I found myself standing outside a Watford multiplex in the midst of spiritual turmoil. It was Halloween 1999, and as a long-term horror movie fan I was itching to buy my ticket for The Blair Witch Project. But I had a problem.
A few years before, I’d become a Christian, and since being ‘born-again’ I’d assumed that horror was one passion I would need to give up. After all, with its supposed glorification of darkness, death and the Devil, horror appears to be the very antithesis of the Christian hope. So, instead, I went to see Bowfinger, a forgettable Eddie Murphy comedy.
Over a decade later and I’m still a Christian. In fact, I’m now an ordained Baptist Minister. I tick the Reverend box on government forms, I preach sermons and carry out weddings and funerals. And yet, something else has changed too: I watch horror movies again. This isn’t some sort of act of defiance against my conscience, but rather a reappraisal of the genre. It’s a realisation that perhaps the sacred and the scary are not so incompatible after all.
I’m not alone. It’s fairly well known, for example, that film critic and Anglican Mark Kermode has described seeing The Exorcist as the moment he knew there was “something beyond this world.”
Scott Derrickson is the Christian director behind Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) and The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005). He’s argued that horror is the perfect genre for Christians, since it’s one of the few popular forms willing to deal seriously with the notion of objective good and evil, or to countenance – like the Christian faith – the existence of the supernatural. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that some audiences discover, like Kermode, a transcendent edge to terror.
As well as high profile directors like Derrickson, there are a growing number of independent Christian horror films like Pray (2007), House (2008), The Familiar (2009) and Paranormal (2009). These are films produced by avid churchgoers, yet they tell stories of crazed killers, possessed teenagers and haunted houses. It’s not just the movies either. Christian horror author Frank Peretti has topped the New York Times best-seller list. I even spotted a Christian survival horror game available on-line, called Eternal War: Shadows of Light. Whether these spooky offerings are actually any good is beside the point. What is significant is their willingness to sit religious themes on the furniture of horror.
THE NOT-SO-GOOD BOOK
The link between the Church and horror is nothing new – in fact, it’s rather as if horror and Christianity were involved in an exchange programme, and one in which horror has always been keen to pay religion an extended visit. From spooky church graveyard locations to themes of the supernatural and demonic, horror has positively revelled in the ideas and symbols of faith. Yet this idea of the exchange working the other way – with Christians actively venturing into the genre – is perhaps neither as new or as post-modern as we might imagine: the horrific and the holy have been meeting for a long time – in the pages of the Bible itself.
The Christian scriptures are filled with vivid descriptions of violence, sex and monsters; tales of rape, dismemberment, cruelty and gore lurk between the stories of hope and inspiration [see below “Texts of Terror”]. Some might argue that this is not so much the Bible coming on like a horror movie as simply reporting reluctantly on the evil deeds of man. Yet the horror is there, and it runs deep.
Consider Jesus’s teaching. He often spoke in parables, brief stories shared to illustrate a religious or ethical point. Whether he made them up himself or heard them from others is unknown, but something about these tales seemed to resonate with him. But look at what they contain. For example, “The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant” (Matt. 18:21–35) features choking and torture, while “The Parable of the Tenants” (Luke 20:9–19) hinges on a cruel murder.
Then, of course, there’s the final book of the Bible, Revelation, as firm a favourite with horror films as with apocalyptic cultists and scripture-quoting movie serial killers. Author Will Self has described the Book of Revelation as a “sick text ... a portentous horror film.”[1] And he has a point. The book is filled with monsters pursuing and tormenting people. Beasts leave rotting corpses in the streets while others party over them (Rev. 11:7–10); a woman is drunk on the blood of the saints (Rev. 17:6); and the dead are reanimated and thrown into a lake of fire (Rev. 20:12–15). In one of the book’s most disturbing images, a demonic dragon sits between a pregnant woman’s legs, eagerly waiting to devour the baby as soon as it is born (Rev. 12:4). Things become even more sobering when we read Revelation’s first verse. It tells us that this is not the Revelation of the Apostle John, but the Revelation to him. It comes from Jesus.
Now, I’m not suggesting that God’s son is a closet psychopath – these dark and frightening stories are also lit up with threads of hope. But I do want to suggest that in the palette of narrative colours with which he chose to communicate, Jesus seems to have been quite willing to use the darker shades to make his point. The grotesque had, and still does have, the ability to become revelatory. In other words, there is theology in horror.
