Sinister or Sanctifying? Horror Movies as a Lens for Christianity
Michael: “Every year at Halloween, it seems at least some part of the Christian world breaks into debates over the merits of the holiday. Is it some sort of clandestine satanic or pagan practice that we should avoid partaking in? Is it a harmless part of the world that isn't particularly impactful on our spiritual lives? Is it just secular culture run amok? A slightly unorthodox argument, then, would be that from Jonathan Duncan, a priest and noted horror movie enthusiast: as he sees it, the elements of modern horror can present distinctly Christian themes of worldview, serving as important convictions for Christian morals.
Father, thanks for being here. Let's talk about your love for the horror genre. How did you get started? What was your entry point into the world of horror?”
Fr. Duncan: “Thank you for having me. I would say I'm the youngest of three brothers—my oldest brother is almost 10 years older than myself, and my middle brother is also significantly older. And the result of that is I was watching a lot of horror movies as a kid that I had no business watching—my brothers, you know, were apparently terrible caretakers of me. So I was watching in third grade, fourth grade, the great 80s and 90s horror movies: Nightmare on Elm Street, that whole series, Friday the 13th, Child's Play and the many sequels, Halloween, etc. So I would say it probably had to do with having two terrible older brothers, how I ended up watching horror at a very early age when I had no business doing it.”
Michael: “So what would you say some of your favorite horror films are cinematically, production-wise, message-wise—even just personal connections? What makes those films stand out to you?”
Fr. Duncan: “So, I love It—the 80s or 90s TV mini series, which was the original production. I love the Stephen King stuff. One of my favorite films, not very well known, called Salem's Lot, based on a novel by Stephen King, is a vampire story. I love it, especially because of the interplay between what I would call ‘extraordinary evil,” kind of capital-E Evil, and ‘ordinary evil,’ human sin and weakness and depravity and brokenness—and how those two things interplay, how human sin and immorality kind of opens the door and makes one susceptible to (and often unaware of) the capital-E Evil. That's a theme that I love seeing throughout horror: how the lowercase-e evil, the evils we commit, often blinds us to the reality of the cosmic struggle that we're in the midst of.
But yeah, Salem's Lot, It, Devil by M. Night Shyamalan—I also loved John Carpenter's stuff. In terms of relatively recent things, The Black Phone was a great film, very Catholic in many ways. Let The Right One In– I love vampire movies, and Let the Right One In is a great film. I really love the Netflix Midnight Mass series, and I liked the Netflix Dracula series as well. So those would be some examples of things that I love. You know, especially with the vampire stories, it's interesting to see in our culture, even going back to Bram Stoker, how the human imagination perceives what it must be like to conquer death. And there's a sense in which the best that our sort of graceless imagination can imagine, when it comes to overcoming death, is vampirism—zombieism, if zombieism is a word. In other words, the best we can imagine for overcoming death is to be a parasite on life, to be a half-life that’s a parasite on others. And yet it points to this deep longing that we have rooted in our being made in the image of God: a longing for eternity. What the Christian Gospel proposes is that you were made for eternity: you were made to conquer death; that you were not made to die, and that it is possible to have a life that is not just a parasitic life on someone else, and instead, in a sort of reverse of that, God Himself allows us to receive Him and feast on him and receive from his fullness grace upon grace. And I think the vampire and zombie tropes and images in those movies are sort of an inversion of that.”
Michael: “So I'm not sure I'd ever voluntarily watched a horror movie before we met, although at this point I'm now well acquainted with the genre. I remember The Skeleton Key, which really embodied a lot of the parasitic nature of this immortality you were talking about. But I'd like to know what it is about the horror aspects of these films, which was always what turned me off of them—not a moral opposition, but just an aversion to that horror element—that you see as the beneficial aspect? Why does it need to be horror and not just a movie about, you know, why vampirism isn't the way that you should go about seeking immortality?”
Fr. Duncan: “First of all, I think that would be a pretty boring movie—it would just be a PSA for living an upright life. I think, why horror, though? Part of what I love about horror is that these are films where it's very clear there's an absolute right and absolute wrong. It's very clear that the supernatural, the metaphysical, is real. In so many other movies, it's just about how this life is beautiful and it's a gift. But we also need to be pulled out—we need to have the veil lifted a little bit to remind us that we're also facing eternity, and eternal choices. And that's helpful.
