As a kid growing up in Southern Indiana, I wasn't allowed to watch horror movies, like Friday the 13th or Halloween. Having kids myself, I now completely understand why I wasn't allowed. The last thing I want to deal with in the middle of the night is a screaming 7-year-old scared by something he saw on TV.
Still, I loved to be scared so I snuck in real ghost stories while staying at my grandma's house during the summer. I shivered into the night as I read story after story about ghosts. I loved it. The love of being scared has followed me into my adulthood. Many Christians find it it odd that I have an interest in scary things. They are completely weirded out when they find out I have written and just published a horror novel.
I usually start with a Stephen King quote. He wrote in his masterful survey of horror,
Danse Macabre, that, "Traditional Horror has a morality that would make a Puritan preacher smile." King demonstrates that Traditional horror recognizes that there is a moral order to the universe. Brahm Stoker wants us to think about the horror of killing children as the brides of Dracula eat a peasant baby. Oscar Wilde's masterful uncanny horror story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, invites us to consider the difference between our private and public life through the rotting painting of Dorian Gray's soul.
The Nicene Creed, one of the foundational statements of Christianity, states that God is the creator of the seen and the unseen. Many of us have no problem with the seen part. Human beings long to know everything. Science is based on that very idea. My worldview tells me that God wants and loves the scientific impulse. The problem comes when that scientific desire becomes spoiled by a narrow-minded skepticism that betrays good critical thought. A naturalism that refuses to accept the possibility that there might be something beyond what our five senses can understand.
The Southern writer Flannery O'Connor once wrote that to reach the deaf sometimes you have to shout. Uncanny horror, through its scares, prickles and bumps in the night, shakes us out of our materialistic slumber. Unsettling horror can shake us out of the naturalistic stupor.
I'm always reminded of Medieval paintings when I think about horror. These paintings are full of horrific symbolism about death. Paintings done during the Black Death are full of skulls, skeletons and demons. The horrifying images invite us to consider that we are mortals doomed to die. The medieval mind considered loving God and loving their neighbor as the highest good, the good that should be our ultimate aim. Through grossing us out, the medieval painters pointed us to thinking about serious things.
Gross-out horror can serve this function in modern horror books and movies. A zombie eating brains, Dracula's fangs sinking into a tender throat and the horrible death of a beloved character can force people to realize the fragility of our own lives. We live such sterilized lives when it comes to death. Funerals are held in antiseptic funeral homes with unnaturally arranged flowers and bad food. When we go to a funeral, we want to get in, hug the family and get out. Rarely are we given time to reflect on the person's death or to think about our own death.
Gross-out horror doesn't just invite us to contemplate death but also to make fun of it. The Irish Christians still celebrated Halloween after their conversion as a way to mock death and the grave. Many of our Halloween traditions can be traced back to the medieval Irish practice of mocking death. They believed in the resurrection of Christ and knew death would one day be defeated.
However, gross-out horror can lead to the last category, torture porn. In the past 20 years, movie theaters have been flooded with movies that delight in killing, maiming and torturing. Hostel, Saw and even the movie Hannibal delight in casting out the traditional morality of old school horror. Even the "heroes" in these movies are sadistic, vengeful people who take delight in not just killing someone, but utterly dehumanizing them.
Torture porn wants you to root for the killers and to cheer each splatter of blood. Torture porn isn't humanizing. In fact, it dehumanizes to justify its glorification of torture. The stories don't invite discussion about deeper questions. Torture porn wants us to delight in pain.
Sacramental horror does the opposite. By combining uncanny and gross-out horror, we can become participants in the signs and seals of a bigger picture. Sacramental horror invites you to think about realities you can't see, touch or taste, but still exist. By horrifying us, horror humanizes by making us consider the evil that is loose in the world of our own hearts. Stories of sacramental horror shine light into the darkness of the human heart and exposes what's there. These stories help us partake in the idea that there might just be more to our world than what we can see.
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Anyway, I think there's also a flip side to what you say here, in that the most sacred Christian sacraments involve an element of horror. Baptism and Eucharist are ultimately about Resurrection, but in one we die/reenter the womb, and in the other we eat God.
