Following the lead of a friend (I don’t regularly read Christianity Today on my own), I found “How Horror Uncovers Our ‘Holy’ Hypocrisy,” by Sara Kyoungah White. It seems that some evangelical Christians have begun to notice the popularity of horror movies. This isn’t the same as condoning, of course, and this article took me back to the writing of Holy Horror. One of the reasons for the book was that, at the time, few people (very few) were exploring religion and horror. Web searches inevitably brought up the question “is it okay for Christians [subtext, “evangelicals”] to watch horror?”. Since that time I’ve been exploring why the connection of horror and religion is so appealing. If you’re a daily reader here, no doubt you’ve noticed it before. I read on, noting that White has a difficult time finding anything redeeming in horror, apart from trying to stretch it to cover the usual evangelical concerns.
Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash
Some of us, however, are seeking a kind of holy grail—an articulation of how horror contributes positively to spirituality. That it does is beyond question. The real puzzle is why. It might help if we had a better definition of spirituality. What exactly do we mean by that? Even some of my Unitarian friends are put off by the word. Still, it’s part of the human make-up. You might call it “mind,” “psyche,” “personality,” “spirit,” “consciousness,” or “soul”—or any of a host of other words—but there’s something about people that makes us reflect on realities outside ourselves. Some of do it with a great deal of awareness that we are undertaking such a quest. Others may seldom or never think of it consciously. We all do it, however. We don’t all use horror to help us think through, or experience it.
I have long used movies for therapy. It’s only been in the last several years that I’ve begun to notice that horror puts me into a spiritual frame of mind more than other movies tend to. White notes “nearly every one of the top horror movies of all time deal with some kind of Christian theme or portray a Christian character.” Some of us have noticed that in the course of our exploration of the genre. Of course, that depends on how we decide on “the top horror movies of all time.” The list she cites is the ever-shifting IMDb “Top 50 Horror Movies” list, which has far too many recent films on it. Still, her claim holds if you go back to the classics and move forward. There’s definitely a connection there, and, I suspect, it has nothing to do with the showcasing of our sins.
