TYPE the question “Is it OK for a Christian to watch . . .?” into Google and it auto-completes in a way that is, in equal parts, informative, amusing, and depressing. At or near the top of that hierarchy of most-searched questions appears: “Is it OK for a Christian to watch horror movies?” The answer, according to most of the top results, is: “No.”
And, yet, in what other genre could the only thing to save the day against unimaginable terrors, from vampires to demons, be . . . a member of the clergy? It’s strange how the Church seems ambivalent at best about this misunderstood genre.
There are more progressive answers, of course, although they tend to treat horror like uranium: an inescapable part of the modern world that should be handled with caution and kept at a distance. But the majority-verdict seems clearer: horror is not for followers of Jesus.
From clerics who denounce Hallowe’en every year to Christians who protest against Christ-affirming horror films such as The Exorcist, and the under-representation of horror on Christian publishing lists, this seems to be a consensus. Well, almost.
There are Christians who love horror. There are Christians who make horror — successful horror that reaches broad audiences and engages with important theological questions. Horror is a cultural space in which Christian themes and imagery are regularly showcased in a positive light and can, when done well, be beneficial.
Horror can be evangelistic and prophetic as well as cathartic. It may not be for all Christians, but perhaps it is time for us to stop assuming that horror is for none of us.
Cards on the table: I love horror. The first book I ever read was Dracula, I’m an avid consumer of horror films, and the only novel that I’ve ever had published is about magic, murder, and monsters. Before you write this off as the product of a horror-addled mind, let me submit that, all the while I’ve loved horror, I’ve also preached in churches, served in Christian rough-sleeper ministries, and been employed by one of the oldest mission agencies in the world.
While none of that is a guarantee of sound mind or theology, I think it’s fair to say that I am, in the words of the 1932 classic film Freaks, “One of us!” (The phrase is chanted by the eponymous circus folk as they ceremonially induct a woman into their number.) Thus, I find the prejudice against horror in the Church a little insulting, as well as a missed opportunity.
I AM not the only one. Mike Duran is a Christian author of speculative fiction based in the United States. “I’m more politically conservative, and I’m more religiously conservative,” he says. “I believe in the traditional values of Christianity. But this is one of those categories where I find myself out of the mainstream.”
Mr Duran is a man who thinks that there are “legitimate gripes” about too much “woke” representation in media these days. “But the interesting thing is that Christians do the same thing with their art.” He says that, in contrast with almost any other art-form or genre, with horror, “You almost have to give an apologetic every time you broach the subject.”
The Revd Peter Laws, a Baptist minister from the north-east of England, had a similar experience. “When I first became a Christian, I was told by some people in the Christian Union to stop watching horror.”
He ignored them, and, over the years, as he has written and broadcast on the subject of horror and faith, he has come to the conclusion that most of the concerns are more aesthetic and subjective than moral or spiritual. “It’s almost always about personal taste,” he says, “and they’ve wrapped that up in theology and presented the opinion that horror is dangerous. But, actually, it’s just because they’re not into it.”
And, even though Mr Laws has written a book on horror (The Frighteners: Why we love monsters, ghosts, death and gore, Icon Books, 2018) and hosts a regular podcast comedy-horror “church service”, “Creepy Cove Community Church”, he thinks that it’s fine if other people are not into it.
“I’m not evangelistic about horror,” he says. “I wouldn’t encourage people who don’t like horror and are scared by it to start watching it to enrich their Christian lives. Why would you do that?”
None the less, Mr Laws can attest to horror’s evangelistic potential. “In one sense, horror is what got me on the road to becoming a Christian,” he says. “I was anti-Church and anti-Christianity. . . But there was something about horror which kept making me ask these relentlessly theological questions.”
THE tendency of horror to ask big questions is one of the things that, I believe, makes it more than an acceptable interest for Christians, and the way that it can bring people closer to God.
Mr Laws is not the only person who has experienced the positive effects of horror on their openness to spirituality. Recent research by the University of Chester on the religious attitudes of horror fans found that, while fewer than half of the 400 respondents identified as “religious”, more than 80 per cent classified themselves as “spiritual”. Since YouGov reckons that only 30 per cent of British people class themselves as spiritual, these results suggest a correlative (if not causal) relationship between liking horror and an openness to the idea of a more than merely material world.
Dr Jonathan Greenaway, who led the research, says that you can split those “spiritual” respondents into two distinct groups: “The second group generally seemed much more interested in things like the occult, tarot, chaos magic, and sigils,” he says. This fits with one Christian preconception of people who like horror.
But the first group were what Dr Greenaway calls “High Church Christians”. This group made multiple references to prayer, mass, and confession, and included Anglicans, Roman Catholics, “and quite a few ordained clergy, including Church of England”.
Dr Greenaway, who is also the author of Theology, Horror, and Fiction, explains the split like this: “Horror is a space for experimentation with, and investigation of, religious or theological ideas, but without the baggage of being stuck within a certain kind of institutional setting.”
