an overwhelming and painful feeling caused by something frightfully shocking, terrifying, or revolting; a shuddering fear: to shrink back from a mutilated corpse in horror. anything that causes such a feeling: killing, looting, and other horrors of war.
Gothic novels have conventionally been divided into the schools of terror and horror, schools which have often been neatly grouped under the names of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Terror seeks to evoke by suggestion, by dreadful suspense; horror displays in the hopes of generating revulsion.