Skip to main content

Holy Horror




My friend Steve likes horror movies.  It’s something we share in common, and it’s one of the things that brought us together back in college.  He recently published a book that some horror fans will enjoy—Holy Horror.

The idea here—Steve used to teach biblical studies—is that you can learn quite a bit about the Bible from watching horror movies.  It’s an interesting idea because a lot of conservative Christians believe horror is evil.  From the Devil, even.

I find this kind of book interesting because it bring two unexpected fields together.  I write horror stories.  (I’ve got one ready to go, if I can only find the time to get it through Submittable.)  I watch horror movies.  Who would think of finding the Bible in such places?

His larger point, I think, is that horror and religion are closely related.  That I can get!  Have you seen the how the evangelicals behave lately?  How they rally around Trump?  There’s horror right there!

Reading this, what struck me is how often the Bible shows up in horror films.  At first I thought this book was simply all the movies where the Good Book appears in horror.  Clearly it’s not.  Steve hasn’t watched as much horror as I have and he missed a few obvious examples.

Horror will likely never become mainstream.  The reason is that many people don’t like horror, but also many people don’t understand that horror deals with existential issues.  Many horror films are great movies.  Every time I watch The Shining (where Steve starts) or The Exorcist (where he lingers) I say to myself, “That was a great movie!”

Religion has been part of horror perhaps from the beginning.  Most clearly, however, it entered the scene in Rosemary’s Baby.  Holy Horror starts in 1960, and comes up to pretty much the present.  It’s a fun read.  A little on the pricey side, but for my money, it was worth it.  It’s what I call guilty pleasure.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pacing

A criticism that I’ve occasionally received concerns pacing.  The short story, which today means up to about 7000 words, is a limited amount of space to establish mood.  My writing partner Elizabeth was reading a Poe short story recently and commented on how long it seemed. We’ve been accustomed, by the internet, to shorten things.  Flash fiction is in.  Say it in 1000 words or less.  What’s the correct pacing for a 300-word story? I’ve been editing a number of my complete, but unpublished, stories lately.  I’m trying to bring the word counts down.  I don’t want to be thought of as a plodding writer.  At the same time, I’m no action writer.  My stories are thoughtful. Some time ago I started reading Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire .  Dark, moody, and sensuous, this is a slow-paced novel.  Focusing on subtleties and emotions, she paints a writerly picture of the inner life of the undead. If I were an editor to...
Post a Comment
Read more

Small Town

I was born in a small town.  That’s not a quote from John Cougar Mellencamp; it’s the truth.  My hometown, which shall remain nameless here since it is sometimes easy to identify a person by such a small place, is who I am.  We are defined by where we’re from. After spending my first decade, which I didn’t realize was a decade at the time, in my hometown we moved.  We moved to an even smaller town.  A community of less than a thousand.  Industrial, dirty, and drug-ridden.  I began to write. Like most restless minds in small towns, I wanted to escape.  When I first saw the city, I was enamored.  So many people.  So much excitement.  So little community. This week I received the happy news that my story “Prom Night Redux” was accepted for publication by Exterminating Angel Press: the Magazine .  (More details to follow.) The story is close to my heart.  It is a story about being from a small town and wanting...
Post a Comment
Read more

Creativity

  Maybe you’ve noticed this too.   When you step away from fiction writing for a while, your creativity becomes flaccid.   I’ve had to step away from this blog for a while because I was writing my sixth nonfiction book.   God, I’ve missed fiction! Now that I’ve entered that phase of waiting for publishers to respond, I’ve turned my limited writing time back to fiction.   I submitted a couple of stories this week and am waiting to hear about those as well.   When you’re a writer, waiting is a way of life. Opening my software where I store my fiction stories, I was amazed by how many I found.   Some of them are bad—so bad that they’ll never (rightfully) be published.   Some are surprisingly good and have been sitting around while I finished up my nonfic. The vast majority, however, are unfinished.   Some years back I realized that when I’m writing in the heat of inspiration but don’t have time to finish a story that I need to write down where I...
Post a Comment
Read more