Justin Lee’s defence of the horror genre was certainly compelling — I was especially persuaded by the idea of a sort of cosmic vertigo in which sublime horror is inverted into beatific ecstasy. As Marlow wrote, “this is not hell, nor are we out of it” — one man’s hell is another’s purgatory, the agony of creation is in the final event transmuted, by the divine alchemist’s refining fire, into unalloyed joy.
As a defence of the theological significance of horror and holy terror, I have great admiration for the argument and in large part find myself in furious agreement. There is a wonderful line from Thomas De Quincey that Lee’s essay recalled to me: “The horror of life mixed itself already in earliest youth with the heavenly sweetness of life…without a basis of the dreadful there is no perfect rapture. It is in part through the sorrow of life, growing out of dark events, that this basis of awe and solemn darkness slowly accumulates.”
That the feeling of horror might have a proper role in Christian theology should be uncontroversial. Where I find myself less convinced is the idea that the contemporary horror genre is everywhere and always a good representative of it. There’s a temptation, with genres we personally enjoy, to try and defend them by elevating them to a spiritual and moral plane beyond what the genre can really bear.
We can certainly find something of holy awe and terror in Flannery O’Connor, and perhaps too (on the strength of the quoted passages) in some of the works of Stephen King. But how does The Texas Chain saw Massacre bring us closer to God? A group of attractive young people are horrifically dismembered by a group of grotesque rednecks. That’s it. That’s the plot. Let’s try another — the Saw franchise, in which individuals are imprisoned and forced to perform grotesque acts of torture and mutilation on themeselves and one another. Or how about The Human Centipede in which abducted tourists are stitched together, mouth to anus, by a mad surgeon? This great work of art was inspired, apparently, by a joke — oh and the experiments of Joseph Mengle.
I’m a tremendous fan of horror, but it would be impossible to defend much of the genre’s content on the basis that it is a gateway to divine inspiration. It would also be folly to pretend that it did not contain much that should engage the criticism and concern of Christians worried about the direction of our culture.
One line, especially, stood out from Lee’s piece to me as objectionable: “The intensification of horror preserves the ethical effects of tragedy for audiences whose moral nerve-endings have been deadened by secularization and non-stop postmodern diversions.” Isn’t part of the reason that modern audiences are so “deadened” to finding deeper moral and spiritual truths in art precisely because they are desensitised by the sex, violence, profanity and cynicism that pervades so much of modern culture? Is the solution to a person deafened by a loud noise, or dazzled by a bright light to blast loud music at them and shine a torch in their eyes? Or do we put them in a quiet, dark room to recover?
Lee has a high opinion of horror audiences, and it seems, human nature in general. But he seems to drastically underestimate our appetite for prurience and perversion. At one point he suggests that “katharsis cannot be achieved by watching the evening news. The idea of experiencing katharsis by observing real, raw human suffering is not only morally repugnant, it is psychologically implausible.” Morally repugnant, certainly — but psychologically implausible? It is by no means clear, in a world of reality TV, tabloid journalism, social media pile-ons and YouTube videos of beheadings, that people are making anything like such a clear cut division between news and entertainment.
It would be dishonest and disingenuous to pretend that there are not people watching horror for the same reasons they watch porn, street fights or the nightly news. People enjoy the “shock” of extreme images, either for the negative visceral thrill, or in some cases, out of actual sadism or sadomasochism. Part of the purpose of art should be to take such impulses, and correct, challenge or subvert them — but a significant portion of horror sets out to do the opposite (as the “slasher” film exemplifies).
The emphasis on shock alone is also disappointing because, of course, the greatest horror films are all about building tension. I recently rewatched the fantastic Japanese horror classic The Ring, and was struck by its profound stillness. Scenes are full of echoing spaces and silences. Every shot is luminously beautiful. Horror is properly at its most religious in its silences.
