The correct answer is C. Stock characters
Explanation:
Stock characters are characters widely used in fictional literary works including horror and suspense genre who are mainly stereotypical and flat. This means these characters do not change during the story but instead follow features of characters widely used in certain genres or types of stories, because of this most of these characters can also be considered as cliches and can be related to social prejudices. These characters also imply the writer or author does not need to create complex and new characters but instead rely on stereotypical ones, which are easy to remember and recognize by the reader as these are familiar characters that appear over and over in different stories of the same genre. Thus, many horror and suspense stories use stereotypical stock characters which readers recognize and relate to them.
