This post is written by my friend and former seminary classmate, Zach Adams! Zach is a youth pastor, husband to Victory, and life-long learner. In addition to his interest in Old Testament studies, Zach loves the way we tell stories through film.
I hope I don’t get fired for writing this, because I’m a youth pastor who loves horror movies. In fact, I believe a healthy diet of horror can enrich your life and increase your capacity for love of God and love of others. However, the genre is often a target of hate for those who think we should focus our minds on those things that are true, noble, right, pure, and lovely (Philippians 4:8). Why dwell on such horrifying things if we can easily not do so? Isn’t that living with a spirit of fear, which God has explicitly not given us, according to the Apostle Paul (2 Tim 1:7)? In this post, I would like to briefly give three reasons why I think you should (consider) watching horror movies this Halloween season–and the entire calendar year–or, at least allow your friends to watch them in peace.
Horror Movies Uniquely Communicate Truth, Desire, and Emotion
We’ve all found ourselves in situations where we wished we had a flashlight as we stumbled through a dark room, perhaps as we turn off the last light for the night and sprint to our bedroom to escape an imagined pursuer. Movies are shots in the dark, literally flashes of light projected onto a screen in a dark room where we gather to watch, hoping to escape our own stories for a time, or perhaps to make sense of them through another’s. They are also shots in the dark figuratively. They are attempts at creating or finding meaning in a world unmoored from its foundations of truth and beauty. Naturally, some shots come closer to truth than others, but if they’re honest, they are still valuable expressions of fear and desire.
This is what draws me most to the horror genre: it expresses and grasps at truth, desire, and emotion in ways that no other genre is able to do. Horror movies search for meaning with honesty about our fears and the wrongness of this fallen world. They are worthwhile because of this: they acknowledge reality as it is, in all of its horror, even if it is through the medium of the fantastical. As people who are invested in a holistic pursuit of truth, they are worth our time.
My favorite example of this idea is the 2014 movie The Babadook, by the Australian director and screenwriter, Jennifer Kent. This movie has almost the same message as Pete Dokter’s Pixar movie, Inside Out (2015), even though they are drastically different in their presentation. Both movies’ protagonists are wrestling with deep grief. Inside Out’s Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) struggles to process the sadness that accompanies her family’s move across the country. This struggle is shown through personified emotions inside Riley’s head, the most prominent of which is Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), who completely ignores, rejects, and abuses Sadness (Phyllis Smith) in order to pretend that everything is okay.
In The Babadook, a widowed mother, Amelia (Essie Davis) struggles to contend with the grief that haunts her six years after her husband was killed in a traumatic car accident while driving Amelia to the hospital to deliver their baby, Samuel. Samuel is now six years old, and begins to display erratic behavior as he becomes obsessed with a monster from a children’s book he found, Mister Babadook. Grief takes monstrous form in the guise of Mister Babadook who haunts this broken family, slowly driving Amelia further into depression and eventually to lashing out violently at Sam. The movie is not about defeating the monster–you can’t get rid of the Babadook, after all. Instead, the family learns to live with this monster who will by necessity never go away.
The Babadook and Inside Out both grasp at the important truth that grief and sadness are absolutely necessary to our human existence. To deny this emotion is to diminish ourselves and harm the people around us. Yet, they package that message in very different ways. Let me be clear, Inside Out is a wonderful movie, but it cannot communicate this important truth in the way that The Babadook does. The Babadook shows us the horrifying monster that grief can be as well as the monsters we can become by refusing ourselves any capacity for sadness. I have recently seen the story of The Babadook play out almost exactly in the lives of a family I know who has suffered through terrible grief. Because I have wrestled with this movie’s wrestling, I have an increased capacity to understand the monstrous nature of grief in their lives, as well as my own, and the importance of helping them to face the monster down.
There are many movies that help us to understand the nature of our world more fully. To briefly include some other examples, horror movies can help us to:
- Understand the complexity of evil and that not all those who are called monsters are villains. And sometimes they’re vilified so others can profit (Pan’s Labyrinth).
- Help us to realize the horror of life without God, grace, or true community (The Lodge; The Conjuring; Hereditary; Midsommar).
- Identify misplaced notions of an angry God or a loveless religion (Carrie; Saint Maud)
- Understand the injustices of society (Get Out; Us; Barbarian)
This brings me to my next point.
Horror Movies Allow us to Draw Closer to Others with Empathy
One of the most powerful theater-going experiences I’ve had was watching the movie Barbarian (2022), in which a woman, Tess (Georgina Campbell) arrives at her Detroit AirBnb only to find it is already occupied by a man who booked the house through a separate agency. To the audience’s chagrin, Tess steps inside to stay the night after exhausting all other options. I won’t give anymore details, because it’s best to see this movie with as little info as possible, but what transpires is a wild ride of suspense, terror, and even comedy. This experience was an embodied one. My theater’s audience screamed out together, clenched our fists together, laughed together, and sat in shock together. We entered into the experience of Tess as a communal activity and felt along with her and for her.
