Let's look at "Twilight" for starters. I really enjoyed this series of novels by Stephanie Meyer. My teenage son teased me about reading them (I think he may have called me a pussy) but they were well written and very interesting. I read them all. I liked the first one better than the rest.
"True Blood" is running on HBO. Similarly to Twilight a woman falls in love with a Vampire (although that's where the similarities between the stories ends). But his too is very popular and has the same cross genre approach.
My novel, just released by my publisher Midnight Showcase, has the same cross genre idea floating inside it. The publisher looks for romance in all of their publications, and sometimes they are horror or science fiction, or other cross genres.
My novel is titled "The Holy Reaper." There are no vampires. And the love story involves two regular old humans who fall in love while trying to find out why people in St. Louis keep killing themselves. They do find out why, and it turns out to be a pretty evil force behind the grisly suicides.
Maybe we need more of this. I reflect on Stephen King novels, which I have read nearly all of, and he tends to leave romance out, not that that's a bad thing. Seems to me in a lot of his stories people in love are tragically torn apart from each other. That is probably why he is so good at horror.
And in most movies that are in the horror genre, the love story is absent. Nobody falls in love in The Exorcist, or Halloween, or Scream, or Psycho. In fact in all of those examples the persons in love tragically lose each other as I noted previously about Mr. King.
My hypothesis is that combining romance and horror is similar to creating the romantic comedy. A lot of women dig romance (at least more so then men) and by creating the romantic comedy the males find going to see a romantic movie more palatable. In the same token, a horror story with a romantic element makes the horror genre more palatable to women.
It is good when we can do things together that we both enjoy.
