Here we have an article titled "The Horror! The Horror!" by graduate student Mathias Clasen:
http://www.academia.edu/217296/The_Horror_The_Horror_
He argues that the human fondness, the human need, for scary stories and films has less to do with history, culture, or sexual repression than it does with basic natural selection. In other words, we have evolved to be scared of certain things because avoiding them meant survival. Sounds obvious, but worth remembering. However, I do feel that Freud's "The Uncanny" is an excellent and very interesting take on this sort of thing. Many of the best horror stories are those which work on two (or more) levels: The visceral (evolutionary - run from the thing with the big fangs so it doesn't use them to rip you open and swallow large chunks of you) and the abstract (cultural or psychosexual - I know there wasn't a little girl in the men's room, and I know that little girls can't turn into dead old women... can they?).
Here, meanwhile, we have "What About Genre, What About Horror?" by Peter Straub, bestselling author of Ghost Story and co-author (with Stephen King) of The Talisman:
http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/what-about-genre-what-about-horror.html
Straub takes a pretty cantankerous tone here, but he has a point. Arguing over genre boundaries, and about the merits of a particular work just because it's classified as belonging to this or that genre, doesn't help us much. For example, I remember reading Shirley Jackson's classic "The Lottery" years ago, thinking it was excellent (and disturbing), and noticing that it kept popping up in all sorts of anthologies of "Great American Literature" and so forth. It wasn't until later that I learned it was often classified as a "horror story". After all, it contains no zombies, ghosts, voracious alien parasites, or the like. Yet it is certainly horrific. And it is certainly an example of great literature.
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