I've talked to so many people—good, faithful, pious Christian people, who are very, very hesitant about horror. But I always take encouragement from G.K. Chesterton, who actually addressed this same critique. Now, the critique that Chesterton faced was whether children should be exposed to fairy tales. We think of fairy tales now as these kind of anodyne, sterilized stories, like Disney; but of course, you go back to the older and the original fairy tales, like the Grimms’ stories, and they were often violent, dark, supernatural—they were the horror of their day. And I love this line in Chesterton’s essay The Red Angel, part of a work called Tremendous Trifles: ‘Fairy tales then are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear. Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly—that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of ‘bogey.’’ So we’re using that term, like in ‘boogeyman.’ ‘What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately, ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.’ And I would say that horror does the same thing.
Now obviously, I'm talking about a particular kind of horror— supernatural horror. Many people, you know, criticize horror and say, ‘well, there's gratuitous sex and violence.’ I would say yes, that's certainly true in many of them, but there's also a lot of gratuitous sex and violence in non-horror films. So the question is, as a genre itself, ought it to be embraced? I think we should approach horror in the same way Chesterton is describing fairy tales: that what they show us is that there is a cosmic war going on, and that the end of that war is decided. But that doesn't mean there aren’t still real skirmishes, real battles, and I think horror enables us to see that reality.
What's fascinating to me is that horror as a genre of films is increasingly trending younger. And I'm sure you found this to be the case in your own social circles too—people who may consider themselves maybe not religious at all, maybe somewhat religious, questioning, agnostic, or maybe even straight out atheist, they still have this desire, this kind of longing after the supernatural—they want to see these films. I did just a little bit of digging—in terms of the share of the cinema market 25 years ago, horror films were roughly 4.5% of the overall film market. Now, it's something like 10%. 25 years ago, in 1998, I think there were like 17 horror films made—this year there were 43 set to be made. So obviously, there's a popularity here. And even as we think about a culture in the United States that's becoming more secular, or less ostensibly religious, there's still something about the supernatural that is nudging at people. And I'll be very honest with folks— if I can get people to contemplate that they might have this enemy who hates everything about you and wants nothing but your ruin and destruction, and the ruin and destruction of all of God's good creation—if folks are willing to conceive that there might be such an enemy, then they might be open to say, ‘could I have someone who might love me even more than this other hates me? Might I have a friend, a God, a creator, a redeemer who, over and against this enemy who is seeking to twist and kill and distort, wants my good and wants the good of His good creation?’ And so that's the hope that I have when I seek to introduce people to horror and to provoke some of these questions in them.”
Michael: “So in the past, I've seen people draw connections between the horror genre and the medieval Christian practice of memento mori—’remember your death.’ How do you see horror emphasizing that contrast between mortality and immortality? Do you think that horror may play an important role in remembering that mortality in our daily lives as Christians?”
Fr. Duncan: “I think we absolutely have to have that in front of us. And horror is one of the few genres that does it. I love other genres of films—it's not that they're bad—but horror puts our mortality, our fleshliness, in front of us. And we need that because we are constantly bombarded with messages and advertisements trying to get you to forget that ‘you are dust and to dust you shall return.’ Because if you're remembering that you're ultimately dust, you're going to be less inclined to buy the thing that someone is trying to get you to buy. And you have so many people around you trying to get you to take your mind off of these big, metaphysical questions of ultimate goodness, and ultimate truth, and ultimate beauty. Meanwhile there's never a question in these kinds of horror films that there is not ultimate goodness, because it's very obvious when you see Evil—capital-E Evil—that this is Evil. So we need to constantly be reminded—we need those memento mori, those reminders of our own mortality. We need those reminders of death. But we also need to be reminded that Christ is the victor over death.”
Michael: “Now, we're both Catholic and I think it's fair to say that a lot of horror products like to evoke a sort of Catholic aesthetic, with varying degrees of sensitivity. There's the classic evil ghost nuns that come to mind with things like The Nun or American Horror Story: Asylum and, of course, The Exorcist—”
Fr. Duncan: “—and in Stoker, of course, Bram Stoker's Dracula, where the Eucharistic host becomes a weapon—and holy water, all of these things. You know, we often joke that when things get bad, there's a haunting or there's vampires, nobody calls for your local Protestant minister, may God bless them. They always want a Catholic priest when there's a ghost in the house, when there's a demon possession, when there's vampires—they want holy water, they want sacramental. So there's kind of a recognition there in the midst of this fear and conflict that sacramentality—nature taken up by Christ and the people of Christ, nature that's blessed and set apart and sanctified—is given to us for our use. And that's just a whole sacramental principle that's at the heart of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and to varying degrees, other Protestant traditions as well. And so I think that's what makes it so easy to point to Catholicism in these films and to want to appropriate some of that, because we recognize that we are sacramental people by nature, and that God has given us in His mercy not just an intellectual religion, but a religion of signs and sacraments, of blessed water, of icons and incense, of the Eucharist, of oil, of all of these various things which are instruments of grace for us all in different ways, as we seek to live in the midst of this battle-torn world of spiritual strife.”
