Unlike Justin, I often feel the need to justify my interest in horror. When Marquette University ran a piece to promote my Theology of Horror, a parent wrote the administration to decry my research and teaching. Horror movies, the parent inveighed, fill the viewer’s mind “with sick, twisted, and evil images” and serve only to confuse “our youth on what is right, and what is evil.” A Jesuit priest and theologian should know better than to screen “evil movies filled with horrible, unchristian, and sinful themes” with students in his Theology of Horror course. The claim: in the stygian darkness of the macabre and horrific, no glimmer of divine light can be discerned. The parent’s final plea was to have my course vetted by a committee with a “deep theological background” before it gets offered again.
Incidentally, on the day the email was sent I was elected as department chair. And, yes, Theology of Horror, will be offered in Spring 2025.
I resonate with Justin’s enthusiasm for horror and agree that, approached discerningly, the genre can function as an unorthodox preaeparatio evangelium. At the same time, I share Sebastian’s skepticism of the “idea that the contemporary horror genre is everywhere and always” a good ingress to Christian theology or theological reflection. Indeed, I feel like I wrote Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films as a way to mediate between their positions. Mindful of the word’s double meaning, I think it apt to describe the book as the enchiridion of a Jesuit priest and horror fan: it is both a “handbook” meant to tutor viewers in how to view horror films discerningly and a “blade” to defend the viewer against critics who think horror movies are a celluloid gateway to hell.
Drawing on Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, I want to deepen and expand on what Justin calls the “monstrosity of Christ.” When I teach first-year theology students, I use the four movements of Carroll’s “complex discovery plot” as a framework for understanding the Gospel. Spatial constraints require concision, but I think I can give a sense for how one can be tutored to discern in horror’s depths hints and glimmers of revelatory light. The film critic Robin Wood famously observed that “normality is threatened by the monster.” In his words, deeds, and resurrection, Christ is monstrous because he threatens a normality that preserves and perpetuates sin. In a world accustomed to a sinful status quo, Christ is monstrous because he reveals that we are living in the horror story of history.
Let me start by enumerating the four movements of Carroll’s complex discovery plot:
- Onset: Monster’s presence is announced. Ex. Chrissy’s death in Jaws.
- Discovery: Characters recognize a monstrous presence and try to convince others of the threat it poses. Ex. Brody and Hooper struggle to convince mayor that a great white lurks in the water.
- Confirmation: Characters convinced that mortal danger is at hand. Ex. Alex Kintner’s death.
- Confrontation: Characters confront monster. Ex. “Smile, you son of a bitch!”
When I introduce the complex discovery plot to students, I have them watch the short film Lights Out because it neatly encapsulates the movements in under three minutes:
As she has likely done countless times before, the woman prepares to go to bed by switching off the lights. Normally, she does so without thought. On this night, however, normality is disrupted with the onset of a shadowy presence. What follows is a harried process of discovering and confirming the reality of the presence at it draws nearer. The intimations of danger lead the woman to affix tape to the switch, perhaps an unknowing gesture toward 1 John 1:5, “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” The film climaxes in jump-scare confrontation when the entity and the woman meet face to monstrous face…and the creature plunges them into a darkness from which, we sense, the woman will not escape.
Fans can readily think of other horror films that follow this pattern and, to be sure, that combine these movements in other ways. My pedagogical purpose in using this film is to help students appreciate the underlying logic that animates a horror film. For horror presumes and preys upon our sense of and desire to maintain our sense of “normality.” Horror horrifies because it threatens to sunder the status quo as the monstrous entity endeavors to reconfigure reality and establish some new and unwanted normal. This monstrous incursion and upheaval is, naturally, met with resistance by those accustomed to things being as they are.
