Should we, as Christians, steer clear of reading works of horror or watching ones made for the screen or listening to that podcast series that gives us chills?
Don’t works of horror glorify darkness and violence?
This is a legitimate concern among Christians facing a culture of unbelief and demonic activity—a culture that chooses death instead of life, cursing instead of blessing.
And, if asked by such a believer about whether it was OK to enjoy works of horror, I would not answer as Lee does, though there is much in his essay with which I would agree.
Horror, Lee says while commending the genre (as we can), foregrounds the extraordinary in the ordinary. And, certainly, works of horror can do that, though one of the merits of all art (not only those evoking horror) is this same capacity: To see with the eyes of a little child, even something frightening, and make new—“That’s not thunder, mommy, but God clashing cymbals.”
In works of horror we may find what Lee calls the dynamic of the extraordinary in the ordinary, or in quoting John Milbank, the “interplay of the infinite with the finite.”
Follow that dynamic: As Lee says, the infinite contains the finite. Yes, but through depersonalizing contingency, albeit with Christ’s aid? I like Robert Jenson re: this dynamic, when he says, “Love is precisely the infinite embrace of the finite,”[1] which love is the activity of the triune God. God is not infinite simply because He is “not finite,” or without limits on His nature, but because He is infinitely active. The mutual action of the Father, Son, and Spirit is limitless. As boundless Love, God bounds over all limits. He’s full of surprises.
Perhaps, then, we should ask, what horror stories reveal the God who is Love while surprising us and making new? As the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said, “Art acts above all on the soul, shaping its spiritual structure.”[2] For Tarkovsky—whose 1979 movie Stalker, with its invisible Zone traps and Meat Grinder and all-mysterious Room, inspires in me utter dread—art expresses its “own postulate of faith.”
Consider Mary Shelley’s (gravely misunderstood) 1818 novel, Frankenstein, in which Victor Frankenstein is brought to confront his cowardice through the monstrosity of his own creation—to recognize that he has sacrificed his family and friend and wife, even an innocent youth, on the altar of self-seeking ambitions, unwilling to take responsibility for the death wrought by his handiwork, while the creature yearns for the love of community but cannot attain it. Shelley’s horror story, while drawing on Goethe and Milton, is about the confrontation of two monsters, Victor and the creature, who are devoted to self-destruction to the dismay of those, like Justine and Elizabeth, who know God is love.
Claiming Frankenstein or even Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula as great works of horror is likely inoffensive now, unless we mistakenly import an apology for Percy B.’s atheism or Byronic debauchery into Shelley’s novel or coded sexual deviance into Stoker’s (ignoring Dracula’s criticisms of nobility’s abuses of power).
So, what is offensive in some works of horror? The inquiring believers with concerns about darkness in the arts often are thinking (almost) exclusively of visual works depicting gore (as in “slashers”), grotesque monsters, and demonic possession. That is, they are concerned about horror which arouses revulsion—or even that which seeks to arouse by revulsion.
An (already mentioned) example comes to mind: Despite being a sharply written story about a priest who recovers his faith in God in the face of evil, William Friedkin’s 1973 movie The Exorcist is remembered mostly for Linda Blair’s puffy potato makeup, swivel head, and pea soup vomit. The gross stuff.
That kind of horror, though, is the weakest form of inducing fear, according to novelist Orson Scott Card, who contends there are three ways to elicit fear in works of art3:
- Tales of Dread: Fear of the unknown, what you can’t see, that strange sound in your house at night…
- Tales of Terror: Fear of a known threat—being paralyzed when you see an enemy or disaster come upon you.
- Tales of Horror: Fear expressed as revulsion and disgust at the aftermath of violence.[3]
I’m not convinced of his strict classification, but it’s instructive (especially for writers), and Card’s general point—written more than thirty years ago—still resonates: Storytellers appear less and less capable (or interested) in crafting Tales of Dread or Tales of Terror, leaving us with Tales of Horror, many of which now seek to pornographically stimulate and depersonalize, inciting us to crave some new horror.
With that in mind, I have doubts about whether Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the il y a (“there is”) justifies queuing up an encounter or confrontation with any horror monster en route to divine ecstasy. For Levinas—with whose work I acknowledge only a slight familiarity—the il y a is inactive, impersonal, anonymous, silent—the depersonalizing night.