Yet, not all Christians embrace it. Actually, most don’t – just witness the anti-Halloween stance that many evangelicals adopt. Well-meaning believers hand out tracts and leaflets warning families against the terrible danger they believe Halloween represents: namely, that it’s a doorway to the occult. It’s even common for churches to provide alternative events on Halloween, so that communities can avoid celebrating anything disturbingly spooky. Or consider the uproar emanating from some Christian quarters against such popular entertainments as Buffy, Harry Potter and, more recently, the Twilight saga. There’s a fear that these stories of vampires and wizards might seduce innocent kids into an unhealthy interest in the dark side.
To help make their point, they may well quote Philippians 4:8, which advises believers to think about that which is true, noble, pure and lovely. Yet, this might be to misread the verse in question. While there’s clearly a benefit to contemplating the good, God can hardly be asking us simply to avoid all things unpleasant. If that were true, we’d better not watch the news and we’d certainly need to skip over many verses of the Bible itself. Also, and more crucially, the verse says we must think on that which is true. For Christians, it may well be true that God is pure and noble. Yet isn’t it equally true that, in the same worldview, the supernatural is real and the Devil exists? To not engage with these subjects through debate, study and art would be to present only a half-truth, a partial reality.
I’m not suggesting that Christians, or anyone else for that matter, should feel obliged to watch and engage with horror. Many people simply don’t get it, and that’s fine with me. Yet what about the rest of us who’ve always felt a pull towards all things spooky and macabre, who read strange magazines like Fortean Times and who, on visits to the funfair, always seem to gravitate toward the Ghost Train? Might it not be reasonable to suggest that the themes of horror can offer some unique spiritual insights of their own?
HORROR AND HISTORY
My argument is hardly new. Horror and Christianity have a rich, shared cultural heritage. If we look at folklore, fairytales, campfire stories and urban legends, we find they have all used frightening elements in order to articulate social fears, many of the themes of which derive from or have their basis in Judæo-Christian thought.
In the visual arts, Renaissance painters such as Hieronymus Bosch (see FT264:56–57) demonstrated the vivid connection between religious faith and the horrific imagination. The Bible and the Catholic Church were the driving inspiration behind Bosch’s art, yet many of his more surreal works, such as the right-hand panel of the triptych The Garden of Delights, offer nothing less than an all-out horror show. His paintings are a veritable ‘Where’s Wally?’ of horrific images. Men have arrows rammed into their anuses and fish-headed monsters devour people whole, only to defecate their remains into a pit filled with other people’s vomit. This is horror at its most extreme – and it is informed by religious ideals.
Indeed, as one art historian has written, the 16th century “was a period in the history of Catholic Europe when it seems that no painter’s career could move forward until some graphic scene of martyrdom had been proved as part of his repertoire”. [2] In 1563, the Council of Trent issued an ecumenical decree to artists “encouraging the deliberate depiction of horror”. [3] The hope was to rekindle religious sensibilities by stoking up fear of damnation and hell.
In the following century, Puritan American Protestants didn’t use the visual arts to depict horror for salvation’s sake. Instead, they used their preferred method of communication: the written and preached word. In 1693, the prominent Puritan minister Cotton Mather wrote On Witchcraft: Being the Wonders of the Invisible World. It described, in lurid detail, the horror of the Salem Witch Trials the year before. “Mather’s narrative was an immediate hit – in some ways, an early form of the longed-for Great American Novel; it presented a labyrinthine world of secret dangers, hidden mysteries, surreptitious delights, hapless heroines – in short, a Gothic world.” [4]
The hellfire preachers of the Great Awakening followed in Mather’s footsteps, most famously Jonathan Edwards. He can be described as one of America’s most important theologians, but he also had a predilection for the macabre. As a boy, he had a fascinated loathing for spiders, and in one of his earliest publications, On Spiders, he described them as “little collections” of “corrupting nauseousness”. In his most famous sermon, the still terrifying Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Edwards used the image of the monstrous spider to horrific effect. “The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: His wrath towards you burns like fire.” [5] It’s a little unnerving that Edwards seems to assume we know what it’s like to hold a spider over a flame; I can’t say I’ve ever done it myself.
With such dark themes and linguistic excess, it’s perhaps no surprise to find that the American Puritans cast an influential shadow over revered horror author HP Lovecraft. It’s tempting to suggest that Lovecraft was a sort of theologian himself. He might have been a self-declared atheist, but his Cthulhu Mythos certainly seems at pains to set human history into a cosmological context, albeit a terrifying one.
