No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.
—Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles

Stephen King has quipped throughout his career, “People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy … and I keep it in a jar on my desk.” He borrowed the joke from Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, but the line would ring true coming from virtually any writer of horror fiction, and even truer from horror filmmakers. We simply delight in making people squirm.

When I try this or a similar line on friends and acquaintances who probe my motives for writing horror as a Christian, the reception is at best amused dissatisfaction. At worst, some philistine will deem me deficient in the sanctification department, in which case I tell them to take it up with the author of that superlative horror story, The Apocalypse of St. John.

I feel little need to justify my enjoyment of the horror genre, or my own literary experiments within it. Since I was a small boy, I have always loved setting a toad on the shoulder of an unsuspecting victim. In elementary school, I would mix together all the food on my lunch tray until it resembled the toxic runoff of an industrial dump site, and then chew with my mouth open in front of dismayed female classmates. If I could have survived putting my beating heart into a Ball jar, I would have taken it to show-and-tell.

My first formative experience with the genre came when I was nine years old. Aliens (1986) was playing on network television one evening and I had been left alone with the remote. I remember being so terrified by the buildups to the jump-scares that I had to change the channel, count to ten, and flip back mid-action. The tension of anticipation was too much for me, but I had fallen in love with the monster at first sight. The xenomorph was pure, alluring mystery. A creature of coherent contradictions: radically inhuman and yet retaining the genetic imprint of its human host; a soulless animal that somehow possessed manlike cunning; its skeleton impossibly both endo- and exo-, violating the basic categories of inside and outside; the feminine sleekness of its dark body challenged by an elongated, curving skull that even at age nine I knew to be phallic. That is to say, it was wrong—but wrong in a way that was self-evidently right.

I began drawing xenomorphs in the margins of my homework, unleashing them in macabre landscapes peopled by impaled corpses (an image I stole from a stage in Mortal Kombat II). It was no small mercy that this was several years before Columbine; otherwise I’d have been fast-tracked to a therapist’s couch, or worse.

My evangelical parents decided horror was off-limits. This only increased my fascination. When they’d take me to Blockbuster to pick out movies, I’d sneak off to the horror aisle to read the summaries on the backs of VHS covers, and make up my own stories as if the marketing scripts and images were prompts. Sometimes, a single parental “No” can determine the course of a child’s life. In horror I had found the most loathsome toad imaginable, and there would be no stopping me from setting it on as many shoulders as I could manage.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that my love for the genre was from the first a matter of visceral fun. And if it weren’t still fun, I wouldn’t write or consume it. But it is much more than mere fun. Rightly understood, horror, like tragedy, is a necessary genre. It is also a profoundly Christian genre, in both its genealogy and the phenomenological effects it creates for its audience. Although horror hooked me for reasons I acknowledge without embarrassment to be puerile, it is a genre all intelligent Christians should wrestle with, for it reveals, in often unforgettable fashion, truths about human existence and our relation to the divine that so pervade our lives as to be normally invisible.

My apologia for the genre consists of five interconnected theses:

1. Horror, as emotion and event, is intrinsic to the human condition and therefore worthy of concentrated artistic expression.
2. Tragedy is so essential a genre that the gospel cannot be articulated without its foil; and many of the best horror stories function as tragedy on steroids for modern audiences with deadened moral senses. Even more than tragedy, horror destabilizes the “I” of the subject through a radical confrontation with the Other—and with otherness as such—that reveals the Other as the very ground of one’s subjectivity. The ethical implications are profound, and the experience can operate as praeparatio evangelium.
3. All true art is incarnational, but this is especially true of horror, whose effects require a special fidelity to representing reality.
4. Horror provides an entry into comprehending the paradox of the Incarnation, what John Milbank and others have described as “The Monstrosity of Christ.”
5. Horror, although colored by the Fall, is the necessary and proper disposition of the rational mind of the finite human creature as it stands before the immensity of the Creator. We will even experience horror in heaven—as ecstasy.

Defining Horror

“I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud. ”
—Stephen King, Danse Macabre

The casual skeptic of the horror genre is fond of asking, “Why should I subject myself to horrifying films or books when I can get my fill by watching the evening news?” What he invariably mistakes for a rhetorical mic-drop is really just unserious question-begging. No one forgoes romantic dramas because real life already features enough sex and conflict.

The question conceals a normative judgment against the horror genre, transposing the evil that so often attends real-life “horrors” onto their artistic counterparts, as if enjoying John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) were analogous to enjoying news of a murder spree. The same judgment is sometimes made against westerns, crime thrillers, and other violent genres; but never with the vehemence reserved for horror. Even horror stories that lack depictions of violence are deemed morally suspect. This is because the emotional state of horror itself is presumed to indicate the negative moral valence of its object, and that to evoke the emotion as an artist or to enjoy it as a viewer is to participate in the object’s evil.

But this is a category error. Certain emotions are proper to certain objects of experience, which may possess a moral status, but that status must be evaluated independently of emotions. Even in common usage, objects that “horrify” are often morally neutral. One is “horrified” by the sight of a slick rat emerging from a drainpipe; by the delight one’s toddler takes in filling his diaper in front of guests; by the anonymous immensity of the crowd in Times Square on New Years Eve; by the knowledge that regions of the ocean too deep for light to penetrate nonetheless teem with life; by the unknowability of what lies beyond the event horizon of a black hole.

