After terrifying readers for almost four decades with serial murderers and hostile aliens, the multiple award-winning writer Ramsey Campbell is one of Britain’s most respected fantasy authors. For Alan Moore he’s “Britain’s greatest living horror writer”, while Stephen King suggests that “good horror writers are quite rare … and Campbell is better than just good.” But why did Campbell embark upon this ghoulish career? Rupert Bear.

The author tells how a Rupert Bear annual was in the pillowcase at the end of his bed on Christmas morning in 1947, leaving him haunted by the story, Rupert’s Christmas Tree.

Rupert the Bear

“Rupert acquires a magical tree that decamps after the festivities and returns to its home in the woods,” remembers Campbell. “Perhaps this was meant as a charming fantasy for children, but the details – the small high voice from the tree, the creaking that Rupert hears in the night, the trail of earth he follows from the tub in his house, above all the prancing silhouette that inclines towards him, the star it has in place of a head – are surely the stuff of adult supernatural fiction. I think I got my start in the field right there, and many of my preoccupations must derive from my early childhood.”

Campbell is not alone in finding horror in apparently innocuous childhood tales. South African horror author Sarah Lotz, whose novel The Three opens with a series of inexplicable plane crashes, pins her choice of career on Beatrix Potter “and the utter horror that is The Tale of Samuel Whiskers.

“The image of Tom Kitten being rolled into a roly-poly pudding by a pair of giant rats while they casually discussed pastry gave me claustrophobia and nightmares for a full year when I was five or so,” says Lotz, who also writes horror as one-half of SL Grey. “But there was also something fascinating and thrilling about feeling like that – it was the most powerful reaction I’d had to a story thus far, and since then I’ve wanted to replicate it.”

‘Tom Kitten bit and spat, and mewed and wriggled; and the rolling-pin went roly-poly, roly; roly, poly, roly’ ... an illustration from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or the Roly-Poly Pudding by Beatrix Potter.

The genre’s biggest seller, King, meanwhile, blames Bambi in an interview in this month’s Rolling Stone magazine – and expresses something similar to Lotz’s mix of thrill and nightmare. “When that little deer gets caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also exhilarated,” King told Rolling Stone. “I can’t explain it.”

“This feeling is anything but pleasurable,” agrees Lotz, “as anyone who’s ever experienced the cold dread of real fear will know – the 1am phone call, the threat of violence, the missing child, the wait for the diagnosis in the doctor’s office.”

But “watching horror movies and reading horror fiction allows us to become armchair adrenalin junkies, able to safely experience the heightened pulse rate and responses to real fear without the threat of coming to any actual harm,” she believes. “It’s a cliche, but I suppose some of us crave this feeling because it makes us feel alive; maybe we’re just masochists.”

Over two centuries ago, Edmund Burke made an attempt to explain it, suggesting in his Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful that “ terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too closely”, and that “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

The British horror novelist Adam Nevill agrees, citing the critic Terry Heller’s evocation of escaping “the normal limitations of social reality … to practice or pretend mastery of some fears.

“This particular psychological pleasure contributes to another level of pleasure,” Heller argues, “the experience of extremes of emotion usually not available in ordinary life, for the play with fear intensifies those emotional extremes.”

Nevill, whose new novel, No One Gets Out Alive, sees a young woman move into a house of nightmarish horrors, says it was the ghost stories of MR James that first awakened his love of horror. He recalls his father reading to him, and “lying in the bottom bunk transfixed by terror some nights, but also captivated by the idea of the supernatural”.

“I tend to find my own pleasure is derived from the sense that something monumental is close to the experience of the characters, and to the natural world,” Nevill says. “More than a glimpse of this supernormal presence would be unbearable. I think this is one of the great transporting experiences you can have as a reader, and it’s the holy grail I always pursue in my own work.”

For the novelist Sarah Pinborough – whose interest in horror was sparked by a school performance of Dracula that she saw aged six (“It terrified me so much I didn’t sleep with a window open until I was about 16”) – supernatural horror is “a release of all our suppressed existential fears without having to actually face them.

Truly terrifying ... Dracula, 1931. Photograph: Rex/Snap

“Plus, often there are moments in horror that are very close to comedy. When there is a big ‘jump’ in a horror film, we often shriek and then laugh, which is a release in itself,” says Pinborough, whose own books, Mayhem and Murder, send supernatural horror stalking the streets of Victorian London.

Campbell, however, says that the older he gets, the less he finds a taste for terror “even slightly odd. Being made to feel by art is surely no bad thing – to be scared any more than to be made to weep or indeed to be amused out of one’s wits,” says the writer, whose latest novel, Think Yourself Lucky, sees a killer in Liverpool detailing his violent crimes on a blog.

“It’s a way of engaging the imagination, and a good deal is right with that,” according to Campbell. “For me the best terror approaches awe and is actually moving.”