The greatest stories draw us into the experiences of its characters, immerse us in its world, and shape us into something new. Good movies entertain us, but the best ones stay with us and help us to live more fully in the real world we inhabit, where real people feel and experience real things. Storytelling deepens our capacity for empathy by entering into the story of another. Pairing this ability of storytelling with the horror genre allows us to empathize more deeply with the fears and experiences–even traumatic ones–of those around us.
Consider the movie Gerald’s Game (2017), directed by Mike Flanagan and adapted from a novel by Stephen King. In this film, a middle-aged couple takes an isolated vacation where they hope to spice up their stale marriage. The husband (Bruce Greenwood) has an idea to fulfill a sexual fantasy he has of handcuffing the wife, Jessie (Carla Gugino) to the bed, one that she is reluctant to do but eventually gives into trying. Before anything happens, the husband dies of a heart attack while Jessie is still handcuffed to the bed. There, chained to the bed, Jessie begins to think hopelessly through her options of escape while her thoughts begin to race and return to her childhood. In these flashback scenes, which are emotionally intense and hard to watch (though not graphic), we discover that Jessie is a survivor of sexual abuse. The chains she is trying to escape are not just the ones that hold her to the bed, but the ones that hold her to her traumatic past.
Now, because of the content of Gerald’s Game, I would not recommend it to just anyone. However, as someone who has not experienced sexual abuse, this horrific story helped me understand more deeply, at a mental and emotional level, what it is like to be chained and haunted by these scarring experiences (and the pain it takes to get free from them). Because I have seen Gerald’s Game, I have a greater capacity to love and care for those who have experienced such traumatic events, an invaluable gift for me as a pastor and human being in relationship with other human beings. I also have an increased gratitude for a God who frees and heals us of the horrible realities of our world.
Similarly, Get Out (2017), allows me to understand the dehumanizing effects of racism for people of color. Barbarian allows me to understand what it feels like to be a woman in America, Signs helps me to wrestle with doubt in the face of a silent God, A Nightmare on Elm Street helps me to know in a new way the fear of being alone, A Quiet Place (does this count as a horror movie?) helps me to understand that there is a deep enough love that can face horror.
Horror Movies Show Us that Evil is Real, but it Has an End
I’ve heard it said often, “Why would I spend time watching horror movies when life is horrifying enough?” That’s a fair statement, and as I claimed in my first point, this is one of the genre’s strengths. Life can be horrible, and we need a way to process this. Horror movies take these fears we have and place them before us in a controlled environment where our fear cannot just be felt, but processed and released. They can serve as a kind of exposure therapy that enables us to find healing and release.
Horror movies scratch at our inevitable sense that good and evil truly exist, and it plays with our hope that evil can be defeated. As Christians, we know this as a guaranteed outcome. Evil and terror has an expiration date because the light of the world has entered into darkness and defeated Death by death. Any horror that persists is the death throes of evil on its deathbed.
I’m reminded of this as I watch one of the most feared types of horror for the Christians I know: supernatural horror. These movies–take The Exorcist (1973), or The Conjuring (2013), for example–portray a world where demons exist and they have power. But they also inevitably show that there is something–excuse me, someone–greater and more powerful than they are. These forces of evil corrupt humanity away from God’s good intention, but they can be overcome and defeated by faith. This resonates deeply with the message of Scripture, even if creative license is taken along the way.
Even in movies without happy endings, at the end of every movie, the screen fades to black and the credits roll. This is a reminder that no horror will have the last word, but everything will be brought to newness by God. We can have hope of goodness in a horrifying world, we can heal from our horrors and traumas, we can know that there is a good God who walks with us and strengthens us, we can be freed from a spirit of fear and anxiety. This can in fact help us to live without that spirit of fear we’re all concerned about (2 Tim 1:7). And so, horror is an opportunity to face our fears rather than being consumed by them. We do this in a controlled environment and according to our capacity.
Though much more can be said in favor of watching horror movies, and many objections can be lifted and answered, I challenge you to consider watching a horror movie this season. Start small to increase your capacity for it. You can still appreciate horror without watching the scariest movies. But know that it is not an ungodly exercise. It can actually help you to enlarge your ability to love God and others, and to live in the real world. If you don’t watch a scary movie, at least know that there are ways to do so without abandoning your faith or compromising your values.
Some recommendations:
- Fear Not! A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies by Josh Larsen
- Be Afraid by Christianity Today (Podcast hosted by Kutter Callaway).
- “Releasing fear: how horror films can help to ease anxiety” by Bryony Porteous-Sebouhian
MOVIES
Not too scary:
- A Quiet Place
- Get Out
- Pan’s Labyrinth
- The Devil’s Backbone
- Gerald’s Game
- Night of the Living Dead
A little scarier:
- A Nightmare on Elm Street
- Candyman
- Midnight Mass (Netflix Series)
- Scream
- Train to Busan
- The Witch
Pretty scary!
- The Babadook
- Barbarian
- The Conjuring
- Hereditary
- Us
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