Horror, terror, suspense and even “shock” have their place in art, but our ability to find light in the darkest of material is dependent on having a discerning and subtle mind — and properly habituated tastes and morals. Lee is able to find the profound in horror movies, but is the average, spiritually incurious person more likely to be awakened to higher moral and religious truth by watching Stephen King’s It (great film though it is), or by watching It’s a Wonderful Life?
That isn’t because It doesn’t have great humanising messages of its own, but because a jaded, desensitised audience can far more easily come away with only “this was a scary movie about clowns”. The more shocking the material, the more easily the message is lost behind cinematic thrill seeking.
The problem goes deeper than that however — even if we accept that horror is imparting a valuable message to at least some of its more discerning audience, what exactly is the message? Reading Lee you might think horror was simply a royal road to revelation. But much of the horror genre has a very different message to that of the Bible, however scary you happen to find “Biblically accurate angels”.
Lee’s defence of horror draws on the notion of the “sublime”, that emerges especially in 19th century German philosophy. Whilst this is certainly a religious feeling, it is not always one consonant with Christian orthodoxy. An important element, for this dark romantic ideal, is the idea that nature, and the cosmos, is inhuman and incomprehensible. Goethe’s Faust summons the spirit of the Earth but is unable to master or understand it. Despairing of ever attaining true knowledge of reality, he attempts suicide and makes a deal with the devil. Goethe was a considerable influence not only on Lord Byron, but also on Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution brought into the Western imagination the disturbing notion that man’s creation emerges from a chaotic darkness of matter, rather than the perfection of the divine mind.
This idea of a perversely inhuman human origin also drives the ideas of Freud and Jeung, and the notion of the subconscious. This explicitly post-Christian dark materialism is at the root of much of the modern horror genre. Its most famous exponent is HP Lovecraft, whose “cosmic horror” imagines a bleak, antagonistic universe inhabited by monstrous, inhuman beings. Our sanity and our reason are frail, limited things, easily destroyed by the “otherness” of reality.
There is, of course, a Christian tradition of horror writing, well founded in both the earlier Gothic genre, and the ghost story. MR James, an Anglican clergyman, embodies this tendency. Though his stories may sometimes end in horror and catastrophe, they tend towards a “resolution”; an explanation, however unsettling, which points towards an underlying rational order.
Though both Christian and post-Christian horror writers may deal with exactly the same material (Arthur Machen for example writes about many of the same ideas and tropes as Lovecraft, as does MR James), they do so with subtly but substantially different implications. We may see human bodies and natures mutilated, distorted, subverted — but our horror derives from the knowledge that man is made in the image of God, that we are witnessing not only cruelty, but blasphemy. On the other hand, post-Christian horror imagines a universe in which there are devils but no angels, hell and no heaven, anti-Christ without Christ
A writer like King hovers between these two traditions. There are emotional and psychological explanations and moral narrative resolutions aplenty in works like It, but there is no ultimate metaphysical framework for who or what Pennywise is — he comes from an alternative universe, but this just further begs the question. The encounter, meanwhile with “Maturin” the turtle that created the universe, seems to point towards crude Jungian allegory, not to mention the atheistic trope of “it’s turtles all the way down”.
Some modern horror is explicitly Christian, as with The Exorcist, but it would be vain to pretend that films like Hellraiser or Alien are not set in an explicitly non-Christian reality. Whether interdimensional or extraterrestrial, the monsters involved are aimed squarely at Christian theological anthropology — humans are not the stewards of creation, they are not made in the image of God, they are frail fleshly things to be used, devoured and discarded by more powerful beings.
Much horror, of course, is in the same sort of metaphysically ambiguous territory as King. In the world of Suspiria three terrible witches destroy young lives — are they evil beings in a Christian cosmos? Or are the women, — described as the “three sorrows” — like the fates in paganism, agents of an impersonal reality? Rosemary’s Baby is a film about the Antichrist, but God doesn’t seem to be around much, and Rosemary ends the film seemingly reconciled to her demonic child.
