I mean, if it doesn't have some kind of non-realistic element, should we really call it horror in the first place?
Why on earth not? Horror is a genre, not a setting.
Some people may find it interesting, though, that Gothic fiction that now gets all lumped together as "horror" used to have a very strong divide between "horror" and "terror." Horror was explicit, grotesque, focused on shock; terror was about suspense, uncertainty, and the threat rather than the fact of something awful happening. Both were about creating emotional response, and specifically fear, but they had very different approaches towards it. And horror was strongly (but not exclusively) associated with the "male Gothic," which was usually unambiguously supernatural, while terror was strongly (but not exclusively) associated with the "female Gothic," which often presented potentially supernatural events only to later reveal that they had mundane but no less fear-inspiring explanations. So in that sense, King is very much horror in that he's very in-your-face, and non-supernatural horror is comparatively very rare within the genre.
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I mean, if it doesn't have some kind of non-realistic element, should we really call it horror in the first place?
Why on earth not? Horror is a genre, not a setting.
Some people may find it interesting, though, that Gothic fiction that now gets all lumped together as "horror" used to have a very strong divide between "horror" and "terror." Horror was explicit, grotesque, focused on shock; terror was about suspense, uncertainty, and the threat rather than the fact of something awful happening. Both were about creating emotional response, and specifically fear, but they had very different approaches towards it. And horror was strongly (but not exclusively) associated with the "male Gothic," which was usually unambiguously supernatural, while terror was strongly (but not exclusively) associated with the "female Gothic," which often presented potentially supernatural events only to later reveal that they had mundane but no less fear-inspiring explanations. So in that sense, King is very much horror in that he's very in-your-face, and non-supernatural horror is comparatively very rare within the genre.