Michael: “Now, in a lot of contemporary horror, you kind of see people evoking that religious imagery to show the impotency of these, you know, churchy type people—for example, in the recent Renfield movie, a priest just explodes. With demons, oftentimes they'll show them, you know, flipping a crucifix upside down to show their power over it. Why do you think modern horror continues to lean on these Christian ideas of evil, but also rarely adopts Christian ideas of good—or at least seems to be leaving those off to the side?”
Fr. Duncan: “I think it has to do with the fact that no one wants to be predictable. And so I think, whereas Stoker had a clear picture and a clear trajectory in his work, the modern horror producers are constantly trying to do the thing that we're not going to expect—having it appear that ‘Oh, Evil might just win this time.’ So I'm thinking about The Nun, which I think we may have seen together—in that, at the very end of the first movie, there's a real sense in which the demon might have won, or at least had some victory that we didn't anticipate. But even when I find these films wanting to critique the Church or the corruption of its ministers, I have yet to find a film where a supernatural entity is defeated by natural means. To me, that's a significant point—that even within the secular producers and movies, I’ve never seen a point where a natural means, a purely natural means, is successful in addressing the supernatural evil.
Now, it may be a supernatural means that is taken up by someone who's unlikely, right? So instead of it being a faithless priest, maybe it's a young child, or in the case of The Nun it’s a young sister who hasn't even taken her vows yet. But I think that’s different—they're trying to sort of overthrow authority structures, and that's fine. Horror, by the way, has a long trajectory of that, where adults and the people in authority are the last ones to figure out what's going on, whereas children are especially aware of the supernatural reality. So you think about Nightmare on Elm Street or It, of course—where the hell are the adults in Derry, Maine, or wherever it is? Are they aware that there's a killer clown? No, because the children are the ones who know. And they're the ones who go to battle—Nightmare on Elm Street, right? It's the teens, it's the youth who are able to see something—there's an openness there, which is actually kind of rooted in Christianity as well, that there's something about the innocence of the child, while the authority figures are kind of blinded to it.”
Michael: “Now, a big question—do you see any danger in horror as a genre, either in a spiritual sense or in a moral sense? What parts of the genre do you think are not particularly gratifying?”
Fr. Duncan: “Yeah, so I think immediately of the kind of straight gore fest slashers. I've seen some of those things—I remember going to see with a friend House of 1000 Corpses, some of the Rob Zombie stuff—and I don't think they're especially interesting or beneficial. The supernatural stuff tends to be a little bit more my interest. I think there are two—and of course, Lewis echoes this as well—there are two equally dangerous paths here. One is to deny all of this entirely, and to say that there's no demons, there's no devil, it's all superstition—which of course opens you up to be deceived. As you look at the world, you'll wonder, ‘how could things be so bad?’ And I think it just leaves you open to all kinds of things. The other extreme, which is also dangerous, is to become obsessed, and to fall into the trap of a kind of dualism that says—and a lot of a lot of horror films propose this in a dualistic way—that it's God versus the devil, and you have to wait until the end to see how things are going to turn out. And I think that's just absolutely false.”
Michael: “Now, the Church has a long history of taking demonic forces seriously—exorcism traditions stretch all the way back to Jesus and Paul, and there's some really interesting scholarship that suggests that perceived effectiveness of Christian exorcisms was linked with Christianity’s spread in the first centuries. But I also know that the Church has tended to encourage exorcists to stay quiet, and generally to limit demonic encounters with the broader world. Do you think there's wisdom in that? What caution should we take with fictional depictions of these sorts of supernatural evils?”
