Your Guide To The Domestic Horror Sub-Genre

When it comes to domestic horror, I think that pregnancy horror probably deserves to be its own sub-category. But in terms of horror about pregnancy, Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby absolutely takes the cake. This novel explores the horrifying constraints placed on women in the domestic sphere, especially when it comes to motherhood. Filled to the brim with unsettling paranoia, Rosemary’s Baby is about a young pregnant woman who feels as if she can’t trust anyone around her. Not her neighbors. Not her husband. And not even the baby growing inside of her. Also of note is Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, which similarly explores the horrors and claustrophobia of domestic life.

The Shining is an excellent example of a haunted house story that sheds light on the horrors happening within a family unit. If you’re somehow unfamiliar with this story, here’s the deal. The Torrance family goes to live in a secluded, snowed-in hotel in the middle of nowhere, where patriarch Jack Torrance will work as the caretaker of the hotel during its off-season. There, a series of strange and supernatural events will force Jack Torrance to confront his conflicting feelings about his role as a father, his alcoholism, and his violent tendencies.

In an interview with The Miami Rail, author Victor LaValle said he wrote his horror novel The Changeling about his own fears of becoming a father while still grappling with growing up fatherless. “I realized how ill-equipped I was for my kid because I was so in my head about my own hurts,” LaValle said. “I knew that if I was wrestling with this, many of my friends, male and female, who were fatherless — even if their father was in the house — must be wrestling with it, too.” In The Changeling, LaValle takes that very complicated topic and turns it into a dark fantasy/horror novel about a man on a journey to find his wife after she commits a terrifying act of violence.

This deeply unsettling novel incorporates many horror elements — ghosts, a haunted house, and even vampires — to confront how the effects of grief and loss, mental illness, and racial politics affect one family over generations. The Silver home is the ancestral home of the Silver family, and now Miranda Silver, her twin brother Eliot, and their father are living there and have converted it into a bed and breakfast. But there’s something strange about the home, which seems to be especially unwelcoming to outsiders. And Miranda is starting to experience a strange hunger.

Sarah Gailey’s Just Like Home is a brand new 2022 novel, but it’s one of the most terrifying domestic horror novels I’ve ever read. This novel is a haunted house story mixed with a true crime–inspired thriller that ultimately tells the story of one woman’s unsettling relationship with her mother, her serial killer father, and their haunted family home. When Vera was a child, her father was arrested for murder. He committed several murders in their home, right in the basement, where he also hid the bodies. Years have passed, and Vera hasn’t been back to her childhood home since she became estranged from her mother. But when her sick mother asks her to return to home, Vera obeys, despite the hard feelings and the difficult memories.