She entered the graveyard, the full moon rising cast distorted, dark shadows. Everything seemed threatening. The smell of death, fear and terror was everywhere. From out of the darkness a beast howled … children of the night. (Dracula) A frail, vulnerable woman, alone among the dead sensed an unseen presence. (Ghost Story) The villagers killed him the day before yesterday and he was buried, locked deep beneath the weight of earth and stone. (Freddie Kruger, Nightmare on Elm Street) Banished, back to the depths from which he came. (Any numbers of sequels) You tripped over an exposed root and she fell down as she tried to get her bearings. Then she saw it. A scarred hand emerging from an unmarked grave. (Night of the Living Dead, The Walking Dead or any zombie movie) Slowly the dead corpse emerges. She thought that she must run but was terrified beyond her capacity for rational thought. (Egon, Ghostbusters) She tripped and fell in the dark. Two guards tried to stop her. She screamed at them…”Run fools!” She escaped into the safety of the the familiar village, she ran up the stairs of her apartment building. She felt the presence behind her. She turns, but no one was there. She opened the door, slamed it shut and locked it. She was safe within the comfortable world of her friends. Then she noticed him, standing in the corner, addressing her terrified friends. Its dead lips moved and words from beyond the grave poured out: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Then he breathed and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven.” The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead - Why don’t we see the resurrection as a horror story? Why, instead, is it a story of hope?
Horror from the beginning: The gross, the horrible and the terrifying As you recall, the story of Genesis starts to turn towards the dark when the serpent seduces Eve by convincing her that the Creator is not worthy of her trust. Then brother kills brother and lies about it. In Greco-Roman stories, Saturn eats his sons because he is afraid that one might betray him. Think Jack Nicholson in The Shining, a movie about an alcoholic and delusional father, captivated by a motel who violently kills one man and attempts to murder his wife and son.
In medieval lore, probably going back to the 6th Century originally, the Danes told a story about Grendel who would attack and eat warriors gathered in Hrothgar’s mead hall. Beowulf attacks and kills Grendel, and then after the monster mother takes revenge, Beowulf must swim to the bottom of the lake and attack and kill monster-mom. So much horror centered in dysfunctional families. Think the movie Psycho with Janet Lee and Anthony Perkins. Or Carrie with Sissy Spacek, whose monster mom drives a likeable, but off-beat teen, to destroy the community.
The Exorcist and Dracula and the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, emphasized the power of faith in confronting the darkness. A priest’s prayers heal a little girl or is it the priest’s self-sacrifice? Van Helsing, armed with crucifix and cross, defeats the dark, seductive powers of the blood sucker, the anti-Christ whose victims drink it’s blood.
As the movie going public moves away from Christ and towards self-sufficiency, Buffy the Vampire slayer only has her self-confidence. In movies like Disney’s Malificent or Broadway’s Wicked, the metaphysic of evil is dismissed, and the monster is just misunderstood. Imagine a psychologist saying Mr. Hitler, “tell me about your childhood?” Good versus evil as morphed into existential dread a social problem to be managed. Does the secular world explain evil in any compelling manner?
Scary stories and reality Stephen King, the master of terror, talks about three different kinds of horror which compose a story:
The gross out: The repulsiveness of our nature is present in a severed head or a decomposing corpse.
Horror proper: Imagine the graphic portrayal of the unbelievable. The audience is faced with something that strikes up genuine fear, typically caused by the sight of something so implausible or unnatural that their minds struggle to grasp what they are seeing. The dead waking up and walking or horrifying clowns. Fear is rooted in the uncontrollability of nature as in Jurassic Park’sdinosaurs or Hannibal Lecter cannibalism in Silence of the Lambs.
Terror: The deep psychological and spiritual basis of terror is rooted in the unknown. The lights mysteriously go out and you feel something behind you, following you, touching you. Our psychological control and our rationality fall away and we are abandoned in another realm present in our world.
The Incarnation takes on the terror of corporality Today we celebrate the Feast of All Saints, the Army of the Dead… think any Bruce Campbell film. But each saints story is rooted in the story of Christ.
The gross out: The Lord experiences the grossness of life in his brutal death. Throughout his life, Jesus’ body has every function that our bodies have. He cuts his finger, has a headache, a tummy ache and experiences the death of his father Joseph.
Horror proper: He sees Romans brutalize Jews and take their property. He is arrested himself, brutalized, marched down the street and jeered at and then hung up naked on the cross.
Terror: The psychological dimension of horror, the Lord experiences being hunted, conspiracies against his life, conniving, scheming and betrayal by a friend. What, he wonders, will become of his mother and friends when he is not their to protect them?
There is no point asserting that Jesus never feared any of these experiences. No point in saying that the spiritual is more real than our corporality, the horror and terror are very real and we need to be confronted. You have no need of faith if everything is under your control. You have no need of courage if all fear is only an illusion.
Our final end is not to become just nice people, but to transfigured as sons and daughters of God.[i] In the readings today, St. John reports “a vision of a great multitude, which no one could count, from every nation, race, people, and tongue” fulfilling God’s promise to Abraham, that by his seed all the nations of the world would be blessed. (see Genesis 22:18). The Church celebrates many famous Christians on their individual memorials and today she praises God for all His “holy ones.” God’s saints are divinized by Baptism, by the mystery of the grace of God. (see Colossians 1:2). They wait for the day when they will “share in the inheritance of the saints in light” (Colossians 1:12). St. John, in the second reading, tells us that to be “saints” means to be “children of God.” We are God’s children, but “what we shall be has not yet been revealed.” (1 John 3:3). Christ revealed earthly beatitude for us. We are “blessed,” He says, when we are poor, when we mourn, when we are persecuted for His sake. It is then we should “Rejoice and be glad, for [our] reward will be great in heaven” (Matthew 5:12).
Horror and human action Why do scary movies frighten us? The metaphysical reality of the horror film genre is built on the Christian world view. The demonic cannot exist if there is no God. Without the Christian God, supernatural reality slides back to the actions of daemons like Saturn and Aphrodite who do horrible things to each other and people, because it amuses them. Life is absurd because human beings have the nagging suspicion that it really isn’t, that there is someone out there, there is more to all of this than appears. That is why vampire movies where crucifixes are powerless are deeply problematic.
The gross, the horrible and the terrible, if not confronted by faith, are weaponized. Destructive mobs seek racial justice. Slander and ruinous public accusation armed for the betterment of our political life. Scapegoating and violence to protect us from the harsh realities of corporeal life. Fear used to manipulate and bully.
The gospel is subversive. It reveals the chinks in our armor. What disgusts us, what horrifies us, the name of our terror. It then colonizes them, heals them and redirects our disordered imaginings confronting them with the truth of faith and the truths of reason. When its mission is accomplished it robs the howling mob of its illusion of goodness. It unmasks the cult of accusation that dominates us. It exposes the demonic scarecrows’ bag of tricks. The scariest monsters in movies are usually human. In The Wizard of Oz, one of the scariest movies ever made, a mean neighbor wants to kill a little girl’s dog, trees grab at you, machines come alive and cry, witches, flying monkeys, a bullying wizard. But, the scarecrow, who is scared of everything, isn’t scary because it just wants to use its brain. Halloween, All Saints and All Souls day is this human reality bundled altogether around the Resurrection. So come, eat his flesh and drink his blood and join his Army of the Dead! Well, actually they are more alive than ever.