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Showing posts with label Gothic and Horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gothic and Horror. Show all posts
October 31, 2013
Riding On the Nightmare
If one were to develop a so-called Theology of Horror, or rather an intersection between Christianity and Horror, then one of the primary and classic texts to put things into perspective would be G.K. Chesterton's article titled "The Nightmare". I highly encourage that it be read and contemplated.
THE NIGHTMARE
By Gilbert Keith Chesterton
A SUNSET of copper and gold had just broken down and gone to pieces in the west, and grey colours were crawling over everything in earth and heaven; also a wind was growing, a wind that laid a cold finger upon flesh and spirit. The bushes at the back of my garden began to whisper like conspirators; and then to wave like wild hands in signal. I was trying to read by the last light that died on the lawn a long poem of the decadent period, a poem about the old gods of Babylon and Egypt, about their blazing and obscene temples, their cruel and colossal faces.
"Or didst thou love the God of Flies who plaguedthe Hebrews and was splashedWith wine unto the waist, or Pasht who had greenberyls for her eyes?"
I read this poem because I had to review it for the Daily News; still it was genuine poetry of its kind. It really gave out an atmosphere, a fragrant and suffocating smoke that seemed really to come from the Bondage of Egypt or the Burden of Tyre. There is not much in common (thank God) between my garden with the grey-green English sky-line beyond it, and these mad visions of painted palaces, huge, headless idols and monstrous solitudes of red or golden sand. Nevertheless (as I confessed to myself) I can fancy in such a stormy twilight some such smell of death and fear. The ruined sunset really looks like one of their ruined temples: a shattered heap of gold and green marble. A black flapping thing detaches itself from one of the sombre trees and flutters to another. I know not if it is owl or flittermouse; I could fancy it was a black cherub, an infernal cherub of darkness, not with the wings of a bird and the head of a baby, but with the head of a goblin and the wings of a bat. I think, if there were light enough, I could sit here and write some very creditable creepy tale, about how I went up the crooked road beyond the church and met Something-say a dog, a dog with one eye. Then I should meet a horse, perhaps, a horse without a rider; the horse also would have one eye. Then the inhuman silence would be broken; I should meet a man (need I say, a one-eyed man?) who would ask me the way to my own house. Or perhaps tell me that it was burnt to the ground. I think I could tell a very cosy little tale along some such lines. Or I might dream of climbing for ever the tall dark trees above me. They are so tall that I feel as if I should find at their tops the nests of the angels; but in this mood they would be dark and dreadful angels; angels of death.
* * * *
Only, you see, this mood is all bosh. I do not believe it in the least. That one-eyed universe, with its one-eyed men and beasts, was only created with one universal wink. At the top of the tragic trees I should not find the Angel's Nest. I should only find the Mare's Nest; the dreamy and divine nest is not there. In the Mare's Nest I shall discover that dim, enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched the Nightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare-when you know it is a nightmare.
That is the essential. That is the stern condition laid upon all artists touching this luxury of fear. The terror must be fundamentally frivolous. Sanity may play with insanity; but insanity must not be allowed to play with sanity. Let such poets as the one I was reading in the garden, by all means, be free to imagine what outrageous deities and violent landscapes they like. By all means let them wander freely amid their opium pinnacles and perspectives. But these huge gods, these high cities, are toys; they must never for an instant be allowed to be anything else. Man, a gigantic child, must play with Babylon and Nineveh, with Isis and with Ashtaroth. By all means let him dream of the Bondage of Egypt, so long as he is free from it. By all means let him take up the Burden of Tyre, so long as he can take it lightly. But the old gods must be his dolls, not his idols. His central sanctities, his true possessions, should be Christian and simple. And just as a child would cherish most a wooden horse or a sword that is a mere cross of wood, so man, the great child, must cherish most the old plain things of poetry and piety; that horse of wood that was the epic end of Ilium, or that cross of wood that redeemed and conquered the world.
* * * *
In one of Stevenson's letters there is a characteristically humorous remark about the appalling impression produced on him in childhood by the beasts with many eyes in the Book of Revelations: "If that was heaven, what in the name of Davy Jones was hell like?" Now in sober truth there is a magnificent idea in these monsters of the Apocalypse. It is, I suppose, the idea that beings really more beautiful or more universal than we are might appear to us frightful and even confused. Especially they might seem to have senses at once more multiplex and more staring; an idea very imaginatively seized in the multitude of eyes. I like those monsters beneath the throne very much. It is when one of them goes wandering in deserts and finds a throne for himself that evil faiths begin, and there is (literally) the devil to pay-to pay in dancing girls or human sacrifice. As long as those misshapen elemental powers are around the throne, remember that the thing that they worship is the likeness of the appearance of a man.
That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror and such things, which unless a man of letters do well and truly believe, without doubt he will end by blowing his brains out or by writing badly. Man, the central pillar of the world must be upright and straight; around him all the trees and beasts and elements and devils may crook and curl like smoke if they choose. All really imaginative literature is only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature and the straightness of the soul. Man may behold what ugliness he likes if he is sure that he will not worship it; but there are some so weak that they will worship a thing only because it is ugly. These must be chained to the beautiful. It is not always wrong even to go, like Dante, to the brink of the lowest promontory and look down at hell. It is when you look up at hell that a serious miscalculation has probably been made.
* * * *
Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare tonight; she whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with us over the moon, like that wild, amorous cow whose child was the Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me.
(Originally appeared in The Daily News, Oct. 16, 1909, and in Alarms and Discursions, NY: Dodd, Mead. 1911)
A Defense of Skeletons
In his 1902 book titled The Defendant, G.K. Chesterton defends a bunch of apparently nonsensical things that are often viewed differently by others, with his characteristic humorous wit mixed with deep yet commonsensical thought. In chapter three he undertakes a defense of skeletons, which is an appropriate contemplation for Halloween.
By Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Some little time ago I stood among immemorial English trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils. As I walked among these living pillars I became gradually aware that the rustics who lived and died in their shadow adopted a very curious conversational tone. They seemed to be constantly apologizing for the trees, as if they were a very poor show. After elaborate investigation, I discovered that their gloomy and penitent tone was traceable to the fact that it was winter and all the trees were bare. I assured them that I did not resent the fact that it was winter, that I knew the thing had happened before, and that no forethought on their part could have averted this blow of destiny. But I could not in any way reconcile them to the fact that it was winter. There was evidently a general feeling that I had caught the trees in a kind of disgraceful deshabille, and that they ought not to be seen until, like the first human sinners, they had covered themselves with leaves. So it is quite clear that, while very few people appear to know anything of how trees look in winter, the actual foresters know less than anyone. So far from the line of the tree when it is bare appearing harsh and severe, it is luxuriantly indefinable to an unusual degree; the fringe of the forest melts away like a vignette. The tops of two or three high trees when they are leafless are so soft that they seem like the gigantic brooms of that fabulous lady who was sweeping the cobwebs off the sky. The outline of a leafy forest is in comparison hard, gross and blotchy; the clouds of night do not more certainly obscure the moon than those green and monstrous clouds obscure the tree; the actual sight of the little wood, with its gray and silver sea of life, is entirely a winter vision. So dim and delicate is the heart of the winter woods, a kind of glittering gloaming, that a figure stepping towards us in the chequered twilight seems as if he were breaking through unfathomable depths of spiders' webs.
