IGN has a preview of the upcoming adventure book (which I'll be honest, kind of slipped my mind with the announcement of Tasha's Cauldron of Everything,) including early chapters on Ten Towns, the remote settlements in the Dale, as well as two creatures found in the book's bestiary.
One is a returning favorite: the Chwinga from Tomb of Annihilation (which my party just encountered, actually!) returns, though in an obviously very different environment. These nature spirits are benevolent and helpful, and in ToA serve as a kind of relief from the relentless death and danger of that adventure. I suspect, given the dark nature of this adventure, they'll serve a similar role.
The next, and brand new, monster is the Coldlight Walker. If you remember the poster to John Carpenter's The Thing (a major reference point for this adventure,) this is basically a monster built to look like that image. As a CR 5 Undead, its main hook is that when it kills things, they remain frozen for 9 days, meaning you can't thaw, animate them, harm them with fire, or raise them from the dead. While a generous DM could, I imagine, treat this like an automatic gentle repose, I think the intention here is to make it so that you won't be able to use Revivify to bring a person back. Raise Dead has a 10-day window, which means that you'll need to be ready to cast that on the day they thaw out or you're out of luck (I don't recall the level range of the adventure, but I'd guess you don't get high enough for 7th level spells, at least until the very end.)
Rime of the Frostmaiden is supposed to evoke "modern horror," in contrast with the gothic horror found in Curse of Strahd. It strikes me that some of the great horror movies of the 1980s had winter, snow, and cold as major themes in them. The Thing, of course, had a group of scientists trapped in an antarctic research facility with an infectious, mimicking alien... mass (100% aberration creature type) and The Shining had the Torrance family trapped in its big hotel over the winter.
Despite my tendency to use horror elements in my writing and D&D adventure creation, I can't really describe myself as a horror aficionado (I get really squeamish with gore and body horror) so I don't know exactly how I'd classify "modern horror" with any great specificity.
Gothic Horror is obviously a growth out of the Romantic movement of the 19th Century, which saw the meticulous enlightenment writing of the 18th Century as too stuffy and stodgy, and embraced a more mystical, supernatural, and emotion-driven narrative (for a fantastic contrast between that 18th Century enlightenment story versus 19th century Romanticism, I cannot highly enough recommend Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel, the two of which represent those two worldviews - though Strange is the latter and Norrel is the former, all in the context of an alternate history involving magic.) But gothic horror tends to call back to ancient history (or at least medieval) and dark forces that exist within the human psyche that resist control by rational thought - werewovles and vampires are both infectious as well as representing a kind of unrestrained id.
To define "Modern Horror," I think we need to think about the subgenres that followed in the 20th and 21st century.
Probably the biggest of these subgenres to be born of the 20th century is cosmic horror. As our understanding of the physical universe expanded, showing how weird things really were (thanks in large part to Einstein) and how tiny we were in relation to the cosmos, writers like H. P. Lovecraft merged the psychological horror of gothic writers like Edgar Allen Poe with trepidation over the vastness of the cosmos and some early science fiction (I think it's easy to forget how Lovecraft's monsters were often quite similar to those found in 1950s B-Sci-Fi movies, though in the latter, America's post-WWII confidence tended to render such creatures as defeat-able with the right know-how and scientific insight.) Yet, lost in those B-Sci-Fi movies was the underlying and rather Romantic notion in cosmic horror of a death of rationality - though in contrast to gothic horror, where part of the danger was succumbing to emotionality, in cosmic horror, the fear was that rationality, the enlightenment, and any kind of ordered thought was just a big lie that keeps us from the true state of reality - utter chaos and madness.
While not exactly a horror genre, the 1970s saw a rise in conspiracy thrillers, especially following the Watergate scandal, with paranoia and the inability to trust those around you was a prevalent theme to this genre.
We can't really talk about horror of the 20th century, though, without acknowledging the slasher movie. There was a bit of fascination with serial killers even starting with Fritz Lang's M in 1931, and I think you can also consider Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho in 1960 to be a kind of proto-slasher. Wes Craven's 1972 Last House on the Left took the real-life Manson Family murders and made villains that resembled a group of hippies (never mind that Manson was more of a white supremacist cult leader than a peace-loving hippie.) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1974 really got the ball rolling, and then Halloween in 1978, Friday the 13th in 1980, Nightmare on Elm Street in 1986 gave us some of the titans of unstoppable teenager-killers with Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and Freddy Kreuger.
Though not the first adaptation of the series, 1991's Silence of the Lambs spawned a whole flood of (mostly forgettable) "psychological thrillers," which made the analysis of some serial killer's MOs into the puzzle by which heroic investigators would try to catch them without becoming one of their victims. Unlike the 80s slashers, psychological horror almost never contained any real or implied supernatural element.
As for the past 20 years, I'll confess I might not have enough movies under my belt to really define any serious trends. Starting with the Blair Witch Project in the 90s, we had a bit of a trend of "found footage" horror, such as the big-budget Cloverfield, which blended cosmic horror, kaiju movies, and this style of storytelling in a kind of oblique reference to the urban destruction that came with September 11th. Paranormal Activity was also a big deal.
We've also seen horror dominate the independent movie industry (to be fair, horror has often worked well in the indie field) and probably also related to the War on Terror, our national tolerance for torture was either critiqued or celebrated (depending on the critic) by "torture porn" horror like the Hostel and Saw movies.
It's admittedly a little hard to analyze the movements currently going on in the genre, being in the middle of it (not to mention during a time in American life that feels a lot like Stephen King's The Stand.)
Oh, how could I forget Stephen King!
Emerging in the late 70s and continuing to be one of the most adapted writers, King's take on horror can't be ignored. Much as Poe influenced Lovecraft, King was an avid Lovecraft fan, but where Lovecraft found nothing but loneliness and madness and a disdain for humanity (plus a further disdain for humanity that didn't fit within the ethnic identity that he belonged to) King brought humanism - both in empathy for his characters but also an exploration of how trauma and abuse can leave deep wounds in the soul - to cosmic horror. Having first been exposed to King by reading his Dark Tower series, I've always classified him as more of a Dark Fantasy writer than a horror writer, though the border between those genres is extremely fuzzy.
While King's stories are usually deeply rooted in an American setting, there's generally some sort of win for his characters to earn by the end, even if they don't all make it out alive. And for that reason, I actually think he's a really crucial touchstone for a "modern horror" D&D adventure, which presumably has some kind of win condition and doesn't simply end with everyone dying out in the cold.
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