Dark Fantasy

What it is

Dark fantasy is fantasy that has let horror in. It keeps the magic, monsters and invented or enchanted settings of fantasy, but uses them to produce dread rather than wonder: magic corrupts, the supernatural preys, and the world itself is sick. Its heroes are often antiheroes, its monsters sometimes narrators, and its victories cost more than they win.

The term is famously loose. The critic Brian Stableford defined it as fantasy that incorporates elements of horror fiction into the standard fantasy formulas, and proposed a useful division: supernatural horror set in our world is "contemporary fantasy," while horror set partly or wholly in secondary worlds is "dark fantasy." In practice the label covers both a horror-first tradition and a sword-and-sorcery-first one, which is why two different writers are credited with inventing it.

Origins

The mood is old: Gothic novels, Edgar Allan Poe, and the decadent fantasies of the late 19th century all mix beauty with terror. The pulp era fused the two decisively. In Weird Tales, H. P. Lovecraft's Dreamlands stories and Clark Ashton Smith's tales of Zothique and Hyperborea placed necromancers, ghouls and cosmic horrors in fantasy settings, and much early Sword & Sorcery pitted its heroes against eldritch sorcerers.

The name arrived in two places. Charles L. Grant (1942–2006), a leading writer of subtle "quiet horror," used "dark fantasy" for stories in which humanity is threatened by forces beyond its understanding — a way to distance his work from gory horror. Karl Edward Wagner applied the term, in a fantasy sense, to his stories of Kane, an immortal, murderous genius who walks through a sword-and-sorcery world like a Gothic villain. The first Kane novel, Darkness Weaves, appeared in a mangled edition in 1970; the next Kane novel, Bloodstone (1975), arrived from Warner Books under a Frank Frazetta cover.

Evolution

Michael Moorcock's The Elric Saga became the archetype of the fantasy branch: a doomed albino emperor bound to a soul-eating sword, destroying what he loves. From there the genre grew in both directions. Horror writers such as Stephen King (The Dark Tower, from 1982) and Clive Barker (Weaveworld, 1987) wrote fantasy with a horror writer's instincts; Anne Rice's vampires showed monsters from the inside.

Games embraced it early. Tracy and Laura Hickman's module Ravenloft (1983) sent D&D parties into a Gothic domain ruled by the Vampire Strahd, and the Ravenloft setting (1990) built a whole cosmology of cursed domains within the mist-bound Demiplane of Dread. Vampire: The Masquerade (1991) sold itself as a game of personal horror. Blizzard North's Diablo (1996) turned a descent through a cathedral into Hell into an action RPG template, and in Japan Kentaro Miura's Berserk (1989– ) set a visual standard for armored despair. Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher stories, and the games that followed, made the monster-hunter a dark-fantasy hero.

The 21st century's defining dark fantasies may be games: FromSoftware's Demon's Souls (2009), Dark Souls (2011) and Elden Ring (2022), directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, whose ruined kingdoms and fading gods spawned the Soulslikes genre. Darkest Dungeon (2016) put its adventurers' sanity on the line alongside their Hit points.

How to tell it apart

• Dark fantasy vs. Grimdark: the most confused pair in the atlas. Dark fantasy is defined by horror — the supernatural as source of dread. Grimdark is defined by moral bleakness — human cruelty, cynicism and war — and can have very little magic at all. A haunted, cursed land is dark fantasy; a realistic war of mutual atrocity is grimdark. Grimdark is best seen as a branch of this family (see its own exhibit).
• vs. High / Epic Fantasy: high fantasy may confront a Dark Lord, but it expects light to win. Dark fantasy doubts that, or makes the cost unbearable.
• vs. Sword & Sorcery: S&S uses horror as an obstacle to cut through; dark fantasy lets it seep into the hero.
• vs. Weird Fiction: weird fiction's horror is cosmic and indifferent; dark fantasy's is often moral, personal and Gothic.

Where to start

• The Elric Saga — the doomed antihero in his purest form.
• Karl Edward Wagner, Bloodstone (1975) — Kane at full menace.
• Ravenloft — the adventure that brought the Gothic to D&D.
• The Witcher Saga — The Last Wish collection first.
• Dark Souls — the genre's great modern text, told through ruins and item descriptions.