But surely the idea that its leaves are the chief grace of a tree is a vulgar one, on a par with the idea that his hair is the chief grace of a pianist. When winter, that healthy ascetic, carries his gigantic razor over hill and valley, and shaves all the trees like monks, we feel surely that they are all the more like trees if they are shorn, just as so many painters and musicians would be all the more like men if they were less like mops. But it does appear to be a deep and essential difficulty that men have an abiding terror of their own structure, or of the structure of things they love. This is felt dimly in the skeleton of the tree: it is felt profoundly in the skeleton of the man.
The importance of the human skeleton is very great, and the horror with which it is commonly regarded is somewhat mysterious. Without claiming for the human skeleton a wholly conventional beauty, we may assert that he is certainly not uglier than a bull-dog, whose popularity never wanes, and that he has a vastly more cheerful and ingratiating expression. But just as man is mysteriously ashamed of the skeletons of the trees in winter, so he is mysteriously ashamed of the skeleton of himself in death. It is a singular thing altogether, this horror of the architecture of things. One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.
One ground exists for this terror: a strange idea has infected humanity that the skeleton is typical of death. A man might as well say that a factory chimney was typical of bankruptcy. The factory may be left naked after ruin, the skeleton may be left naked after bodily dissolution; but both of them have had a lively and workmanlike life of their own, all the pulleys creaking, all the wheels turning, in the House of Livelihood as in the House of Life. There is no reason why this creature (new, as I fancy, to art), the living skeleton, should not become the essential symbol of life.
The truth is that man's horror of the skeleton is not horror of death at all. It is man's eccentric glory that he has not, generally speaking, any objection to being dead, but has a very serious objection to being undignified. And the fundamental matter which troubles him in the skeleton is the reminder that the ground-plan of his appearance is shamelessly grotesque. I do not know why he should object to this. He contentedly takes his place in a world that does not pretend to be genteel--a laughing, working, jeering world. He sees millions of animals carrying, with quite a dandified levity, the most monstrous shapes and appendages, the most preposterous horns, wings, and legs, when they are necessary to utility. He sees the good temper of the frog, the unaccountable happiness of the hippopotamus. He sees a whole universe which is ridiculous, from the animalcule, with a head too big for its body, up to the comet, with a tail too big for its head. But when it comes to the delightful oddity of his own inside, his sense of humour rather abruptly deserts him.
In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance (which was, in certain times and respects, a much gloomier period) this idea of the skeleton had a vast influence in freezing the pride out of all earthly pomps and the fragrance out of all fleeting pleasures. But it was not, surely, the mere dread of death that did this, for these were ages in which men went to meet death singing; it was the idea of the degradation of man in the grinning ugliness of his structure that withered the juvenile insolence of beauty and pride. And in this it almost assuredly did more good than harm. There is nothing so cold or so pitiless as youth, and youth in aristocratic stations and ages tended to an impeccable dignity, an endless summer of success which needed to be very sharply reminded of the scorn of the stars. It was well that such flamboyant prigs should be convinced that one practical joke, at least, would bowl them over, that they would fall into one grinning man-trap, and not rise again. That the whole structure of their existence was as wholesomely ridiculous as that of a pig or a parrot they could not be expected to realize; that birth was humorous, coming of age humorous, drinking and fighting humorous, they were far too young and solemn to know. But at least they were taught that death was humorous.
There is a peculiar idea abroad that the value and fascination of what we call Nature lie in her beauty. But the fact that Nature is beautiful in the sense that a dado or a Liberty curtain is beautiful, is only one of her charms, and almost an accidental one. The highest and most valuable quality in Nature is not her beauty, but her generous and defiant ugliness. A hundred instances might be taken. The croaking noise of the rooks is, in itself, as hideous as the whole hell of sounds in a London railway tunnel. Yet it uplifts us like a trumpet with its coarse kindliness and honesty, and the lover in 'Maud' could actually persuade himself that this abominable noise resembled his lady-love's name. Has the poet, for whom Nature means only roses and lilies, ever heard a pig grunting? It is a noise that does a man good--a strong, snorting, imprisoned noise, breaking its way out of unfathomable dungeons through every possible outlet and organ. It might be the voice of the earth itself, snoring in its mighty sleep. This is the deepest, the oldest, the most wholesome and religious sense of the value of Nature--the value which comes from her immense babyishness. She is as top-heavy, as grotesque, as solemn and as happy as a child. The mood does come when we see all her shapes like shapes that a baby scrawls upon a slate--simple, rudimentary, a million years older and stronger than the whole disease that is called Art. The objects of earth and heaven seem to combine into a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and levity. The tree above my head is flapping like some gigantic bird standing on one leg; the moon is like the eye of a Cyclops. And, however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for ever.
Horror: The Perfect Christian Genre
Scott Derrickson is a Christian and prominent Horror movie director who intertwines theological themes with his horror films. He is most famously known for his films The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) and Sinister (2012), and is slated to take on a Stephen King story and a biblical story. G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien are clear influences in his work, among others. So far his focus has mainly been on the demonic and evil, with a tension between a fairly healthy dose of reason and the supernatural/paranormal, though often ending up with an acceptance of the latter.
In August 2005 Peter T. Chattaway from Christianity Today did an interview with Derrickson, that offers a few valuable insights on the intersection between Christianity and horror. Below are some excerpts:
Why would a Christian get involved in horror films, of all things?
Scott Derrickson: In my opinion, the horror genre is a perfect genre for Christians to be involved with. I think the more compelling question is, Why do so many Christians find it odd that a Christian would be working in this genre? To me, this genre deals more overtly with the supernatural than any other genre, it tackles issues of good and evil more than any other genre, it distinguishes and articulates the essence of good and evil better than any other genre, and my feeling is that a lot of Christians are wary of this genre simply because it's unpleasant. The genre is not about making you feel good, it is about making you face your fears. And in my experience, that's something that a lot of Christians don't want to do.
