Some months ago I wrote a post about the possession movie The Unborn. I don’t watch movies to pass the time. I watch them to learn something. And many horror movies are fairly smart. In my blog post on this one I didn’t go into too much analysis because I already knew at that point that I wanted to share my thoughts on the larger venue, Horror Homeroom. My piece, “Ecumenical Exorcism in The Unborn” has just been posted there. The fairly small number of regular readers I have know that I post about horror movies with some frequency. They help me to make sense of things, especially in this insane world where petty dictators keep rising to the top of the political spectrum because, apparently, we hate ourselves so much. Horror helps prepare you for that.
In any case, The Unborn is a good example of how religion and horror work together. They cooperate very nicely, in fact. Religion is pervasive enough in horror that it would be an error to say “religion-based horror” is a sub-genre of the whole. No, the two go together as naturally as chocolate (vegan, preferably) and peanut butter. If I had a million dollars I might go back to grad school to explore just this nexus. (I wouldn’t be looking for a teaching job either, because “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice…”) I’m not the only one who knows that there’s something there. Ironically, before horror films proper were even invented, many churches actively discouraged the movies. Perhaps they were inherently aware that these represented competition. And there was already too much competition, what with other denominations and all. But some films do occupy the same space as religion. Quite often horror.
If you’re interested in how The Unborn fits into this picture, head on over to Horror Homeroom. And yes, there is a book-length project in all of this. It’s one I’ve been chipping away at for years. That’s because the connection is obviously there, but I haven’t, to my own satisfaction, been able to figure out exactly what it is. Perhaps I need to add a degree in psychology to my bucket list. These things meet similar mental needs for a cross-section of people. I suspect that most horror fans don’t think about it too much, which may be why my blog isn’t exactly jammed with traffic. That doesn’t mean that the connection’s missing. There are many things in life yet to be discovered.
