What might your typical London tourist have been doing earlier this January? Visiting Buckingham Palace? Wandering the British Museum? Taking in the Paddington Bear Experience? Probably she would not have expected to be overshadowed by a 15-foot bloody and maniacal Ralph Fiennes surrounded by columns of human skulls plastered on the side of a passing London bus.
This was part of the advertising campaign for the fourth installment of the postapocalyptic horror film franchise 28 Days Later. Next to the gruesome scene was the film’s tagline: “Fear is the new faith.”
The movie, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, is a study in human evil. Set in a United Kingdom still ravaged by the “infected” (not zombies, lest the geeks devour me!), the film follows 12-year-old Spike as he is inducted into a sadistic, satanic cult led by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal. Along the way, Spike encounters the “humane” and humanistic Dr. Ian Kelson (played by Fiennes), who works from a vast ossuary on a cure for the disease.
On one level, the tagline isn’t too difficult to explain or to empathize with. As with all “good” films in this genre (as some define them), the real monsters to be studied aren’t the infected or zombies but the humans that remain.
In the 28 Days Later world, a world of chaos and meaninglessness, fear isn’t something to be avoided; it’s the glue that can hold fractured people together. The vulnerable are looking for leaders who do indeed terrify the monsters but who also protect and deliver us from other threats—perceived or real. For the powerful and charismatic, fear can be weaponized for control, serving as a substitute for religious belief, driving cultish behavior and extreme violence.
More interesting than the film’s trope of fear-as-control, though, is what it reveals about us as viewers: that we willingly submit to fear and pay to have it managed for our pleasure. In our late-modern culture, described by Paul Virilio as an “administration of fear”—a world where terrors and horrors are legion, where we feel “bewitched, bothered, and bewildered”—you’d expect us to seek distraction from all that.
So why are we drawn all the more to films like Bone Temple? One might think we want to escape all this horror—not pay good money to be entertained by it. And yet the horror genre is having its moment in the sun. Films like Sinners and Weapons are being recognized during awards season, which historically has been rare for the genre.
When it comes to horror, there’s always more going on than just pure entertainment. Horror is a fallen echo of the fear of God. We crave terror because we were made for awe, and horror gives us a counterfeit version we can try to control.
Psychology of Horror
From a psychological perspective, the horror genre has been explored for some time. The well-known author (and expert on the genre) Stephen King has reflected on the nature and need of horror. He notes that “the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.”
Horror is a fallen echo of the fear of God. We crave terror because we were made for awe, and horror gives us a counterfeit version we can try to control.
Although it can be used glibly, there is a catharsis in horror. “The answer seems to be that we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. With the endless inventiveness of humankind, we grasp the very elements which are so divisive and destructive and try to turn them into tools—to dismantle themselves.”
Elsewhere, King notes the need to exercise (rather than exorcise) our fears not just for our sake but for the sake of society:
The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let free, our nastiest fantasies realized . . . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark. . . . For myself, I like to see the most aggressive of them . . . as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators swimming around in that subterranean river beneath. Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down there and me up here.
Horror movies are great examples of what the psychologist Paul Rozin calls “benign masochism,” the realization “that the body has been fooled, and that there is no real danger, leads to pleasure derived from ‘mind over body.’”
Some have commented on how the zombie postapocalyptic genre indulges our apocalyptic fantasy, especially in young men: violence without guilt (because zombies are dead already); “free” stuff without the drudgery of work (because you can take what you want); freedom from the normal moral constraints; a simplicity to living that contrasts with the multiple demands of daily life suffocating us; and, because you’ve prepared yourself for this moment, the possibility of being in control and “top dog,” when maybe in real life you’ve been the runt of the litter.
Summing up this apocalyptic fantasy, James Crooke writes,
This is our simultaneous fear and fantasy. Why are we so afraid? Because we know that people can behave badly. Yet why are we so attracted? Because we know that people can behave badly. While we are afraid of an apocalypse and the consequent breakdown of law and order, because we know this will permit human beings to behave wickedly, we fantasize about the same because we secretly wish to be wicked with impunity. If this is correct, then the fantasy seems to massage or realize this longing by enabling the reader to live it vicariously—to “get one’s fix,” however temporary.
All these reasons have merit but only seem like parts of a larger puzzle. Do these explanations exhaust the reasons for our fascination with horror and our craving for fear? I believe we can go deeper—and darker.
What we popularly call “horror” covers a hierarchy of fears that King breaks down into three categories. The first is terror (“It’s coming!”). Terror is the dread of what might happen, the fear of the unknown. Terror is about sustained anticipation and imagination. Second, there is horror (“It’s here!”). Horror is the revelation itself, the shock of the now known. Finally, there is the gross out (“It’s revolting!”). Here, the fear is one of disgust and revulsion.
As King famously states, “Terror [is] the finest emotion. . . . So I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.”