To me, the horror genre is the genre of non-denial. It's about admitting that there is evil in the world, and recognizing that there is evil within us, and that we're not in control, and that the things that we are afraid of must be confronted in order for us to relinquish that fear. And I think that the horror genre serves a great purpose in bolstering our understanding of what is evil and therefore better defining what is good. And of course I'm talking about, really, the potential of the horror genre, because there are a lot of horror films that don't do these things. It is a genre that's full of exploitation, but the better films in the genre certainly accomplish, I think, very noble things.
How do you avoid what some might consider a fascination with evil?
Derrickson: It's something I've thought a lot about. I think of this kind of material in an almost dietary fashion. It's something that is potent and powerful and it's not healthy for anyone to overindulge in it.
I would be concerned if one of my children were constantly watching nothing but horror films or indulging in gothic literature without the balance of other types of art and entertainment. I do think that's a danger. C. S. Lewis had that very practical wisdom, well stated, in his introduction to The Screwtape Letters, when he talks about how the two great dangers, in regard to our thoughts about the demonic and the devil, are to think too much of them or too little of them. To be too afraid of them, to be too hesitant to engage in discussion or thought or art that deals with this realm, is to give in to fear; but to become fascinated with it and to indulge in the material is also very unhealthy.
So for me personally, I stagger the kinds of material that I do. I've written in other genres, and if I'm working on a project like the one that I just did, during the course of working on it, I don't watch any horror films, I don't read any scary literature, I try to fill myself with things that are a bit brighter, to keep myself personally balanced. But I think that both kinds of material are important for a balanced diet—at least for me.
It's been said that "The Passion of the Christ" was very popular with horror audiences. Do you have any perspective on that?
Derrickson: I do. It's very gothic, a very dark film. And I think there are people who just have an inclination to want to see material that deals with that aesthetic. And yet I think that film also ought to be regarded by Christians as a horror film. I think the crucifix is gothic iconography, and yet what I love about the horror genre, what I love about gothic iconography, what I love about gothic literature, is the potential that it carries to blend with it beauty and meaning. And when beauty and meaning are combined with the horrific, you get things like the cross, and you get things like medieval art, and you get things like Dante's Inferno.
And it is something that American evangelicalism has abandoned, for the most part—to their own detriment, because I think the result is, we have left gothic imagery and the power of that aesthetic to Catholics and to non-Christians. Not that Catholics are non-Christians—I think most Catholics are Christians—but my point is that there is a great value in that aesthetic and people need that. I think that the history of the Christian church is one that is marked by an understanding of this. When I went to Europe a few years ago, I felt very at home there, and I loved standing in Notre Dame and looking at all the gargoyles on the outside of that building, and realizing that, as scary and frightening as they were, what I was looking at was something that was built to the glory of God.
How did your interest in the horror genre begin?
Derrickson: When I was in film school. I knew that I wanted to integrate my faith with cinema in some way that was relevant to the culture. And I was looking for a way to do that, and I had just re-read The Screwtape Letters, and within the same year, I read Walker Percy's novel Lancelot, and there was a line in Lancelot that said, "'Evil' is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone's either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil … God may be absent, but what if someone should find the Devil?"
It really started to resonate with me, that this was the genre where a Christian could connect with mainstream culture, and there was potential there to not preach to the choir—not even preach to the culture, but connect with the culture. And that is certainly what I have been trying to do with a lot of my work. And in the case of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, I was very committed to not making a movie that was intended to give spiritual or religious or metaphysical answers to the audience. I really just wanted to make a film that was going to provoke the mainstream audience to ask themselves what they believe, and cause them to come away from the film provoked to think about and discuss spiritual matters and spiritual issues that I think are profoundly important.
Why Zombies Matter
By Russell D. Moore
Zombies are everywhere. Ever since the classic “Night of the Living Dead,” the undead have shown up in movies. Zombies now are featured in top-rated cable TV shows, and in apocalyptic novels and survival guides. An entire genre has ignited around the concept of adding zombies to classic literature (“Pride and Prejudice with Zombies,” etc.). But why are we drawn to these gruesome figures?
In the New York Times, columnist Amy Wilentz reminds us why zombies scare us, and why we can’t help but watch through our clenched hands covering our eyes. The zombie myth is rooted in something quite real, and quite terrifying. The zombie stories emerged in a Caribbean context of brutal slavery. The zombie’s horror is that he is, she writes, a slave forever. After all, if even death cannot free you, you can never be free.
That’s exactly the point, and here’s why it should matter to Christians.
Zombies are horrifying not simply because they’re mean and aggressive. They are horrifying because they represent what ought to repulse us: the rotting decay of death. But they still walk. And, beyond that, they still crave. In their search for human brains, they are driven along by their appetites, though always under the sway of a slavemaster’s will.
That’s our story.
The biblical story of the Fall of humanity is one of a humanity that comes under the sway of death by obeying the appetite. God places a fiery sword around the Garden of Eden, Genesis tells us, so that the primeval humans wouldn’t eat of the Tree of Life and live forever. Why? It’s because God didn’t want to consign humanity to a never-ending existence of this kind of walking death. He sentences us to the curse of death so that, ultimately, we can be redeemed.
The gospel tells us that, apart from Christ, we were walking in the flesh, that is slavishly obeying our biological impulses and appetites without the direction of the Spirit. As such, we were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1). But we weren’t inert. We instead, though dead, “walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). We were walking dead slaves.
And, in our death, our appetites weren’t silenced but instead drove us along. This walking death, the Apostle Paul writes, was driven along as we “carried out the desires of the body and the mind” (Eph. 2:3).
Caribbean people could resonate with the horror of zombies because they knew what it was like to be enslaved by evil people, with no hope of escape. And maybe our culture pays attention to zombies because we know what it is like to be dead inside, but unable to find peace, unable to stop walking.
The gospel doesn’t just extend our lives forever into eternity. That’s what we, left to ourselves, think we want. The rich young ruler asks Jesus how he can inherit eternal life, but Jesus points out that he wants to eternalize his present state rather than to be hidden in the life of Jesus himself. That’s a zombie walk, and Jesus loves us too much for that.
Jesus offers instead life, and that abundantly, as we eat of his flesh, drink of his blood, share in his triumph over the accusing slavemaster.
So let’s have some sympathy for the zombies. And next time you see the trailer for a zombie film, or see the picture of a walking corpse on the cover of a novel, remember that that was your story once too.
