On Friday, Bob Hoose posted about why our society has a collective yen for horror flicks. It is a curious phenomenon: None of us love to hear something go bump in the night—particularly if it’s an unexplained bump in your hall closet. But things that go bump on screen? We love it.
The reasons, as Bob reported, are legion: We like the vicarious thrill or the sense of relief or even long to release some sort of weird impulse inside us. Plugged In is critical of the horror genre as a whole, of course. But many of those reasons Bob listed resonate with me personally. (Or at least they did.)
For a good chunk of my life, I was one of those “thrill-seeking closet crazies looking for stress relief.” When I was a teen, my best bud and I would rent a horror flick pert near every week. Some would be pretty creepy. Some were silly. And a great many were abysmal. But for us, it didn’t matter. If the horror film was truly horrible, it gave us the chance to go all Mystery Science Theater 3000 on the thing. If it was actually scary … well, we could take turns checking to make sure nothing was lurking in the back seats of each other’s cars.
There was one film, though, I drew the line at—one movie I thought would be too scary even for my hardened soul: The Exorcist.
It was the culmination of a Halloween-season all-nighter. My friend popped the VHS into the machine at about 3 a.m. And while I didn’t stop him, I didn’t really want to see the thing either. Both my friend and I were Christians, and there was something particularly bothersome to us about demon possession—particularly manifested in a film you couldn’t laugh off. So I told my bud that it was fine if he watched, but I was gonna go to sleep.
There were two problems with this plan: One, I am genetically incapable of falling asleep while watching a movie—even a movie detailing the migratory patterns of sloths. Two, it was really, really hard to drift off when the television set was blaring this:
“Blrhgh! GrrrRRRR! AAAAAAH!”
And my nervous friend was giving a play-by-play like this:
“Paul, you’re not gonna believe—OH, GOOD HEAVENS! WHAT DID SHE JUST DO?! NOOOO WAY! THAT’S THE GROSSEST THING EVER!”
To this day, I’d call The Exorcist the scariest film I’ve ever seen … even though I literally saw perhaps 15 minutes of it. It has burned itself into my brain, even though I absorbed most of it with my eyes tightly shut.
Looking back, it seems like The Exorcist exemplifies what I found enticing about horror films back in the day … but it also illustrates why horror can be so problematic.
Some folks consider horror films to be inherently anti-Christian. I’ve never really gone that far. Oh, most horror flicks display horrendous theology, of course … but they’re also one of the few avenues in our culture in which we’re allowed to probe and examine some important, and inherently religious, themes: The nature of life and death, good and evil, salvation and damnation. Recognizing this, some Christian filmmakers have attempted to redeem horror through their work, and even Exorcist author William Peter Blatty was actually trying to work on viewers’ souls, not give them goose bumps:
When I first heard, in 1949, of an actual case of demonic possession and an exorcism going on nearby while I was a junior at Georgetown University, I remember thinking, 'Someday, somebody's got to write about this, because if an investigation were to prove that possession is real, what a help it would be to the struggling faith of possibly millions, for if there were demons, I reasoned, then why not angels? Why not God?'
So there’s that.
And yet, the genre is inherently problematic—infused with sex and gore, often illustrating the very worst of human (and even inhuman) impulses. Blatty, I’m sure, had the best of intentions when he wrote The Exorcist. But that evening, I couldn’t see or hear them. Instead, I saw a glimpse of pea soup jettisoning from a little girl’s mouth. I heard things I can’t repeat here. The Exorcist didn’t strengthen my faith—it scarred my soul a little.
A love of horror flicks tends to be something of a young person’s phenomenon, and perhaps that makes sense. When we’re young, we feel durable, tireless, ageless. We long for excitement. We long for a thrill. Those of us who were raised in a loving, familial environment perhaps feel the pull more than some. Maybe we lack a firm understanding of the darker things around us … and so we gravitate toward that darkness—to glimpse a pretend nightmare within our daydream worlds.
But as we age, we realize there are nightmares enough. When we’re a part of a fallen world, we inherently walk in the shadows, live in the darkness. And we understand that a jet stream of pea soup doesn’t equip us any better to deal with the real horrors around us. They become just more weight on our souls … an impediment to seeing the world not as it is, but the world as God intended.
I don’t enjoy prototypical horror flicks anymore—particularly if they’re apt to actually scare me. I do what I can to avoid even reviewing the things. They bother me … and frankly, they should. Don’t get me wrong … there are times I still enjoy a good scare. Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favorite directors, and I have a soft spot for M. Night Shyamalan’s early work. I still will read works by Edgar Allan Poe or plow through creepy Victorian classics like Frankenstein or The Monk on occasion. But I no longer need to feel terrified to feel alive. Life has enough exhilaration (and terror) for me as it is.
So tonight, as we hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters who come to our door, we won’t be watching a horror flick to pass the time. My family and I will be playing Monopoly. And in this economy, the thought of skipping past Park Place and Boardwalk every time I round that last corner is frightening enough.
Recent Comments