While beings and events that horrify are not for that reason necessarily evil, neither are they ordinary objects of experience. And because we recognize that ordinary experiences are worthy of artistic representation and elevation (e.g., in domestic realism), we must concede that extraordinary beings and events are at least as worthy, especially when they present themselves to consciousness in ways that helps us to make sense of conscious experience as such. As will be shown below, nothing does this more effectively than beings and events that horrify.

What, then, does it mean to be horrified? How should we define “horror”?

The Latin root, horrēre, means “to bristle,” as when one’s hair stands on end, or “to shudder,” “to tremble”—physiological responses to fear or disgust. Although something of its original physicality endures in common usage, the word’s connotations are so profuse that its denotative significance is generally obscured. In critical discourse, however, the meaning of “horror” has been retained and refined. It is a recurrent sub-theme in phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and even cultural anthropology, often appearing under the guise of investigations into alterity, liminality, the uncanny, the abject, the Other.

One of the fullest treatments is Nöel Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, which locates the emotion’s essence in our inability to assimilate an object of experience into given, culturally determined systems of symbolic meaning. For example, my affection for toads and other creeping things notwithstanding, I loathe spiders and, thanks to the givens of my experience as an American, I do not recognize them as food; thus, my revulsion at the sight of a plate of fried tarantulas in a Cambodian marketplace could justly be described as horror. Likewise, the blurring of categories can be horrific. This explains what’s horrifying in a creature like Nosferatu: neither male nor female, neither living nor dead, both human and inhuman, its visceral wrongness threatens to undo our readymade schemata.

Carroll names the emotion one experiences when encountering a monster like Nosferatu in film or fiction “art-horror.” A cognitivist, Carroll understands “art-horror” to be an occurrent, rather than dispositional, emotional state, “in which some physically abnormal state of felt agitation has been caused by the subject’s cognitive construal and evaluation of his/her situation.” The object that art-horrifies, he argues, must be construed as both threatening and impure. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s classic study Purity and Danger, Carroll characterizes an object or being as “impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, incomplete, or formless.”

For Carroll, art-horror monsters are a species of the genus “monsters,” which he defines as “beings that do not exist according to the lights of contemporary science.” Monsters “are unnatural relative to a culture’s conceptual scheme of nature. They do not fit the scheme; they violate it. Thus, monsters are not only physically threatening; they are cognitively threatening. They are threats to common knowledge. Undoubtedly, it is in virtue of this cognitive threat that not only are horrific monsters referred to as impossible, but also that they tend to render those who encounter them insane, mad, deranged, and so on.”

A perfect example is Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the supernatural villain of Stephen King’s novel IT. Near the end of the opening sequence, Georgie, a young boy, loses his paper boat down a storm drain. When he tries to retrieve it, he discovers the affable Pennywise watching him from behind the grate. Like the viewer, Georgie is familiar with storm drains and clowns; while they might give us the creeps, they aren’t horrifying. But we have never seen a clown in a storm drain before, and we recognize the wrongness of the conjunction immediately.

“Storm bleeeew me away,” Pennywise the Dancing Clown said. “It blew the whole circus away. Can you smell the circus, Georgie?”

George leaned forward. Suddenly he could smell peanuts! Hot roasted peanuts! And vinegar! The white kind you put on your French fries through a hole in the cap! He could smell cotton candy and frying doughboys and the faint but thunderous odor of wild-animal shit. He could smell the cheery aroma of midway sawdust. And yet…

And yet under it all was the smell of flood and decomposing leaves and dark stormdrain shadows. That smell was wet and rotten. The cellar-smell.

Perhaps we don’t quite notice when the hair on the back of our necks starts to bristle, but by the time Georgie smells peanuts rivaling the drain’s odor of sodden decay, we are properly horrified.

Pennywise is an interesting case. According to Carroll, It “is a kind of categorically contradictory creature raised to a higher level. For It is a monster that can change into any other monster, those other monsters already being categorically transgressive.” But, at least in the novel, Pennywise is much more than that: It is a shapeshifter only as experienced by Its victims. As the novel’s heroes discover, in Its own being, Pennywise is a cosmic horror, the impurity and threat of which are inescapably metaphysical. This presents a problem for Carroll’s analysis, which, in its rigorous materialism, narrowly construes impurity and downplays the idea that events can horrify.

“Category errors and logical paradoxes, though they may horrify philosophers, are not normally regarded as impure. But neither do they belong to the domain of ‘objects and entities.’ For the purpose of analyzing art-horror, the domain of objects that are to be assessed in terms of impurity are beings. Indeed, they are a special sort of beings, viz., monsters.”

Carroll’s perspective makes it impossible to explain what makes Pennywise so superlative a cognitive threat: the blurring of specific ontic categories. For It is not merely a monstrous being but also a place and a process, “the Dead Lights,” a hell that preserves its victims in unending conscious torment. To know the Dead Lights is to have one’s subjectivity whittled down until only horror remains, a horror upon which horror feasts.

It is simply not true that logical paradoxes only horrify philosophers; regular people are just more likely to encounter them outside of textbooks. Paradoxes are ubiquitous in human experience, and, because some paradoxes transcend the bounds of discrete cultures—are, indeed, universal—they are capable of inspiring horror deeper than that evoked by the wrongness of mere culturally-bounded impurity.

This deeper horror is more than an emotional state; it involves a kind of knowing. Or, better: it presupposes a direct, unmediated knowledge of metaphysical reality. We all have moments where we are impressed by the sheer gratuity of existence. These moments often come when gazing at mountains, the ocean, a towering thunderstorm, but they can be induced even by everyday objects. It’s the uncanny realization of an object’s contingency, the fact that it could have been otherwise, or not at all. The sudden awareness of the infinite qualitative abyss separating what something is (its sensible qualities, function, etc.) from the fact that it is. This awareness is unsettling, even sublimely frightening because one can’t help intuiting analogically that one is also such an object.