Vlad the Impaler as Romanians See Him
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For a short yet concise treatment on how the historical figure Vlad Tepes, popularly known as Vlad the Impaler, who served as an inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula, has been viewed and is still viewed by his native Romanians, see the following article by Elizabeth Miller:
Among the things she writes, is the following:
"During the 1970s, the Communist government also undertook many practical projects to re-enforce Vlad's reputation as a national hero: statues were erected, streets were renamed, restoration of his Arges castle was undertaken, and a commemorative postage stamp was issued in 1976 to mark the anniversary. In 1978, a feature movie entitled Vlad Tepes was produced which, according to Stoicescu, 'portrays the true personality of a great prince'. Though the movie could be rather tedious, it is an interesting understanding of Vlad from a contemporary political point of view: it comprises thinly veiled parallels between Vlad's political and military policies and the position taken by the Communist Party with respect to nationalism, the aristocracy, foreigners, and the maintenance of law and order."
Below is the complete 1978 movie Vlad Tepes, with English subtitles:
October 24, 2013
March 31, 2013
Was the Resurrected Jesus a Zombie?
It has become quite common, and a bit overstated, these days to refer to the post-resurrected Jesus as "Zombie Jesus", thinking that there is a comparison between the features of the risen Jesus with that of Zombies as depicted in popular culture, both said to rise from the dead. Usually such comparisons are not based on any compelling intellectual arguments, but it is worth examining nonetheless. Does the resurrected Jesus display Zombie-like characteristics to warrant such a comparison? The folks at ZombieTheology.com examined both features and characteristics in a neutral fashion to give us the answer. After an analysis of the resurrected Jesus as described in the Gospels and the traditional pop culture Zombie depicted by George Romero (of Night of the Living Dead fame), here is what they found:
ROMERO ZOMBIES
- Zombies are human bodies that died and have come back to life.
- Zombies only possess basic motor skills.
- Zombies cannot talk. At best they can communicate like animals through moans and groans.
- Zombies have one intention: to eat the living.
- Zombies are dangerous.
- Zombies are physical, they have no supernatural abilities.
- Zombies bodies are decaying and rotting.
- Zombies are not capable of complex thoughts or problem solving skills.
GOSPEL JESUS
- Yes, Jesus did die and come back to life.
- Jesus built a fire and cooked fish for Peter and a few of his other followers. Building a fire requires use of very fine motor skills. – John 21
- Jesus talks to several people after rising from the dead. – John 21 (for one example)
- Jesus seemed to have no intention of eating people, and we have no record of him eating any humans after rising from the dead; we do however see him eating fish and honeycomb (so not even just meat). – Luke 24:42-43
- Jesus did not seem dangerous at all, on the contrary people were happy to be around him. He traveled with two of his followers (without them even knowing it was him) and they asked him to stay with them when he was getting ready to part from them. If he were dangerous it would not make sense to ask him to stay. – Luke 24:29
- Something really interesting about the resurrected Jesus was his ability to walk through walls and disappear. These seem like some kind of supernatural function which Zombies are incapable of. – Luke 24:31, John 20:19
- Jesus’s body did still have the holes from the spear and nails, but surprisingly Thomas, one of his followers, was not afraid to stick his finger in those holes. Jesus broke bread and cooked fish and people ate these things. If Jesus were a rotting corpse it seems unlikely that people would be so willing to eat the food he prepared or stick their hands in his side. John 20: 27, Luke 24:42-43, John 21
- The resurrected Jesus could talk, he prepared meals, he explained complicated doctrines, asked tough questions, performed supernatural acts, and did several other things that demonstrated problem solving and complex thought processes. His actions and words demonstrated something beyond human, not subhuman such as the living dead.
So whether you are a Christian or not, it is clear from Scripture that the risen Jesus it describes is certainly not a Zombie. One is forced to disbelieve the Bible and write off the resurrection all together, or embrace the Bible’s story and realize that the risen Jesus was someone who was raised in glory, not decay. Whichever you choose, a Zombie Jesus is clearly not an option.
February 7, 2013
Deal With The Devil
Going through some old files a few days ago, I came across a short story I wrote for my high school English class that I had not read in 20 years. In November 1993 I was a senior in high school, and in my English class we watched the movie Crossroads (1986) starring Ralph Macchio, which is loosely influenced by the old legend of Blues guitarist Robert Johnson and his infamous deal with the devil. Following the film, we were assigned to write our own story with the title "Deal With The Devil", one page in length.
Around that time my uncle owned a rare Buick Regal Grand National that we would take to New Hampshire to race, and since it was a car I wanted for myself, I based my story on it. Also, on one occasion on our way to New Hampshire my uncle was pulled over by a police officer for speeding, and because he had a suspended license they arrested him; this also played a role in my story.
I ended up getting an A+ for the paper, with comments throughout like "Beautiful!" and "This is great!" Now I see it as a bit amateurish and funny and it sort of reads like a Twilight Zone episode with a moral twist ending, but I offer it here for fun to give my readers a glimpse of something I wrote 20 years ago before the days of the internet.
I should also mention that it was this same English teacher who later accused me of plagiarizing and gave me an "F" grade on my final paper, which was a critique of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. When I proved that I had not plagiarized, she gave me an "A+" with a note that said: "I hope one day to read your books!"
Deal With The Devil
By John Sanidopoulos
November 5, 1993
One day as I was riding my rusty old bicycle to school I beheld the most beautiful and coolest car I had ever seen in my life. It was a polished black Grand National with gold hub caps and bumpers and extra thick tires. I guess the real beauty of the car was how it remained so smooth as it accelerated down the street. I imagined myself riding in that car to school instead of riding on my old beat-up rusty bike. My heart burned with covetousness.
When I got home that day I saw that same Grand National stop in front of my house and a man getting out of the car and coming towards my house. I heard a knock on my door. I answered. It was a man dressed like a car salesman and he told me that he would give me the Grand National if only I would give him all the rights to my soul. He handed me the keys and laughed hysterically and walked away, still laughing. Taking the keys I headed for the car.
Excitedly I got in the car and put the keys in the ignition. The car drove so smoothly that you could be driving at thirty miles-per-hour and feel like you're driving at ninety miles-per-hour. Or maybe I was fooled. All of a sudden I heard a police siren behind me. I pulled over. The officer said I was driving at ninety on a thirty mile-per-hour road. The speedometer, I discovered, was set at minus sixty miles-per-hour. He then found out I had no license. After writing down the license plate number he discovered it was the President's stolen car. I got really scared. The police officer then took me to the police station and locked me up in jail. The next day I was brought to court and was found to be guilty. I was ordered six months in jail.
After being released from jail I found a job at a gas station. I worked there three years and raised fifty-thousand dollars and bought myself a Grand National better than the one I had seen three and a half years prior.
