Fear Not!: A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies
My conservative Protestant upbringing obliged a narrow range of 1970s mainstays like The Muppet Show and CHiPs. But wait. Even typing those titles provokes another, very different viewing experience. I am, what, maybe ten years old, standing and staring at a television screen at my friend Robbie’s house. The jagged announcer’s voice informs me that “This is The Saturday Shocker on WKBD Detroit!” I can remember few plot-points from this transfixing programming. But the memory provokes many questions: Why were those kids feeling the walls of a haunted house for a light switch? Why didn’t they run from the very slow-moving ghosts? When a man’s hand peels away a gooey, dripping mask from a dead woman’s face, does that mean she’s reliably dead?
I doubt my ten-year-old self looked as adorably vulnerable as little Carol Anne Freeling kneeling before the TV set in Poltergeist. But if my fellow churchgoers could have joined me on that long ago Saturday afternoon, what would they have said? My parents would have covered my eyes and ushered me out of the room, lest they be forced to calm my night frights for the next five months. Others in my church community might have taken a more judicious route, by citing the book of Philippians and asking whether this show was noble, lovely, or admirable.
What a laugh it’d give to go back to watch the B-Movie antics of The Saturday Shocker one more time. But if you’re looking for something besides avoidance or lampooning when it comes to the darker elements of onscreen storytelling, I’d recommend the film criticism of Josh Larsen. Over the years I’ve found a great deal of help from larsenonfilm, the podcast Filmspotting, and his book Movies Are Prayers. Lately, Larsen’s added to his oeuvre with Fear Not: A Christian Appreciation of Horror. I’d like to try to frame a response to this readable and resourceful volume with two propositions.
Horror plays a larger role in movies than I once had thought. I know people who love fright flicks, but I’d hazard that most moviegoers in my circles profess leeriness about the genre. Perhaps this uneasiness comes from a tendency to reduce horror movies to a sub-category of horror like slasher films. But Larsen’s eleven central chapters address a broad range of horror categories and then connect each discussion to a particular human fear, with titles ranging from “Monster Movies: Fear of Our Own Capacity for Sin” to “Sex and Death: Fear of Sexuality” to “Body Horror: Fear of This Mortal Coil,” and so on. Larsen’s discussions of zombie, creature, and ghost stories—as well a narrative he calls “prophetic horror”—surprised me into the realization that I have somehow consumed a respectable number of scary movies over the years.
Larsen also helped me understand what various production elements are doing in horror cinema like The Sixth Sense and Nope and Jaws. His close readings assume that “method is as much a part of the artform as meaning” (2), and, building on that assumption, Fear Not exercises a close critical eye for lighting, composition, transitions, writing, and performance. Take, for example, Larsen’s discussion of The Babadook, which explores not only the particulars of one character’s performance, but also the production design: the “older shabby home consists entirely of shades of gray, blue, and black: the trim work is black; the carpet running down the black stairs is a gloomy blue; and the walls are a blah gray” (87). The book’s especially good when discussing a movie’s editing choices, as in Larsen’s criticism of Unfriended, which shows how the film “manages to wring suspense and emotional resonance by choosing which onscreen window to maximize or by picking the precise moment to have a certain notification to alert to pop up” (95). Such critical attention to horror’s artistic elements makes the genre more watchable even for timid viewers.
I can imagine some readers dismissing Larsen’s detailed discussions of the technical elements of horror as a sort of escapism: in an age of climate change and institutional racism and wealth inequities, does anyone benefit from explicating found-footage techniques in The Blair Witch Project? But to his credit, Larsen’s close analyses do not avoid pressing cultural concerns. Although he doesn’t belabor the politics his criticism uncovers, he does keep a weather eye out for the social and ideological implications of movies like The Fly and Train to Busan. His discussion of Poltergeist, for example, laments that the film’s nod to Native American experience does not more fully acknowledge “that vast stretches of United States consist of stolen and disrespected ground” (98). His describes Jordan Peele’s Us as a “prophetic wake-up call about rampant American consumerism and the exploitative economics that enable it” (77). Long ago, Walker Percy dramatized moviegoing, not just as a thing you do on Friday nights, but as a way of being in the modern world. Larsen’s analysis of prophetic horror similarly illumines the role fear plays in our everyday experience.
