Horror’s success on the big screen is because there is a persistent recognition of the problem of evil, one of the greatest metaphysical and theological conundrums that have occupied some of the greatest intellectual minds past and present. Horror is that dreadful reminder that evil exists even as we moderns like to deceive ourselves in …
“Why do people seek out stories, novels, movies, plays, and games that horrify?” Matt Cardin, America’s preeminent writer on horror, asks this important question in his excellent collection of horror essays What the Daemon Said. It is especially relevant in the midst of a disenchanted and scientistic world of technology that relentlessly pursues domination over this world. Despite living in a scientistic age, Cardin implies that our insatiable appetite for horror seems to be directly correlated with the banishment of symbolism from the world of nature and the triumph of science, technology, and commerce across the globe.
Stories about angels, demons, and monsters and stories producing a sense of dread terror, fear, and anxiety have been around since the beginning of civilization. Those who like to think humans have moved beyond dark superstitions undoubtedly scoff at the persistence of horror, often asserting it is nothing more than a vestige inheritance of the Bronze Age. Not Matt Cardin. Cardin tackles this seemingly odd question of why our fascination with dark arts, superstition, and the frightening cosmos has only gotten stronger despite the continuous advancement of science and technology, bringing a disenchanted world in its wake.
One might say that the triumph of our post-Enlightenment scientistic world—in which the forces of industry, science, and technology unite to strip the world bare of awe, mystery, and wonder and lead to a pragmatic economic world of comfort and security—must necessarily lead to an appetite for horror. Cardin begins this phenomenal exposé into horror by examining the writings of Thomas Ligotti, one of the leading horror fiction writers of the previous generation. The heart of Ligotti’s worldview of horror, as Cardin summarizes, is one of nihilistic emptiness, meaninglessness, and tragedy. Ligotti’s world of horror is a world without meaning; it is the world of modernity. Quoting Ligotti, ‘My outlook is that it’s a damn shame that organic life ever developed on this or any other planet.’”
Amid this “meaningless and menacing” existence, the old ways of finding meaning in life: in God, beauty, and family, have all been stripped away. The veil has been peeled back, torn asunder. In a Lovecraftian moment of revelation, we agree with Ligotti that the world we live in is a “nightmare vision of reality” filled with “cosmic despair” and “existential torture.” Horror, then, is the de facto state of existence in a world without meaning. And with scientism having driven away that old awe, beauty, and wonder in the world—invariably bound up with belief in God, spirits, and supernatural entities—horror has become a popular substitutionary craze for our loss of metaphysical and moral enchantment.
The relationship between science, technology, and horror is quite strong upon closer consideration. Not long after the revolution of the printing press, horror fiction began appearing in England with the publications of works like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, and the various novels of Ann Radcliffe. By the time filmography became a new medium for telling stories, horror was one of the first genres of films produced: stories dealing with angels and demons abounded in the early decades of film’s nascent beginning. Cardin reminds us of this often-forgotten fact of film history, “The 1890s saw the birth of the movies, and the Demon got involved in the new industry right from the start.”
Here we must ask ourselves the question: why horror? Why is horror so popular in our technological world? Why is horror bound up with the driving away of awe, beauty, wonder, God, spirits, and the moral law? Cardin convincingly answers these questions with the wrongness or repulsiveness that is essential to horror, a wrongness and repulsiveness that touches our “physical, metaphysical, [and] moral” senses. In short, horror is the manifestation of the metaphysical and supernatural impulse when a benevolent and beautiful God has been driven into exile in our age of techno-hedonistic relativism. All we have left is the ghost of metaphysical dread: “Horror horrifies: it sets out to inspire a sense of fear and dread mingled with revulsion.”
In the mid-eighteenth century, the Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke penned his most famous philosophical treatise entitled An Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful. In that masterful work, Burke articulated a dual nature of aesthetic psychology in humans – one aspect of mankind was a spirit seeking the beautiful and the other the sublime; the two spirits often clashed with each other. The sublime, Burke continued to elaborate, was premised on a sense of “dread horror,” passionate ecstasy often leading to pain and fright, a sense of insignificance and even the apprehension to death. Anxiety was a key component of the sublime. This sense of the sublime Burke also associated with traditional religion. The loss of religion in modernity hasn’t killed the sense and want for the sublime innate in humanity. Rather, it has caused the spirit of the sublime to morph into something else: horror.