One day I saw the man who had purchased my soul and brought disaster to my life pull up to my gas tank with that same stolen car. I demanded that he give the rights of my soul back to me. He said that only if I beat him in a car race would he give me back the rights to my soul. I immediately stepped into my car and we drove to a long open road. When we came to a traffic light we both stopped.
The race was going to be only a hundred yards long. The green light came on and we both accelerated. The only thing I remember after that was the smell of burned rubber and the sight of a lot of smoke. He beat me within a matter of seconds.
I immediately died and went to Hell. I saw the man who was driving the Grand National approach me and he revealed to me that he was the devil. I immediately fell down and wept and realized that if only I had given my soul fully to God I would have been much better off in Paradise.
November 8, 2012
The Movie "Bram Stoker's Dracula": Interesting Facts for Orthodox Christians
Though Bram Stoker's novel Dracula is one of my favorite works of fiction, the movie adaptation by Francis Ford Coppola in 1992 is among my least favorite on-screen depictions (though it is a very entertaining movie with good cinematography and gothic atmospherics). By putting the authors name into the title, it was hailed to be the most accurate depiction of the story on film, when in reality very little is accurate but for certain details. The same false advertising was done with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, also directed by Coppola. Having said this, there are a few interesting facts within the film that may be of interest to Orthodox Christians.
1. The first shot of the movie is the outside dome of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople with a cross on top, which then is replaced with the crescent moon when the narrator explains that Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453.
2. Though the opening scene of the movie is not in the book and is entirely fictional, it does depict a real 15th century Romanian Orthodox Prince named Vlad the Impaler, who many believe to be the primary inspiration behind the mythical vampire known as Dracula.
3. Anthony Hopkins plays a Romanian Orthodox priest named Cesare in the opening scene of the movie, who tells Dracula that his beloved Elisabeta's soul is damned for committing suicide in despair. It should be noted also that Anthony Hopkins, who was made famous by his previous film Silence of the Lambs, also plays the narrator, the captain of the Demeter, and of course, Van Helsing. Van Helsing is supposed to be a reincarnation of Fr. Cesare in the film, just as Mina Harker is supposed to be a reincarnation of Elisabeta (this is not in the book).
4. Prince Vlad's scream after he drives his sword into the cross is not the voice of Gary Oldman. Lux Interior, lead singer of punk band The Cramps, recorded the scream and it was dubbed in.
5. Greek-American avant-garde performance artist, vocalist, keyboardist, and composer Diamanda Galás provided vocal effects for the three brides of Dracula.
6. To keep to budget, Bram Stoker's Dracula was filmed almost entirely on the MGM soundstage; only the wedding was filmed on location at Saint Sophia's Greek Orthodox Church in Los Angeles. Director Francis Ford Coppola explains on the DVD commentary that Mina and Jonathan Harker's wedding was a reshoot of the entire ceremony with a genuine Orthodox priest, and he jokingly realized afterwards that Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves really were married following the ceremony.
November 3, 2012
The Monsters Among Us
October 30, 2012
With Halloween approaching, people turn their attention to the spooky and the scary, reveling in stories and images of ghosts, ghouls and witches for the holiday. However, while some monstrous characters only come out to play in October; others enjoy attention year round.
For example, in recent years, vampire media has gained popularity, from Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" series of books and films to HBO's "True Blood," which finished its fifth season this summer. Zombies have recently seen a resurgence in popularity as well, evidenced by new takes on the genre, such as Zach Synder's 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead," Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later" and Edgar Wright's "Shaun of the Dead." Zombies have even shambled onto the television screen with AMC's "The Walking Dead."
Hollywood is quick to cash in on what's popular, but why do themes gain popularity in the first place? Does the prevalence of a certain monster reflect what's going on in our society today?
November 2, 2012
Zombies and God
5 Religious Questions That Zombie Stories Ask Us
Stant Litore
October 25, 2012
"And he asked me, Son of man, can these bones live?" -- Ezekiel
Since releasing the first novels in "The Zombie Bible," I've heard from a lot of readers asking me what zombies have to do with the Bible -- or what the Bible has to do with zombies. The answer is a lot, and I'm not just talking about the Bible's numerous references to either the risen dead or the restless dead.
After all, Western religion asks a series of nearly unanswerable questions: How do we, as a community, manage the excesses of human passion and drive? How do we maintain a just community while living in a world that wants to eat us? Is there a God in that world, and if there is, does he love us?
And though they lurch out of left field and are rarely written by philosophers or theologians, zombie stories tend to stalk down these same questions and chew their way right into them.
Let's take a look.
1. No More Room in Hell
"When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth." That was the tagline for Romero's zombie flicks of the '60s and '70s. It speaks to a bleak vision of humanity -- that our species is capable of packing hell until it overflows with men and women who are so given to their hungers that eventually they exist only to feed those hungers, rather than their hungers existing to feed them. Zombie stories throw into sharp contrast the best and worst of what we are. In "28 Days Later," it is our capacity for rage and mindless violence that is highlighted; in "Dawn of the Dead" and "Shaun of the Dead," it's our rampant consumerism; in the original script for "I Am Legend," it's our ability to hate.
Zombie stories boil all our postmodern angst down to one of the essential religious questions: How bad are we? And does love trump that? In religious terms, are we creatures of sin or creatures of love?
2. People Devour People
Fyodor Dostoevsky said that hell is the inability to love. Zombie stories go a step further, defining hell-on-earth as what happens when not only are we unable to love but the only way we know to seek union with another is to devour them. The Bible warns about wolves in sheep's clothing, and Jesus instructs Peter three times to show his love by "feeding the sheep." But what if we live in a world where the sheep eat the sheep? What then?
3. Eyes That Don't Look Back
Besides gore, a trademark of the zombie story is those gray, vacant eyes. The dead look at you and they don't really see you. They see food. That's all they see. I don't know if there are many things more horrifying than to be seen by another human being as nothing more than an object to consume. The philosopher Levinas describes the way that the human gaze demands a response. To look into the eyes of the other is to see their demand that you recognize them as not other, as someone who is like you, someone who hungers and suffers and loves even as you do. The dead don't do that. Can the living?
The first article of Judeo-Christian theology, one of the earliest statements made in the Old Testament or the Torah, is that humanity, male or female, is created in the image of God. Zombie stories force us into a place where we have to interrogate that, or at least question how faithful we have been to that ethical statement. Do we see something divine and valued when we look at another man or woman, or do we see food for our fears, our ambitions or our needs?
4. Life is Choice
AMC's "The Walking Dead" repeatedly presents its ragged crew of post-apocalypse survivors with ethical dilemmas, demanding that they choose between what may be necessary and what may be right. As though to force the question: How do we live together in a rapidly decomposing world? Zombie stories wrestle with free will. Do the survivors have the ability to determine their future, or are they doomed from the beginning by the hunger of their race and the moral and physical evils of a dead world that live on unburied?