This is a confrontation with what Emmanuel Levinas termed the il y a (“there is”). Beneath all the sensible qualities of an object—and, indeed, beneath the totality of all objects—lies the bare fact of its being. The il y a is that which remains present to consciousness after all empirical qualities have been stripped away from its object. This is true of all discrete, contingent beings, including ourselves. Beneath all our diverse, sensuous particularities lies this common, shadowy substratum—the il y a. And for Levinas, “the rustling of the there is . . . is horror.”

The horror of the il y a bears a special relationship to consciousness, writes Levinas. “To be conscious is to be torn away from the there is, since the existence of a consciousness constitutes a subjectivity, a subject of existence, that is, to some extent a master of being, already a name in the anonymity of the night. Horror is somehow a movement which will strip consciousness of its very ‘subjectivity’. Not in lulling it into unconsciousness, but in throwing it into an impersonal vigilance…”

Let me reiterate that to equate horror with evil is to make a category error. Paul Santilli, in his essay “Culture, Evil, and Horror,” explains this well.

“Indeed, if evil in its classic Augustinian version refers to the annihilation of being or death in its broadest possible construal, then horror may be regarded as the obverse of evil. For it is the presence of the real as that indefinite, murky leftover of cultural integration and rational syntheses that arouses horror, not the absence of being. Whereas we experience evil in what has been taken away from us and destroyed, we encounter horror as that which refuses to pass away, haunting existence as literally the refuse of what has been destroyed.”

The il y a is a kind of womb, a featureless fecundity that gives us to ourselves. In the il y a, one hears echoes of Plato’s chora, which in the Timaeus is called the “receptacle of all becoming” as well as the “mother and receptacle of all visible and sensible things.” It is a near-universal idea in mythical cosmogonies that the substance out of which the world is made is feminine. One finds it in the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, where Marduk slays the watery chaos monster Tiamat and forms the world from her corpse. One finds it also in the prologue of Genesis, which riffs elegantly on the Enuma Elish: “Now the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” In the context of monotheism, God is necessarily the creator of the formless void itself. And what God creates is good. The watery chaos, the substratum, the il y a, the chora—whatever one calls it—is itself contingent. It is not, as Levinas seems to suggest, the ground of being. Rather, we might say that to be confronted by the il y a is to be confronted by contingency as such. The il y a, therefore, necessarily gestures beyond itself to the One who fashioned it, the One who is the non-contingent ground of all being.

Art-horror confronts us with the truth that there is no escape from being. Far from a mere occurrent emotional state, it is both synchronic and diachronic, and, true to emotion’s etymology (Latin emovere, “to move out”), art-horror is bound up with the energeia of narrative movement. And because the arrest of the “I”  before the il y a is narratively unfinished, at its best, art-horror dares us to pass through the contingent into completion—that is, divine embrace.

Tragedy

“What the tragic poet must produce is the pleasure derived from pity and fear through mimesis.”
—Aristotle, Poetics

Whereas Christians often struggle to recognize the worth of horror stories, they readily accept the importance of tragedy. The gospel itself presupposes humanity’s long acquaintance with tragic suffering. Its dramatic effect depends upon our recognizing that Jesus’s murder on the cross is an unmerited catastrophe that seems to confirm our deepest suspicions about reality’s inherent injustice. The “good news” is only good and news by virtue of its departure from the tragic foil. Jesus’s resurrection, the original “eucatastrophe” of Tolkien’s coinage, is narratively comprehensible precisely as the inversion of the catastrophe of tragedy. For the Christian, this is more than enough to secure the genre’s perennial importance. 

While tragedy and horror are not identical, tragedy depends upon horror for its effects. We learn in Aristotle’s Poetics that the tragic plot “should be so constructed that even without seeing the play anyone hearing of the incidents happening shudders with fear and pity as a result of what occurs.” The Greek phrittein means literally to shudder or to get goosebumps—its Latin equivalent is, of course,horrēre. When Oedipus gouges out his eyes, we shudder and shudder again, doubly horrified: first by our visceral empathy over the mutilation; and then by our recognition of what it means: that Oedipus was shown the underbelly of existence and had his fill of seeing.  

According to Aristotle, by evoking pity and fear, tragedy “effects a katharsis of these and similar emotions.” Scholars have been debating the meaning of katharsis since the Renaissance, but most interpretations seem to depend on metaphorizing Aristotle’s use of the term in his biological texts to signify the release of pent-up bodily fluids (particularly menstrual blood and semen). The most straightforward reading of katharsis, then, is the release in the theatre of pent-up emotions like fear and pity, which one could not express in public without shame (especially if one were a man). The weeping and screaming that Aristotle observes were common among audiences of tragedies were given special sanction in the religious context of Dionysian festival.

(Although in the contemporary West public outbursts of emotion are as licit as they have ever been, it remains the case that men are judged more harshly than women for their outbursts. This is likely a reason that stories with tragic or horrifying plots tend to be more popular among men: they have greater need of katharsis.)

Horror is quite obviously an emotion similar to fear and pity. But, unlike other emotions, horror is evoked by the very backdrop of our existence, the il y a that both shapes and threatens our subjectivity. It is an inescapable feature of our being in the world, ever ready to burst forth when we rediscover our own contingency. Our psychological and spiritual health depends on occasionally venting some of its pressure.