Justin is right: “the story of Christ—his incarnation, death and resurrection—provides the archetype of the horror story.… his identity as Logos made flesh is, quite literally, the horror to end all horrors.” Here I side with Justin against John Wilson. Horror is radically incarnational because it treats the finitude and fragility of the flesh with the utmost seriousness. Good horror, for sure, strikes powerful psychological notes; great horror carves those notes into the viewer’s flesh. To flesh (pun!) this out a bit more, let me suggest that Carroll’s way of plotting horror can assist us in discerning more clearly how the Gospel narrates the divine inbreaking of the Logos (Incarnation) who assumes human flesh not to rend and ravage it but, rather, to redeem and restore it. Jesus’s Incarnation, Ministry, and Resurrection reveal and show forth (monstrare: to show) who God is, what God’s dream is for human history, and they make it possible for us to exit the horror story of sin by collaborating with the Spirit to establish God’s Reign on earth. The normality established by sin, through the revelatory and monstrous incursion of God’s Logos, is threatened by a new and gracious order.
Let me start with the Onset of the Incarnation and the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. Contrast the Gabriel’s visitation to Mary (1:26–28) with Rosemary’s impregnation in Rosemary’s Baby. In the Gospel, Mary’s shock and astonishment at learning she was to bear God’s son is met pacifically and her assent; in the movie, Rosemary is offered no choice and is violently turned into a receptacle for Satan’s seed. Simeon celebrates Jesus’s presentation in the Temple by proclaiming, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” (2:34-5). Jesus understood his mission as one of bringing good new to the poor, to proclaiming “release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind” (4:18). In a parodic inversion of the Gospel, the coven celebrates Adrian’s birth—“The year is one!”—as establishing a new order, a new reign that reflects Satan’s power. In the Gospel, God enters history to reconfigure it; in Polanski’s film, the death of God creates an opportunity for Satan to rewrite history in a new and infernal key.
When teaching, I treat Jesus’s life and ministry—especially on his words (parables, teachings) and works (miracles, interactions)—as part of the Discovery phase. We learn who someone is by watching how that person acts and interacts. Or, to cite a medieval axiom, agere sequiter esse: to act follows to be. In A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels, we learn who Freddy Kreuger is by watching him dispatch helpless and, often, hapless teens. Freddy’s (often comical) words and (always) violent works establish him as an entity to be feared. In a way, Freddy’s harrowing presence stands as the photographic negative of Jesus’s hallowing ministry. Jesus’s parables narrate the way outsiders become insiders, the way the excluded are graciously included, the way those who are despised or alienated are being called to communion. His deeds concretely enact the inbreaking of God’s reign, and they issue a prophetic critique to the powers that be: a normality built on oppression, one that perpetuates alienation and estrangement, is not in tune with God’s desire for history. As a type, Freddy acts as an antichrist who illustrates the disfiguration of history caused by sin; Jesus, by contrast, reveals how God works to reconfigure creation according to the pattern of the Logos made flesh.
The Confirmation stage, Carroll writes, “involves the discoverers of, or the believers in, the existence of the monster convincing some other group of the existence of the creature and of the proportions of the mortal danger at hand.” In Jaws, confirmation takes place for the mayor after Alex’s death; in The Devil’s Doorway, the confirmation of supernatural evil happens too late to save Father Thomas from the diabolical nuns. In the Gospels, the crowd cries for the release of Barabbas (Mark 15:7, Matthew 27:16) and Jesus’s crucifixion. In Jesus trial and crucifixion, we see the lengths humans will go to preserve normality, even one configured according to sin’s logic. My book uses The Purge to explicate René Girard’s mimetic theory, and I agree with Justin that “Christ fully revealed the operation of the scapegoat mechanism underlying the archaic sacred. For the first time in human history, the mythical lie—that a single victim was guilty of precipitating a community’s violent mimetic crisis—was exposed.” In a world riven by sin, Jesus cannot but be seen as monstrous because he reveals what it means to be fully human in an inhuman world. In a sense, the crowd saw Jesus rightly: he was, and continues to be, a threat to a sinful way of life. Offered the option to convert or to kill, sinful humanity maintains its homeostasis by extinguishing the One who exposes the darkness at the heart of human culture.