Such an encounter sounds more like the quandary of many a Lovecraftian figure, gone mad before an eternal one until annihilated by it—to scream in horror until consumed by silence. And so here I would echo Sebastian Milbank’s concern about representing any or all horror material as “a gateway to divine inspiration” or “a royal road to revelation.”
Though I greatly enjoy much of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, I find many of his stories as well as some in Robert Chambers’ exhilarating 1895 collection, The King in Yellow, to end on a note of despair, as typical of “post-Christian horror,” as Sebastian Milbank calls it. And the fear of annihilation (often) looms threateningly in these works, just as it does when a culture which initially worshiped the creature is disabused of that spell by the spread of the gospel but later also doubts the existence of the Creator. Without the creature or the Creator, there’s nothing left to worship—nothing. Hence the Lovecraftian Cthulhu, or post-Christian monster, which is creature and Creator and nothing all at once.
Must horror be tied to this fear of annihilation?
No, and we can start with the Bible—Wycliffe’s Bible. For it’s from Wycliffe that we gained this English word through his translation of “loco horroris” in the Vulgate’s Deuteronomy 32:10, the “place of horror” from which Yahweh rescued Israel.
The virtues of this particular word appear to have gone largely unnoticed until the Bard, being averse to letting a good word go to waste, revived its career in Macbeth where Macduff discovers the “most sacreligious murder” of Duncan and cries, “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!”
Through Macduff, “horror” gets not one but three performances, and William Shakespeare’s prominent usage appears to have caught on since, after 1670, the word’s appearances spiked, especially in Christian devotional literature and in phrases like “horror of conscience.”
In “loco horroris,” we’re not far from Lee’s “experience of horror” (though the waste howling wilderness remains a place to be rescued from) while Shakespeare’s use of “horror” to describe the violation of “the Lord’s anointed temple” is very much what Sebastian Milbank calls the “horror of evil,” represented in the Christian story of Jesus’s death on the Cross as well as His resurrection as “God’s triumph.”
And, in a phrasing, which I think is consistent with J. R. R. Tolkien’s notion of “eucatastrophe” (mentioned by Lee), we must say that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not eucatastrophe simply as an inversion of catastrophe. For the resurrection of Jesus Christ cannot be eucatastrophe without being a catastrophe.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ was a catastrophe. It was a disaster spoiling principalities and powers, and the first-century Jewish leaders knew it for they conspired with the Roman governor Pontius Pilate to conceal it, to be silent and to spread their own conspiracy theory: “Let’s say his followers stole the body instead.”
Resurrection as Catastrophe for Evil: Since the Pennywise of Stephen King’s novel It keeps reappearing in this conversation, why not consider that other demonic clown who dwells in the sewers and preys on the weak—Horrabin, of Tim Powers’ horror novel, The Anubis Gates?[4]
In the historical-fictional world of 19th century London brought to life by Powers—a Roman Catholic—the devil and his servants seek to summon the Egyptian god Anubis from retirement in children’s myths but fail. The forces of evil, including homunculi and werewolves and more, repeatedly try to use magic, but their attempts always go horribly wrong.
And Horrabin, a deformed clown who magically deforms the members of his underground beggar thieves guild, walks on stilts—terrifying. But use stilts he must since the blood of some son of a carpenter, who died, cleansed the world, making dirt inimical to his health and interests. According to the Egyptian magicians, there aren’t even enough people to afflict with magic, especially if they were baptized in the Name!
But does resurrection as catastrophe for evil need to be obvious in works of horror in order to “redeem” our interaction with them? It will be obvious if we conform our imaginations to the Word—as will a work of horror that revels in revulsion.
When the sins of the past are “resurrected” as a zuvembie (a female zombie) on a Southern plantation in Robert Howard’s 1938 short story, Pigeons from Hell, we recognize the author’s use of horror tropes to craft a tragedy, to depict a cycle of violence stemming from race-based cruelty—“O horror, horror, horror.”
Pigeons from Hell ends in silence, in a wanderer and a sheriff’s conspiracy not to speak of the woman who rose from the dead, but only because, as Macduff says, “tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name” the horror of evil they have witnessed.
But when Frank Cotton bargains with the Cenobites for life beyond and endless indulging of the flesh in Clive Barker’s 1986 novel, The Hellbound Heart (later adapted as Hellraiser), we’ve stepped into a world where sadomasochism has been “resurrected,” and evil has not been disarmed. We’re now In the Mouth of Madness (1995) with Sam Neill’s John Trent, in a cell, disfiguring our bodies. We’re back to courting annihilation.
