simple folk tales.

So the question is D&D, and Ravenloft in particular, able to do good mundane folk horror or does D&D simply demand that PCs face magic and monsters

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That does bring up one of the issues with D&D power levels when trying to do horror. Countryside and Wickerman work because they feature mundane humans facing mundane humans, but in D&D the humans arent so mundane.
In the Ravenloft WickerMan-like adventure (Circle of Darkness) the PCS make a choice between a powerful high priest and a Level 13 Pit Fiend. These are supernatual threats not simple folk tales.

So the question is D&D, and Ravenloft in particular, able to do good mundane folk horror or does D&D simply demand that PCs face magic and monsters

Well, there is no such thing as "not supernatural" in D&D, so you can't do it in quite the same way. But you could still do that kind of scenario by letting your villagers just have the same magic that is available to petty much anyone in D&D-land. That level of supernatural is mundane. I think the trick is to make the villagers seem innocuous - I would make them halflings, and play into the bumbling bucolic tropes until the knives come out.

 

[tetrasodium]

That does bring up one of the issues with D&D power levels when trying to do horror. Countryside and Wickerman work because they feature mundane humans facing mundane humans, but in D&D the humans arent so mundane.
In the Ravenloft WickerMan-like adventure (Circle of Darkness) the PCS make a choice between a powerful high priest and a Level 13 Pit Fiend. These are supernatual threats not simple folk tales.

So the question is D&D, and Ravenloft in particular, able to do good mundane folk horror or does D&D simply demand that PCs face magic and monsters

The monster hunter international books (not related to the video games) books provide a good space for comparison here. The basic premise is "what if bad ass monsters were real and what if the gun toting wannabe heroes they encounter were for a change actually competent then what if the government paid these crazies bounties to secretly hunt & kill monsters so people dont realize monsters are a thing".

Having access to pc tools doesn't mean that you have the one(ie slivered holy acid fire etc) needed for a given monster or that you know how to use it against that monster's loophole. Even if the monster doesn't need anything special it doesn't mean that you are skilled to use it against a monster that takes everything a full crew of off the scale skilled specialists have to take it on with difficulty.