In horror, the Confrontation stage unfolds as a battle between humanity and the monster. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead can be read as a protracted confrontation narrative. A former student once asked, “But, Duns, who are the real monsters in the movie?” Ostensibly, the villains are revenant ghouls with an appetite for human flesh. Yet might not the real monsters be the humans who turn on and betray one another? Perhaps the power of Romero’s film and its epigone stems from its ability to reveal us to ourselves: ghouls and zombies have no choice but to follow their undead instincts, but how often and how easily do we choose to cannibalize one another? In these movies, death begets an endless cycle of death. In the Gospel, the Risen Christ overcomes death and offers a forgiveness that graciously liberates disciples into a new mode of life. Sebastian rightly underscores the shattering moral force of proclaiming that the Risen Christ “unseats the ‘god of this world’ named by Paul — death, the devil and all the human authorities who serve him.” In a world marked by reciprocal violence, in an age when, as Cardinal George is said to have remarked, “everything is permitted but nothing is forgiven,” the way of life offered by the Risen Christ confronts us with a choice: the way of life or the way of death. Zach Parker writes, “the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a catastrophe.” Indeed, it is the eucatastrophe, the great reversal that brings about the breakdown of death through the breakthrough of God’s Reign that disrupts and begins the gracious reconfiguration of sinful human history.
I do not quite agree with Sebastian that Justin underestimates our “appetite for prurience and perversion.” I suggest, instead, that Justin under develops the way Christ’s “monstrosity” functions to reveal in a shattering and disruptive manner the horror story that sin has made of history. Like Justin, Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit saw that “Jesus thrown everything off balance. If He did what He did, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.” The Misfit echoes Friedrich Nietzsche in The Will to Power (aphorism 1052) who also discerns that Jesus “throws everything off balance” and forces a choice between Dionysus and the Crucified, between a way of life that creates victims or a way of life that is concerned for them. We can remain in the horror story of sin and violence or we can surrender everything to follow the one who invites us to live in a new manner.
Christ’s light is monstrous, purging our eyes and enabling them to see around us the ravages of sin and death. Wooed by the call of the Spirit, we must choose: cling to the status quo and preserve a sinful normality or allow grace to liberate us from the horror story in which we live and engraft us into unfolding story of the Triune God who labors in history to make all things new (Revelation 21:5).
Ryan Duns is Associate Professor of Theology at Marquette University. He is the author of Theology of Horror.
Unlike Justin, I often feel the need to justify my interest in horror. When Marquette University ran a piece to promote my Theology of Horror, a parent wrote the administration to decry my research and teaching. Horror movies, the parent inveighed, fill the viewer’s mind “with sick, twisted, and evil images” and serve only to confuse “our youth on what is right, and what is evil.” A Jesuit priest and theologian should know better than to screen “evil movies filled with horrible, unchristian, and sinful themes” with students in his Theology of Horror course. The claim: in the stygian darkness of the macabre and horrific, no glimmer of divine light can be discerned. The parent’s final plea was to have my course vetted by a committee with a “deep theological background” before it gets offered again.
Incidentally, on the day the email was sent I was elected as department chair. And, yes, Theology of Horror, will be offered in Spring 2025.
I resonate with Justin’s enthusiasm for horror and agree that, approached discerningly, the genre can function as an unorthodox preaeparatio evangelium. At the same time, I share Sebastian’s skepticism of the “idea that the contemporary horror genre is everywhere and always” a good ingress to Christian theology or theological reflection. Indeed, I feel like I wrote Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films as a way to mediate between their positions. Mindful of the word’s double meaning, I think it apt to describe the book as the enchiridion of a Jesuit priest and horror fan: it is both a “handbook” meant to tutor viewers in how to view horror films discerningly and a “blade” to defend the viewer against critics who think horror movies are a celluloid gateway to hell.
Drawing on Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, I want to deepen and expand on what Justin calls the “monstrosity of Christ.” When I teach first-year theology students, I use the four movements of Carroll’s “complex discovery plot” as a framework for understanding the Gospel. Spatial constraints require concision, but I think I can give a sense for how one can be tutored to discern in horror’s depths hints and glimmers of revelatory light. The film critic Robin Wood famously observed that “normality is threatened by the monster.” In his words, deeds, and resurrection, Christ is monstrous because he threatens a normality that preserves and perpetuates sin. In a world accustomed to a sinful status quo, Christ is monstrous because he reveals that we are living in the horror story of history.