The contrast between annihilation and death/resurrection is subtle but key in Alex Garland’s 2018 sci-fi horror movie, Annihilation, which is wildly and wonderfully different from Jeff Vandermeer’s source novel. In the movie, a group of female scientists wrestle with the meaning of life in light of each one’s afflictions and past traumas: of the two team leads, one sinks into despair and is annihilated while the other finds that immortality—new life—after division, death. The last one standing finds hope beyond death through new creation, through forgiveness of sins (even adultery), through her union with the resurrected man.
Following Sebastian Milbank, those in union with the Resurrected Man should not “drastically underestimate our appetite for prurience and perversion” but cultivate “a discerning and subtle mind—and properly habituated tastes and morals.”
And I think works of horror can do that. Christians need not be afraid of horror.
Christians need not be afraid of the black spider. Or at least that’s the lesson imparted by a kind grandfather figure in Jeremias Gotthelf’s5 1842 horror novella, The Black Spider.[5] While preparing for the baptism of the family’s newest child, the grandfather warns the family and guests at the christening party of the dangers that follow when parents fail to baptize their infants, recalling that time, centuries before, when a farmer’s wife promised to save, for the Devil, an infant from baptism.
When she failed, a black spot burned the woman’s cheek, eventually changing her into a black spider which devoured villagers until she was captured and imprisoned in a wooden post in grandfather’s house—right by the dinner table, a piece of wood turned black because of the prisoner locked within.
What is the grandfather’s prescription in the face of this horror? Baptize your infants, eat, drink and be merry. Tell the story of the black spider and laugh in the devil’s face.
Zach Parker is Assistant Pastor of Church of the Redeemer inMonroe, Louisiana. He is also the Managing Editor at Athanasius Press.
[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, “The Triune God” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 220n64.
[2] Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1989), 41.
[3] Orson Scott Card, Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card, “Introduction” (New York: Tom
Doherty Associates Inc., 1990), 3-4.
[4] Powers’ book was published in 1983, three years before the publication of King’s novel, leading many Powers fans to wonder whether King was inspired by Horrabin…
[5] Gotthelf is the pen name of Swiss minister Albert Bitzius.
Should we, as Christians, steer clear of reading works of horror or watching ones made for the screen or listening to that podcast series that gives us chills?
Don't works of horror glorify darkness and violence?
This is a legitimate concern among Christians facing a culture of unbelief and demonic activity—a culture that chooses death instead of life, cursing instead of blessing.
And, if asked by such a believer about whether it was OK to enjoy works of horror, I would not answer as Lee does, though there is much in his essay with which I would agree.
Horror, Lee says while commending the genre (as we can), foregrounds the extraordinary in the ordinary. And, certainly, works of horror can do that, though one of the merits of all art (not only those evoking horror) is this same capacity: To see with the eyes of a little child, even something frightening, and make new—“That’s not thunder, mommy, but God clashing cymbals.”
In works of horror we may find what Lee calls the dynamic of the extraordinary in the ordinary, or in quoting John Milbank, the “interplay of the infinite with the finite.”
Follow that dynamic: As Lee says, the infinite contains the finite. Yes, but through depersonalizing contingency, albeit with Christ’s aid? I like Robert Jenson re: this dynamic, when he says, “Love is precisely the infinite embrace of the finite,”[1] which love is the activity of the triune God. God is not infinite simply because He is “not finite,” or without limits on His nature, but because He is infinitely active. The mutual action of the Father, Son, and Spirit is limitless. As boundless Love, God bounds over all limits. He’s full of surprises.
Perhaps, then, we should ask, what horror stories reveal the God who is Love while surprising us and making new? As the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said, “Art acts above all on the soul, shaping its spiritual structure.”[2] For Tarkovsky—whose 1979 movie Stalker, with its invisible Zone traps and Meat Grinder and all-mysterious Room, inspires in me utter dread—art expresses its “own postulate of faith.”
Consider Mary Shelley’s (gravely misunderstood) 1818 novel, Frankenstein, in which Victor Frankenstein is brought to confront his cowardice through the monstrosity of his own creation—to recognize that he has sacrificed his family and friend and wife, even an innocent youth, on the altar of self-seeking ambitions, unwilling to take responsibility for the death wrought by his handiwork, while the creature yearns for the love of community but cannot attain it. Shelley’s horror story, while drawing on Goethe and Milton, is about the confrontation of two monsters, Victor and the creature, who are devoted to self-destruction to the dismay of those, like Justine and Elizabeth, who know God is love.
