Tales for the Spooky Season
Horror films scare and entertain us, but there’s more to be found in their narratives than simple thrills. Within their shadows, an attentive viewer can glimpse unexpected flashes of orthodox Christian belief. In Theology of Horror: The Hidden Depths of Popular Films, Ryan G. Duns, SJ, invites readers to undertake an unconventional pilgrimage in search of these buried theological insights.
Every Friday afternoon, my father would load me and my siblings into the car and drive to our local video store. Our movie selections presaged the way we would turn out as adults: my brother tended toward films about Sports and Action, my sisters to movies about Nature and Romance. Although I was seldom able to convince my father to let me rent one, I was magnetically drawn to Horror. Dad feared, I suspect, that allowing his 10-year-old to watch Puppet Master, Shocker, or Friday the 13th would turn his son into a sociopath. The workaround to his wariness was to enter horror through the classics: Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Browning’s Dracula, and Whale’s Frankenstein. In time, I was permitted to expand my rentals to include gorier and grislier fare: A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Halloween, and I once managed to rent Faces of Death. To give credit to Dad, I did not become an axe-wielding maniac. I became a Catholic priest and a theologian. I let the reader decide which is scarier.
There is no question that the horror genre is bankable at the box office. Between 2017 and 2022, an average of 76.7-million tickets to horror movies were sold. In terms of percentages and dollars, this reflects approximately 10% of annual ticket sales and amounts, on average, to $690,000,000 a year spent on horror films alone. This figure is more impressive when we consider the toll the Covid-19 pandemic exacted on the movie industry and the production disruptions it caused. As a college professor, I find it remarkable that students who do not like horror are familiar with Jason Voorhees, Pinhead, Momo, Slenderman, Billy the Puppet, and Pennywise. This is not surprising: Horror films target audiences between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, and most tickets are sold to viewers under forty. As a priest and scholar of theology, what intrigues me is the popularity of supernatural films (Paranormal Activity franchise, the remake of Stephen King’s It), especially those with theological content (The Conjuring series). Films about ghosts, devils and demons, exorcisms, and spiritual warfare between good and evil, appeal to the demographic most likely to be religiously unaffiliated or to disaffiliate from their religious tradition. We may live in an increasingly secular age, one shorn of explicit signs of religious commitment, but Generation Z’s taste in movies indicates an abiding interest in, if not hunger for, the supernatural and Transcendent.
As Victoria Nelson observes, we live in an age when the “transcendental has been forced underground, where it has found a distorted outlet outside the recognized boundaries of religious expression.” If Nelson is correct, then our sense of the Transcendent, the Numinous, the Divine, or God, has not so much disappeared as it has been displaced. One of this book’s purposes is to examine how horror movies are one such site where God has been banished and, in the process, distorted. For many of my students, their understanding of religion or theology has been mediated to them not through sacramental practices but through regular viewings of supernatural horror. Gothic cathedrals sought to provoke a sense of awe and wonder at the incomprehensible heights and splendor of the Divine; many horror films, especially those of a supernatural bent, induce a sense of terror and horror by mutating the Transcendent and turning it into a for or entity whose arrival elicits screams of fear.
In this book, I want to look at how horror films can be approached as one of those locations—those “underground places”—where God or the Transcendent has been displaced. I want to venture, that is, into the forbidden depths of horror to look for, excavate, and explicate what I intuit to be profound metaphysical and theological themes. Many horror films, whether knowingly or not, presuppose that their audience share a common metaphysical—and, often, theological—worldview. I make this claim because, for horror to successfully horrify, it must depict an event that shatters and disrupts expectations shared by the film’s characters and audience. Horror horrifies by depicting an event that irrupts into and disrupts the status quo. In a six-word summary, film critic Robin Wood provides a formula for the horror film: normality is threatened by the Monster. Douglas Cowan, in Sacred Terror, describes this as the metataxis of horror. Within horror films, Cowan observes, “the advent of one unseen order heralds—or at least threatens—the disappearance of another.” In many works of horror, the normative or accepted “order” or taxis reflects the dominant religious tradition. For instance, the significance of a Satanic Black Mass would be profoundly disturbing within a culture familiar with Christian and Catholic liturgies; in a predominantly unchurched society, however, the force of its depiction would likely be blunted. The metataxis of horror involves, consequently, an incursion into the world that precipitates a breakdown of the dominant order, leaving it to the characters to recognize and respond to this shattering…before it is too late. The djinn must be overcome, the creature vanquished, the demon exorcised, before the metataxis it causes becomes the new order, the new normative taxis of horror. My aim is to look at the way films depict “normality” and to consider how the depicted metataxis of horror acts as an invitation to metaphysical and theological reflection. By sifting and discerning the rubble left in the wake of the metataxis we can, I believe, begin to appreciate better how metaphysics and theology underpins what we assume to be “normal.”
(excerpted from introduction)