But 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. A healthy conscience militates against instrumentalizing suffering. This does not mean that true events cannot be occasions for katharsis, only that they cannot be so while they are fresh; they must first be transformed through mimesis, re-presented to the mind under the discipline of narrative craft. This is no less true of events that horrify than of those that arouse pity or fear. 

It is no wonder, then, that many of the best contemporary horror stories function like tragedy on steroids. 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. “When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do,” Flannery O’Connor wrote in 1957, “you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” It goes without saying that the largest and most startling figures are found in horror.

Elsewhere I have illustrated this phenomenon with Hereditary (2018), whose status as one the most horrifying films ever made couldn’t have been achieved without its explicit intertextual relationship with Sophocles’s The Women of Trachis. As with other entries in the “horror realism” sub-genre (e.g., Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, The Innocents, Carrie), fate is the real focus. Hereditary’s greatest effect is the mounting dread over the sense that one is merely a passenger. The only character who could conceivably be said to have genuine agency is the demon Paimon—director Ari Aster’s stand-in for an Olympian god.

Even though films like Hereditary demonstrate the remarkable fittedness of tragedy and horror, some scholars resist the identification. Carroll, for example, distinguishes horror stories from what he calls tales of dread. “The uncanny event which tops off such stories causes a sense of unease and awe, perhaps of momentary anxiety and foreboding. These events are constructed to move the audience rhetorically to the point that one entertains the idea that unavowed, unknown, and perhaps concealed and inexplicable forces rule the universe. Where art-horror involves disgust as a central feature, what might be called art-dread does not.”

Carroll draws the distinction in order to protect the materialism of his analysis, and to preserve the idea that the emotional state of being horrified is occurrent, rather than dispositional or a process; for dread is an emotional experience that unfolds through time. But so is horror, which diminishes or intensifies based on the subject’s physical and temporal proximity to the horrifying object. Because, as Carroll observes, the object of horror presents a cognitive threat, as knowledge of the object deepens, so does the feeling of horror. The most horrifying moment of Alien (1979), for example, is when the juvenile xenomorph explodes from John Hurt’s chest—where it had been implanted by the “facehugger,” the life-form in its intermediate stage—as the crew is eating dinner: the greatest horror comes not from the gore, but from the knowledge that this man has been literally feminized by alien rape, his chest cavity transformed into a womb. What seems at first to be a “concurrent emotion,” is really the climax of a narrative that has been unfolding over several scenes, building towards a crystallization of cognitive threat. Likewise, when we consider that great horror depersonalizes the subject, unsettles the “I”, the dread one feels approaching the loss of self before the il y a clearly belongs to the event of horror, an encounter with the Other that is necessarily both synchronic and diachronic. 

Excluding tragedy from his analysis blinds Carroll to the profound ethical implications of horror. The katharsis induced by ancient Greek tragedy was of necessity experienced by individuals in their role as members of a civic and religious community; the community itself, not just the individual, was the subject of katharsis. In order to experience katharsis, the community’s members must have identified with the tragic characters deeply enough not only to pity them in their suffering, but to fear for and with them, to suffer with them, which in its turn means imagining themselves as pitiable. Because tragic heroes are necessarily much greater than even the most elevated members of the audience, the imaginative distance crossed from audience to stage is wide enough that the distances between audience members are small by comparison. It should be easy to see how this would function as a kind of ethical “priming” for identification with the others of one’s community.

 While it remains true today that horror, like comedy, is more powerful and enjoyable when experienced in the company of others, it is rarely experienced in the context of genuine community—and never in a context even remotely analogous to a Dionysian festival. But that does not mean it is incapable of effecting a similar ethical priming. One might even argue, as does Paul Santilli, that the imaginative materials of horror are especially well-suited to suggest ethical responses to the unique challenges of late modernity superior to the rationalistic ethic of the classical enlightenment. Writes Santilli:

“For example, in a Kantian or neo-Kantian morality, the monstrous exception to the order of reason or rational discourse cannot be truly human, and when it manifests itself in the human it becomes identified with a kind of radical evil. But what if we regarded the inhuman itself as an element of the human, as the drive or desire that eludes civilizing and symbolizing categories, or as the body that refuses to transform itself into spirit and remains, like the bodies in Todd Browning’s film Freaks (1939), grotesque, unruly, and horrible in the eyes of the established order? If we reject modernity’s efforts to cleanse the world of ambiguous and ambivalent beings for the sake of science and efficiency, we may be open to acknowledging the humanity of the deformed body, of the “refuse” of wars, genocides, and merciless economies, and of the unnerving outsiders who haunt the borders of our civilized neighborhoods. This acknowledgment cannot dispense with horror, pretending that the mutilated body or the cadaver is something other than a monster, but it can be an opening to an ethics of love and responsibility for the other.”

(The key word here is “opening.” No coherent, normative ethical system can be built on these grounds—only an inchoate priming of recognition. This is why Levinas’s ethics fails, and why Buddhist metaphysics has been plausibly used to justify both pacific self-sacrifice and crimes against humanity, as Slavoj Žižek has emphasized.)

But there is a deeper reason that the horror genre is such fertile ground for ethical provocation. The ethical priming effected by classical tragedy for its original audiences was necessarily delimited by the rigid socio-religious matrix the genre developed within. Only the greatest of men and women, the upper strata of society, were deemed appropriate subjects of tragic experience; the common, the lowly, the marginal were judged fit for comedy and idyll, but unworthy of tragic pathos. Even as tragic drama primed identification with the Other, it disciplined that identification in a way that precluded the possibility of universal human dignity and reinforced the existing social hierarchy.