Claiming Frankenstein or even Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula as great works of horror is likely inoffensive now, unless we mistakenly import an apology for Percy B.’s atheism or Byronic debauchery into Shelley’s novel or coded sexual deviance into Stoker’s (ignoring Dracula’s criticisms of nobility’s abuses of power).
So, what is offensive in some works of horror? The inquiring believers with concerns about darkness in the arts often are thinking (almost) exclusively of visual works depicting gore (as in “slashers”), grotesque monsters, and demonic possession. That is, they are concerned about horror which arouses revulsion—or even that which seeks to arouse by revulsion.
An (already mentioned) example comes to mind: Despite being a sharply written story about a priest who recovers his faith in God in the face of evil, William Friedkin’s 1973 movie The Exorcist is remembered mostly for Linda Blair’s puffy potato makeup, swivel head, and pea soup vomit. The gross stuff.
That kind of horror, though, is the weakest form of inducing fear, according to novelist Orson Scott Card, who contends there are three ways to elicit fear in works of art3:
- Tales of Dread: Fear of the unknown, what you can’t see, that strange sound in your house at night…
- Tales of Terror: Fear of a known threat—being paralyzed when you see an enemy or disaster come upon you.
- Tales of Horror: Fear expressed as revulsion and disgust at the aftermath of violence.[3]
I’m not convinced of his strict classification, but it’s instructive (especially for writers), and Card’s general point—written more than thirty years ago—still resonates: Storytellers appear less and less capable (or interested) in crafting Tales of Dread or Tales of Terror, leaving us with Tales of Horror, many of which now seek to pornographically stimulate and depersonalize, inciting us to crave some new horror.
With that in mind, I have doubts about whether Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of the il y a (“there is”) justifies queuing up an encounter or confrontation with any horror monster en route to divine ecstasy. For Levinas—with whose work I acknowledge only a slight familiarity—the il y a is inactive, impersonal, anonymous, silent—the depersonalizing night.
Such an encounter sounds more like the quandary of many a Lovecraftian figure, gone mad before an eternal one until annihilated by it—to scream in horror until consumed by silence. And so here I would echo Sebastian Milbank’s concern about representing any or all horror material as “a gateway to divine inspiration” or “a royal road to revelation.”
Though I greatly enjoy much of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, I find many of his stories as well as some in Robert Chambers’ exhilarating 1895 collection, The King in Yellow, to end on a note of despair, as typical of “post-Christian horror,” as Sebastian Milbank calls it. And the fear of annihilation (often) looms threateningly in these works, just as it does when a culture which initially worshiped the creature is disabused of that spell by the spread of the gospel but later also doubts the existence of the Creator. Without the creature or the Creator, there’s nothing left to worship—nothing. Hence the Lovecraftian Cthulhu, or post-Christian monster, which is creature and Creator and nothing all at once.
Must horror be tied to this fear of annihilation?
No, and we can start with the Bible—Wycliffe’s Bible. For it’s from Wycliffe that we gained this English word through his translation of “loco horroris” in the Vulgate’s Deuteronomy 32:10, the “place of horror” from which Yahweh rescued Israel.
The virtues of this particular word appear to have gone largely unnoticed until the Bard, being averse to letting a good word go to waste, revived its career in Macbeth where Macduff discovers the “most sacreligious murder” of Duncan and cries, “O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name thee!”
Through Macduff, “horror” gets not one but three performances, and William Shakespeare’s prominent usage appears to have caught on since, after 1670, the word’s appearances spiked, especially in Christian devotional literature and in phrases like “horror of conscience.”
In “loco horroris,” we’re not far from Lee’s “experience of horror” (though the waste howling wilderness remains a place to be rescued from) while Shakespeare’s use of “horror” to describe the violation of “the Lord’s anointed temple” is very much what Sebastian Milbank calls the “horror of evil,” represented in the Christian story of Jesus’s death on the Cross as well as His resurrection as “God’s triumph.”
And, in a phrasing, which I think is consistent with J. R. R. Tolkien’s notion of “eucatastrophe” (mentioned by Lee), we must say that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not eucatastrophe simply as an inversion of catastrophe. For the resurrection of Jesus Christ cannot be eucatastrophe without being a catastrophe.
