Sexual Horror

There are two ways to make a work of art fall into the genre of sexual horror: either derive the horror elements from nonconsensual sexual activities or the threat of it, or make the environments or creatures themselves resemble genitalia to make them seem alien or eerie.  Sexuality in the right context is a thing of great pleasure, a core part of human existence on a mental/phenomenological and bodily level alike, an enormously significant moral category, a way to bind two people's minds and bodies together, and a way to introspectively savor self-awareness and the potential depths of passion.  It is far from the most foundational or otherwise important part of reality, but it is a vital one.  The precise subgenre of sexual horror takes something that can be so very pleasurable and existential and puts in a context of terror, violation, or even just the strangeness of a foreign visual style for environments meant to parallel sexual organs.

Some of the more overt examples of sexual horror works that have been made and released are so niche or controversial that the vast majority of people who love diverse art have probably never heard of them.  The erotic cosmic horror game Lust for Darkness is an example.  Merging Lovecraftian-inspired cosmic horror with a sexual bent and an exploration of how irrational people might destroy themselves in the pursuit of pleasure, Lust for Darkness is artistically mixed in quality but very unique and bold in its themes.  Still, there are somewhat culturally mainstream examples that are more recognized for other reasons or that somehow have had their sexual horror get less noticed.  Outlast is very explicit in relying on the sexual horror of rape or threatened rape in the Whistleblower DLC for the first game and in the main story of the second game.  This is a series of sexual horror that is not as well known for this aspect because the horror is broader than just this, but it is very direct and intense when it is present.  For a franchise with distinct sexual horror that is better known than Outlast but still does not always have its sexual horror acknowledged, there is Alien, which has either subtle or overt sexual horror depending on the film and scene.  

The worm-like creatures of Prometheus have heads that resemble vaginas; the second mouth of the Alien franchise's xenomorph that protrudes from the outwardly visible mouth resembles a penis (concept art for the original film actually makes this mouth within a mouth look even more like a realistic human penis).  The facehuggers implant xenomorph eggs in humans by orally raping them, just as the squid-like creature at the end of Prometheus orally rapes the Engineer because the mouth is where it insert its genitalia.  The sexual horror here comes from creatures that seemingly act without any sort of grand ideological motivations in an attempt to sexually reproduce.  In other words, they might not be malicious or hypocritical or evil in the way humans are when they rape or otherwise sexually violate people, but they are relentless and are ultimately in many cases performing aggressive sexual acts against the will of the human victims (or animal victims in some of the entries, like Alien 3).

As the examples show, this branch of horror can be organically matched with everything from cosmic horror to science fiction.  When done right, sexual horror can be more personal and thematically powerful than standard horror alone.  Like cosmic horror, sexual horror directly deals with very crucial parts of what it means to be human and thus of what the nature of reality is.  It does not have to get used just for sheer shock value.  The subgenre is great for its uniqueness, its combination of typically separated elements, and its subject matter that can so easily prompt moralistic reflection and thought about relationships between persons, among other things.  There is nothing wrong with even rationalists being subjectively averse to this kind of horror, or to horror as a whole, but sexual horror is inherently philosophically charged in ways that are more overt than they are in plenty of other genres and their respective subgenres.  Sexuality is no small part of human existence and connects directly with even more foundational issues of introspection, morality, subjectivity, and more, so to deny its potential for artistic exploration is thoroughly irrational.