The horror genre has only recently attracted the interest of philosophers. A principal catalyst was Noël Carroll’s 1990 monograph The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart, which remains the locus classicus for horror theory scholarship and continues to frame the agenda for academic controversies within it. This dissertation engages with several debates initiated by Carroll, assesses his responses to them, and propose and defends theoretical alternatives. I approach these debates by way of four genre (or subgenre) studies. The first (sub)genre, the slasher film, asks whether human beings themselves can be ‘monsters,’ in Carroll’s technical sense. I conclude that they can, and I consider the possibility that all of us—in our everyday existence—may be monstrous. I then turn to tales of dread. These tales question our epistemic mastery of the natural world and of our place within it. I outline the typical characteristics of dreadful tales, develop an account of the emotion of dread as elicited by certain films, paintings, and novels, and argue that uncanny, weird, and eerie events and entities are the proper objects of the aesthetic emotion of dread. The third examines found footage horror films. Harnessing Carroll’s analysis of horror plots, I argue that found footage exhibits well-defined plot conventions that thematically unite the subgenre, and I explore what it conveys about the fragility of human agency. Fourthly, I analyze non-narrative instances of the horror genre as presented by paintings, sculptures, and installations; I argue against Carroll’s inclusion of fictional protagonists’ psychological states in necessary conditions for the elicitation of art-horror. I then turn my attention from horror subgenres to the horror genre writ large, addressing the perennial puzzle of our attraction to works of horror. I reject Carroll’s cognitivist explanation in terms of epistemic curiosity and question whether it is possible for any single, universal theory to capture horror’s appeal. I conclude that the motivations of its audiences are affectively infused, varied, diverse, and historically conditioned.