Horror movies invite wisdom for mind and body alike. Larsen’s writing seeks what he calls resonance at the limits of human knowing. “That’s the project of this book, to examine how certain fright films resonate with our broken experience—in artistically true, noble, and admirable ways—while also hinting at God’s redemptive promise” (7). In their essay in The Sublime: From Antiquity to the Present, Andrew Chignell and Matthew Halteman might add that horror films take readers from “bedazzlement, terror, and transfixedness” to a space where the viewer’s concepts and language “are felt to be transcended or surpassed” (185). They also describe “a eureka stage” when the sublime creates shifts in feeling and belief. Larsen’s criticism is wise both to the bedazzlement and the eureka.
This is where horror takes us: to that place of surrender, where what some consider to be the platitudes of Christianese suddenly have real power, because we have no other choice. In horror, there is humility. And in our humility, the good news of the gospel offers true comfort, because it arrives from completely outside of ourselves, despite ourselves. (10).
Larsen chooses his book’s subtitle wisely: “A Christian Appreciation of Horror.” If he had chosen a different title—“A Theological Exegesis” or a “Biblical Analysis”— he would have overstated the project. At times, I wished for Larsen to more fully engage the hermeneutic challenges of thinking Christianly about horror. Despite his skill at exploring style and method in film texts, Larsen rarely addresses style and method in biblical narrative. He does identify numerous connections between horror and particular scriptures. “The ghost’s eventual response,” he writes of Unfriended, “is the opposite of the love and mercy Paul also writes about in Romans 3:24…” (96). Or, to cite another representative example: “Like Satan atop the mountain making promises to Jesus in Matthew 4, Mr. Teague offers Steve a new home…” (97). I appreciated his longer discussion of the whatever-is-noble-lovely-or-admirable passage in Philippians, but I felt less helped by the book’s allusive connection-making that, at times, devolved into a this-movie-reminds-me-of-that-verse approach.
Larsen could reasonably respond that I’m asking too much of a slim volume that already has a lot of work to do just correcting people’s misconceptions of scary movies. But I suspect that the book could at once simplify and deepen the faithfulness of its analysis by discussing fewer Bible passages. For example, I think Larsen’s right to see commonality between Jeremiah’s preachments and the cinematographic antiracism of Jordan Peele—and not just because Us cites a specific verse from Jeremiah. The filmmaker, no less than the prophet, makes aesthetic choices that push unwilling people to reconsider their own history. But what if Jeremiah were the only book of the Bible Larsen drew upon in the rest of his book’s criticism? How might a more extended examination of the weeping prophet’s body horror (suspended in a muddy pit) and haunting voices (whispers from YHWH) and bloody violence (of imperial armies) illumine other fright flicks that Larsen examines? I think it works the other way, too. If Jeremiah can help us read the late-modern consciousness in horror films, watching fearsome cinema may, in turn, help us re-read Jeremiah. How, for example, does Hitchcock’s engagement with morally complacent audiences in Psycho intensify appreciation for the prophet’s modes of engaging his audiences in ancient Judah?
Still, Fear Not does vital work for fearful readers in churchly interpretive communities. My own institutional research in and around predominantly white institutions suggests that people of faith can struggle to talk about systemic problems, at least in part, because they struggle to deal with their own feelings of guilt, shame, and sadness. To honestly engage the feelings evoked by horror films may feel like volunteering to be swallowed by a Muppet monster (my first encounter with body horror) or to be a kidnapping victim in an episode of CHiPs (my first encounter with moral panic). It feels so much easier to sidestep fear and grief and desire. But Larsen’s smart, funny, and pointed film criticism offers essential emotional wisdom for engaging our terrors and our hopes.