Hallowed Ground
When describing and experiencing terror in films, and particularly those dealing with supernatural elements where we encounter something unknown, we are entering onto hallowed ground. I’m using that term not metaphorically but literally.
In his influential book The Idea of the Holy, scholar of religion Rudolf Otto spoke of the numinous (from the Latin numen, meaning “power”), the nonrational encountering with Otherness (the “holy”) that can’t be reduced to any other category. Otto realized that to put such a visceral encounter into words is extremely difficult, but he famously described it as “mysterium tremendum et fascinans”—a tremendous and fascinating mystery.
The “mystery” is both the shock and stupor of encountering the wholly Other and our inability to categorize that encounter with our experience.
The “tremendous” is the awfulness, terror, and dread of this encountering, which is overpowering and overwhelming, and reveals our nothingness and the Other’s infinite greatness. We experience what Otto calls the “creature feeling”: a recognition of how small, fragile, and insignificant we are.
Finally, there is the “fascination.” Despite the fear and the terror, we are irresistibly attracted to the numinous. It’s an intoxicating, joyful ecstasy that we desire and yearn for and that is our highest good. Isn’t this a great description of what we experience in watching quality horror, where there is genuine terror?
The problem, though, is that the numinous is vague; undefined; impersonal; and, in terms of going to watch a horror film, under the controlled conditions of a laboratory (theater).
Fear of the Lord
Let’s return to the notion of the “creature feeling” but put it through a distinctively Christian lens. As creatures, we’re hardwired with fear—most importantly fear of our Creator, God himself. The “fear of the Lord” is a significant theme in the Bible, often associated with wisdom (Job 28:28; Prov. 1:7; 9:10). It’s a fear rooted in awe, trust of One who is wholly Other as uncreated, in a category of his own: mysterious, tremendous, and fascinating.
As creatures, we’re hardwired with fear—most importantly fear of our Creator, God himself.
However, in our rebellion against God, fear is suppressed and substituted for other fears in the natural and supernatural world (Rom. 1:18). Thus, our proper fear for God is dulled, even though deep down we’re still fearful of the terrible consequences of turning from the One who made us. Fear isn’t a pleasant feeling.
This framework starts to explain our love of horror, for it expresses, in twisted and perverted forms, what J. H. Bavinck describes as the human condition—our running away from God and our running to him at the same time—under the controlled conditions of the movie theater. Professor and cinephile Grant Horner describes this well:
For a believer, fearing God is a sublime, deep pleasure. That is what the ultimate fear is—pleasurable. It is not supposed to be negative, uncomfortable or debilitating, but rather edifying by showing us who we are in terms of an almighty and infinite being. . . . Because we are wired to gain pleasure from the fear of God, yet as a race we do not fear him, we find ourselves in the rather perverse position of experiencing certain pleasure coming to us in the form of highly manufactured and densely controlled fears packaged as entertainment. . . . Fearing God cannot be bounded, yet we trust his care and love for us, his promise that he will not harm us. The precise opposite is the case in horror films: the evil entity wants to harm us—but we can control it because we know it isn’t real. Our problem is that in our grievously foolish and fallen nature, we don’t think God is real either.
We need to recognize that fear is a many-splendored thing. As I’ve written elsewhere, for the Christian still tempted to live in fear, there’s a sense in which our relationship with Jesus Christ means our earthly fears are relativized, removed, and repurposed.
But what about those who don’t think this God is real?
Monstrous Christ
In 1866, English poet and playwright Algernon Charles Swinburne published what some believe was his most famous work, Hymn to Proserpine. The poem’s epigraph is Vicisti Galilaee (“You have conquered, O Galilean”), the alleged last words of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (AD 331–63), who opposed Christianity and supported the traditional Roman pantheon. (Proserpine is the goddess of the underworld.)
Although ascribed to Julian, the poem reflects Swinburne’s regret on the rise of Christianity and a lament for the cruel but vibrant gods of the past:
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Swinburne’s Jesus Christ isn’t someone to fear. He’s someone to pity.
But compare that to the reaction of those first eyewitnesses that Easter morning: “They went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mark 16:8). Notice they were trembling, bewildered, and dumbstruck, not by what they saw but by what they didn’t see. This was something properly terrifying. As Ryan Duns argues,
The film critic Robin Wood famously observed that “normality is threatened by the monster.” In his words, deeds, and resurrection, Christ is monstrous because he threatens a normality that preserves and perpetuates sin. In a world accustomed to a sinful status quo, Christ is monstrous because he reveals that we are living in the horror story of history.
So here’s the challenge: Yes, we can settle for this status quo, which includes trying to tame our fears in the controlled conditions of the movie theater. Or we could be brave and, maybe for the first time, explore the mysterious, tremendous, and fascinating person of Jesus Christ, the One who couldn’t be controlled even by what we believe to be our greatest fear: death. He truly is the conquering Galilean.
The Gospel Coalition