Truly Terrifying: 24 Must-Read Nonfiction Books for Horror Fans

First published in 1967, Carlos Clarens’s Illustrated History of Horror and Science-Fiction Films offers an in-depth look into the inspiration, creation, and legacy of your favorite classic horror movies. Complete with full cast and crew lists for more than 300 pictures, this Illustrated History is a must-read for any film buff.

This is the first of two books on this list from film scholar Robin R. Means Coleman, PhD. Initially published in 2011, Horror Noire received a second edition printing in 2023. The book traces more than 100 years of Black actors, writers, and directors’ contributions to horror movie history, as well as the evolving ways Blackness is presented on the big screen.

Coleman co-authored this nonfiction book about modern Black horror movies with BlackHorrorMovies.com founder Mark H. Harris. Here, Dr. Coleman and Harris explore representation and inclusivity in horror cinema since the 1968 Civil Rights Act. You can read an excerpt here: The Black Character Horror Movie Survival Guide.

Guggenheim Fellow Ruth Franklin digs deep into the life of famed horror writer Shirley Jackson in this multi-award-winning biography. Despite her premature death in 1965 at age 48, Jackson was one of the 20th century’s most prolific horror writers, authoring six novels — including We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Haunting of Hill House — three memoirs, and dozens of short stories.

We’re in the midst of a horror renaissance, but horror fiction had its true heyday in the 1970s and ’80s. In Paperbacks from Hell, author Grady Hendrix traces the genre’s 20th century successes, and how publishers sold readers on all things horror for two solid decades.

We’ve already talked about the real-life events that inspired some of your favorite horror novels, including The Exorcist and The Hunger. In Behind the Horror, author Dr. Lee Mellor dives into the headlines behind 21 famous horror movies across nearly 90 years of cinema history, from M: A City Searches for a Murderer to The Lighthouse.

American slashers rely on nigh-unstoppable male villains, like Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Leatherface. Asian horror, on the other hand, tends to focus on the spirits of wronged and vengeful women — the onryō, the ohaguro-bettari, the cheonyeogwisin. In Unquiet Spirits, 21 Asian women come together to talk about their unique experiences in, and perspectives on, the horror community.

Fear is a negative emotion, so why do we love horror movies so much? Nina Nesseth’s pop-science exploration of our affinity for scary movies sheds some light on how we respond to horror, why we seek it out, and the ways in which it evolves with us as a society.

Creature from the Black Lagoon premiered in 1954, making the titular Creature the most recent of the Universal Classic Monsters — a line of classic movie villains that includes the Bride of Frankenstein, the Invisible Man, and Dracula. You’re undoubtedly familiar with all of the UCMs, but did you know that it was a woman, Milicent Patrick, who designed the Creature? Patrick, who also created Chernabog for the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of Disney’s Fantasia, was at risk of fading into obscurity when Mallory O’Meara brought her into the spotlight once more, in The Lady from the Black Lagoon.

You only need to scroll through this list to see that women’s contributions to horror cinema are routinely overlooked and undervalued. Women Make Horror contains 18 essays on female horror filmmakers, their work, and the myriad representations of women — for better or worse — in scary movies.

In this slim 1997 text, Hunter College’s Isabel Cristina Pinedo examines the roles that race and gender play in horror cinema. At a time when many writers lambasted horror for its frequent juxtaposition of sex and violence, Recreational Terror offered a different perspective: that women could find empowerment in the genre.

Horror: A Literary History is a 250 year chronology of developments in horror fiction. Here, scholars explore the breadth of this spooky history, from The Castle of Otranto to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Weird Tales, Stephen King, and beyond. This slim but powerful volume belongs on every horror aficionado’s bookshelf.

Queerness isn’t unique to horror, but horror does share a rather unique relationship with queerness. Horror is about otherness, and few things have been othered more in recent history than queerness. It Came from the Closet collects 25 essays that focus on both queerness in horror films and those movies’ impact on individual queer identities.

Nearly 60 years after 16-year-old Sylvia Likens died as the result of three months of abuse at the hands of her foster mother, the case continues to fascinate, largely due to its abject cruelty. The details of Likens’s abuse and death are not for the faint of heart. Jack Ketchum drew inspiration from Likens’s story for his 1989 novel, The Girl Next Door, which was adapted for the screen in 2007.

Voodoo shows up a lot in American horror media. Unfortunately, the depictions audiences may be most familiar with aren’t exactly kind or true-to-life. Based on the author’s experiences as a Voodoo practitioner in 1930s Haiti and Jamaica, Tell My Horse may help to separate fact from fiction in the minds of horror fans and occultists alike.

Iris Chang’s microhistory of the Nanjing Massacre is not for the faint of heart. The Japanese Army’s wartime atrocities in the winter of 1937 and ’38 rival — or perhaps even eclipse — those at the Battle of Berlin and Mỹ Lai. A difficult and eye-opening read, this is not a book you’ll soon forget.

Fans know just how inventive an author Carmen Maria Machado is. Her 2019 book, In the Dream House, blends horror with memoir as it unravels the lingering questions regarding her relationship with an abusive, unnamed girlfriend during her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Haing Ngor won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Cambodian photojournalist Dith Pran in The Killing Fields. Unlike other actors who worked on the 1984 film, however, Ngor had firsthand experience with Pol Pot’s regime, having survived three imprisonments under the Khmer Rouge. He tells his heartbreaking story in Survival in the Killing Fields.

Researching the UK’s haunted places — the landscapes that served as backdrop to classics like The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man — didn’t just help Edward Parnell parse through the recurring nightmare that plagued his young adulthood. It also led to the creation of Ghostland, which examines the UK’s ancient forests, spooky moors, and other natural features that inspired our favorite English ghost stories.

When it comes to truly terrifying nonfiction, it’s hard to beat The Hot Zone. The filoviruses — a family that includes the Ebola and Marburg viruses — pose a unique threat to humanity. They have high contagion and mortality rates. We have few vaccines or cures readily available. If you’re already a hypochondriac like yours truly, consider skipping this one.

Few things continue to captivate and horrify book lovers quite like anthropodermic bibliopegy. Many libraries across the world claim to hold books bound in human skin, but how many of those are the real article? Librarian Megan Rosenbloom is part of a multidisciplinary team that authenticates these volumes. Read all about the origins of the practice in Dark Archives.

Did you know that rabies can live in a human body for up to seven years before the carrier becomes symptomatic? If that tidbit alone doesn’t leave you wanting to sleep with the lights on tonight, pick up a copy of Rabies: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Disease, for more nightmarish facts.