A particularly horrific scene, as depicted in William-Adolphe Bougeureau’s 1850 painting “Dante and Virgil in Hell” (publlic domain image)

(1) UNDERWORLD

Chthonic horror!

God is a hole in the heart of the world and he’s hungry – omnipotent, omniscient, omnivorous.

Yes, I know my top entry for mythology horror is a common denominator across mythologies – dare I say lowest common denominator in a different sense – rather than any specific mythology.

But you don’t get more horror in mythology than chthonic horror, the horror of the underworld.

Even when it isn’t literal hell or pandemonium, the underworld is a bleak and dark place, that hole in the heart of the world.

Even when its gods aren’t literal demons or devils, they are those hungry gods representing the force of death in a world of the dead. The underworld lies between death and destruction or between the proverbial devil and the deep blue sea – the adversarial forces of nature between predation and parasitism, between evolution and entropy. Or is that devolution (heh)?

And of course its denizens are the dead.

While there tends to be mythic horror in descent into the underworld, literally or metaphorically, particularly if one remains there for good or rather for evil (heh), mythic horror usually involves the underworld or its supernatural forces moving in the other direction, invading our own world. For that matter, that’s usually the default plot or premise of horror fiction, literally or metaphorically.

Hell, even the intrusion or invasion of mythic worlds other than the underworld into our own can be terrifying. “Be not afraid” as Biblical angels say to soothe the terror from their appearance.