As a genre horror reflects just the same confusions that are everywhere in our culture about the status of Christian truth. Some examples, in print and on screen, may lead towards God, but plenty seem to travel in the other direction. In elevating horror as a whole to an anticipation of the divine, we are perhaps missing a rather obvious trick.
Perhaps the strongest defence of the genre is not that it inspires spiritual yearning, but rather its power to criticise and interrogate modern culture. Much horror has a healthy, unreconstructed moralism about it — adulterers, deadbeat parents, promiscuous teens and corrupt businessmen all get gloriously disproportionate and grisly punishments. Beyond this sort of rough justice, the best horror films expose the dystopian potential of unquestioned habits and technologies. In Videodrome, Cronenberg depicts, in the most vicious and revolting terms, what we are really “doing” with all the screens in our lives. Snuff movies are transmitted by malevolently sentient TV sets, the protagonist becomes erotically obsessed with them through sexually explicit visions, and ends up merging with the new technology, killing himself whilst staring at a screen proclaiming “long live the new flesh”. 40 years ago, long before Facebook, let alone TikTok, horror exposed the sexualising, mimetic, and transhumanist potential of digital media.
The purpose of shock can, in the right context, be about opening us to transcendence, but a better general defence of its use in horror is to confront us with the reality of sin and evil in our own lives and culture. The “monstrosity of Christ” is, indeed, about the conjunction of man and God in a single person. But it is no less about the monstrosity of the passion itself — that God might suffer as a man, that humanity might put God himself to trial and death.
Lee describes with some force and insight the moment of salvific inversion, but he leaves out the moral force of it: in dying at the hands of a human judge, and rising again, Christ unseats the “god of this world” named by Paul — death, the devil and all the human authorities who serve him. This is certainly horror, indeed cosmic horror, but a powerful element of the horror is the horror of evil, and, like with post-Christian horror, a universe ruled by evil. What post-Christian horror misses, is the successful rebellion against evil, of the master returning to his house, of God’s triumph in both time and eternity.
Sebastian Milbank is Executive Editor of The Critic.
Justin Lee’s defence of the horror genre was certainly compelling — I was especially persuaded by the idea of a sort of cosmic vertigo in which sublime horror is inverted into beatific ecstasy. As Marlow wrote, “this is not hell, nor are we out of it” — one man’s hell is another’s purgatory, the agony of creation is in the final event transmuted, by the divine alchemist’s refining fire, into unalloyed joy.
As a defence of the theological significance of horror and holy terror, I have great admiration for the argument and in large part find myself in furious agreement. There is a wonderful line from Thomas De Quincey that Lee’s essay recalled to me: “The horror of life mixed itself already in earliest youth with the heavenly sweetness of life…without a basis of the dreadful there is no perfect rapture. It is in part through the sorrow of life, growing out of dark events, that this basis of awe and solemn darkness slowly accumulates.”
That the feeling of horror might have a proper role in Christian theology should be uncontroversial. Where I find myself less convinced is the idea that the contemporary horror genre is everywhere and always a good representative of it. There’s a temptation, with genres we personally enjoy, to try and defend them by elevating them to a spiritual and moral plane beyond what the genre can really bear.
We can certainly find something of holy awe and terror in Flannery O'Connor, and perhaps too (on the strength of the quoted passages) in some of the works of Stephen King. But how does The Texas Chain saw Massacre bring us closer to God? A group of attractive young people are horrifically dismembered by a group of grotesque rednecks. That’s it. That’s the plot. Let’s try another — the Saw franchise, in which individuals are imprisoned and forced to perform grotesque acts of torture and mutilation on themeselves and one another. Or how about The Human Centipede in which abducted tourists are stitched together, mouth to anus, by a mad surgeon? This great work of art was inspired, apparently, by a joke — oh and the experiments of Joseph Mengle.
I’m a tremendous fan of horror, but it would be impossible to defend much of the genre’s content on the basis that it is a gateway to divine inspiration. It would also be folly to pretend that it did not contain much that should engage the criticism and concern of Christians worried about the direction of our culture.