It wasn’t until the Gospel of Mark depicted Peter, a poor fisherman, as a tragic figure—taking seriously his bitter weeping after he denied Christ—that the suffering of the lowly became a subject of serious representation in western literature. “A tragic figure from such a background, a hero of such weakness, who yet derives the highest force from his very weakness…is incompatible with the sublime style of classical antique literature,” writes Erich Auerbach in Mimesis.

“It is apparent at first glance that the rule of differentiated styles cannot possibly apply in this case. The incident, entirely realistic both in regard to locale and dramatic personae—note particularly their social station—is replete with the problem of tragedy. Peter is no mere accessory figure…He is the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense. Of course this mingling of styles is not dictated by an artistic purpose. On the contrary, it was rooted from the beginning in the character of Jewish-Christian literature; it was graphically and harshly dramatized through God’s incarnation in a human being of the humblest social station, through his existence on earth amid humble everyday people and conditions, and through his Passion which, judged by earthly standards, was ignominious; and it naturally came to have—in view of the wide diffusion and strong effect of that literature in later ages—a most decisive bearing upon man’s conception of the tragic and the sublime.”

Auerbach’s insight finds an interesting parallel in René Girard’s exegesis of the crucifixion. As a sacrificial victim whose innocence was clear to all, 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. According to Girard, Greek tragedians intuited some of this truth and their tragic narratives correspondingly departed from established myths in ways that hinted at those myths’ violent origins. This helps account for both the unique power of classical tragedy and the limits of its ethical vision. The scapegoat mechanism remained invisible for so long because it circumscribed human consciousness; it could not be thought from inside human subjectivity. Girard took this for a proof of Christ’s divinity: only God could see and expose the mechanism that had generated “the gods” of myth. Once that knowledge arrived from outside, a radical expansion of individual and historical consciousness took place, with immediate implications for literature.

Peter had to pass through the tragic to recognize his own abject place in the economy of generative violence that Christ first revealed by his death, and then conquered by his resurrection. “Despair and remorse following his desperate failure prepared him for the visions which contributed decisively to the constitution of Christianity,” writes Auerbach. “It is only through this experience that the significance of Christ’s coming and Passion is revealed to him.”

Likewise, the “mixture of styles,” as Auerbach calls it, could only have been thought by writers who experienced the Incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ as real historical events. The eucatastrophe of Christ made possible the recognition of tragic dignity in every individual. The event ripples not just forwards but also backwards in time, transforming the meaning of Peter’s denial, granting him a tragic grandeur that could not have been recognized otherwise, and that is all the more glorious for marking a turn within, and not the end to, his story.

Two millennia later, the legacy of the mixture of styles is alive in the horror genre’s preference for everyman protagonists, a preference that, like the genre itself, never could have arisen except within Christian culture. The fact that the horror genre’s effects, derived from tragedy, are felt all the more powerfully for that preference, testifies to the truth of the Christian vision of human dignity, as does the now worldwide popularity of the genre.

Incarnational Art

“The type of mind that can understand good fiction is not necessarily the educated mind, but it is at all times the kind of mind that is willing to have its sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and its sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery. Fiction should be both canny and uncanny.”
—Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

Meaning in fiction, as in all true art, is not propositional. It cannot be distilled into discrete truth claims. Rather, meaning in fiction is irreducibly experiential, as Flannery O’Connor well knew.

In her classic essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” O’Connor identifies fiction’s primary characteristic as its concreteness. “The beginning of human knowledge is through the senses, and the fiction writer begins where human perception begins. He appeals through the senses, and you cannot appeal to senses with abstractions.” She goes on to describe the work of fiction as generating a precise, vicarious sensuous experience for the reader—what John Gardner would later term the “fictive dream.” It’s akin to hypnotic induction. When we read a sensuously rich narrative, our system of mirror neurons—on which depends our ability to empathize, to see the self in the other—activate in ways analogous to their behavior during the actual experience. As a teenager I would disappear for hours at a time into Middle Earth, often to emerge in a fog, as if I were just waking from a good nap, and convinced I could still feel moving over my neck the cool air of the Paths of the Dead. Great fiction, great art, casts powerful spells.

“Art is selective,” writes O’Connor, “and its truthfulness is the truthfulness of the essential that creates movement.” Because art concerns itself with truth, which, being infinite, is always only provisionally accessible, a work that begins and ends with its creator’s message is a dead work. It lacks that crucial movement, that dive into unknown depths—which is to say: it lacks love. For the creation of all true art is romance in the grandest sense: an endless adventure into the heart of being. In our finitude, we can only discover the infinite as it calls to us through the mediation of the particular—hence O’Connor’s emphasis on the concrete. Art, especially fiction, is incarnational. It is sacramental.

But the realm of the particular is quite messy, and the ability to deal with that messiness with subtlety is not distributed uniformly among the faithful. O’Connor addresses this problem in another essay, “The Church and the Fiction Writer,” observing, “What leads the writer to his salvation may lead the reader into sin, and the Catholic writer who looks at this possibility directly looks the Medusa in the face and is turned to stone.”

The effect of one’s art on individual believers cannot be the Christian writer’s concern as he is writing. This is not to say the effect does not matter, or cannot be powerful. Echoing Aristotle, O’Connor readily admits that some believers should be prevented from reading certain genuine works of art; but she’s also thankful that this duty falls to the Church so that the artist “can limit himself to the demands of art.” The need for such guardianship is inversely proportional to believers’ aesthetic education. “Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels that they don’t have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit.” There is a deep irony here: “It is when the individual’s faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life.”