The resurrection of Jesus Christ was a catastrophe. It was a disaster spoiling principalities and powers, and the first-century Jewish leaders knew it for they conspired with the Roman governor Pontius Pilate to conceal it, to be silent and to spread their own conspiracy theory: “Let’s say his followers stole the body instead.”
Resurrection as Catastrophe for Evil: Since the Pennywise of Stephen King’s novel It keeps reappearing in this conversation, why not consider that other demonic clown who dwells in the sewers and preys on the weak—Horrabin, of Tim Powers’ horror novel, The Anubis Gates?[4]
In the historical-fictional world of 19th century London brought to life by Powers—a Roman Catholic—the devil and his servants seek to summon the Egyptian god Anubis from retirement in children’s myths but fail. The forces of evil, including homunculi and werewolves and more, repeatedly try to use magic, but their attempts always go horribly wrong.
And Horrabin, a deformed clown who magically deforms the members of his underground beggar thieves guild, walks on stilts—terrifying. But use stilts he must since the blood of some son of a carpenter, who died, cleansed the world, making dirt inimical to his health and interests. According to the Egyptian magicians, there aren’t even enough people to afflict with magic, especially if they were baptized in the Name!
But does resurrection as catastrophe for evil need to be obvious in works of horror in order to “redeem” our interaction with them? It will be obvious if we conform our imaginations to the Word—as will a work of horror that revels in revulsion.
When the sins of the past are “resurrected” as a zuvembie (a female zombie) on a Southern plantation in Robert Howard’s 1938 short story, Pigeons from Hell, we recognize the author’s use of horror tropes to craft a tragedy, to depict a cycle of violence stemming from race-based cruelty—“O horror, horror, horror.”
Pigeons from Hell ends in silence, in a wanderer and a sheriff’s conspiracy not to speak of the woman who rose from the dead, but only because, as Macduff says, “tongue nor heart cannot conceive nor name” the horror of evil they have witnessed.
But when Frank Cotton bargains with the Cenobites for life beyond and endless indulging of the flesh in Clive Barker’s 1986 novel, The Hellbound Heart (later adapted as Hellraiser), we’ve stepped into a world where sadomasochism has been “resurrected,” and evil has not been disarmed. We’re now In the Mouth of Madness (1995) with Sam Neill’s John Trent, in a cell, disfiguring our bodies. We’re back to courting annihilation.
The contrast between annihilation and death/resurrection is subtle but key in Alex Garland’s 2018 sci-fi horror movie, Annihilation, which is wildly and wonderfully different from Jeff Vandermeer’s source novel. In the movie, a group of female scientists wrestle with the meaning of life in light of each one’s afflictions and past traumas: of the two team leads, one sinks into despair and is annihilated while the other finds that immortality—new life—after division, death. The last one standing finds hope beyond death through new creation, through forgiveness of sins (even adultery), through her union with the resurrected man.
Following Sebastian Milbank, those in union with the Resurrected Man should not “drastically underestimate our appetite for prurience and perversion” but cultivate “a discerning and subtle mind—and properly habituated tastes and morals.”
And I think works of horror can do that. Christians need not be afraid of horror.
Christians need not be afraid of the black spider. Or at least that’s the lesson imparted by a kind grandfather figure in Jeremias Gotthelf’s5 1842 horror novella, The Black Spider.[5] While preparing for the baptism of the family’s newest child, the grandfather warns the family and guests at the christening party of the dangers that follow when parents fail to baptize their infants, recalling that time, centuries before, when a farmer’s wife promised to save, for the Devil, an infant from baptism.
When she failed, a black spot burned the woman’s cheek, eventually changing her into a black spider which devoured villagers until she was captured and imprisoned in a wooden post in grandfather’s house—right by the dinner table, a piece of wood turned black because of the prisoner locked within.
What is the grandfather’s prescription in the face of this horror? Baptize your infants, eat, drink and be merry. Tell the story of the black spider and laugh in the devil's face.
Zach Parker is Assistant Pastor of Church of the Redeemer inMonroe, Louisiana. He is also the Managing Editor at Athanasius Press.
[1] Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, “The Triune God” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 220n64.
[2] Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1989), 41.
[3] Orson Scott Card, Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card, “Introduction” (New York: Tom
Doherty Associates Inc., 1990), 3-4.
[4] Powers’ book was published in 1983, three years before the publication of King’s novel, leading many Powers fans to wonder whether King was inspired by Horrabin…
[5] Gotthelf is the pen name of Swiss minister Albert Bitzius.
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