Perhaps the most famous film that embodied horror during our cultural and cosmic disenchantment of the past century was The Exorcist. “In the 1960s and 1970s,” Cardin writes, “it was not just Roman Catholic culture but Western culture at large that was suffering such disenchantment, and Blatty’s 1971 novel and its 1973 film counterpart landed right in the middle of this.” Understanding the reality that horror is a manifestation of the supernatural and metaphysical, often in the throes of cultural upheaval, better helps the pilgrim understand the power and potency of horror and why it periodically emerges and flourishes in certain ages: the late 1700s, the turn of the twentieth century, and the 1970s. As society at large was turning away from a belief in supernatural presence, what made The Exorcist truly horrifying was “it posited that a vile supernatural presence, like a revenant of a mythological age thought long dead, could enter the body of an innocent young girl.”
Horror’s success on the big screen is because there is a persistent recognition of the problem of evil, one of the greatest metaphysical and theological conundrums that have occupied some of the greatest intellectual minds past and present. Horror is that dreadful reminder that evil exists even as we moderns like to deceive ourselves in saying there is no such thing as evil and that all values are relative. As Cardin chillingly states, “What if there were evil but no good to counterbalance it?”
In an exceptional chapter on George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead films, Cardin offers a penetrating reading of its spiritual qualities by bringing the film into dialogue with Meister Eckhart, Buddhism, and the seemingly sacrilegious inversion and inadequacies of Christian spiritual-cultural imagery and belief: the resurrection of the body and a communal meal as the source of spiritual nourishment (the eucharist). The zombies are resurrected bodies, but they are not beautiful and loving as envisioned by Dante and implied in the Christian tradition concerning the afterlife. Furthermore, the frailty of the body and how easily it is mangled and bloodied causes us great anxiety since we have been formed by a tradition of humanism that praises the body as good because God created it. The ease at which the zombies consume flesh and are made more horrifying dramatically confronts and evinces the eucharistic theology of Christianity, where consuming flesh and blood makes one beautiful and divine.
Romero’s films, our sagacious author explains—emerging in the maelstrom of the “God-is-Dead” era—posits a sense of “absolute nihilism and hopelessness” while playing on all the central spiritual sensibilities: death, resurrection, and judgment. Yet, in this hopelessness, there is still a spiritual bridge offering an acceptance of this hopelessness as a path to spiritual enlightenment. “[T]he starting point of Buddhist practice is a piercing realization of the fact of existential hopelessness,” Cardin writes. “The decision to turn to Buddhism looks all the more promising when we look into the classical Buddhist tradition and find much interesting material dealing with death and decay, which (as if this even needs to be reiterated) are topics of central importance in the Living Dead films.” Concluding Romero’s films with Meister Eckhart, “One of the most powerful spiritual exercises is to meditate deeply on the mortality of physical forms, including your own. This is called: die before you die.”
This, too, is wise advice, especially in a Christian and post-Christian culture. After all, the culminating moment of Christ’s own life and redemption of the world wasn’t through the life he lived but the death he died. And that death that was quite brutal at the hands of the vicious Romans which revealed the frailty of the body of the Son of God! The notion that death brings redemption and escape from the horror of this world is a very ancient spiritual belief, one that the Living Dead films call us to remember, according to Cardin’s analysis.
While some of Cardin’s commentary on the cross-fertilization of angelology and demonology in religion is not necessarily substantiated in contemporary biblical scholarship, for example, Cardin overplays the Zoroastrian-Judaism connection that has largely been abandoned by contemporary scholarship on archaeological, compositional, and linguistic grounds, What the Daemon Said is a great exposé into the history of angels, demons, and horror over the millennia of Western culture. The reader will not only find wonderful analyses of films, as I’ve covered here but also reflections on literature and poetry. The reader will also find exceptional cultural criticism, particularly directed at Francis Bacon and the Enlightenment tradition of scientific conquest and how the enchanted rainbow was destroyed and became an empty rainbow, which had a direct influence over the development of horror.
Although horror originates in supernatural and spiritual beliefs and sentiments—angels and demons, especially demons—the most enduring analysis of horror from Cardin’s brilliant mind is how horror and science are interconnected. In our cultural wasteland, the rise of horror strongly coincides with the tyrannical triumph of science and technology, which has driven a sense of the sublime and the supernatural away. Yet it hasn’t entirely driven away that sense of evil, the desire for goodness to triumph over evil (even if it doesn’t), and a want for transcendence that goes beyond this world. We may very well be stuck in “chapel perilous,” but we still find ourselves in a chapel even if covered in cobwebs, rotted wood, and eerie noises all around us.
Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is the author of Finding Arcadia: Wisdom, Truth, and Love in the Classics (Academica Press, 2023) and The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books (Wipf and Stock, 2021).
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