I love a good dust up over genre boundaries. Whether it’s sci-fi versus fantasy or prog rock versus anything, I get sucked into these things. Part of it’s a genuine curiosity about where the lines are drawn. Part of it, honestly, is see what can be some spectacularly wrong takes.

So it was that, last week, I was drawn to a Twitter dust up of an interesting opinion – can you have horror is space?

It started this way:

The first response seems about right:

Makes sense, right? I mean, it’s a movie where a monster – which happens to be an alien – kills victim after victim in a single locale – a spaceship – forcing the hero to pull it together and kick ass. It’s a horror flick. It’s sci-fi.

Not to the original questioner, who followed up:

I’m not sure I’m convinced, mainly because I think “horror” is both a genre unto itself and also a type of story.

Let me make an analogy to progressive rock. At its inception, prog was a descriptive term, a generic label for all kinds of music that was pushing the boundaries of what was contemporary rock at the time. When the genre’s popularity tailed off it wound up giving birth to a particular idea of music defined by a handful of stereotypical features – long songs, focus on instrumental passages, mythical/literary lyrical topics. Later on, newer bands influenced by the original wave of prog started making their own music in the style of those original bands. Thus, “prog” became both a descriptive term and a style.

Horror is kind of like that. There definitely is a genre of horror stories, but there’s also the fact that horror stories can be told in all kinds of different settings. Some may involve supernatural elements, some may not. Some may be set in modern times, other may have a historical setting. Relevant to the discussion here, you can also have horror stories set in the future and, yes, in space. They may be sci-fi (or fantasy), but that doesn’t keep them from being horror stories, too.

In the end, that’s one of the cool things about speculative fiction. Whether sci-fi or fantasy, it’s more of a setting or milieu than a story type in itself. Either genre can support stories from romance to mystery to satire to daring heist caper. Given that, it doesn’t make any sense to say that being a sci-fi story precludes that same story from being a horror story, too.

For what it’s worth, the final vote tally was like something out of one of those “dictator for life” elections somewhere:

Oof.