Is it really, though? Isn’t horror all knife-wielding maniacs chasing cheerleaders through the woods? As with any genre, there are more and less thoughtful examples, but most, because they deal with the threat of death, suffering, or eternal torment, force us to consider some fundamentals of life that we might avoid while watching or reading romance or comedy.
“Horror asks existential questions,” says Donald S. Crankshaw, one of the editors of Mysterion, a Christian literary journal that regularly publishes horror: “Do we matter? What is death? These are questions of faith. That’s why faith is so interesting to horror.”
Like Dr Greenaway’s conception of horror itself, Mysterion acts as a space in which these questions can be safely addressed, without presupposing the answers or forcing them into dogmatic boxes. “We don’t like stories that come to a firm conclusion of: ‘This is the way things are. This is the truth,’” Dr Crankshaw says. “It’s more interesting when we’re talking about the experience of an individual encountering something beyond them, and then being unsure of what it really means.”
Horror studios are not, of course, covert theology labs, high-minded and self-consciously worthy. “Even in its avant-garde nature, Horror is decidedly lowbrow and very deliberately populist,” Dr Greenaway says. “They’re not orthodox Christian films. The point shouldn’t be to retro-actively baptise this whole section of culture.” But, he says, “there are religious questions being engaged with, perhaps in terms that more traditional religious environments either can’t, or won’t, engage.”
THE questions are not always general or existential. They can be exploratory. What would jealousy look like in an archangel, and what advantages does faith give “talking monkeys” (humans) over them, as The Prophecy investigates? What are the ethical limits of spiritual warfare, as The Exorcism of Emily Rose (in which an exorcism on a child is violent and painful, but the demonic possession is real) asks? What are the limits of God’s grace, and what is the nature of angelic power, as A Dark Song explores through a woman’s grief driving her to occult vengeance (and beyond it)?
Interesting as these questions are, they are unlikely to convince anyone of horror’s value if they have concerns about the genre that run deeper than aesthetic taste. After all, there are real criticisms for horror to answer.
“Horror can be hugely misogynistic,” Dr Greenaway says. “There is a huge amount of ableism, specifically towards people who are mentally ill, in horror films. Often, disability is used as a kind of point of horror.” Add to this, the perception that horror is a very white genre, and you have a strong case that horror is inherently unsound on ethical grounds.
But is horror any more a carrier of immoral prejudice than other genres? Yes, disfigurement and deformity are problematic tropes in some horror, but how often has comedy used physical disability or deviation from a societal body “norm” as fodder for laughs? How neurotypical would we call Mr Bean?
In the world of action movies and novels, how many bad-guy bosses are far from able-bodied and “normal” looking? A short perusal of scarred and wheelchair-bound Bond villains should demonstrate that horror is not the only genre with an ableism problem.
And, while the world of comedy is still riddled with performers loudly proclaiming their anti-“woke” (including anti-feminist) agendas, comedy history is not exactly free of sexism, either. In contrast, Mr Laws suggests that even the misogynistic late-20th-century slasher films, with their “bare-breasted females getting chased by men with hockey masks through the woods”, were better than their action-movie contemporaries, in which women were often only props to be rescued.
“Those horror films are way ahead of the pack, in terms of having powerful female roles,” he says. “They’re famous for having what’s called ‘the final girl’, where the surviving person who can save the day is a woman.”
Similarly, horror is no less racially diverse than any other genre. In fact, one of today’s most bankable horror directors is the Black director Jordan Peele, whose films often deal with the horror of racism in its subtler forms, and feature Black leads rather than the white saviours still common in other Hollywood fare.
NONE of this means that Horror is somehow more “woke” than other genres. Dr Greenaway insists that we cannot think of horror as being either progressive or reactionary. “Horror is almost intrinsically unstable, not something that can easily be turned to specific ideological, religious, or theological ends.”
And, for some, the main objection to horror is not its politics, but its very nature: the horrific things that it depicts, and the moral and spiritual peril in which they put the audience.
Morally, how can one justify enjoying the suffering of others on screen or in a novel — no matter how many good political or theological points are made? The answer, for me and other horror fans, is that we don’t. I personally enjoy being scared, but I don’t like watching people suffer. So, areas of horror (or other genres) that linger on physical pain or trauma tend to be ones that I avoid, just as I avoid dramas about cancer. The idea that I am a bad person for enjoying films that feature non-existent vampires, werewolves, and ghosts is obviously ludicrous.
This lack of differentiation between sub-genres is perhaps part of horror’s image problem. “A lot of people don’t really know what horror is,” Dr Greenaway says. “So, if you say to somebody, ‘I really like horror movies,’ a lot of the time, they’ll say: ‘I can’t stand that stuff, like Hostel’ [a controversial 2005 film fitting into a violent, sadistic, sub-genre many call ‘torture-porn’]. Well, that’s a very small subset of horror. And, truth be told, I’m not super-into that myself.”