Novels like "I, Zombie" by Hugh Howey cast the life of the zombie in the same light. Howey's zombies are still conscious and retain the memories of their past lives, but are powerless to halt their violent actions -- because their hungers are a continuation of the hungers and addictions under which they lived.
Do we have choices?
5. Lives of Unstoppable Hope
If, either on religious or philosophical grounds, a zombie story suggests that we do have choices, then the zombie story becomes an allegory of hope.
Father Polycarp in "What Our Eyes Have Witnessed" emphasizes the need to live lives of unstoppable hope, even in the face of almost certain failure. He says this in a Roman ghetto in the second century A.D., as the dead devour starving survivors who have been abandoned by their uphill neighbors. Possibly zombie stories are so attractive to us because they ask this final religious question: What reason do we have for the hope within us? Why, in the face of the global food crisis, a genocide every decade, climate change, world poverty and finally, the ravenous dead -- why, in the face of all that, do we not just lie down and die?
Conclusion
Zombie stories invite us to write for ourselves a secular theology of the dead. And to our battered world here in the early 21st century, that elusive theology remains a uniquely appealing one.
October 31, 2012
True Orthodox Ghost Story #2: The Exorcism of the Haunted Cabin
By John Sanidopoulos
"...around their graves shadowy phantoms of the departed are often seen."
- St. Gregory of Nyssa ("On the Soul and the Resurrection")
According to my own many experiences, ghosts are real and hauntings are real. As for what the nature of these ghosts and hauntings are, it is uncertain and I believe each must be examined on a case by case basis. It may be possible, and it would seem most likely, that a demonic entity is behind it. However some arguments also offer up the possibility that it could be the soul of a person who has passed, whether in tragedy or not. Yet, one must not forget to allow for some healthy skepticism, since such matters usually end up being the figment of ones imagination, or an unexplained natural occurrence. Keeping this in mind, I offer the following true personal experience, that can be corroborated outside of my own personal testimony.
October 30, 2012
Christians and Horror: Three Views
In 2011 the website Zombie Theology (no longer in existence) did a series on the three different views Christians generally have in regard to the horror genre. They were written by three different Christian authors who stated their case for each, providing an interesting and helpful exchange of opinions regarding this divisive topic. Below are the links to the original sources:
Christians and Horror
The Critique of Pure Horror
Jason Zinoman
July 16, 2011
WITH gruesome television series about vampires, werewolves, serial killers and zombies earning huge ratings, and a new cinematic bloodbath opening seemingly every week, the cultural appetite for horror raises a curious question: why do so many of us enjoy being disgusted and terrified?
The question has long puzzled parents and mystified spouses, but it has also increasingly engaged the attention of academics. Scholarship on the horror genre has grown so much over the last three decades that a peer-reviewed journal devoted to it, Horror Studies, was started last year. While much of the field’s research is sociological or cultural, focusing on what scary movies reveal about the time or place in which they were made, a small library of books and essays has also tried to explain the visceral appeal of shivers down your spine.
For horror studies the “It’s alive!” moment was the 1979 publication of “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” an essay by the film critic Robin Wood. At a time when horror was treated by many as a second-class genre, Mr. Wood introduced the now-familiar idea, rooted in psychoanalytic theory, that scary movies provide a valuable window onto what our society “represses or oppresses.” The monster, he wrote, represents the marginalized, the sexually or politically subversive, the taboo: the 1931 film “Frankenstein” identified the creature with repressed homosexuality; the first zombie in the 1968 classic “Night of the Living Dead” was a manifestation of family dysfunction.
Mr. Wood did not try to explain why such transgressive elements can be pleasurable, but other scholars borrowed his framework to do just that. In the 1986 article “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine,” Barbara Creed, a film professor at the University of Melbourne, located the appeal of horror’s blood and gore in a nostalgia for the uninhibited time in childhood before filth became taboo.
The 1987 essay “Her Body, Himself,” by Carol J. Clover of the University of California, Berkeley, argued that horror movies offer their teenage male viewers an illicit opportunity to revel in their feminine side. Contesting the claim that horror encourages a sadistic male gaze, Ms. Clover took a closer look at the low-budget exploitation film, in which typically all the female characters are murdered, save for the sole woman who struggles to survive and ultimately escape the villain. Classic examples include Jamie Lee Curtis’s role as Laurie Strode in “Halloween” and Marilyn Burns’s as Sally Hardesty in “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
Ms. Clover argued that this was one of the few film genres that regularly asked male audiences to identify with a triumphant female protagonist. It gave teenage boys license to indulge a gender-bending fantasy that was, she wrote, “unapproved for adult males.”
While these scholars argued that horror taps into positive emotions that are otherwise repressed, other psychoanalytic theories saw horror in the opposite light: as a safe and cathartic way to deal with darker feelings. In his 1980 essay “The Aesthetics of Fright,” the critic Morris Dickstein described horror as a “routinized way of playing with death, like going on the roller coaster.”
But not all theories of horror have been psychoanalytic, trading on notions of repression and release. In 1990 the philosopher Noël Carroll, a staunch critic of the psychoanalytic approach, published “The Philosophy of Horror,” in which he proposed that the pleasure of horror movies is due not to whatever psychic substratum the monster represents, but rather to the peculiar curiosity it inspires.
The defining characteristic of the monster, Mr. Carroll argued, is that it’s hard to classify, categorically incomplete or contradictory, or just generally hard to understand. The monster in the “Frankenstein” series, for instance, is what Mr. Carroll called a “fusion figure,” made of spare parts, including different brains. The horror is rooted in the unknown, but this strangeness also sparks curiosity and fascination. Horror plots are often constructed to emphasize the mystery of the nature of the monster. Most of “The Exorcist,” for example, is taken up with the intricate detective work of a mother trying to figure out what is wrong with her daughter.
One virtue of Mr. Carroll’s theory is that it captures the paradoxical nature of horror’s allure: the very oddity that makes monsters repulsive is precisely what makes them attractive.
In today’s age of increasingly explicit cinematic violence, the scholarly focus has gravitated to the basic pleasures of gore. In “The Naked and the Undead,” Cynthia Freeland, a feminist critic who teaches philosophy at the University of Houston, argues that certain kinds of graphic violence are so skillfully theatrical that they evoke a “perverse sublime.” Their far-fetched extremity also gives the audience the distance needed to relish the bloodbaths. Ms. Freeland cites the ghoulishly over-the-top scenes in “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2,” including a sparks-flying chain saw duel between the masked killer Leatherface and a vamping Dennis Hopper that, just to make things more interesting, adds a hatchet and grenade into the mix.