One line, especially, stood out from Lee’s piece to me as objectionable: “The intensification of horror preserves the ethical effects of tragedy for audiences whose moral nerve-endings have been deadened by secularization and non-stop postmodern diversions.” Isn’t part of the reason that modern audiences are so “deadened” to finding deeper moral and spiritual truths in art precisely because they are desensitised by the sex, violence, profanity and cynicism that pervades so much of modern culture? Is the solution to a person deafened by a loud noise, or dazzled by a bright light to blast loud music at them and shine a torch in their eyes? Or do we put them in a quiet, dark room to recover?
Lee has a high opinion of horror audiences, and it seems, human nature in general. But he seems to drastically underestimate our appetite for prurience and perversion. At one point he suggests that “katharsis cannot be achieved by watching the evening news. The idea of experiencing katharsis by observing real, raw human suffering is not only morally repugnant, it is psychologically implausible.” Morally repugnant, certainly — but psychologically implausible? It is by no means clear, in a world of reality TV, tabloid journalism, social media pile-ons and YouTube videos of beheadings, that people are making anything like such a clear cut division between news and entertainment.
It would be dishonest and disingenuous to pretend that there are not people watching horror for the same reasons they watch porn, street fights or the nightly news. People enjoy the “shock” of extreme images, either for the negative visceral thrill, or in some cases, out of actual sadism or sadomasochism. Part of the purpose of art should be to take such impulses, and correct, challenge or subvert them — but a significant portion of horror sets out to do the opposite (as the “slasher” film exemplifies).
The emphasis on shock alone is also disappointing because, of course, the greatest horror films are all about building tension. I recently rewatched the fantastic Japanese horror classic The Ring, and was struck by its profound stillness. Scenes are full of echoing spaces and silences. Every shot is luminously beautiful. Horror is properly at its most religious in its silences.
Horror, terror, suspense and even “shock” have their place in art, but our ability to find light in the darkest of material is dependent on having a discerning and subtle mind — and properly habituated tastes and morals. Lee is able to find the profound in horror movies, but is the average, spiritually incurious person more likely to be awakened to higher moral and religious truth by watching Stephen King’s It (great film though it is), or by watching It’s a Wonderful Life?
That isn’t because It doesn’t have great humanising messages of its own, but because a jaded, desensitised audience can far more easily come away with only “this was a scary movie about clowns”. The more shocking the material, the more easily the message is lost behind cinematic thrill seeking.
The problem goes deeper than that however — even if we accept that horror is imparting a valuable message to at least some of its more discerning audience, what exactly is the message? Reading Lee you might think horror was simply a royal road to revelation. But much of the horror genre has a very different message to that of the Bible, however scary you happen to find “Biblically accurate angels”.
Lee’s defence of horror draws on the notion of the “sublime”, that emerges especially in 19th century German philosophy. Whilst this is certainly a religious feeling, it is not always one consonant with Christian orthodoxy. An important element, for this dark romantic ideal, is the idea that nature, and the cosmos, is inhuman and incomprehensible. Goethe’s Faust summons the spirit of the Earth but is unable to master or understand it. Despairing of ever attaining true knowledge of reality, he attempts suicide and makes a deal with the devil. Goethe was a considerable influence not only on Lord Byron, but also on Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution brought into the Western imagination the disturbing notion that man’s creation emerges from a chaotic darkness of matter, rather than the perfection of the divine mind.
This idea of a perversely inhuman human origin also drives the ideas of Freud and Jeung, and the notion of the subconscious. This explicitly post-Christian dark materialism is at the root of much of the modern horror genre. Its most famous exponent is HP Lovecraft, whose “cosmic horror” imagines a bleak, antagonistic universe inhabited by monstrous, inhuman beings. Our sanity and our reason are frail, limited things, easily destroyed by the “otherness” of reality.