Is it damaging to consume art that is violent, gory, or concerned with dark themes? If it is, this poses some problems for Bible-loving Christians, Dr Greenaway suggests. “The Bible is a shockingly horrifying book in many ways. I think Christianity has a huge dark side to it, and a willingness to engage with things which are deeply frightening if you take them seriously.”
Mr Laws agrees. “In Revelation, there’s a dragon waiting between the legs of a woman to devour a baby, and people being drunk on blood,” he says. “There is graphic violence in Judges in particular, where King Eglon gets stabbed, and the blade is enveloped by his flesh.” Mr Laws calls this “really messed-up stuff”, and insists that it is not essential to the story.
This is not to forget that at the centre of Christian symbolism is an instrument of cruel execution.
BUT what of the subgenre of supernatural horror, which deals with demons and hauntings? For a particular rational-materialist subset of Christians who don’t believe in a literal devil, these films and books may be no more worrying than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But not all Christians come from a materialist culture.
Hannah Onoguwe is a Christian author from Nigeria. The spiritual in Nigeria, she suggests, is intertwined with ordinary life: “We have these stories in our culture, which are supernatural, where spirits appear,” she says. “They are supposed to make you scared, maybe not to lie, not to do bad things, but they’re there.” And yet Ms Onoguwe has written supernatural horror (at least one story, the wonderfully creepy Breaching the Distance, appeared in Mysterion).
But she says: “I think there might be lines I wouldn’t cross. If, to be authentic, I would have to do some really dark research — maybe the dark arts or the occult — I’m not going do that. Because I do believe some of those things are not very beneficial.”
Is it dangerous to watch or read things about evil spirits? The argument about demons in the Bible comes to mind, of course, although the Bible places evil in the context of God’s sovereignty and his ultimate judgement. But, then, so does horror when it is done right, Ms Onoguwe says: “The point is that good triumphs over evil. I think generally Horror tries to bring that out.”
Ms Onoguwe’s perception of horror may not apply to works in the genre, but it certainly applies to some classics. The Exorcist is such a classic, beloved of serious film critics and horror fans alike.
While Christian protests were organised against The Exorcist when it was first released, Dr Greenaway points out that “It was written by a devout Catholic. It’s an incredibly Catholic film.” And — spoiler alert — “The exorcism works, the priest sacrifices himself; the sacraments are shown to be efficacious. It’s great Catholic propaganda,” Dr Greenaway says.
THERE are very few serious films that are as theologically and biblically thorough as The Exorcist. There are also very few that more deserve the label of horror. Is it easy watching? No. But is it spiritually dangerous? No more than any visualisation of Jesus casting out demons.
Not endangering your soul and not being any worse than other genres seems quite a low bar, though. Does horror offer anything positive? I think it does, not just in the obvious areas of catharsis and entertainment or in the engagement with theology, but in the area of social commentary.
Horror has a great track record as a vehicle for satire and sociopolitical provocation (as does the other great speculative genre, science fiction), and the easiest place to see it is in zombie films. Of the director George Romero’s great titles in that subgenre, almost none of them is primarily about facing death.
The 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead, with its more competent Black lead mistrusted by white counterparts, is about race in America; Dawn of the Dead (1978) explores the growing horror of Western consumerism through zombies that keep on returning to a mall even after they have died. Day of the Dead (1985), with its human monsters using violence to tame a majority zombie world, addresses militarism and imperialism in a way that is as pertinent today as it was to the Reagan era.
If Mr Romero’s zombie thrillers turned racial anxiety or fears over rampant consumerism into (rotting, shuffling) flesh, and if Stanley Kubrick’s classic The Shining (in which the ghosts are less scary than a man with anger issues) took aim at toxic masculinity, a more recent offering finds horror in . . . well . . . us.
Midnight Mass, made in 2021, is a Netflix show that makes Christians the monsters. A small Christian community starts seeing miracles, and grows in power, with horrifying results. The show features a traditional monster, but the real source of fear is what Christians might do to unbelievers around them if they had a powerfully free hand. As a commentary on the contemporary United States, it may be one of the currently most prophetic shows.
And yet, despite featuring one of the most moving scenes of repentance and grace ever captured on screen, Midnight Mass, which was created by Mike Flanagan (who also created and directed the enormously popular The Haunting of Hill House), is unlikely to get much love or support, even from progressive Christians.
Among more traditional or conservative believers, there is a palpable hunger for more of a Christian presence in the media that influence the world, particularly Hollywood. But a Christian director such as Scott Derrickson is rarely “claimed” by the Church, despite being associated with huge films, such as Marvel’s Doctor Strange, because of his earlier work in horror.
As every horror fan will admit, time and again, it’s not for everyone. But, as Kristin Janz, another editor of Mysterion, says: “I don’t mind if people say: ‘I shouldn’t read that because I’m a Christian.’ I have a problem when they say: ‘You shouldn’t read that if you’re a Christian.’”
Nobody has to be become one of us, but a little tolerance and understanding would go a long way to making Christian horror fans feel less like monsters.
Jonathan Langley is the author of Incredulous Moshoeshoe and the Lightning Bird (Montag Press, 2021).