In an essay that will be published later this year in “The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film,” Adam Lowenstein, an associate professor in English and film studies at the University of Pittsburgh, also emphasizes the aesthetic of horror. For him, meticulous camerawork, pacing and artful splatter are a kind of carefully staged showmanship that the audience appreciates as pure performance. He calls it “spectacle horror.” When Laurie Strode discovers a trio of dead bodies in “Halloween” — one emerging swinging from a closet, another from a cabinet — it’s a highly staged sequence in which the director, John Carpenter, is “quite literally pulling the strings on this series of attractions,” Mr. Lowenstein writes.
What are we to make of all these theories? Now that horror is a standard feature of the mainstream cultural menu, the genre has increasingly become like any other where craft and beauty are drawing cards. But what will always distinguish horror is its unique capacity to make us tremble. And it’s unlikely that any single theory will ever entirely explain that appeal, for fear is as personal and subjective as beauty.
To be sure, the psychoanalytic approach, drawing as it does on feelings and impulses born early in childhood, captures something important; adults forget just how terrifying being a small child can be. But children also adapt quickly, and not all frights are unpleasant: peekaboo, after all, is one of the first games any child plays, and “Hansel and Gretel” introduces readers to cannibalism before inviting them to celebrate the burning of a witch.
If getting scared is one of our first pleasures, then maybe horror movies are just a reminder of how much fun we used to have.
Jason Zinoman, a frequent contributor to "The New York Times", is the author of “Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood and Invented Modern Horror.”
Vampires and Religion in Popular Culture
Vastly different worlds share similar symbolism.
JoAnne Viviano
October 28, 2012
Walk into Jess Peacock’s home, and you’ll think he’s ready to throw one heck of a Halloween party.
Dolls in coffins bookend other creatures on the mantel, a crematorium sign is on one wall, prop skulls and gargoyles lurk about, and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter watches from a movie poster.
But the horror paraphernalia is no holiday collection; it represents both Peacock’s passion and his academic pursuits. The theology student examines the intersection of religion and vampires in popular culture. His scholarly materials include books on the undead, such as three copies of his “favorite novel of all time” — Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot.
“The vampire subgenre provides the unique opportunity, in some ways, to give symbolic flesh to theological concepts,” said Peacock, a graduate student at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio in Delaware who has presented his research in various venues and is writing a book. “A lot of people don’t know they’re talking about it or listening to it when they’re watching a movie or reading a book.”
Consider crosses, sacred ground, drinking blood and immortality.
The religious connotations stretch from pre-modern writings to the 21st century, where a new audience is entranced by the young-adult Twilight books and films and the True Blood HBO television series and books.
Vampires represent “sin, temptation, Satan and even God,” Peacock writes in his research, and the narrative “deals with issues of the soul, the hope for a life hereafter and the potential of forces beyond our control to deface that hope.”
That’s not to say that watching horror movies will make you embrace religion. Peacock says he doesn’t consider himself religious, and he has been watching vampires and other demons on the big screen since he was a child.
“It would be impossible to construct a coherent and sensible theological framework from which to develop any type of legitimate belief structure,” he writes. But the vampire, he adds, can be a “relevant and imaginative symbol” to spur conversation about heavy theological concepts generally reserved for churches and college campuses. Such topics might include the existence of evil in a world guided by a loving God; the fear and horror that come with awe of the divine; and liberation theology, which focuses on fighting oppression.
The vampire in American culture traces its root to pre-modern Slavic peasants and has morphed over the years to embody the changing fears and anxieties of society, said Dan Collins, an associate professor of Slavic languages at Ohio State University who teaches a course titled “Vampires, Monstrosity, and Evil: From Slavic Myth to Twilight.”
To those peasants, vampires represented the cosmic battle between good and evil, God and Satan, and were used to explain infant death, disease, loss of crops and cattle and other adversity, Collins said. In 1897, author Bram Stoker used Dracula to reflect the religious skepticism of his society and explore why harm comes to good people who develop into instruments of God to subdue the evil and restore justice.
Collins said the 20th century brought tormented, remorseful vampires whose evil natures were watered down and attributed to external hardships and psychological illnesses as society grappled to understand what made people do “evil” things. Think Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, which portrays Lestat and Louis as not evil but tormented. Now on the scene are the Twilight vampires, including the undead Edward, a golden boy who resists premarital sex and avoids drinking human blood. This theme reflects the fears and anxieties of the teenage girls to whom the series is marketed, Collins said.
“The vampire has become the shadow side, the dangerous side of the human psyche,” he said.
Peacock said the recent changes could reflect a shift from the vampire as an overtly religious figure to a more-secular one, perhaps as a similar change takes place across society.
Consider the film Dracula 2000, in which the Prince of Darkness is revealed to be none other than Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus Christ. (His death comes at the hands of a 21st century woman named Mary who works at a Virgin Megastore.)
Flash-forward about seven years: In the film 30 Days of Night, a woman cowers before a vampire, saying “Please, God. Please.” The villain asks, “God?” and after looking at the sky, shakes his head and declares, “No God.”
“The shift in theological tone is fascinating in and of itself,” Peacock said. “If there is a connection between a wane in religion and a wane in the vampire genre, that’s vastly fascinating."