By “honest,” O’Connor does not mean superficially “realist.” As she explains in “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” she is concerned with the writer who “believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious,” the writer for whom “what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.” Such a writer—who is a kind of prophet—will necessarily “use the concrete in a more drastic way. His way will much more obviously be the way of distortion.” Moreover, “the look of his fiction is going to be wild,…it is almost of necessity going to violent and comic, because of the discrepancies that it seeks to combine.”

The affinity between horror and the grotesque should be obvious, and so I take O’Connor’s reflections on the latter to illuminate the former. Importantly, the world of horror fiction is even more Christ-haunted than O’Connor’s South. “The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.” This fear also stalks the reader or watcher of horror. And, as O’Connor notes, “Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive.”

Flannery O’Connor offers no prescriptions for how the Church should practice its literary guardianship, but it’s safe to assume she would rather see energy invested in providing believers with “the fundamental equipment to read” than in encouraging the production of anodyne art. Better to be fed on meat at the risk of indigestion than to subsist on a diet of milk.

Christians (especially Evangelicals) are fond of saying that “all truth is God’s truth.” If Christianity is true, if God is tripartite, then all truth must, ultimately, be Christian—irreducibly trinitarian. Fiction that is genuine art is meaningful—is true—only insofar as it is faithful to the particular kind of thing it is, as Flannery O’Connor so eloquently explains. Genuine art, even when ostensibly secular, even when it tempts spiritually weak men to sin, is always truer than bad art, even when that bad art is ostensibly “Christian.” This applies equally to horror literature as to the grotesque.

A passage from Stephen King’s novel The Stand illustrates this nicely. Although he was raised a Methodist, is still a believer (even if nominally so), and has on several occasions discussed his belief that his gift for storytelling, and the stories themselves, were given to him by God (he even speaks of God as existing in three persons and has a special fondness for the Holy Ghost, whom he thinks of as “the ultimate spook”)—King is a secular writer. He has also written one of the most compelling Christian saints of contemporary literature in Mother Abigail, a 108-year-old black lady Moses whom God has made his prophet to an American remnant after the “super flu” wiped out ninety-five percent of humanity. The first scene that centers Mother Abigail demonstrates the necessity of concrete detail to truth-telling and to generating the characteristic effects of horror fiction. The passage comes as she reflects on her imminent confrontation with the novel’s chief antagonist, the Anti-Christ figure Randall Flagg.

She was old. She wanted to rest and enjoy the cycle of the seasons between now and whenever God got tired of watching her make her daily round and decided to call her home to Glory. But what happened when you questioned God? The answer you got was I Am, Who I AM, and that was the end. When His own Son prayed that the cup be taken from his lips, God never even answered . . . and she wasn’t up to that snuff, no how, no way. Just an ordinary sinner was all she was, and at night when the wind came up and blew through the corn it frightened her to think that God had looked down at a little baby girl poking out between her mother’s legs back in early 1882 and had said to Himself: I got to keep her around a goodish time. She’s got work to do in 1990, on the other side of a whole heap of calendar pages.

Her time here in Hemingford Home was coming to an end, and her final season of work lay ahead of her in the West, near the Rocky Mountains. He had sent Moses to mountain-climbing and Noah to boatbuilding; He had seen His own Son nailed up on a Tree. What did He care how miserably afraid Abby Freemantle was of the man with no face, he who stalked her dreams?

She never saw him; she didn’t have to see him. He was a shadow passing through the corn at noon, a cold pocket of air, a gore-crew peering down at you from the phone lines. His voice called to her in all the sounds that had ever frightened her—spoken soft, it was the tick of a deathwatch beetle under the stairs, telling that someone loved would soon pass over; spoken loud it was the afternoon thunder rolling amid the clouds that came out of the west like boiling Armageddon. And sometimes there was no sound at all but the lonely rustle of the nightwind in the corn but she would know he was there and that was the worst of all, because then the man with no face seemed only a little less than God Himself; at those times it seemed that she was within touching distance of the dark angel that had flown silently over Egypt, killing the firstborn of every house where the doorpost wasn’t daubed with blood. That frightened her most of all. She became a child again in her fear and knew that while others knew of him and were frightened by him, only she had been given a clear vision of his terrible power.

“Welladay,” she said, and popped the last bit of toast into her mouth. She rocked back and forth, drinking her coffee. This was a bright fine day, and no part of her body was giving her particular misery, and she offered up a brief prayer of thanksgiving for what she had got. God is great, God is good; the littlest child could learn those words, and they encompassed the whole world and all the world held, good and evil.

“God is great,” Mother Abigail said, “God is good. Thank You for the sunshine. For the coffee. For the fine BM I had last night, You was right, those dates turned the trick, but my God, they taste nasty to me. Ain’t I the one? God is great . . .”

The virtues of his passage should be apparent. We get “inside” Mother Abagail and find a thought-life textured with concrete hopes and fears and all the ticks and fixations of a long, painful, yet faithful, history, all firmly rooted in a deep sense of place. For Mother Abagail, prayer is a walking dialogue with God the Father. Her stream-of-consciousness is shaded by a life of Scripture-reading and tent meetings. Her prayers are more earnest and faithfully rendered than what one finds in so-called “Christian” fiction, and this is because King is attuned to what Flannery O’Connor calls “mystery and manners.” “You can’t say anything meaningful about the mystery of a personality,” writes O’Connor, “unless you put that personality in a believable and significant social context. And the best way to do this is through the character’s own language.”