There is, of course, a Christian tradition of horror writing, well founded in both the earlier Gothic genre, and the ghost story. MR James, an Anglican clergyman, embodies this tendency. Though his stories may sometimes end in horror and catastrophe, they tend towards a “resolution”; an explanation, however unsettling, which points towards an underlying rational order.
Though both Christian and post-Christian horror writers may deal with exactly the same material (Arthur Machen for example writes about many of the same ideas and tropes as Lovecraft, as does MR James), they do so with subtly but substantially different implications. We may see human bodies and natures mutilated, distorted, subverted — but our horror derives from the knowledge that man is made in the image of God, that we are witnessing not only cruelty, but blasphemy. On the other hand, post-Christian horror imagines a universe in which there are devils but no angels, hell and no heaven, anti-Christ without Christ
A writer like King hovers between these two traditions. There are emotional and psychological explanations and moral narrative resolutions aplenty in works like It, but there is no ultimate metaphysical framework for who or what Pennywise is — he comes from an alternative universe, but this just further begs the question. The encounter, meanwhile with “Maturin” the turtle that created the universe, seems to point towards crude Jungian allegory, not to mention the atheistic trope of “it’s turtles all the way down”.
Some modern horror is explicitly Christian, as with The Exorcist, but it would be vain to pretend that films like Hellraiser or Alien are not set in an explicitly non-Christian reality. Whether interdimensional or extraterrestrial, the monsters involved are aimed squarely at Christian theological anthropology — humans are not the stewards of creation, they are not made in the image of God, they are frail fleshly things to be used, devoured and discarded by more powerful beings.
Much horror, of course, is in the same sort of metaphysically ambiguous territory as King. In the world of Suspiria three terrible witches destroy young lives — are they evil beings in a Christian cosmos? Or are the women, — described as the “three sorrows” — like the fates in paganism, agents of an impersonal reality? Rosemary’s Baby is a film about the Antichrist, but God doesn’t seem to be around much, and Rosemary ends the film seemingly reconciled to her demonic child.
As a genre horror reflects just the same confusions that are everywhere in our culture about the status of Christian truth. Some examples, in print and on screen, may lead towards God, but plenty seem to travel in the other direction. In elevating horror as a whole to an anticipation of the divine, we are perhaps missing a rather obvious trick.
Perhaps the strongest defence of the genre is not that it inspires spiritual yearning, but rather its power to criticise and interrogate modern culture. Much horror has a healthy, unreconstructed moralism about it — adulterers, deadbeat parents, promiscuous teens and corrupt businessmen all get gloriously disproportionate and grisly punishments. Beyond this sort of rough justice, the best horror films expose the dystopian potential of unquestioned habits and technologies. In Videodrome, Cronenberg depicts, in the most vicious and revolting terms, what we are really “doing” with all the screens in our lives. Snuff movies are transmitted by malevolently sentient TV sets, the protagonist becomes erotically obsessed with them through sexually explicit visions, and ends up merging with the new technology, killing himself whilst staring at a screen proclaiming “long live the new flesh”. 40 years ago, long before Facebook, let alone TikTok, horror exposed the sexualising, mimetic, and transhumanist potential of digital media.
The purpose of shock can, in the right context, be about opening us to transcendence, but a better general defence of its use in horror is to confront us with the reality of sin and evil in our own lives and culture. The “monstrosity of Christ” is, indeed, about the conjunction of man and God in a single person. But it is no less about the monstrosity of the passion itself — that God might suffer as a man, that humanity might put God himself to trial and death.
Lee describes with some force and insight the moment of salvific inversion, but he leaves out the moral force of it: in dying at the hands of a human judge, and rising again, Christ unseats the “god of this world” named by Paul — death, the devil and all the human authorities who serve him. This is certainly horror, indeed cosmic horror, but a powerful element of the horror is the horror of evil, and, like with post-Christian horror, a universe ruled by evil. What post-Christian horror misses, is the successful rebellion against evil, of the master returning to his house, of God’s triumph in both time and eternity.
Sebastian Milbank is Executive Editor of The Critic.
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