KEEP TELLING YOURSELF... IT’S NOT ‘ONLY A MOVIE’
Fast forward to 1900, and Christians were already using the new medium of cinema to share the Gospel. Soldiers of the Cross – a potent multi-media mixture of lantern slides, music and film – was directed by Herbert Booth, son of Salvation Army founder William Booth. Audiences sat in Melbourne Town Hall, Australia, watching what might be considered the first Christian horror film – a vivid depiction of the stories of the martyrs, showing St Stephen being stoned to death, Christ in the throes of agony on the cross and Christian women hurling themselves into vats of lime rather than deny their allegiance to the one true God.
The trend for Christians to employ terror in films and novels continued throughout the 20th century. In 1974, Baptist evangelist Estus Pirkle created a low-budget drama-documentary called The Burning Hell (as well as its lurid title it boasted the Cormanesque tagline “20,000 Degrees Fahrenheit and not a drop of water!”). Still available today in multiple languages, the 60-minute film sought to “portray in graphic terms all of the horror of Hell and how to escape its flames”.
The Seventies also saw films like A Thief in the Night (1972) and A Distant Thunder (1978), which in turn led to the wildly successful Left Behind series of the mid-1990s. These films focused on the terrifying subject of the End Times, employing a pre-millennial eschatology where, in the last days, Christians vanish in the rapture and those who are left must take the Mark of the Beast while facing life in a terrifying society ruled by the Anti-Christ and his corrupt government. Such themes can’t help but touch the horror nerve, and come on like a cross between a sermon and a B-movie.
The current surge in Christian-based horror films, novels and Halloween events isn’t a post-modern cultural quirk. We’re not seeing the rise of Christian horror, but rather the resurgence of a largely forgotten tradition.
Yet what should we make of it all? If we have an openness to religious faith, as I do, then we might treat Christianity’s dalliance with horror as a welcome opportunity to explore spiritual ideas. Certainly, for me, growing up with no church background, horror movies became an unexpected doorway into the more hopeful themes of faith.
On the other hand, we could see it as nothing more than a manipulative scare tactic to fill pews, while attempts at modern horror by Christians may leave us more amused and annoyed than afraid. Yet, whatever the case, Christianity’s unique contributions to the literature and cinema of terror can’t help but make the truly great horror films and novels even more frightening. Religion tugs at our shoulder as we leave the cinema and makes some disturbing, important suggestions about the supernatural world, the Devil and the threat of Hell ... that maybe what you just watched is not only a movie. And if that’s true ... well, that really is scary.
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Notes
1 Will Self: “The Revelation of St John”, in Revelations, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2005, p381.
2 Nigel Spivey: Enduring Creation – Art, Pain and Fortitude, University of California Press, 2001, p131.
3 Ibid, p113.
4 Edward J Ingebretsen: Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell, ME Sharpe, New York, 1996, p18.
5 Jonathan Edwards: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Dover, NY, 1999, p228.
TEXTS OF TERROR
As well as inspiration and hope, the Bible has some truly horrific moments. Here’s a small selection...
A thousand men bludgeoned to death with a donkey’s jawbone (Judges 15:15–16).
Victims burned alive (Numbers 16:35; Joshua 7:25; Judges 9:49, 15:6; Daniel 3:22; Matthew 13:49–50).
Parents cannibalise their children (2 Kings 6:28–29).
Cutting off thumbs and toes (Judges 1:6–7).
Decapitation (1 Samuel 17: 51, 31:9; 2 Samuel 16:9, Mark 6:22–29).
Disembowelling and stabbings (Judges 3:21–22; 2 Samuel 2: 23, 3:27, 20:10; 2 Chronicles 21:19; Acts 1:18).
Dismemberment (1 Samuel 15:32–33; Daniel 2:5, 3:29; Judges 19:22–29 – includes gang rape then dismemberment!).
The Leviathan, a fire-breathing sea monster (Job 3:8, 41:1–34; Psalms 74:14, 104:25–26; Isaiah 27:1).
Gouging out of eyes (Judges 16:21).
Hanging (Joshua 10:26; Esther 9:25; Matthew 27:5).
Parents murder their children as a sacrifice (2 Kings 3:27, 16:3, 17:17+31; 21:6).
Choking and torture (Matthew 18:28–35).