After a lengthy digression on Mother Abagail’s life—her parents settling in Nebraska as freed slaves; her most cherished day, when she sang hymns and played guitar for a crowd of whites, winning them over despite their prejudice—King returns to her present fear of “the man with no face.”

“Please, my Lord, my Lord, not unless I have to, I’d have you take this cup from my lips if You can. I’m old and I’m scared and mostly I’d just like to lie right here on the home place. I’m ready to go right now if You want me. Thy will be done, my Lord, but Abb’s one tire shufflin old black woman. Thy will be done.”

No sound but the creak of the rope against the branch and the crows off in the corn. She put her old seamed forehead against the old seamed bark of the apple tree her father had planted so long ago and she wept bitterly.

The image of the tree compliments the Gethsemane-tinged idiom of her prayer, and the “crows off in the corn” recall the “gore-crew” of the earlier passage. Such proliferation of details allows for the textual echoes that make even the most fragmented or unruly work of fiction feel like an organic whole. It allows for an author’s discovery of “the essential that creates movement.” And, true to the legacy of Peter’s bitter tears, Mother Abigail possesses tragic dignity, despite her lowly social station; this makes her terror much more palpable.

There is a lesson here for any writer of horror. The particularity and personalism of the King passage is what allows it to be frightening. We believe in Mother Abagail and so we believe in her fear. And her particularity allows for a stark contrast with the otherness of Randall Flagg, “the man with no face.” When, a few pages later, Mother Abagail drifts off to sleep and has another nightmare, Flagg desecrates her memory of that cherished day, subverting it into a horror show of racism and sexual assault. This twisting of the good by personal evil, and Mother Abagail’s subsequent battles to reclaim her memory and identity, are compelling—and instructive—because of her concreteness. We see ourselves in her because she is so concretely other than us. This identification with Mother Abagail deepens our experience of Flagg’s radical otherness, the dread weight of his implacable will. And, strange as it may seem, Mother Abagail’s observation that Flagg, in his seeming ubiquity, his horrible thereness, “seemed only a little less than God Himself,” allows us to tap into a fresh, defamiliarized awareness of the infinite alterity of the I AM, to taste something of what the Israelites knew before the darkness of Sinai.

The Horror to End All Horrors

“And I saw between the throne (with the four living creatures) and the elders a Lamb standing, as if slain, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent out into all the earth.”
—Revelation 5:6

The Bible is replete with horrifying imagery: the world returned to the chaos waters from which it was made; a sword swallowed past the hilt by obese flesh; a lion’s carcass filled with delicious honey; Jezebel’s body devoured by dogs, her skull, hands and feet forsaken as refuse; the ghost of Samuel, necromanced out of Sheol by the witch of Endor; Ezekiel’s vision of the living creatures by the river Chebar; his valley of reanimated corpses; feral Nebuchadnezzar; the dead leaving their tombs as Christ’s body hangs limp on the cross; the worm-ridden corpse of Herod; nearly every image in the Apocalypse. Listing them all would be tedious and unnecessary. The Bible is obviously not shy about horror and employs it to great, edifying effect.

I would even argue that, read metaphysically, the story of Christ—his incarnation, death and resurrection—provides the archetype of the horror story. Quite apart from the gruesome details of his crucifixion, or the sheer strangeness of his resurrected body, his identity as Logos made flesh is, quite literally, the horror to end all horrors.

Christ is the monstrous Other par excellence. As distasteful as it may sound, all other monsters, whether real or fictional, are monsters only by virtue of participating in the monstrosity of Christ. This is because all monsters are paradoxical—constituted by a coincidence of opposites—and Christ incarnates the greatest of all paradoxes, the paradox of the Trinity, making it visible and thinkable for the first time in human history.

(I do not have space to demonstrate it, but my suspicion [and it is still just a suspicion] is that it is only within and downstream of Jewish-Christian literature and faith that monsters—as opposed to events, as in Greek tragedy—are experienced as horrifying. Other religious traditions are filled with chimerical beings that inspire horror in outsiders, but which have their place within the conceptual categories of their native culture; the depiction or manifestation of the elephant-headed humanoid Ganesh may frighten his worshippers, but it will not horrify them. It is unlikely that such a deity would even be considered monstrous by those who believe in it.

In contrast, the monsters of Jewish-Christian literature are experienced as both monstrous and horrifying by believing Jews and Christians. I’m thinking particularly of angels, like Ezekiel’s living creatures, but also of theophanies; in both cases, the experience often seems intrinsically unassimilable, to possess something the mind cannot contain. Ezekiel, for instance, falls on his face at the sight of the mere attenuated “likeness” of God’s glory.

Strangely enough, such depictions of the unassimilable both shape and are shaped by the unique realism of the Tanakh and [even more so] the New Testament. The depiction of paradoxical beings in the Tanakh prepared the way conceptually for the Incarnation and the corresponding revolution in representation.)

In The Monstrosity of Christ, John Milbank explains the paradox of incarnation in terms of the interrelationship of the finite and the infinite: “God is eternally within himself also what he is not, namely the finite, since at one point, which by grace is every point, the finite has been eternally conjoined to his Logos in terms of its character, the elusive shape of its enigma, or in other words its ‘personality’—which is not, after all, its own personhood, but instead that of the divine Son. In the end, according to the strict logic of a hyperbolic orthodoxy, creation, deification, and incarnation are all identical.”

The infinite must contain the finite within its plenitude, or else it is not infinite. In this way, the infinite is the finite, while exceeding it. And although the finite always implies its ground in the infinite, it is not convertible with it. As Milbank writes, summarizing Meister Eckhart, the otherness of the infinite from the finite is “more extreme than any that pertains between one finite thing and another.”