Fr. Duncan: “So I think it's helpful for us to be reminded of capital-E Evil that exists, but at the same time, every exorcist worth their salt (yes, that was a play on words there— those of you who get the joke, get the joke)—every exorcist I know, including the ones that I know personally, knows that it is the lowercase-e evils that ultimately are the biggest threat to most faithful people. And by lowercase e, I don't mean to diminish them—I mean the ones that don't make dramatic horror films: lust, greed, jealousy, sin, selfishness, faithlessness, these kinds of things. Every good exorcist will tell you the real power in the spiritual life—I'm speaking of course, as a Catholic—comes from the sacraments, particularly from the sacrament of confession, bringing your sins to Christ, through Christ’s minister the priest, so that your soul can be cleansed and healed of the wounds of sin. Or that comes from receiving Christ's body and blood in the Eucharist. Any exorcist will tell you these things are so much more powerful than the rite of exorcism, because while the exorcism is the prayer of the Church made in the name of Christ, these things through the sacraments are the actual presence of Christ. So they’re just so much more potent, so much more powerful, and they are the ordinary means for believers to confront evil in their own lives: prayer, confession, seeking to grow out of the old life of sin and into the new life of grace, seeking to mortify sins and the flesh, seeking to grow in holiness. These are the ways you are going to confront evil ordinarily.
That doesn't mean there aren't these extraordinary cases in an age like our own that is prone to philosophical materialism and skepticism—it can still be helpful for us to remember that you have an enemy who hates you, a spiritual enemy is pure, bottomless intelligence. And yet, you more often play into their hands when you fall into these other ordinary sins, when you look at that website you know you shouldn't look at, when you stay out drinking when you know you shouldn't, when you sleep around when you know you shouldn't. These will be the evils that most of us are going to confront on a regular basis, as opposed to the more dramatic extraordinary encounters with Evil.”
Michael: “So are there any films that you think particularly well capture this idea of horror done right, of embodying the correct evils in the correct big-E and little-e way?”
Fr. Duncan: “Yeah, I think recently The Pope's Exorcist was a great example, where you see the role of confession and prayers to Jesus Christ in salvation—not simply exorcism, but encountering Christ through the sacraments. Of course, it's also pretty great that it's the sort of skeptic modernist priest who gets the smackdown on him, while the exorcist at the center, who's based on a real person, is shown to be faithful. And I think we need to be reminded of that, because the Church—and I mean all Christian bodies—are always going to be tempted to err on the side of just going with the usual thing, kind of ‘go along to get along,’ because this is the nature of how institutions operate. And so we do need those reminders that there is a capital-E Evil out there that works behind the scenes in the lowercase-e evils, but also that we need to be attentive to him in those moments where he manifests himself, and that we ultimately have to confront him with Christ.”
Michael: “Now, last question for tonight. You’ve told me before that you share this passion for horror movies with your kids—when do you think it becomes appropriate for children to begin experiencing this kind of thing? When are we prepared enough to begin encountering and understanding the depiction of evil?”
Fr. Duncan: “So it's going to be a little bit different for each child. I think, of course, some kids are especially sensitive and easily made afraid, and so you have to be prudent about it. But I think, when they're to the point where they're old enough that you can begin to explain the nature of the universe and how ultimately this war is already won, and it was won by the victory of the Lamb slain—and that yes, there are these little battles, these moments where the soldiers of the enemy still believe that the war is going on, even though the war is definitely over and they are defeated—it’s the point when you can begin to explain some of that. I know for my own five children, part of our daily family devotions is praying the Our Father, the Lord's Prayer, the Hail Mary and the Saint Michael prayer. And by making that a regular part of our devotions, that provokes questions right there—it gives an opportunity for catechesis.
For my own kids, partly because of the theology of it, but if I'm being very honest also because of the nostalgia, I introduced them to the 1990 series, Are You Afraid of the Dark? which I grew up with, and Goosebumps, which I also grew up with. Also some of the more recent things: Netflix did a really great job on their series Creeped Out—there's no gore, although it has a bit of a horror feel, maybe like a younger retelling of The Twilight Zone. Each episode is like a little morality play and actually really, really good. Definitely family friendly. So I would definitely encourage that, although it can be a little scary. I've begun introducing a few other things to my oldest son, too—he's seen the Netflix Midnight Mass series, which also has a fantastic soundtrack. So yeah, I think, you know, use discernment. If your kids are especially prone to being afraid or fearful, then obviously you're going to want to hold back. But by and large, mine seem to be pretty open—or at least if they're having terrible nightmares and crying themselves to sleep, they haven't told me yet. So hopefully that's not the case.”
Michael: “Well, Father, I want to thank you for your time, and your willingness to engage with us on this subject—and I want to wish you and all of our listeners and readers a fantastic Halloween and a blessed All Saints Day.”
Fr. Duncan: “You too, and don't forget, most importantly, say your prayers!”
Fr. Jonathan Duncan is the campus minister for Catholic Campus Ministry at Furman University.