Let me start by enumerating the four movements of Carroll’s complex discovery plot:
- Onset: Monster’s presence is announced. Ex. Chrissy’s death in Jaws.
- Discovery: Characters recognize a monstrous presence and try to convince others of the threat it poses. Ex. Brody and Hooper struggle to convince mayor that a great white lurks in the water.
- Confirmation: Characters convinced that mortal danger is at hand. Ex. Alex Kintner’s death.
- Confrontation: Characters confront monster. Ex. “Smile, you son of a bitch!”
When I introduce the complex discovery plot to students, I have them watch the short film Lights Out because it neatly encapsulates the movements in under three minutes:
As she has likely done countless times before, the woman prepares to go to bed by switching off the lights. Normally, she does so without thought. On this night, however, normality is disrupted with the onset of a shadowy presence. What follows is a harried process of discovering and confirming the reality of the presence at it draws nearer. The intimations of danger lead the woman to affix tape to the switch, perhaps an unknowing gesture toward 1 John 1:5, “God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.” The film climaxes in jump-scare confrontation when the entity and the woman meet face to monstrous face…and the creature plunges them into a darkness from which, we sense, the woman will not escape.
Fans can readily think of other horror films that follow this pattern and, to be sure, that combine these movements in other ways. My pedagogical purpose in using this film is to help students appreciate the underlying logic that animates a horror film. For horror presumes and preys upon our sense of and desire to maintain our sense of “normality.” Horror horrifies because it threatens to sunder the status quo as the monstrous entity endeavors to reconfigure reality and establish some new and unwanted normal. This monstrous incursion and upheaval is, naturally, met with resistance by those accustomed to things being as they are.
Justin is right: “the story of Christ—his incarnation, death and resurrection—provides the archetype of the horror story.… his identity as Logos made flesh is, quite literally, the horror to end all horrors.” Here I side with Justin against John Wilson. Horror is radically incarnational because it treats the finitude and fragility of the flesh with the utmost seriousness. Good horror, for sure, strikes powerful psychological notes; great horror carves those notes into the viewer’s flesh. To flesh (pun!) this out a bit more, let me suggest that Carroll’s way of plotting horror can assist us in discerning more clearly how the Gospel narrates the divine inbreaking of the Logos (Incarnation) who assumes human flesh not to rend and ravage it but, rather, to redeem and restore it. Jesus’s Incarnation, Ministry, and Resurrection reveal and show forth (monstrare: to show) who God is, what God’s dream is for human history, and they make it possible for us to exit the horror story of sin by collaborating with the Spirit to establish God’s Reign on earth. The normality established by sin, through the revelatory and monstrous incursion of God’s Logos, is threatened by a new and gracious order.
Let me start with the Onset of the Incarnation and the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. Contrast the Gabriel’s visitation to Mary (1:26–28) with Rosemary’s impregnation in Rosemary’s Baby. In the Gospel, Mary’s shock and astonishment at learning she was to bear God’s son is met pacifically and her assent; in the movie, Rosemary is offered no choice and is violently turned into a receptacle for Satan’s seed. Simeon celebrates Jesus’s presentation in the Temple by proclaiming, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed” (2:34-5). Jesus understood his mission as one of bringing good new to the poor, to proclaiming “release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind” (4:18). In a parodic inversion of the Gospel, the coven celebrates Adrian’s birth—“The year is one!”—as establishing a new order, a new reign that reflects Satan’s power. In the Gospel, God enters history to reconfigure it; in Polanski’s film, the death of God creates an opportunity for Satan to rewrite history in a new and infernal key.
When teaching, I treat Jesus’s life and ministry—especially on his words (parables, teachings) and works (miracles, interactions)—as part of the Discovery phase. We learn who someone is by watching how that person acts and interacts. Or, to cite a medieval axiom, agere sequiter esse: to act follows to be. In A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels, we learn who Freddy Kreuger is by watching him dispatch helpless and, often, hapless teens. Freddy’s (often comical) words and (always) violent works establish him as an entity to be feared. In a way, Freddy’s harrowing presence stands as the photographic negative of Jesus’s hallowing ministry. Jesus’s parables narrate the way outsiders become insiders, the way the excluded are graciously included, the way those who are despised or alienated are being called to communion. His deeds concretely enact the inbreaking of God’s reign, and they issue a prophetic critique to the powers that be: a normality built on oppression, one that perpetuates alienation and estrangement, is not in tune with God’s desire for history. As a type, Freddy acts as an antichrist who illustrates the disfiguration of history caused by sin; Jesus, by contrast, reveals how God works to reconfigure creation according to the pattern of the Logos made flesh.
