When monsters preach

Some horror films are not just surprisingly religious but thoroughly Catholic and sacramental, and shockingly orthodox. In 1968, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave depicted a young man, a sincere atheist, who is deeply at odds with the faithful monsignor whose niece is the love of his life. Ultimately, the two men ally to defeat Dracula, who perishes to the Latin words of the Lord’s Prayer, as the now-converted young atheist devoutly crosses himself. Leaving aside the splattering blood and gore, this would almost fit into a conservative Sunday school class.

By no means are all horror films so didactic, but most teach fundamental ideas that are broadly theological about the existence of the evil and monstrous, commonly of a supernatural quality, and at least by implication, of the larger cosmic good that can overcome those forces. Darkness reveals light. Horror represents a setting in which the transcendent and the numinous are still present, even after they have been so thoroughly excluded from mainstream discourse. In a secularized world, horror becomes a site of displacement where we can still find vestiges of what was once the consensus normality of the spiritual. Central to horror is the idea of the monstrous, the malevolent transcendent, suddenly intruding into the established familiar order, utterly disrupting it: the metataxis threatens the taxis.

Although fashions change in the specific forms of horror that appeal at any given moment, the genre continues to flourish, and scholars of religion inevitably contemplate the quite weighty theological lessons that people learn from these productions. Among several recent books, I think of Douglas E. Cowan’s Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen (Baylor University Press, 2008) and the collection of essays edited by Brandon R. Grafius and John W. Morehead, Theology and Horror: Explorations of the Dark Religious Imagination (Lexington Books, 2021).