Four of my favorite examples of horror from fiction are:
1. The original (show, not movie) Reavers from Firefly. The movie ruined it by making it an artificially induced virus thing and turning them from existantial horror to basically another version of fast zombies, but the concept as originally presented, that the blackness of space causes a sort of contagious insanity that can be passed along just by surviving a Reaver attack, is incredibly effective. The idea that there is something out there so horrible that just witnessing it will turn you into it >>>> fast zombie virus.
2. The terata from C. S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy. The heroes stumble upon a group of children living in a magic utopia in the wilderness, apparently in perfect harmony and health, worshiping a magical tree-thing that protects them. They then discover that the tree-thing is parasitically feeding off its victims' worship and that both the youth and the health are an illusion. The terata aren't actually eternally children or eternally healthy - the tree-thing has simply made them and everyone who enters its spear of influence perceive them that way, while in reality they're all starving, aging, and dying of untreated illnesses and festering neglected wounds that they don't even know are there (because the illusion of perfection means they never realize they exist and so never tend to them).
3. The original 70s version of The Wicker Man. Because you know, watching it, that the crops will keep on failing even after they sacrifice a human, because it's not actually going to work. And the only sacrifice bigger than the stranger they lured to their village to kill is Lord Summersisle. And he knows it, too. And also because the animal masks are just really freaking creepy.
4. The Hinshelman story in American Gods. A small town is idealic and peaceful, except for a single teenager or adolescent who disappears every winter. The hero eventually discovers that one child or youth every year is killed by the town's car salesman and thrown into the lake. Then he discovers, buried at the botom of the lake under the years worth of bodies, an ancient box containing the corpse of a child. The child was sacrified by the ancient pagan Northern European tribe that some of the townspeople are descended from, in order to make themselves their own personal god to worship for good fortune. And it gave them good fortune, as long as they "fed" it with a similar sacrifice every year. Eventually, they completely forgot that the child/god-thing had ever existed and just remembered that the box brought luck, and their descendants took it with them when they immigrated to the US and buried it in the lake. By then, though, the child/god-thing had figured out how to "feed" itself. (And Hinshelman, the amiable old car salesman, is of course actually the child-thing). Again, like the terata, it's the combination of childhood and innocence with something horrific hidden underneath, but in this case the fact that the child/god-thing's own people have completely forgotten it and that they created it to begin with by horribly killing it makes it worse. And the fact that the corpses are all frozen under the lake ice also makes it worse somehow.
And example of something that could have been super effective psychological horror but that instead is just a bad movie barely redeemed by the presnce of Ron Perlman is Season of the Witch. The premise is that everyone believes a witch/demon has caused the plague to come to the countryside, and that she must be killed or cast out to get rid of it. Where the movie fails, IMO, is by making this literally true and having the woman accused of being the witch actually turn into an evil demon that the heroes have to fight in badly CGI-ed action sequences. The idea of the movie, where the heroes return from the Holy Land to fund themselve in the middle of a depopulated Europe ravaged by the Black Death is incredibly effective horror - both small farmsteads and entire towns are abandoned and filled with corpses, and they don't know what's happened or why, and then they're tasked with dragging this woman accused of witchcraft to a monestary to be used in a exorcism to stop the plague, and they don't know if it will really work, or if this is just some poor madwoman who's totally innocent. And both the claustrophobic atmosphere of fear and paranoia caused by "everyone everywhere is dying and we don't know why, let's find a scapegoat!" and the uncertainty of "is this all witch-hunting hysteria with an innocent woman desperately trying to talk her captors out of killing her or is there actually something supernatural going on here" as the witch reveals flashes of malevolence and tries to manipulate her guards is much scarier than "a CGI batwinged monster rips out from inside a girl's body and eats people and then they cut its head off, the end."
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1. The original (show, not movie) Reavers from Firefly. The movie ruined it by making it an artificially induced virus thing and turning them from existantial horror to basically another version of fast zombies, but the concept as originally presented, that the blackness of space causes a sort of contagious insanity that can be passed along just by surviving a Reaver attack, is incredibly effective. The idea that there is something out there so horrible that just witnessing it will turn you into it >>>> fast zombie virus.
2. The terata from C. S. Friedman's Coldfire trilogy. The heroes stumble upon a group of children living in a magic utopia in the wilderness, apparently in perfect harmony and health, worshiping a magical tree-thing that protects them. They then discover that the tree-thing is parasitically feeding off its victims' worship and that both the youth and the health are an illusion. The terata aren't actually eternally children or eternally healthy - the tree-thing has simply made them and everyone who enters its spear of influence perceive them that way, while in reality they're all starving, aging, and dying of untreated illnesses and festering neglected wounds that they don't even know are there (because the illusion of perfection means they never realize they exist and so never tend to them).
3. The original 70s version of The Wicker Man. Because you know, watching it, that the crops will keep on failing even after they sacrifice a human, because it's not actually going to work. And the only sacrifice bigger than the stranger they lured to their village to kill is Lord Summersisle. And he knows it, too. And also because the animal masks are just really freaking creepy.
4. The Hinshelman story in American Gods. A small town is idealic and peaceful, except for a single teenager or adolescent who disappears every winter. The hero eventually discovers that one child or youth every year is killed by the town's car salesman and thrown into the lake. Then he discovers, buried at the botom of the lake under the years worth of bodies, an ancient box containing the corpse of a child. The child was sacrified by the ancient pagan Northern European tribe that some of the townspeople are descended from, in order to make themselves their own personal god to worship for good fortune. And it gave them good fortune, as long as they "fed" it with a similar sacrifice every year. Eventually, they completely forgot that the child/god-thing had ever existed and just remembered that the box brought luck, and their descendants took it with them when they immigrated to the US and buried it in the lake. By then, though, the child/god-thing had figured out how to "feed" itself. (And Hinshelman, the amiable old car salesman, is of course actually the child-thing). Again, like the terata, it's the combination of childhood and innocence with something horrific hidden underneath, but in this case the fact that the child/god-thing's own people have completely forgotten it and that they created it to begin with by horribly killing it makes it worse. And the fact that the corpses are all frozen under the lake ice also makes it worse somehow.
And example of something that could have been super effective psychological horror but that instead is just a bad movie barely redeemed by the presnce of Ron Perlman is Season of the Witch. The premise is that everyone believes a witch/demon has caused the plague to come to the countryside, and that she must be killed or cast out to get rid of it. Where the movie fails, IMO, is by making this literally true and having the woman accused of being the witch actually turn into an evil demon that the heroes have to fight in badly CGI-ed action sequences. The idea of the movie, where the heroes return from the Holy Land to fund themselve in the middle of a depopulated Europe ravaged by the Black Death is incredibly effective horror - both small farmsteads and entire towns are abandoned and filled with corpses, and they don't know what's happened or why, and then they're tasked with dragging this woman accused of witchcraft to a monestary to be used in a exorcism to stop the plague, and they don't know if it will really work, or if this is just some poor madwoman who's totally innocent. And both the claustrophobic atmosphere of fear and paranoia caused by "everyone everywhere is dying and we don't know why, let's find a scapegoat!" and the uncertainty of "is this all witch-hunting hysteria with an innocent woman desperately trying to talk her captors out of killing her or is there actually something supernatural going on here" as the witch reveals flashes of malevolence and tries to manipulate her guards is much scarier than "a CGI batwinged monster rips out from inside a girl's body and eats people and then they cut its head off, the end."