Dostoevsky On Edgar Allan Poe
Excerpt from the Russian translation of the introduction to The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, and The Devil in the Belfry titled:
Three Tales of Edgar Poe
By Fyodor M. Dostoevsky (Vremia, 1861)
Two or three stories by Edgar Poe have already been translated and published in Russian magazines. Here we present to our readers three more. What a strange, though enormously talented writer, that Edgar Poe! His work can hardly be labeled as purely fantastic, and in so far as it falls into this category, its fantasticalness is a merely external one, if one may say so. He admits, for instance, that an Egyptian mummy that had lain five thousand years in a pyramid, was recalled into life with the help of galvanism. Or he presumes that a dead man, again by means of galvanism, tells the state of his mind, and so on, and so on. Yet such an assumption alone does not make a story really fantastic. Poe merely supposes the outward possibility of an unnatural event, though he always demonstrates logically that possibility and does it sometimes even with astounding skill; and this premise once granted, he in all the rest proceeds quite realistically. In this he differs essentially from the fantastic as used for example by Hoffmann. The latter personifies the forces of Nature in images, introduces in his tales sorceresses and specters, and seeks his ideals in a far-off utterly unearthly world, and not only assumes this mysterious magical world as superior but seems to believe in its real existence. . . Not so Edgar Poe. Not fantastic should he be called but capricious. And how odd are the vagaries of his fancy and at the same time how audacious! He chooses as a rule the most extravagant reality, places his hero in a most extraordinary outward or psychological situation, and, then, describes the inner state of that person with marvelous acumen and amazing realism. Moreover, there exists one characteristic that is singularly peculiar to Poe and which distinguishes him from every other writer, and that is the vigor of his imagination. Not that his fancy exceeds that of all other poets, but his imagination is endowed with a quality which in such magnitude we have not met anywhere else, namely the power of details. Try, for instance, yourselves to realize in your mind anything that is very unusual or has never before occurred, and is only conceived as possible, and you will experience how vague and shadowy an image will appear before your inner eye. You will either grasp more or less general traits of the inward Image or you will concentrate upon the one or the other particular, fragmentary feature. Yet Edgar Poe presents the whole fancied picture or events in all its details with such stupendous plasticity that you cannot but believe in the reality or possibility of a fact which actually never has occurred and even never could happen. Thus he describes in one of his stories a voyage to the moon, and his narrative is so full and particular, hour by hour following the imagined travel, that you involuntarily succumb to the illusion of its reality. In the same way he once told in an American newspaper the story of a balloon that crossed the ocean from Europe to the New World, and his tale was so circumstantial, so accurate, so filled with unexpected, accidental happenings, in short was so realistic and truthful that at least for a couple of hours everybody was convinced of the reported fact and only later investigation proved it to be entirely invented. The same power of imagination, or rather combining power, characterizes his stories of the Purloined Letter, of the murder committed by an orangutan, of the discovered treasure, and so on.
October 27, 2012
Cosmic Horror vs. Holy Terror: Christians Can Find Value and Meaning in Scary Movies
Jason Morehead
October 15, 2012
The nights are getting longer, darker, and colder these days, making it the perfect time to pull out your favorite horror novel or scary movie and get the heebie-jeebies before bedtime. Probably not, though, if you’re a Christian. I would suspect that the “horror” genre is one of the most unpopular genres — literary, cinematic, or otherwise — for Christians, and understandably so. Many entries in the genre seem to do little else but revel in cruelty, sadism, and gore, e.g., the recent wave of “torture porn” films.
However, Christianity Today‘s Jonathan Ryan argues that it is possible for Christians to find value in the horror genre. He writes:
I find meaning—including biblical truths and theological implications—throughout much of the genre. My appreciation for meaning in scary stories finds its roots deep in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his concept of “cosmic horror,” as well as in the works of Arthur Machen with his notion of “holy terror.” One is rife with despair, the other clings to hope. The contrast between the two results in a remarkable tension found in the history of horror.
Ryan surveys modern horror and finds most of it nihilistic, which he traces directly back to the influence of Lovecraft, who is best known for stories like The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness. Lovecraft’s worldview can be summed up thusly:
The human race will disappear. Other races of beings will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure ‘Victorian fictions.’ Only egotism exists.
This nihilism can be seen even in such recent movies as The Cabin in the Woods and Prometheus, though both films try to mask the horror at their core through different approaches. Ryan compares and contrasts this with Arthur Machen, an Anglican Christian who wrote horror stories containing many of the same ideas and storylines as Lovecraft’s works, but with a different perspective.
Machen felt despair could be avoided by seeing the good God who ruled over the world “behind the veil.” A person could experience holy terror like the prophet Isaiah felt when he stood before the throne of God—or, to bring it back to movies, like Indiana Jones showed in Raiders of the Lost Ark (telling Marion to respect the ark’s power by not looking at it when it was opened) and The Last Crusade (when, to reach the Holy Grail, he had to navigate a treacherous maze requiring him to kneel, to spell God’s holy name, and then take a literal “leap of faith”). Machen uses sacred terror to not only scare us, but to push us deeper to think about “unseen realities.” Through this sacred terror, he created stories richer and more terrifying than anything Lovecraft could conceive. As C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.”
If nothing else, the horror genre is one of the few genres that openly admits the presence of true evil. The challenge, however, that horror novels and movies often fail to overcome is portraying such evil without somehow celebrating or glamorizing it, or presenting it in an exploitative or titillating fashion. If you’re looking for some good cinematic scares for this spooky season that rise above mere exploitation, then I suggest looking at Arts & Faith’s “Top 25 Horror Films.” Some of the entries on the list may surprise you, but their portraits of evil have all been deemed worth considering and reflecting upon by the critics, writers, filmmakers, and fans in the Arts & Faith community.
But if you want to head into the theatre for a good scare this month, consider Sinister. Not only has the movie garnered pretty good reviews — it currently holds a “Fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes — but it was written and directed by Scott Derrickson, a Christian who has argued in the past that the horror genre is the perfect genre for Christians to be involved in, again because of its acknowledgment of evil’s existence in the world around us, and more important, in our own hearts.
Dark Awakenings: The Intersection Between Religion and Horror
Author, scholar, teacher, musician, and theologian Matt Cardin has compiled his new weird supernatural fiction and studies on the interplay between horror and religion in his new book, Dark Awakenings, which has been released by Mythos Books and available through Amazon.
DESCRIPTION:
From its earliest origins, the human religious impulse has been fundamentally bound up with an experience of primal horror. The German theologian Rudolf Otto located the origin of human religiosity in an ancient experience of "daemonic dread." American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft asserted that weird supernatural horror fiction arose from a fundamental human psychological pattern that is "coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it." The American psychologist William James wrote in his classic study The Varieties of Religious Experience that the "real core of the religious problem" lies in an overwhelming experience of cosmic horror born out of abject despair at life's incontrovertible hideousness.
In Dark Awakenings, author and scholar Matt Cardin explores this primal intersection between religion and horror in seven stories and three academic papers that pose a series of disturbing questions: What if the spiritual awakening coveted by so many religious seekers is in fact the ultimate doom? What if the object of religious longing might prove to be the very heart of horror? Could salvation, liberation, enlightenment then be achieved only by identifying with that apotheosis of metaphysical loathing?
This volume collects nearly all of Cardin's uncollected fiction, including his 2004 novella "The God of Foulness." It contains extensive revisions and expansions of his popular stories "Teeth" and "The Devil and One Lump," and features one previously unpublished story and two unpublished papers, the first exploring a possible spiritual use of George Romero's Living Dead films and the second offering a horrific reading of the biblical Book of Isaiah. At over 300 pages and nearly 120,000 words, it offers a substantial exploration of the religious implications of horror and the horrific implications of religion.
Read more here.
For an interview with Matt by Theofantastique on this subject and his essay “Gods and Monsters, Worms and Fire: A Horrific Reading of Isaiah”, read here.
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