Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘horror’ occupies a position far more theoretically dense than its popular usage suggests. The term operates on at least three distinct registers: phenomenological, archetypal, and psychopathological. Rudolf Otto establishes the foundational frame, situating horror — specifically ‘daemonic dread’ and the ‘horror of Pan’ — as the primordial antecedent of numinous religious experience, the seed from which gods and daemons alike emerge. James Hillman extends this into archetypal psychology, arguing that horror is not pathological noise to be eliminated but a psychically necessary mode of encounter with trans-ego powers: the horrible in cult, in myth, and in nightmare serves the soul’s process of connecting to its subterranean dominants — Hades, Dionysus, Persephone. Rafael López-Pedraza situates cultural proliferations of horror imagery as the return of repressed archetypal forces, particularly Dionysian and chthonic ones, channeled through the historically suppressed into sado-masochism, media spectacle, and perversion. For von Franz and the Jungian fairy-tale tradition, horror functions as an encounter with the uncanny Other that the psyche cannot metabolize through ordinary ego-consciousness. Ruth Padel demonstrates how Athenian tragedy institutionalized horror — making visible the polluted interior of the mind and city — transforming it into something bearable and even redemptive. The central tension across these voices concerns whether horror is to be phenomenologically honored as numinous or therapeutically metabolized as pathological defense.