P.S. This post inspired me to talk about the horror of the Eucharist over at my blog (http://ethawyn.blogspot.com/2011/03/theology-sacramental-horror-of.html).
What if something could do to us like we do to animals? (People treated as a food source, or "parts" of some sort, and animals that victimize the humans that are no longer in control of the situation) . (lots of scifi horror based on that premise)
What if humans were treated as callously by an outside entity as we have treated each other? (Alien / Monster movies mainly)
What if we are given our just desserts for our selfish and vain behaviors? (Hellraiser, Wishmaster, etc)
What if our sinful behavior reduces our chance at defending ourselves against any evil spiritual entity?
So, I would say most horror movies can be reduced to our guilt in some way.
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The Irish have a long history of believing in fantasies, myths, and legends. None more fantastical than to believe their priests could keep their pants up and their dresses down around young boys. So, once again the Irish have discovered they've been had hook line and sinker. Maybe Cromwell was right about these people.
Nothing is more horrifying and scary than the thought of bishops in pointed hats and purple dresses foisting these Halloween goblins under their charge, also in dresses of silk and lace, upon innocent children. Gee, it's like celebrating Halloween every day of the year.
"Danse Macabre" reference FTW! This book influenced me deeply as a writer and, later, as a preacher. Stephen King's moral universe is very clear in his books, and the ones that I usually point Christian readers toward are "Needful Things" and "The Dome". One of King's clearest and most frequently repeated themes is "Your actions toward others have consequences". No reasonably sane individual can deny this except by strenuous efforts toward solipsism.
John W. Morehead
TheoFantastique.com
http://www.theofantastique.com/2007/05/16/christianity-and-horror-redux-from-knee-jerk-revulsion-to-critical-engagement/
http://www.theofantastique.com/2009/09/04/bryan-stone-changing-religious-imagery-in-horror/
I read a book about the kids fighting in Iraq. It talked about how during WWII it was easy to teach the recruits how to shoot a gun but difficult to teach them to kill. Not so these days. They've already seen a lot of gore in horror flicks, and gotten high scores for headshots in video games. These kids mentally shift into that mode when they are in combat situations. It becomes a game. It doesn't seem real. That is a dealing mechanism, but it hurts my heart to the core that we have come to the point where it is easy to teach our children to be soldiers that kill.
I don't think 'torture porn' is really an exception, at least by advertising and description: these kinds of things seem to place the killer in the position of being their God or Devil and punishing people for real or imagined 'sins,' ...frankly, as a Pagan I'm just not into any of that kind of stuff, even the trailers for it just seem *insane.* And disgusting.
And, hey, I was a Goth. Creepy-scary isn't the same as this slasher stuff, (or even a lot of Stephen King's own playing on a lot of the very ideas he describes in a quote there. ) Popular horror plays on the most common fears and insecurities, and a lot of those *are* religious-based, general fears of death, judgment, pain, spiritual helplessness, etc. Much of the rest is just messing with orientation and startle responses: the scary equivalent of slapstick. (That probably works for everyone. :) )
Watching gore and suffering isn't about anything particularly noble, just plays to certain expectations. It sure isn't imagery *I* need in my head, and usually the rationale of most popular horror just isn't something I engage with. There are exceptions, though: I'm trying to think of them. Sometimes Stephen King miniseries, not so much slashers. Maybe that's about character development, though. :)
Thank God they don't make these things into films, THAT would be too Terrible to see.
Hell exists for the evil that such events prove all too well exists among men.
"Maitreya says: “When a murderer is executed, the physical body is punished, but can you punish the mind? It is the mind, not the physical body, which is responsible for the act. You think you have destroyed the cause of the murder by destroying the physical body. The problem has not been solved. Once dissociated from the body, the mind still has to run the course of its mental life. It acts as an invisible force and comes into contact with another mind in a physical body, and compels it to commit an act of murder. Suddenly a man goes beserk and kills a number of people.” Maitreya says to scientists, psychologists and doctors: Try to investigate this problem."
- World Teacher Maitreya through an associate as reported in Share International
Still, there's a lot more 'crazy' in human heads than there is 'evil' in what you'd call 'the astral.'
That's why there's shamans, in part. And why 'judgment and sentence' just ain't everything.