According to Milbank, we sense the interplay of the finite with the infinite whenever “we see things as identical with their opposites, when we see things as like each other in terms of their very differences from each other.” Because seeing always presents to the unity of consciousness an integral whole composed of differences, the extraordinary (incarnation) is always present to us in the ordinary.

This dynamic, because of its ubiquity, is the invisible background of experience. Horror foregrounds it.

When we encounter a horror monster, we are forced to recognize, not only our own contingency, but the determining presence of the Other, of difference, within us. We discover that we are not ourselves. “In horror,” writes Levinas, “a subject is stripped of his subjectivity, of his power to have private existence. The subject is depersonalized.” The confrontation with the il y a, in the context of a fictional narrative, presents not only an opportunity for grasping the paradox of the Incarnation’s perfect coincidence of infinite and finite, it also indicates our proper comportment before that glory beyond glory (para-doxa).

The difference between finite beings and the il y a is vastly greater than the difference between individual beings—beings like a human subject and the real or fictional monster he encounters—so great, in fact, that it depersonalizes its subject. But finite beings and the il y a are vastly more alike to each other than either is like the infinite. It follows that true apprehension of the paradox of the Incarnation demands a depersonalization of the subject far more radical than that occasioned by mere finite horror.

The early Levinas ignored the implications of his own phenomenology, writing, “Rather than to a God, the notion of the there is leads us to the absence of God, the absence of any being.” By recognizing “the dialectical character of the presence of absence,” he should have seen that any movement toward synthesis would require passing through the contingency of the il y a. The experience of horror, which possesses intrinsic narrative momentum, is always an invitation to pass from the merely phenomenological into encounter with the ontological source of everything.

For this reason, horror stories that would achieve the genre’s entelecheia must also be faërie stories, in Tolkien’s sense of culminating in a eucatastrophe. A most vivid example is the film Jacob’s Ladder (1990), which depicts a veteran’s descent into a demon-infested phantasmagoria after returning home from Vietnam. Late in the film, Jacob shares his travails with his beloved chiropractor, Louie, who asks him if he has ever read Meister Eckhart. Jacob hasn’t. “Eckhart saw Hell too,” Louie tells him.

You know what he said? He said, The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life. Your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you, he said. They’re freeing your soul…So the way he sees it, if you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”

The quote is either misattributed or a rather inventive paraphrase (it does, after all, seem worthy of Eckhart). Either way, the film plays out according to its logic. Once Jacob lets go of his attachments, the demons fade away and his young son, dead for several years, arrives to guide him into Heaven. Jacob’s Ladder shows that a horror film can be both genuinely redemptive, even beautiful, and so overpoweringly horrifying that viewers fainted in test screenings.

Effective horror stories, even ones (like Hereditary) that contain no eucatastrophe, always offer us a choice: remain in the horror of alienated finitude, clinging to the false autonomy of an illusory self that was never truly ours—or dare to pass through the phenomenal shadow of the infinite, into the still greater horror of paradox. To remain with finitude is to resist the narrative momentum torpedoing us into genuine mystery; it is, instead, to settle cravenly for the mere aporia of negative dialectics, truncating our desire for the more and further.

Beyond the phenomenal shadow lies the discovery that “The God who is the giving source of everything must be the inner reality of everything—more each thing than each thing is itself: more stone in the stone than the stone, and more man in the man than the man, as Eckhart realized (following Augustine and Aquinas)” (Milbank 192). To apprehend fully the paradox of Incarnation is, paradoxically, to undergo an infinite depersonalization, an infinite kenosis that is impossible for us as finite beings, but which Christ makes possible by uniting in his person the Trinitarian infinite to our finitude. It is to pass through the greatest of all cognitive threats—the comprehensive annihilation of the self—to embrace the supreme horror of Christ, which, by conquering all other horrors, ceases in the moment of victory to be experienced as threat, and thus as horror. Only in this confrontation do we become human, do we become ourselves.

“[P]erfect human autonomy,” writes Milbank, “is attained only through a sharing in the most absolute degree of heteronomy imaginable—namely, the paradoxical circumstance that the only true human being who ever lived was not in fact a human person at all, but a divine one.”

Ultimately, it is not “the inhuman itself as an element of the human” that horror dares us to discover, and which suggests a worthy ethical orientation to the Other (per Santilli). Rather, horror dares us to see that it is the divine within us that makes us human. Only on this infinite ground, which demands we see in every Other the very face of Christ, can ethics be coherent and possess a non-arbitrary normative force. Christian ethics—indeed, the Christian life itself—begins with horror, though it does not end there.

Horror, although colored by the Fall, is the necessary and proper disposition of the rational mind of the finite human creature as it stands before the unspeakable immensity of the Creator. But the nearer we draw to the Father through his Son—that is, the more we participate in the monstrous paradox of Christ—the more we come to share in his immensity, the more inexorably we are drawn by the gravity of the Spirit’s infinite relation into the beauty of the Triune life. Heaven, we might say, simply is immersion in infinite horror shorn of threat, wherein dread is inverted (eucatastrophically) into ceaseless desire to give oneself away in kenosis—a giving that is paradoxically identical to receiving from the self-giving source—and emotion is perfected in the unending “moving out” of ecstasy.

Were we to see ourselves now as we will be then, were our dim, finite eyes to behold themselves in the mirror of Christ’s infinity, perhaps they would find, with a thrilling horror, the seven eyes of God’s lamb staring back.

Justin Lee is associate editor at First Things.