The Confirmation stage, Carroll writes, “involves the discoverers of, or the believers in, the existence of the monster convincing some other group of the existence of the creature and of the proportions of the mortal danger at hand.” In Jaws, confirmation takes place for the mayor after Alex’s death; in The Devil’s Doorway, the confirmation of supernatural evil happens too late to save Father Thomas from the diabolical nuns. In the Gospels, the crowd cries for the release of Barabbas (Mark 15:7, Matthew 27:16) and Jesus’s crucifixion. In Jesus trial and crucifixion, we see the lengths humans will go to preserve normality, even one configured according to sin’s logic. My book uses The Purge to explicate René Girard’s mimetic theory, and I agree with Justin that “Christ fully revealed the operation of the scapegoat mechanism underlying the archaic sacred. For the first time in human history, the mythical lie—that a single victim was guilty of precipitating a community’s violent mimetic crisis—was exposed.” In a world riven by sin, Jesus cannot but be seen as monstrous because he reveals what it means to be fully human in an inhuman world. In a sense, the crowd saw Jesus rightly: he was, and continues to be, a threat to a sinful way of life. Offered the option to convert or to kill, sinful humanity maintains its homeostasis by extinguishing the One who exposes the darkness at the heart of human culture.
In horror, the Confrontation stage unfolds as a battle between humanity and the monster. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead can be read as a protracted confrontation narrative. A former student once asked, “But, Duns, who are the real monsters in the movie?” Ostensibly, the villains are revenant ghouls with an appetite for human flesh. Yet might not the real monsters be the humans who turn on and betray one another? Perhaps the power of Romero’s film and its epigone stems from its ability to reveal us to ourselves: ghouls and zombies have no choice but to follow their undead instincts, but how often and how easily do we choose to cannibalize one another? In these movies, death begets an endless cycle of death. In the Gospel, the Risen Christ overcomes death and offers a forgiveness that graciously liberates disciples into a new mode of life. Sebastian rightly underscores the shattering moral force of proclaiming that the Risen Christ “unseats the ‘god of this world’ named by Paul — death, the devil and all the human authorities who serve him.” In a world marked by reciprocal violence, in an age when, as Cardinal George is said to have remarked, “everything is permitted but nothing is forgiven,” the way of life offered by the Risen Christ confronts us with a choice: the way of life or the way of death. Zach Parker writes, “the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a catastrophe.” Indeed, it is the eucatastrophe, the great reversal that brings about the breakdown of death through the breakthrough of God’s Reign that disrupts and begins the gracious reconfiguration of sinful human history.
I do not quite agree with Sebastian that Justin underestimates our “appetite for prurience and perversion.” I suggest, instead, that Justin under develops the way Christ’s “monstrosity” functions to reveal in a shattering and disruptive manner the horror story that sin has made of history. Like Justin, Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit saw that “Jesus thrown everything off balance. If He did what He did, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.” The Misfit echoes Friedrich Nietzsche in The Will to Power (aphorism 1052) who also discerns that Jesus “throws everything off balance” and forces a choice between Dionysus and the Crucified, between a way of life that creates victims or a way of life that is concerned for them. We can remain in the horror story of sin and violence or we can surrender everything to follow the one who invites us to live in a new manner.
Christ’s light is monstrous, purging our eyes and enabling them to see around us the ravages of sin and death. Wooed by the call of the Spirit, we must choose: cling to the status quo and preserve a sinful normality or allow grace to liberate us from the horror story in which we live and engraft us into unfolding story of the Triune God who labors in history to make all things new (Revelation 21:5).
Ryan Duns is Associate Professor of Theology at Marquette University. He is the author of Theology of Horror.
-->