Yes, I spend too much time watching TV. And yes, I know it is not a favorite genre. But Halloween approaches. And horror happens to be the genre that speaks to fears and anxieties we can’t always express. And in doing so walks on profoundly Christian ground – you might even say Holy Ground. And we happen to be in the midst of something of a golden age of Horror film.
First of all I’m not talking about Freddy or Jason or the jump scare schlock that 16 year olds used to like to use as the excuse to get close at a drive-in. Some of that stuff does still get made, but that version of horror was never a real fright. Neither am I talking about a monster of the week series about hunting Bigfoot or the Mothman or a Chupacabra. I’m thinking about movies like the recent Backrooms, Obsession, the Nosferatu remake or maybe the start of this It Follows. Likewise the works of Mike Flanagan like The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass and his series TV vision of Carrie.
Now Pastor, what the heck could a nice Christian find in any of that? Well, the first thing I’d say is that a recognition that there are more things in creation than are dreamt of in our philosophy is dawning on people. Nosferatu makes it rather explicit. Everyone associated with poor Ellen Hutter either dismisses her thrall to the Vampire or tries to treat is with the most advanced scientific technology that cutting edge Germany could offer. When all that technology has to offer fails. And when they go outside of pure technology reaching for occultist psychology, it too fails. What do they do? What is the only thing that kills the vampire and prevents the fall of the entire area? Ellen’s willing sacrifice of herself, her blood, holding the vampire until the Sun rises. There is power in the blood. Backrooms has something of the same theme. People stumble upon a strange parallel world of hallways and rooms that look like abandoned offices or the backrooms of a zombie mall. It’s all the parts of the world that our scientific buffered selves (thank you Charles Taylor) have cut off and say don’t exist. But just because we’ve put them in the buffer, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. In that movie they all get lost in the backrooms. It is an interesting question whether the moral would be keep up your personal buffers, or something like the backrooms can’t grow and cause such fright and obsession if we kept ourselves more porous – the phrase Charles Taylor in a Secular Age uses to contrast with the buffered self.
There is this thing called the uncanny valley. Most fakes ended up on the wrong side of it. You could tell they were fake although the closer they were the more nervous you became. Think the pod-people from the Body Snatchers. But AI seems to have crossed that uncanny valley. Even a year ago it was still easy to say “that’s AI.” Today? Have you tried chatting with one? I can see why there are people who think it has a soul. And since we have exiled the vocabulary and structure – good theology – with which we could talk about such things, we get the horror. Our anxiety and fear about things we don’t have the words to describe anymore. The artists are struggling to recover the words or as the internet joke about sex and marriage goes – recreate them from first principles. And it always starts in horror. When you all of a sudden realize that you are naked in the middle of a dark garden and something is walking in it.
Last thought about this. Horror artistically is like repentance is to faith. It is the first step. And you don’t know what comes next. Does that thing walking out there seek to destroy me? Or does it love me? Key horror themes. Some horror ends on Holy Ground when you are saved by an act of love. When God shows up in whatever form he takes. In some the characters choose poorly and the monsters do eat them. As Paul says – work out your faith with fear and trembling.
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